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Okay, but I don't think there's a scriptural, much less empirical basis for this claim.
I don't remember the last time I had any thought "out of the blue" but I know that some people have them all the time. Examples I'm particularly familiar with are people with anxious or obsessive tendencies, or who have PTSD symptoms. But their thoughts are explicable in terms of their mental health diagnoses. Given that we can explain things that used to be considered demonic possession or influence as, e.g., multiple personality disorder, schizophrenia, Tourrette's Syndrome, bipolar mania, etc. -- why would your first impulse be to resort to the supernatural to account for far more prosaic neuroses and thoughts?
Indeed, it need not even be pathological. It is well understood now that we tend to learn more quickly and enduringly from negative experiences than from positive ones. This makes perfect sense because avoiding many negative experiences is a life and death matter, whereas seeking positive experiences is merely a hedonic preference with only the most indirect connection to survival, if any at all.
So there is an entirely objective reason to fully and systematically bring one's attention to positive thoughts and ideas and experiences: we need to invest extra effort to even fully remember positive experiences, much less get the full subjective sense of well-being that positives bring to us. This is particularly important for those who by nature lean towards pessimism.
My point was about what scripture is silent about, not about distortion of what it isn't silent about.
I don't think impulsively about this. It's something I've considered and thought deeply about since adopting my world view.
I believe there is a supernatural beyond the natural world. It manifests in abstract thoughts and objective morality. This is the only explanation acceptable to me, for the world we live in. The laws of nature were put in place before man (which are structured to avoid chaos) as well as moral laws, which by our own free will, we don't have to follow (hence chaos, murder, rape, lying, cheating, etc.). The natural world and science cannot account for where consciousness comes from and cannot account for objective morality.
I believe mental illnesses are terms for physical manifestations of negative abstractions (negative being measured against an objective good, which has to exist outside of subjective man). Abstract thinking cannot be weighed, measured, or seen with any scans, so I come to the conclusion it's not part of the natural world. These abstractions create chronic problems through entertaining them regularly, creating the chemicals and pathways that underpin the mental illnesses you named.
I believe there are things we know, things we don't know, and the unknowable, of which I go by faith (in God).
According to the Bible, faith comes as a result of evidence. Consider the following.
Why did Moses have faith? Because a burning bush that didn't stop burning. In effect, Moses was being a respectable skeptical, a critical thinker. He witnessed a physical phenomenon that defied natural explanation from what he knew about nature. He saw the laws of Physics break. Thus, he knew that one of the following 2 explanations could be true:
(1) Laws of physics can change by themselves
(2) Some invisible agent has control of the laws of Physics and can change them
Since Moses was at the same time perceiving that some invisible agent was speaking to him, it was reasonable for him to believe that (2) was the more plausible explanation; otherwise it would have been a strange coincidence that he had a momentary schizophrenic episode and a momentary hallucination at the same time. Thus, the God-fearing character of Moses was built on empirical evidence and sustained by continued empirical evidence during his life, you know, stuff like massive bodies of water parting themselves into giant columns, massive amounts of quail randomly appearing in the middle of a barren desert, etc.
And so it is with every Bible character. They gain faith when the empirical evidence is presented to them. Jesus' disciples believed because they witnessed miracles. Joshua believed because he his hypothesis that marching around a fortified wall 7 times would cause it to crumble, turned out to be the real result.
I ask, Where is my evidence? If God exists, he owes me evidence, just liked he gave to every Bible character.
I'll give a list of examples of what would suffice as evidence for me:
A pool of water that was healing cancer patients (See John 5)
A talking donkey (Numbers 22)
A battle in an Israeli valley that is so dense with casualties that blood fills up the valley to the level of a horse's bridle (Revelations 14)
Of course, the evidence I would accept is not limited to those examples. A casual visit from an angel would be good enough. Or, if my prayers seemed to turn into reality at the same rate in which my wished-for events randomly occur.
Thoughts?
The common answer is "you don't deserve evidence because you are 'less righteous' than those ancient people." Which is a cop-out using very faulty circular reasoning.
That's the point of the story characters though: "they had evidence! we swear! so believe without it or with extremely weak and not well-reasoned forms of it!"
"Just wait though" a lot of your wanted evidences can be self-fulfilling prophecies.
I actually questioned the characters themselves within the religious stories. Were Abraham and Moses and Paul really better people than those around me? The answer was no, they are written as very grotesque individuals of the most inhuman and murderous kind. The only characteristic they seem to share is that they were unrelenting in their converted false beliefs, pretending such beliefs were true no matter what if you didn't question them: a belief that only a mild form of emergent psychosis might inspire. A great tool for personality/activity change though.
