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You obviously didn't read my "Yes" answer with any irony, as I explicitly stated to do.
Note how I answered "Yes" as though it were a fact, when it clearly could only have been my belief, thus proving my own answer wrong. See? That's the irony part.
It would seem that the POE effect is alive and well in the C-D forum, Box. Perhaps a smiley would have helped.
Last edited by MysticPhD; 03-19-2014 at 09:37 PM..
I can't help experiencing a form of deja vu when reading the atheist posts in the forum. I could have written most of them at one time . . . (a bit more effectively even, he, he j/k). It is genuinely frustrating to be unable to breach through the unwarranted certainty that is so endemic to atheist belief. It is most frustrating because I know the intellectual basis of it and considered it absolutely valid at the time. It was so long ago that I now consider it the "dark ages" of my life. I would say that for most of the atheists, Box . . . they "don't really recognize the possibility that what they are saying may not be true."
I accept the possibility that I'm wrong.
However, I base my current position and understanding on the objective evidence I've come across.
they "don't really recognize the possibility that what they are saying may not be true."
the story won't work because there would of been no interest in the investigation. There's no concrete evidence for suggesting believing what people say ( atheist) and locking on to it as written in stone .
Last edited by alexcanter; 03-19-2014 at 08:55 PM..
It's an honest question; what psychological mechanism drives this habit? I'm in the school library right now, and twelve feet to my right sits a duo of chatting women. I haven't been paying close attention to their conversation, so I'm not sure what they're talking about, but I did hear the tension of the conversation rise just now, and I did hear one of the women exclaim, "He thinks he's gunna get away with it, but he's gunna hafta answer to God. He thinks that when he dies everything's gunna be okay, but he's gunna face God in the afterlife, and God ain't gunna have mercy on him!" I feel sorry for the poor sap she's talking about. Sounds like he has a sad date in a hot place coming up.
I don't remember when I first started noticing that religious people state their beliefs as facts, but the more I notice it, the more I see that there is almost no exception to it. In virtually every religious conversation I hear, the conversants proclaim their religious beliefs in the same way that one would state the facts of a court case or a science experiment. "God is real! I'm going to heaven! He's going to hell! Jesus said this! Noah Fdid that!" How could you possibly know any of these things? They are patently unknowable. Yet, though we all understand, with no equivocations, that rat least some claims of religious faith are inconceivable to logic, it is precisely religion that gets stated in the affirmative. In other words, though religion is the last thing anyone should claim as fact, it is fact-claiming that makes up the whole of religious conversation.
But why?
Of the 5,700 New Testament Bible manuscripts and manuscript fragments that we have in the original Greek language, there are between one and four hundred thousand textual discrepancies. Entire factions of Christianity have originated from Bible passages that simply didn't exist until they were inserted to the Biblical canon in the centuries following the life of Jesus. We have a remarkably clear view of the edited, re-edited, re-re-reedited nature of the Christian Bible; and one thing that can be said for sure is that the words on the page of modern Bibles are not the words originally written. So how could anybody claim to know what Jesus, or David, or Moses, or Adam said, did, thought or felt. Moreover, how can anybody who's never died make fact claims about the afterlife, if such a thing even exists?
Again, what is it that fuels our penchant for stating religious claims as facts?
A lot of them are probably emotionally unwilling to accept their agnosticism.
Doubt is a terrible fear/anguish inducing mental state when not properly accepted. often, religious claims have to be modeled as facts by the believers because only facts can support believes by the normal societal standards. The idea from people's interaction with religious texts is to reinforce people's feelings and desires by saying:
Quote:
look at these facts recorded right here, see how they support some of your previous feelings and desires? Don't forget that means that to legitimize its support of those feelings and desires you have to believe in the authoritativeness of the whole thing (whether all literal or some metaphorical). You can now pick and choose the "deeper" meaning that supports your biases! but remember that if they are not facts than they are as useful support for such believes as doubt or wishing.
The only terms from Psychology that I know off the top of my head (lol, like Zeus' creation of Athena) that match these behaviors are Denial and a phobia of cognitive dissonance (perhaps the same as what is called either alethophobia or atychiphobia by English dictionaries).
Sometimes though, people just talk about things like their politics or religion or entertainment as if though it were ostentatious, ostensive, or merely ostensible fact.
Still, Psychological studies have demonstrated that people in general (or on average) are more willing to believe someone who is or seems sure of themselves about a lie (that the studied people have been previously uninformed or vacillative about) rather than believing someone that is honest or shows criticism about an ostensible truth. It's sad, but studies have also shown that people are more willing to believe rhyming poem than explicative prose.
What if both can (somehow, in some bizarre way) be true at the same time? I mean, they say that electrons are literally in several places at the same time, and that's totally counterintuitive; what if God somehow objectively exists and objectively doesn't exist at the same time?
What if there are shades of grey to the existence of God?
I don't think electrons defy logic nor rationality, last I heard from particle and quantum physicists. I heard leptons being the most basic known particles (along with photons, etc) show wave-particle duality, but so do protons (composed of quarks), Bucky balls (large spherical molecules composed of carbon atoms). The math and reasoning to explain why they show wave-particle duality is that their paths exist as probabilities, not that they are in two places at once. What if you (whatever you define yourself as) somehow objectively exist and objectively don't at the same time? What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Such ideas as these would also work to justify the FSM or IPU or Zues or Thor or Bal or Allah or Ahura Mazda or Buddha or Vishnu, etc.
Last edited by LuminousTruth; 03-19-2014 at 09:53 PM..
I don't think electrons defy logic nor rationality, last I heard from particle and quantum physicists. I heard leptons being the most basic known particles (along with photons, etc) show wave-particle duality, but so do protons (composed of quarks), Bucky balls (large spherical molecules composed of carbon atoms). The math and reasoning to explain why they show wave-particle duality is that their paths exist as probabilities, not that they are in two places at once. What if you (whatever you define yourself as) somehow objectively exist and objectively don't at the same time? What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Such ideas as these would also work to justify the FSM or IPU or Zues or Thor or Bal or Allah or Ahura Mazda or Buddha or Vishnu, etc.
Hey, I gave it a shot.
And I just meant "god" in the broad sense; I certainly wasn't referring to homicidal, slave-owning YHWH of the Bible, or whoever.
It is genuinely frustrating to be unable to breach through the unwarranted certainty that is so endemic to atheist belief. I would say that for most of the atheists, Box . . . they "don't really recognize the possibility that what they are saying may not be true."
A total misrepresentation of atheists here - as is your norm.
There is no "certainty" in atheist belief. You just pretend there is in order to straw man. The basis of atheism is uncertainty. We are in a universe - and we do not know how this has come to be. The only thing we are certain about is that those people claiming that some "god" is the explanation - are doing so without giving us any evidencial support or arguments for that assertion.
A total misrepresentation of atheists here - as is your norm.
There is no "certainty" in atheist belief. You just pretend there is in order to straw man. The basis of atheism is uncertainty. We are in a universe - and we do not know how this has come to be. The only thing we are certain about is that those people claiming that some "god" is the explanation - are doing so without giving us any evidencial support or arguments for that assertion.
I think Mystic's point is, regardless of what atheism is in theory, in practice many Atheist argue with a great deal of certainty in their belief that there is no god. I think it's a fair point.
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