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I think it mostly depends on the pre-emptive bias in our minds when we look into the idea of existence of God.
And there are two fundamental paths to it.
1 - If and when a person thinks that there is no God or if he does not have the feel or want of a God in his life, then no matter what reason, logic, argument or intellectual evidence you present to them, they will ALWAYS find a way to reject it.
2 - On the other hand, if a person ponders upon the universe and feels that the entire universe and everything in it could have not come together by chance, so there is something out there. Then he starts his research by having a gut feeing that there is a God out there so let me try to find it. Then, he is most likely to look into every reason, logic and intellectual evidence, with an open mind to see if it makes sense to him or not?
I think this is the reason why you can't shove faith down the throat of an Atheist, and you can't snatch the faith out of theist's heart.
Believing in God, is a call that one receives from within. It can't be, and it should not be forced upon anyone.
It's because you don't want OR feel, the NEED of God in your life.
When and if, you feel the need of God in your life then you will perform your own independent research and use your own intelligence to find the truth.
And there is a standard method to take this journey.
You will set a simple and straight forward criteria that a God (of any religion) will be judged by its book.
Then you will start with studying the holy text of a religion of your choice, and you will go thru all books of all religions that claim to be holy.
And here is the key: during your study of each holy book of each religion under your research, you periodically ask yourself this key question, "Is it the truth?"
And you let your heart answer the question.
This will most likely help you separate truth from lies, and you should be able to reject all Gods except one. The one whose message talks to your heart.
Remember, brain does the research and look for the signs of God, it's the HEART that leaps into faith.
we should use our intelligence to make choices based on free will, and in the end, we will be responsible of our choices.
Didn't I already debunk this as mere self -brainwashing? The problem is that there are clues of an innate preference that the self -deluder doesn't realize themselves (though posting a conversion story often reveals clues - like a dislike of Communism, a liking for Catholicism, a sneaking admiration for Islam) and shazam whodathunkit, they read and read and finally some Significant Passage in the Holy Book reveals the Truth to them, though the conversion had been done long since.
Cardinals, mate, ff you let the heart (you mean the instictive subconscious of the mind) rather than the reasoning and analytical part of the mind, using the mental tools of logic and the databank of validated evidence, do your thinking for you, you are merely finding excuses to keep buying the snake oil.
Last edited by TRANSPONDER; 06-12-2016 at 04:40 AM..
It's because you don't want OR feel, the NEED of God in your life.
When and if, you feel the need of God in your life then you will perform your own independent research and use your own intelligence to find the truth.
And there is a standard method to take this journey.
You will set a simple and straight forward criteria that a God (of any religion) will be judged by its book.
Then you will start with studying the holy text of a religion of your choice, and you will go thru all books of all religions that claim to be holy.
And here is the key: during your study of each holy book of each religion under your research, you periodically ask yourself this key question, "Is it the truth?"
And you let your heart answer the question.
This will most likely help you separate truth from lies, and you should be able to reject all Gods except one. The one whose message talks to your heart.
Remember, brain does the research and look for the signs of God, it's the HEART that leaps into faith.
we should use our intelligence to make choices based on free will, and in the end, we will be responsible of our choices.
So then the Christians whose heart has told them the Bible is true are correct that Christianity is the true religion, while the Muslims whose heart has told them the Koran is true are correct that Islam is actually the true religion despite all the Christians whose hearts have told them it's Christianity, and the Hindus whose heart told them the Rig Veda and Upanishads are true are correct that Hinduism is actually the true religion despite the billions of Muslims and Christians convinced otherwise ?
Or is the atheist who has read them all and decided they are all just myths that conflict with each other correct ?
This will most likely help you separate truth from lies, and you should be able to reject all Gods except one. The one whose message talks to your heart.
Remember, brain does the research and look for the signs of God, it's the HEART that leaps into faith.
My experience is that going by personal "gut" feelings is one of the worst ways of finding out about objective truth. In fact, what your feelings tell you is often quite the opposite of what is actually true.
This is why, for example, most humans for thousands of years believed that the earth was flat and the whole universe revolved around the earth. It sure appears as if that is true and, more importantly, it feels right to want to believe it is true. But it isn't quite.
Apparently yes. What I wanted to get at was to see if any of the more conservative theists could admit to understanding an agnostic simply not seeing enough evidence to believe in, without the need for them to attribute sinful intentions to their disbelief .
I guess the answer is that no, they can't . Some obviously can , but my question was mostly aimed at the conservative theists that make statements about disbelieving in order to continue sinning .
I gave you my personal experience. As an atheist I wanted to sin, and I avoided discussion and belief in God.
That's unacceptably dishonest of you to say.
As a Christian currently, you now think that as an atheist you wanted to sin. As an atheist, that's not what you wanted. As an atheist, you probably just chose not to believe. You fell in with religion and have found a new narrative to spin that, but don't pretend that when you were an atheist you woke up every day like 'what sinful think will I do today.'
In fact, I highly doubt your day to day life is honestly radically different now than it was then. You surely spend more time in a church, talking and thinking about different things, and probably spend your time with different people, but as a person, I seriously doubt you changed as much as you want to believe you did. I don't mean offense by that; believe what you want, but don't act like your giving an honest analysis of atheist. It's highly slanted, even if you add the "I was an atheist once" at the start of your story.
Apparently yes. What I wanted to get at was to see if any of the more conservative theists could admit to understanding an agnostic simply not seeing enough evidence to believe in, without the need for them to attribute sinful intentions to their disbelief .
I guess the answer is that no, they can't . Some obviously can , but my question was mostly aimed at the conservative theists that make statements about disbelieving in order to continue sinning .
It's because you don't want OR feel, the NEED of God in your life.
When and if, you feel the need of God in your life then you will perform your own independent research and use your own intelligence to find the truth.
And there is a standard method to take this journey.
You will set a simple and straight forward criteria that a God (of any religion) will be judged by its book.
Then you will start with studying the holy text of a religion of your choice, and you will go thru all books of all religions that claim to be holy.
And here is the key: during your study of each holy book of each religion under your research, you periodically ask yourself this key question, "Is it the truth?"
And you let your heart answer the question.
This will most likely help you separate truth from lies, and you should be able to reject all Gods except one. The one whose message talks to your heart.
Remember, brain does the research and look for the signs of God, it's the HEART that leaps into faith.
we should use our intelligence to make choices based on free will, and in the end, we will be responsible of our choices.
Well, that was an extended response...
The Reader's Digest version:
I had to attend church until I was in HS. I'm somewhat familiar with the Bible stories and Christian mythology.
No matter how hard I tried to believe it, even as a kid, all the supernatural mumbo-jumbo just never passed the smell test.
So, in a nutshell; believers claim there's a god. I don't accept their opinion on the matter.
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