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Originally Posted by GoCardinals
A simple and straight start is to first empty your brain from any religious or Atheistic indoctrination.
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Well, this is pretty much impossible in our day and age. You'd have to disconnect yourself from the world to do that ... and stay disconnected for a long time. Otherwise, you'll almost certainly be clubbed over the head with Christianity before you take your first blink.
Not that I disagree with this approach, mind you, but there will always be lingering biases, especially for those who are older, less naive, less gullible, and more jaded.
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Originally Posted by GoCardinals
Start fresh with a blank slate, and use your own intelligence and ponder upon your sorroundings, these trillions of processes and all this design in nature , the stars, planets and their motion etc - just look around and ponder.
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See what I mean? You're already using loaded terms like "design" which heavily implies a designer, an intelligent, sentient being that both designed and "built" the universe.
Now you know just how difficult, if not impossible, it is to empty your head completely of your indoctrination.
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Originally Posted by GoCardinals
However, if your answer is something like, “I don’t know but I want to know” -
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This I completely disagree with. Claiming that "if you want to know" how it all came together makes you a potential believer isn't at all true.
You can still go either way, here.
BUT, I have to say this: If the answer is something like, "I don't know but I want to know -- and I want the honest truth no matter where the evidence leads," you will almost undoubtedly become an atheist.
Because there is plenty of empiracal science giving entire libraries filled with evidence for the Big Bang and evolution ... but zero evidence for a creator besides for a pile of fallacies.
If you care about the truth and really want to have an honest answer to your questions -- science saying it does not know YET how life got started or what precisely "banged" during the Big Bang is infinitely more honest than religion claiming to have all the answers, and finding out those answers really don't explain anything.
God speaking the universe into existence with a magical incantation doesn't explain anything. All you're doing is replacing one unknown with another unknown.
Religion claims to know the answer using unknowable and incomprehensible explanations and yet being told with absolute certainty that a creator created everything ends your search for answers right then and there.
Oh, God did it. I guess that's the end of it then!
If you're satisfied with any old answer just as long as it is some sort of answer then religion is fine. But if you really want to dig, to truly understand that which is still a mystery to science, then I'd rather wait for a new scientific breakthrough than to simply accept religion's magical explanations.
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Originally Posted by GoCardinals
OR - “No, the entire universe and everything in it can probably not come together by itself, and there is probably a creator behind all this then you have cross over the line from the non-believers camp into the believers camp.
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True enough, I suppose. It's just too bad that a person would come to the conclusion that the universe could "not have come together by itself" before he even began looking for answers. It would also be too bad if he used the "God of the Gaps" argument or the "argument from ignorance" fallacy. ("I don't understand the cosmology involved or science doesn't have an answer yet, therefore, God.")
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Originally Posted by GoCardinals
The obvious question then becomes, “which one is it?”
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It is highly unlikely that anyone will actually think about this question. Once they've crossed that line into believing the universe is a product of magic, their culture, their society, their parents, their friends, and their community will almost certainly ensure that the dominant religion will answer this question.
Otherwise, determining which God created the universe is actually impossible. In fact, this is the precise moment when I tend to disagree vehemently with believers. They think that if they can disprove evolution and the Big Bang, it not only proves a creator by default (which it doesn't), but they immediately skip a bunch of steps and begin claiming that this creator is the very god they happen to worship.
Which stands to reason, of course. If you believe in Yahweh, you're not going to assume Vishnu created the universe. But that only shows the bias involved, especially since proving a creator does not prove a specific god or a specific religion.
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Originally Posted by GoCardinals
You will then start studying and pondering upon the holy scriptures of any religion of your choice, and you will go one by one thru all religions who claim to have God’s message in the form of a book.
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It sure would be nice if people actually did this -- but more often than not, their society's dominant religion already has its hooks into this person; the only book they'll even touch, much less read, will be the holy book of that particular religion. Moreover, they'll rely heavily on their priest, preacher, pastor, minister, rabbi, or imam to tell them which verses in which books to read and study.
Reading the Bible is the number one cited reason why believers lose their faith and become atheists. I'm sure this is probably true with other religions, as well. However, the clergy knows this and will deliberately steer parishioners away from verses and stories that cast their religion in a bad light.
I don't know a single preacher, for instance, that would tell his congregation to go home and study the story of Elijiah and the two she-bears that tore apart 42 little children for merely making a couple of comments about Elijiah's baldness.
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Originally Posted by GoCardinals
And you will let your heart honestly asnwer the question.
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Actually, if you're going to ask the question, "Is it true?" then you should be looking for evidence. Are the stories supported by historical accounts? Does the archaeology match up? Does the holy book give specifics -- names, dates, locations -- or does it read like a fairy tale with very few specifics and characters known only by their titles? Are there any corroborating historical works describing events in the holy book? Were there any eyewitnesses? Who, exactly, wrote the holy book ... and when?
