Why is Your God(s) True and Others False?

I'm saying that, if these books were to be found, they could be scientifically analyzed, tested, and checked. Statistically, the more sources, or the larger the sample, that correspond with each other, the more accurate the result. Therefore, if we had like 20 eye-witness accounts (of anything), all saying the same thing, from unrelated people, we can be fairly certain that said thing happened in some way. The more accounts, the more certain we are. I, however, am still holding out for some kind of time viewing, to see it first-hand. Unfortunately, even that would probably be able to be biased.

 

The thing is, religious belief is spiritual. Not scientific. Explaining things scientifically isn't always the answer to everything. It is hard believing in things one can't see. I know. But some people don't need proof to believe in something. Some may call that naive, but I classify that as having an open mind.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Pink_Unicorn

There. Have an open mind. Both of these have the same amount of legitimacy as god, except god is more entrenched and brainwashed into people.

:D

 

Oh how very clevarrr. :sarcasm:

Though I do agree in that one tiny point there; God is "brainwashed" into a select few insanely Christian people who stomp around trying to convert people.
It's just not the same. It's so hard to explain, but I'm sorry that you don't know how.

 

Point being, I've never heard of this Invisible Pink Unicorn but I know that the flying spaghetti monster started as a joke to show the supposed illegitimacy of god. But we do have some amount of evidence, and there are people like me who adopt slightly different doctrines that make fundamental sense through logic.

 

Usually any child brought up in a religious family to follow that particular religion has been brainwashed. They have been told that there is only one way and that their parents way is the right way.

As for it being "spiritual" I have to disagree. The universe is based and run by the laws of physics. Everything that happens in the universe happens by interactions of particles, real or imaginary (and yes, that is a scientific term). Anything that happens that contravenes the laws of physics would be supernatural. Supernatural meaning outside of nature and the laws of physics. This just isn't possible. The universe forbids it.

 

There's also the fact that Pastafarianism is used by atheists often to show how ridiculous the christian doctrine is IN YOUR PERSPECTIVE. Perspectives can be warped by what people believe. My point is that if Christianity is true and there is a god, then atheists would be wrong in saying that the christian doctrine is bullshit, and would therefore have a warped perspective just because they are atheist. This would completely reverse your argument, making you the brainwashed people instead of us, brainwashed through rebellious independence if that makes any sense. This is only fortified through my previous point that Pastafarianism was created specifically as a ridiculous farce, while Christianity is arguably true.

Posted separately for multiple reasons, I want to make sure it's seen, I'm in a stable state of mind now and also I'm postwhoring.

 

You make a valid point. But faith isn't based on proof or hard evidence is it? Anyway, I'm getting off topic.

Assuming these "Gods" do exist. How does one go about proving theirs is better?

 

I'm not trying to hurt your argument in any way, AV, but I think that I should bring this to light just for future reference in other debates so you don't make this mistake again.

Spoiler

Kinda contradicting yourself there.

 

No. I'm trying to level the playing feild so that we can have a mutual understanding of the matter at hand.

 

Nice.

Anyways, no, I don't believe that science brainwashes anyone because, in the majority of cases, scientists back up their "beliefs" with proof, evidence, and research, whereas religions back up their beliefs with a being that cannot be proven in any way whatsoever (barring looking back in time and observing religious legend taking place (seeing Jesus walk on water, etc) - an extremely unlikely event) just "making it happen" in a way that is also undetectable.

Now, I do admit, science, as a whole, is just as corrupt and self-centered as most human institutions. There have been incidents of manipulation of data, wishful thinking, rampant speculation and rumor, cover-ups (ignoring crucial data, not Roswell), etc. But that's true for almost every religion, also.

Besides, most people who know the whole bloody history of religion just cannot believe in any loving god who perpetuates that. I know I can't.

 

No, faith isn't about believing in things only when provided with proof, because that's kind of the definition of faith in this case.

Still doesn't make it smart or justifiable. Or necessarily dumb. It's a pretty big assumption as far as I'm concerned, but whatever.

What exactly does the FSM doesn't have going for him that the christian one doesn't? Or hell, what does the christian god have that all other deities and supernatural entities don't?