Still
The evidence those characters in those religious propaganda writings got wouldn't convince me.
A talking burning bush only convinces me of a talking burning bush in my mind. Seeing a talking burning bush with my eyes and the eyes of others that could collaborate and no one that could disprove/explain away the occurrence would only convince me of a talking burning bush.
A voice in my head telling me to sacrifice a child of mine and a gust of wind through bisected baby animal sacrifices only convinces me of a voice in my head and a gust of wind through bisected baby animal sacrifices.
An unexplained vision with varying details after falling off a horse only convinces me of such.
Any extrapolations on my part would be understood to be put a few of the many possibilities.
I'm not very superstitious, so I don't believe that such experiences would give credence to anything more than themselves. Since I'm not superstitious, I also don't trust stories as inerrant truth.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Note that I'm a disappointed agnostic, hence my focus on the need for proof.
If I'm to believe that there is an God that is: all knowing, all loving, all powerful, and all just, it would need to be proven. Instead, we have a world full of suffering, poverty, and injustice - a world where the wicked are elevated and granted whatever they wish while the righteous are beaten into the dirt. So, from the viewpoint of actual events, there's no proof that there is such a God, IMHO. Sure, sure - people will come up with countless excuses about how all this misery is "part of God's plan," but I'm not buying it. Allowing so much suffering and horror to innocents while standing by and doing nothing when the being in question is supposedly infinitely powerful, wise, just, and knowing, is inexcusable. In the end, God allowing this would be like a parent standing by and doing nothing while his toddler crashes down the stairs or burns himself on a hot stove - sure it "teaches him a lesson" or some drek, but it still appalling. If the Biblical God existed as defined within those texts, his actions would be simply inexcusable considering how many people who suffer have done NOTHING to deserve it. And they pray and pray, and get nothing as a reply.
Which takes me to the second point - not only is there no overall balance in the world that would indicate that there is a compassionate or just being out there with great power who cares about us, but the sheer lack of ANY clearly divine miracles makes the whole concept of heavily involved superior beings questionable. Sure, if I was walking along and saw burning bushes that were not consumed and heard a voice talking to me, I'd either assume I'd gone mad or there was some actual being of power there - a "god" of sorts. If multiple people verified the account at the same time and it was otherwise provable, than it could offer evidence. But, again, there's little to nothing out there that would indicate anything of the sort. We don't see pillars of fire, burning bushes, people parting seas, or so on. We're to believe that this is "not the age of miracles" or something, but that's a flimsy excuse... and one would think a God who wanted us to follow him could spare some of that infinite power to demonstrate his existence, but apparently not.
So, long story short, as an agnostic, all I ask for is real proof, but there is none from what I've seen. Now and then, you may see a miracle of sorts, but no clear evidence of God, which is the point of this post.
All the major bible characters believed because of evidence -- according to the anonymous men who wrote, re-wrote, edited and re-re-re-(etc)-edited the bible decades and centuries after the "evidence" supposedly occurred.
Even though I do not believe it is a divine book I will say that you are repeating a statement from somebody but it does not support your claim, not with the picture you give in your comment.
The Bible does have a lot of archeological support for many events mentioned in it. Miracle? Well, that is another story.
There are events mentioned in the Bible that may not have present direct archeological support but in many cases it does have archeological indirect support that merits benefit of the doubt for further findings. Take care.
Do you have modern-day examples of both of these scenarios?
There's a lot of stories out there that can't really be proven. There's yet to be someone out there operating like it's said in the Bible. I would say most Christians aren't speaking the full Gospel, of course in order for me to say that, I must know what the full Gospel is. The message is simple, that everything is done by God's grace. I can't say I can list a provable case of miracles, but once people really operate fully in God's grace, I think we can test this hypothesis out.
Oh, don't worry. I believe that Moses didn't even exist. And of course I don't think there was ever a pool near the Sheep Gate that miraculously healed people.
"Lord" Moses' existence is very questionable. Moses sounded like it meant "born" in Egyptian and "draw out" in Hebrew.
Ramses' names is actually Ramoses so it means "Ra is born" or "Ra birthed him/son of Ra."
and Thutmose's name is actual Thutmoses and means "Thoth is born" or "Thoth birthed him/son of Thoth"
The ancient Jews likely played a game with what moses meant in their language. Just like they did that for "knowing" spies in Lot's House, etc.
There's a lot of stories out there that can't really be proven. There's yet to be someone out there operating like it's said in the Bible. I would say most Christians aren't speaking the full Gospel, of course in order for me to say that, I must know what the full Gospel is. The message is simple, that everything is done by God's grace. I can't say I can list a provable case of miracles, but once people really operate fully in God's grace, I think we can test this hypothesis out.
