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I don't see how you get that interpretation from anything Mystic has said. Also, after all this time, it is not clear to me what you are arguing for or against here. Perhaps if you answered these questions, I could get a clearer picture:
(1) Which holy books do you think are inspired by God, or are consistent with your understanding of God? (And which ones are not?)
(2) Do you believe that humans evolved from apes?
(3) Do you believe that the universe is probably over 13 billion years old, and that our best evidence suggests that it is expanding?
(4) Do you believe that Jesus is one or more of the following: God. Son of God. Born of a virgin. Savior. Will return to Earth in glory.
(5) Do you believe that the Devil is a conscious being who purposefully tempts people to sin?
(6) Do you believe that people reincarnate through many lifetimes? (Do you have any past-life memories?)
(7) Did you exercise free will in choosing to exist? (Notice this is different than asking if you chose to be born in this lifetime.)
(8) Do you believe that homosexuality is a sin in God's eyes?
(9) Do you believe that God knew, 50 years ago, that Donald Trump would someday be elected president?
Of course ya'll are welcome to answer these for yourselves, as well, if ya want.
I hope you have better luck than any of the rest of us in getting her to answer questions.
I don't see how you get that interpretation from anything Mystic has said. Also, after all this time, it is not clear to me what you are arguing for or against here. Perhaps if you would be so kind as to answer these questions, I could get a clearer picture:
(1) Which holy books do you think are inspired by God, or are consistent with your understanding of God? (And which ones are not?)
(2) Do you believe that humans evolved from apes?
(3) Do you believe that the universe is probably over 13 billion years old, and that our best evidence suggests that it is expanding?
(4) Do you believe that Jesus is one or more of the following: God. Son of God. Born of a virgin. Savior. Will return to Earth in glory.
(5) Do you believe that the Devil is a conscious being who purposefully tempts people to sin?
(6) Do you believe that people reincarnate through many lifetimes? (Do you have any past-life memories?)
(7) Did you exercise free will in choosing to exist? (Notice this is different than asking if you chose to be born in this lifetime, but you could answer that one as well, if you want.)
1. a holy book that brings a person close to God, connected to God, and in active relationship with God; and causes them to refine their character and seek to live a life of ever increasing compassion, kindness, generosity, peace, dignity, respect and integrity, is consistent with my understanding of God. Reading a holy book, arguing about a holy book, is very different from putting it into practice and living it. God is accessible and available to every person, regardless of the path they take.
2. irrelevant
3. irrelevant
4. No I don't believe any of those. We are all beloved children of the Creator. There are human teachers sent by God to point people towards God. They are not God. The person pointing at the sun is not the sun.
5. No.
6. Yes to reincarnation. Yes to having past life memories.
7. Yes.
Last edited by Tzaphkiel; 12-14-2017 at 10:59 AM..
I've has some mystical type experiences and I could question where it came from even though I thought I knew. I was a believer at the time and am now an atheist after investigating it. I can't go against the feeling of complete acceptance I had during it though. That part I cannot question. I think having sleep paralysis taught me my mind can register something as externally generated that just isn't. I'm highly suspect of such things and tend to assume there is a rational explanation even if I don't know what it is.
That encapsulates the skeptic view - when you know that something is happening but you don't know what, you say you don't know, but the 'material' is the default explanation (or one that is hoped for)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tzaphkiel
seems like saying "it can't be that" is the same thing as saying "it must be this"
flip side of the same coin
And that, Folks, is the usual response of the Believers. While they accuse the skeptics and materialists of plonking statement of belief, they are making a strawman argument. That is not what the skeptics and materialists are saying. In fact, when such a response is unpacked it is really demanding that the skeptics and materialists accept the Mystic cosmic -thingy -explanation as the far more probable explanation (and in actuality, what is really wanted is firm belief in that mystical claim as reliable fact).
It is in fact the believers who are saying 'can't be that - must be this', when in fact they have no good evidence and the 'that' explanation has the evidence -based default. But of course they can't say what they are really intending, so they have to slap this projected strawman accusation on the materialist view.
As always, once you see the trick explained, you won't be fooled again.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tzaphkiel
1. a holy book that brings a person close to God, connected to God, and in active relationship with God; and causes them to refine their character and seek to live a life of ever increasing compassion, kindness, generosity, peace, dignity, respect and integrity, is consistent with my understanding of God. Reading a holy book, arguing about a holy book, is very different from putting it into practice and living it. God is accessible and available to every person, regardless of the path they take.