 

Science DOES back up their theories with research, but were we to make some fundemental change in properties everything would be ****ed. Hundreds of years ago, people believed so much bullshit, ie that smoke rose to return to the air. They also based these on science much like our own. While I'm not claiming that the scientific theories today are that ludicrous (because they're not), I am saying that even the most intelligent people of that age believed that to be true until one person came in and ****ed over their mirage of the world.

Religion, once again, is supportable, maybe not to the extent that science is but the support is still there and you're not acknowledging it as well as you should just like I said you do earlier in the thread (Or was it in that other thread?). We do have written records (ie, the mother****ing BIBLE), although their accuracy in many points is questionable there are events that we can support with evidence.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/does-archaeology-support-the-bible (I'm probably killing my argument by choosing this specific link because you know more about archeology than I do but I couldn't care less right now. So if you're thinking of trying to nullify my entire argument around this link it won't work as well because I'm acknowledging that this probably isn't the best example for me to use.)

Of course, the church as a worldwide institution is just as corrupt as science and vice versa. Anything constructed as a hierarchy/by humans/as a hierarchy by humans will have its flaws or be corrupt. So, these systems are only as flawed as the people within them, which is, I'm sad to say, pretty damn flawed.

Really? As much as I would like to instantly break out my argument of "God stopped majorly interfering when we demanded out independence at the Fall of Man and only interferes directly and obviously seldomly" argument, I'd like you to elaborate a bit on this history of religion. Because I'd like to hear about this history of religion on earth that bypasses the corrupt church and goes straight to god in that he doesn't exist/isn't benevolent.

 

Well, Apollo has the Illiad, but I don't think you take that as proof of his existence.

 

Is Apollo a character or the author?

 

What does it matter?

Even if it was stated in the Illiad that Apollo was the author I doubt you'd think the supernatural parts of the work were any more real.

A book can't be used to prove itself, if I wrote a book that said i was the master of the universe, raised and sold albino tigerbearsharks for a living, and had fourteen dongs with enough wenches to service them all it wouldn't suddenly become true

Also, for all intents and purposes, god is a character in the bible, and men wrote it, even if they were inspired by him

 

Good point.

That's true, without outside evidence you cannot support the credibility of a book.

You can't use a book to prove itself, that is correct. You can't have some random nonsense in a book and assume it to be true, there has to be some form of logic within it to make it begin to be credible.

God is a character in the bible. Men did write the bible. Yes.

But if all this stems back to the fact that I used the bible as an example there then I realize that it wasn't the best example to use but I can't be bothered to think of another one right now.

 

This is true, but people believed those things before the so-called Age of Science, or the Age of Reason, back when everything had a mystical explanation, and the Dark Ages were just beginning to recede. Now, we have proofs that they never had, and technologies that they wouldn't even begin to grasp, let alone condemn (Witchcraft, etc).

Really? I would truly like to see this support. I really would. The Bible is not, to most scientists, a reliable source, due to the dozen or more translations it suffered through to get to it's present form, and the lack of original copies. I mean, just think of the modern games translated from Japanese that are sometimes ludicrous.

I can think of one translation that changes the meaning of the Bible right off the top of my head. In Exodus, where it mentions the crossing of the Red Sea, someone had, somewhere along the line, mistranslated it from Reed Sea. The Red sea is huge, and hard to cross. The Reed sea, however, is a tiny little marshy, swampy piece of land that, coupled with a tsunami coming in from the explosion of Santorini (I think) at about that time, which would have emptied the Reed Sea, making it possible to walk across. Then, according to an Egyptian record, "the sea swallowed their footsteps". No mention of the loss of the Egyptian army, just a mention of the escape of the Jews.

Again, the bible has been translated so many times, it's not even funny. Besides, that website, I'm sorry to say, defeats itself in almost every paragraph. It offers readings from the bible, and justifies their accuracy in the following way:

L O Fricking L for circular reasoning.

No arguments there. See: Catholic priests molesting boys and just getting sent to another parish (or whatever they're called) instead of thrown in jail (or at least excommunicated). Great enforcement of the bible's anti-homo laws there...