If I understand what you are stating, that there are no examples of miracles because no one has gotten it right yet, then this is quite a convenient answer, don't you think? When one claims that miracles occur but then fails to provide an example because no one really knows how to pull one off, another can effectively claim that miracles don't exist. Therefore, one can conclude, because of your criterion, that the Gospels and the evidence for God are disproved.
I've seen the confirmation bias argument being used by many atheist apologists.
I'm guessing you're not a believer. If that's the case, could searching for the above referenced wiki article be your own bias manifested? Could you be searching out information to dismiss theistic beliefs?
That's a fair point, but her/his larger argument is still valid. While it's certainly not unique to Christians and other religious persons, evidence indicates that the overwhelming multitude of persons exhibit confirmation bias to at least some degree.
This is why we should always be highly critical of beliefs that are based entirely on individual experience, especially our own. One of my favorite quotes is by Stephen Jay Gould - "The easiest person to fool is ourselves." It's so easy for us to think we've had a significant, even supernatural experience when a far more mundane explanation is more probable.
Consider how the brain works: As best we can understand (which is still limited) it's an immensely complex interaction of neural (electrochemical) 'circuits'. Sometimes our neurons fire it such a way that some of us have a profoundly religious/spiritual/supernatural/etc. experience that occurs entirely within our own mind. This experience can seem completely real to us, but probably has no basis in observable, objective reality.
It's difficult enough for us to understand how things work in the present; our understanding of past events is probably even less accurate.
Why did Moses have faith? Because a burning bush that didn't stop burning. In effect, Moses was being a respectable skeptical, a critical thinker. He witnessed a physical phenomenon that defied natural explanation from what he knew about nature. He saw the laws of Physics break. Thus, he knew that one of the following 2 explanations could be true:
(1) Laws of physics can change by themselves
(2) Some invisible agent has control of the laws of Physics and can change them
Your argument breaks down when you say that there is no third option, which would render both 1 and 2 false:
(3) Physical events can be influenced by natural forces that I am not aware of and are not intuitive.
Examples would be water turning to ice, the phases of the moon, birds flying south in the fall, people getting sick from eating pork. All perfectly natural events, not that hard to explain to observers 5,000 years later, but attributable by Moses (and you) to either "an invisible agent" or physical laws that are not fixed. As if, as we now know is not the case, that those are the only two explanations so at least one of them must have been true then and still is.
I don't think impulsively about this. It's something I've considered and thought deeply about since adopting my world view.
I believe there is a supernatural beyond the natural world. It manifests in abstract thoughts and objective morality. This is the only explanation acceptable to me, for the world we live in. The laws of nature were put in place before man (which are structured to avoid chaos) as well as moral laws, which by our own free will, we don't have to follow (hence chaos, murder, rape, lying, cheating, etc.). The natural world and science cannot account for where consciousness comes from and cannot account for objective morality.
I believe mental illnesses are terms for physical manifestations of negative abstractions (negative being measured against an objective good, which has to exist outside of subjective man). Abstract thinking cannot be weighed, measured, or seen with any scans, so I come to the conclusion it's not part of the natural world. These abstractions create chronic problems through entertaining them regularly, creating the chemicals and pathways that underpin the mental illnesses you named.
I believe there are things we know, things we don't know, and the unknowable, of which I go by faith (in God).
I don't think science has to account for objective morality because there is no objective morality to account for.
Science can't currently fully explain consciousness but that doesn't mean we should make explanations up, it means we wait until we know more.
I don't understand why abstract (as opposed to concrete) thoughts require a supernatural explanation, although, I am not sure I am clear on how you define "abstract thoughts".
I believe that it's fine that some things are unknowable and unlikely to be knowable anytime soon, if at all. That just describes the boundaries of our perceptual and intellectual equipment and the fact that we are incapable of comprehending, much less viewing, reality "from the outside". There probably IS no outside.
Whether "this reality is all there is" presents an interesting philosophical question. Reality by definition is all that we perceive and know. If there is something outside of reality that we become aware of, by definition it is not supernatural, but part of reality -- just a part we were not previously aware of. As we have been discussing in another thread, the term "supernatural" is not helpful. A better question than what is supernatural vs natural is what is real vs not real.
Mental illness is real, and even you agree that the underlying biochemical processes are real. Placing the cause outside of the natural order is unjustified when there are far simpler explanations. You might as well place the cause of a car accident on god or satan rather than on driver error, mechanical failure, etc. If you call driver error and mechanical failures "manifestations of negative abstractions", where does it stop?
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The message is simple, that everything is done by God's grace. I can't say I can list a provable case of miracles, but once people really operate fully in God's grace, I think we can test this hypothesis out.