It's almost impossible to verify a lot of these questions. However, letting the heart rule the mind in this case is extremely inadvisable. If you really do want to know if the book is true rather than simply looking for evidence to support the decision you've already made, then logic and critical thinking should be applied. Not feelings and emotions.
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Originally Posted by GoCardinals
Remember, the brain does the research and pondering part, but the call to faith comes from the heart.
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And if the two are not in synch, then listen to your brain. And if you're honest with yourself, it's almost guaranteed the two will not be in synch regardless of which religion it is. There will always be (or at least there *should* be) a little nagging voice in your head saying, "Magic? Really? Does that truly sound like a reasonable explanation? How come we never see these fantastical displays of God's power now? Isn't it far more likely that the authors simply witnessed a purely natural event but didn't have the knowledge or the science to explain it and, thus, attributed it to a god?" And other similar doubts.
No, that nagging little voice is not Satan or djinn or any other outside force trying to lure you away from the faith. What that nagging little voice is, however, is your brain telling your heart, "Get a grip on reality, mister, because you know perfectly well that you would never accept claims of the supernatural as a reasonable explanation in any other context!"
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Originally Posted by GoCardinals
Believing in God is faith and faith is NOT based on evidence or else it’s not faith.
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If it is real, there should be evidence that it is real. If that evidence is absent, then it almost certainly isn't real. Think of it as if you're putting religion on trial. Would we send a suspect to prison because we have faith that he's guilty? Or should the jury demand to see convincing evidence?
Even those abstract things like love, there would be evidence in their behavior. You can tell if a person truly loves you or not based on how they act towards you. Would you marry someone who treated you like everyone else, someone who never went out of their way to see you or talk to you? Someone who was "too busy" most of the time, someone who refused to help you when you needed it?
I should hope not -- thus there is evidence of love in a person's behavior patterns. You wouldn't marry someone who demonstrated no sign of love toward you, but you married him/her anyway because you have faith that he/she does.
It's rather strange, really, that religion is the only construct that pushes the idea of pure faith being a virtue, something good, something to strive for. Yet those who can be convinced on faith alone are the kinds of people scam artists and confidence men look for -- because they are the ones who can be convinced to buy an invisible car sitting in a seemingly empty parking space for a ton of money. It's an invisible car, after all ... like Wonder Woman's jet! That doesn't come cheap!
Faith without even the foundation of evidence is really not a virtue -- it is simply another word for gullibility. It's one thing to have faith in something that has some basis for it -- I have faith that the sun will come up tomorrow. I can't prove that it will, but it has come up every day for the last 4 billion years and there's no reason to think tomorrow will be any different.
That's a far cry from having faith that your cat will sprout wings and fly to London and bring you back some scones. And that is what religion is like.
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Originally Posted by GoCardinals
Nobody actually “knows” who and what’s out there - we are ALL playing a game of probabilities.
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I have to admit -- it's refreshing to hear someone admit this.
Of course, the problem is that I find it hard to believe that anyone would discard the possible, however unlikely, in favor of the absolutely impossible. Creationists do this on a consistant basis. Evolution is at least possible even if the odds against it are astronomical. Supreme, transcendent beings using magic to bring to life a pile of dirt and a rib, well, that is utterly impossible by every scientific and observed standard in existence.
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Originally Posted by GoCardinals
We have put our stakes after doing our own research by using our own intelligence and logic because the clock on EVERYONE is ticking. We will probably know the truth only after our deaths.
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Well, actually, you pretty much have to forgo intelligence and logic in order to believe in most religions. The more fundamentalist and evangelical the belief, the more intelligence and logic are ignored in favor of blind faith.
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Originally Posted by GoCardinals
I wish you all the best if you decide to take this journey and hope that you find something that talks to your heart.
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I tried this journey. Unfortunately, the only thing that talked to my heart were crickets -- the kind you hear when you tell a bad joke and no one laughs. There was nothing "out there" for me, apparently.
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Originally Posted by GoCardinals
Remember, if you look for EVIDENCE then you probably won’t find one - primarily because you can’t *fully* define the entity (God) whose evidence you are looking for. How can you demand the evidence of something that you can’t define?? Think about it!
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Well, yes, that's true for the most part -- but it really depends again on how deeply entrenched you are in religious belief. If you simply believe in a creator, a god, but one independent of any religion, then what you said is absolutely true.
However, when you get religions involved, especially holy books, you then have specific facts that you can try to verify. For instance, was there a global flood? There should be evidence for that, but there isn't. Was there an exodus out of Egypt? Again, there should be evidence of this, but there isn't.
If the holy book is filled with fables and morality tales rather than factual information about the history of said religion and the god it contains, it is more than likely that the god itself is also a fable, not a real being.