2. irrelevant
3. irrelevant
4. No I don't believe any of those. We are all beloved children of the Creator. There are human teachers sent by God to point people towards God. They are not God. The person pointing at the sun is not the sun.
5. No.
6. Yes to reincarnation. Yes to having past life memories.
7. Yes to both parts.
I do not know what a Holy Book is. I do know there are books regarded as having inspired wisdom and are regarded as sacred objects in themselves, but to me, they just another book, and what they say is to be assessed in the same critical manner as any other book of claims or exhortations. And that also applies to those books dealing with mystical experiences or those emotional highs that are taken as such.
And as for religious books, beliefs or practices that "causes them to refine their character and seek to live a life of ever increasing compassion, kindness, generosity, peace, dignity, respect and integrity," If you can find such a person and introduce them to us on the Forum, I'd be delighted, because, by and large, I have found that religious books, beliefs and practices rather tend to produce people that are deluded, close minded, willfully ignorant, snapping, snobby, aggressive, self -righteous, judgemental, illogical, crafty, slippery and evasive in discussion and in fact made, by their religious beliefs, to look far, far worse that they for sure are in Real Life.
Last edited by TRANSPONDER; 12-14-2017 at 11:06 AM..
So are You saying God is not true because God can not be scientifically validated and verified?
It sounds like you are using the flawed logic "if science is truth then anything that is not scientifically validated and verified is not truth."
you know I am NOT saying any such thing since I have experienced God. What I AM saying is that expecting anyone else to believe in God because I have experienced Him is not reasonable. The only things we can expect others to accept are those things that have been validated and verified by science OR that they have experienced.
Quote:
Just like you seem to say if there are parts of a book you don't understand or science cant verify then they are "not truth" they are false and people are lying
Your major fault seems to be adding multiple implications for what are very simple statements. If science can't verify claims or assertions they simply are NOT verified, no need to posit lying.
Thanks for your answers. The only one I find deeply puzzling is (7a). I can think of one way it might seem to work. If you have always existed and if, in every moment of your existence, you have chosen to keep existing, then there was never a first moment in which a being that did not exist suddenly chose to exist. Thus you could, at first glance, seemingly avoid a flat-out logical contradiction. But, ultimately, this approach does not really escape logical contradiction.
(1) Free will is a capacity to make choices in accordance with one's intrinsic nature.
(2) For X to "have an intrinsic nature," X must exist.
(3) For any X, if X does not exist, then X has no intrinsic nature.
(4) For the concept "choosing to exist" to be meaningful, one must not already exist (on pain of utter redundancy).
(5) In order to freely choose to exist, X must already exist (per premises 1 & 2) but X cannot already exist (per premises 3 & 4).
This argument could probably be structured a bit better (ya'll are welcome to suggest improvements), but hopefully you get the key idea. The concept "choosing to exist" is a logically incoherent concept because it implies that "exists" and "does not exist" apply to the one and same being at the moment of free choice. (And, just a reminder, choosing to exist is not the same as choosing to continue existing. There is a logical contradiction with the former, but not the latter.)
I suspect that you are going to insist that you are thinking rationally, and that you did, indeed, choose to exist. And, if so, then there is nothing more I can say about it because if you choose to embrace a logical contradiction, then rational discussion simply has to cease. But I am curious: Why do you even care about this? Why do you feel a need to insist that you chose to exist? Do you remember choosing to exist? (Again, for the umpteenth time, keep in mind that choosing to continue existing is not a problem. Each of us does that in every moment until the point of death.)
If you do remember choosing to exist, then I'd like to know more about how you came to make that choice.
If you do not remember choosing to exist, then why are you so certain that you ever made such a choice?
And what is at stake for you such that you would want to claim that you chose to exist?
BTW: Can you reference any holy book or ancient sage who explicitly claimed that we chose to exist (or that God chose to exist)? Do they explain this? Or do they simply make the claim?
Last edited by Gaylenwoof; 12-14-2017 at 12:26 PM..
Before going into answering, please explain for our viewing audience what's the difference.
(7) Did you exercise free will in choosing to exist?
(Notice this is different than asking if you chose to be born in this lifetime, but you could answer that one as well, if you want.)
Before going into answering, please explain for our viewing audience what's the difference.
(7) Did you exercise free will in choosing to exist?