Reference: The Crusades, where Christians wiped out, along with the Muslims (who had done nothing wrong to them), thousands of Jews and fellow Christians who lived in the Middle East, and sacked Constantinople, apparently ordered to do so by the Pope himself, in a fit of jealousy over the wealth and power of Constantinople.

Reference: The Inquisition, where Christian torturers licensed by the church slaughtered whole families just for believing a slightly different version of Christianity and sticking to it. And may god have mercy on those who weren't Christian at all!

Reference: The Christian missionaries, who, for hundreds of years now, go abroad and tear apart whole societies in an attempt to "save the savage heathens" (and yes, I have heard that phrase used, back when I went to church).

Reference: The nominally Christian conquistadors, who ripped apart several ancient cultures for a few abnormal practices (Aztecs, Inca, Mayans, etc). Many of those cultures existed for longer than any European country in it's present form.

Reference: The nominally Christian original settlers in America (including Columbus) who found it perfectly all right to enslave the native population and purposely spread plague among them (although, the natives did get their revenge - syphilis).

Reference: The Christian justification for slavery (forget the verse), used for centuries to subjugate and humiliate some of the oldest cultures on Earth.

 

Right, we do have methods that they would never think of. HOWEVER they had methods that those before them would never think of, and they were just as greatly convinced with things such as the geocentric model of the universe.

True, the bible has been through enough translations that it's credibility can be doubted, but it cannot be shown that it is as horribly inaccurate as you imply. True there are bound to be some mistakes but that's only natural considering that we are human beings and it's a giant book. So while we can agree that there will be errors in it somewhere along the line, it's just a matter of how many errors there are. This is completely counting out the fact that there are many different versions of the bible, each slightly different.

Also direct Japanese to English translation is complicated as ****. The grammar is different, words that exist in one language don't in another, there are definitive terms and I'm not even going into kanji. These are two languages that developed in completely different parts of the world for the majority of history and have almost nothing in common.

Really? Old gif is old. Everybody knows that those translators were most likely high if they weren't idiots. That is such an outlier of an average that I'm not sure it was done by professional translators (it wasn't).

I remember hearing about this before, but I don't know when or where from. Could I get a link perhaps?

Like I said, not the best example but I can't be bothered now because I'm at the point where I really don't give enough of a **** to find outside resources. I didn't even bother to read it through before I posted it, though it was probably a bad idea in retrospect.

Look at me, giving selective examples to make my side of the argument look more moral than yours. I'd rather not point out the flaws in my side when we've agreed that they're both equally flawed, I'd rather just point out some of the worst and most controversial flaws in yours to make everyone think that my side is less flawed than yours when we've already agreed that it really isn't.

Corruption of man and the church, declared independence at the Fall of Man prevents God from doing anything directly.

Corruption of man and the church, declared independence at the Fall of Man prevents God from doing anything directly.

Corruption of man and the church, declared independence at the Fall of Man prevents God from doing anything directly. And dear god, what church did you go to? That's not a normal church.

Corruption of man and the church, declared independence at the Fall of Man prevents God from doing anything directly.

Corruption of man and the church, declared independence at the Fall of Man prevents God from doing anything directly.

Corruption of man and the church, declared independence at the Fall of Man prevents God from doing anything directly.

I'm not agreeing with any of these events, I'm just saying that I have a system of logic in place for why the world is as corrupt and evil as it is yet still has a benevolent God. Although I'm sure you've heard it before, I've used it before.

 

Like Old Hebrew and Latin, perhaps? Or Latin and Greek? Or even Hebrew and English.

I know, but it was a pretty darn good example nonetheless. I mean, how many of the monks translating the Bible and copying it by hand (a process fraught with error in and of itself) had an absolutely intimate, absolutely perfect knowledge of both languages, either?

Learned this in my World Civs class a few years ago. I don't know if it's online yet. My professor knew about it because one of his friends made the discovery. I've looked, and apparently, the debate about this rages on. I guess we'll just have to agree to be on opposite sides of this debate. Just do a Google search for "exodus "red sea" "reed sea" translation", and you'll find more than you ever wanted to know.

I couldn't think of any incidents off the top of my head. But ok, here's one: In the Victorian era, during the original excavation of Pompeii, several of the excavators plastered over the more erotic frescoes in order to avoid offending anyone.