The problem with all creationist religions is that all of the evidence points one way while religion points in the opposite direction. Therefore, if you were a creationist, you would have to believe that God made the universe in such a way as to appear that evolution and the Big Bang are true ... even though it isn't. Thus God is playing the biggest lie and deception game ever ... that is some serious
maskirovka, as the Russians would call it.
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Originally Posted by GoCardinals
There are 7 billion people on earth. How are you going to bring ALL on agreement as to what is God before you look for evidence. Is a rat a God? Probably not for you but it is for someone. So what is God? Who defines it and how are we all 7 billion going to unanimously agree on it?
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This fact alone should have alarm bells ringing within the logic centers of your brain.
If there was, in fact, One True God that we're all supposed to worship and praise and ego-stroke and beg forgiveness from, shouldn't that be readily apparent?
Wouldn't everyone's heart be called to the same place -- to the same god? As you said, believing in God is based on faith. And it seems to be that, if none of the other religions are true and their gods are false, no one's heart would be called to believe in those religions. Only the true religion with the true God would have any power to call to one's heart.
Instead, people's beliefs are all over the place, with some 30,000 recognized Christian denominations, sects, factions, cults, and organizations -- not to mention those of all the other religions. Would the real God whose voice rings out of a crowd claiming "worship me or else" really hide himself amid thousands of false gods -- and then force you to figure out which god actually made that threat? To figure out which god you need to worship in order to avoid that ominous "or else" punishment?
All of the gods ... all of them ... seem to be playing a cosmic "Where's Waldo" game. Only in this game, the real god isn't wearing a red and white striped shirt so you know beyond doubt that you've found the right one. Instead, it's a "Where's Waldo?" game where all the gods are wearing plain white shirts and there is nothing to distinguish one from another -- at least in terms of deciding which one god is the real god and which of the thousands of others are false.
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Originally Posted by GoCardinals
And then you can’t define exactly what evidence you will accept AND how will you validate it?
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Since atheists are interested in the truth no matter where it leads, we would accept any scientific evidence that can be independently verified by multiple sources, evidence that has been rigorously examined by the peer review process, evidence that can produce actual data, evidence that has been found through experimentation and direct observation, etc. etc.
If that kind of evidence leads to a creator, then so be it.
However, personal experiences, anecdotal stories, holy books, unverified miracles -- especially those that can easily be explained without magic, junk and pseudo-science, nonsensical rationalizations, and appeals to authority will not be accepted as evidence.
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Originally Posted by GoCardinals
You want all misery and disease eradicated over night on earth? You want someone to grow a limb? You want the water in your glass turn into wine?
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If someone is claiming to be a faith healer then yes, healing an amputated limb would certainly be appreciated. The kind of evidence we would want would depend entirely on the claims being made.
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Originally Posted by GoCardinals
Suppose it all happens - how are you going to verify that it was done by God?
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You can't. And it's even more impossible (as if there are degrees of "impossible" heh heh) to ascertain which god did it.
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Originally Posted by GoCardinals
There is no evidence my friend - it’s onky signs. And they are only for those who want to search God.
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You're right, there is no evidence. But instead of treating deities like everything else for which there is no evidence, religion encourages you to believe it anyway. Truth no longer matters -- and there are far too many Christians out there who really DO know that their beliefs are wrong, but they cling to them anyway because comfort is more important than reality.
The reason why "signs" only appear to those searching for God is because they've already made up their minds that God is real -- and then they go looking for evidence after the fact. It is classic confirmation bias. When you're looking for something, there's a good chance you'll find it, even if it's not really there.
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Originally Posted by GoCardinals
Otherwise there is compulsion on anyone to believe or not to believe - we have free will to make our choices, and in the end we will be responsible for our choices that were based on free will.
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Here, you've already assumed that a god exists. Not just that, but you've assumed a judgmental god exists, one who is going to do an overview of our lives and reward/punish us based on the results. And yet there is no evidence for that, either, and hence, no reason to believe it. It boggles my mind why anyone would even want to believe it.
Some Christian denominations seem to be very much anti-pleasure of any sort -- unless you can derive pleasure from Bible reading and singing hymns whenever you're not working. Those denominations instill into people a deep sense of fear and foreboding, a sense that every act, every word spoken, every stray thought that flits through their head will be analyzed and judged by god. Worse still, they often believe in collective punishments (as if that's at all just and fair) so that a few sinners in a bustling town will get everyone in trouble. This, of course, results in oppression, subjugation, prejudice, bigotry, misogyny, racism, and open hatred. The evidence for that is all over the historical record. Which is why I just cannot wrap my mind around why anyone would desire to have such a god.
Of course I do not believe that, should a god be proven to exist, that it will be the type most people believe in -- petty, egocentric, harsh, unapproachable, wrathful, and easily offended. That's not the behavior of a god but of an immature child. It's surprising how few believers see this despite how obvious it is. Which means their desire to believe in what they want rather than in what the evidence supports applies even to their holy books -- and to god's personality itself.
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