(Notice this is different than asking if you chose to be born in this lifetime, but you could answer that one as well, if you want.)
(7b) There is no logical contradiction in choosing to be born into this lifetime. If we are immoral souls who reincarnate from one lifetime to another, it is possible that we are conscious between lifetimes and make a choice to be born into our next life. Some traditions claim that we choose the time and circumstances of each birth in order maximize our potential for learning whatever it is that we need to learn for the overall development of our soul. I am not personally convinced that this sort of conscious life-to-life choice-making occurs, but I see no super-strong reason to disbelieve it either. Some folks have said that they have experienced these inter-life conscious states. Maybe they have, and maybe we do actually make such choices. I am agnostic on this idea until I have experience or empirical evidence upon which to make a decision.
(7a) Is it possible for any being to have ultimately chosen to exist in the first place? I say no (for the reasons I tried to explain in my previous post). I'm having a lot of trouble understanding how the logical contradiction at the heart of this is not intuitively obvious to everyone. Why do I even have to explain this at all? How can someone "choose to exist" if they do not already exist? How can a being who does not, in fact, exist, "choose to exist." And if they already exist, then they are not "choosing to exist" - they are just choosing to continue existing. Of course they might also be choosing to exist in different forms, e.g., they could be a disembodied soul choosing to incarnate into an embodied from. But that's not "choosing to exist" - that's just choosing to exist in a different form.
On a slightly more subtle note, I would point out that even an eternal/non-temporal being (e.g., God) could not have ultimately chosen to exist. If God never had a beginning, then the concept of "choice" has no meaning. God just is and always has been. Period. Given that I exist, I can choose between existence and non-existence (unless I am an immoral soul of such a sort that non-existence is not an option). But I can't have "chosen to exist" in the first place.
Last edited by Gaylenwoof; 12-14-2017 at 03:40 PM..
you know I am NOT saying any such thing since I have experienced God. What I AM saying is that expecting anyone else to believe in God because I have experienced Him is not reasonable. The only things we can expect others to accept are those things that have been validated and verified by science OR that they have experienced. Your major fault seems to be adding multiple implications for what are very simple statements. If science can't verify claims or assertions they simply are NOT verified, no need to posit lying.
LOL, If science can't explain God, there is no God?
HAHAHA.
What in the world?
HAHAHAHA, sorry, it's just so funny, faith is faith LOL. The whole idea is to believe in something you haven't seen. Do you think a person rose from the grave? Science will tell you otherwise, did Jesus raise from the grave or didn't he?
That encapsulates the skeptic view - when you know that something is happening but you don't know what, you say you don't know, but the 'material' is the default explanation (or one that is hoped for)
And that, Folks, is the usual response of the Believers. While they accuse the skeptics and materialists of plonking statement of belief, they are making a strawman argument. That is not what the skeptics and materialists are saying. In fact, when such a response is unpacked it is really demanding that the skeptics and materialists accept the Mystic cosmic -thingy -explanation as the far more probable explanation (and in actuality, what is really wanted is firm belief in that mystical claim as reliable fact).
It is in fact the believers who are saying 'can't be that - must be this', when in fact they have no good evidence and the 'that' explanation has the evidence -based default. But of course they can't say what they are really intending, so they have to slap this projected strawman accusation on the materialist view.
As always, once you see the trick explained, you won't be fooled again.
I do not know what a Holy Book is. I do know there are books regarded as having inspired wisdom and are regarded as sacred objects in themselves, but to me, they just another book, and what they say is to be assessed in the same critical manner as any other book of claims or exhortations. And that also applies to those books dealing with mystical experiences or those emotional highs that are taken as such.
And as for religious books, beliefs or practices that "causes them to refine their character and seek to live a life of ever increasing compassion, kindness, generosity, peace, dignity, respect and integrity," If you can find such a person and introduce them to us on the Forum, I'd be delighted, because, by and large, I have found that religious books, beliefs and practices rather tend to produce people that are deluded, close minded, willfully ignorant, snapping, snobby, aggressive, self -righteous, judgemental, illogical, crafty, slippery and evasive in discussion and in fact made, by their religious beliefs, to look far, far worse that they for sure are in Real Life.
It's never not been the explanation. That doesn't mean it has to be just that a person has to overlook a well established trend to dismiss a probable material source. I see non believers saying a material source is highly likely and a creator being highly unlikely. Believers (not all) don't seem to be able to consider they might be wrong.
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