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God. Do you believe?

Some people just refuse to believe it would not matter what kind proof or examples you could give them. Hey your choice not to believe when your time comes and if you are proven otherwise I apologize. I will pray for you. Pascal is not my go-to argument, but I think it is a safer play for the nonbeliever.
 
ChrisL68 said:
Pascal's wager shows a complete lack of understanding of the concept of belief.
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Pascal's wager is not what I base my faith on. I just said it would be a safer play than just not believing because God has not appeared to you.
 
What is a safer play? If somebody held a gun to your held and said they will blow your brains out if you don't believe that person can walk on water, would you really believe they can walk on water or would you just say it to not get your brains blown in? If you don't really believe, then the entire fear factor of pascal's wager is legitimately dismissed as complete nonsense.

So I can come up with any belief and stipulate that you if you don't believe it, you will suffer some dire consequences, and you will believe it because it is the safer play?

This is just one of the many logical fallacies of this concept.
 
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ChrisL68 said:
What is a safer play? If somebody held a gun to your held and said they will blow your brains out if you don't believe that person can walk on water, would you really believe they can walk on water or would you just say it to not get your brains blown in? If you don't really believe, then the entire fear factor of pascal's wager is legitimately dismissed as complete nonsense.

So I can come up with any belief and stipulate that you if you don't believe it, you will suffer some dire consequences, and you will believe it because it is the safer play?

This is just one of the many logical fallacies of this concept.
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I thought about that and came to the same conclusion after I posted it. You can't force someone to believe in something they don't want to believe in.
 
jamesda3 said:
I thought about that and came to the same conclusion after I posted it. You can't force someone to believe in something they don't want to believe in.
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It has nothing to do with want. I think everybody would prefer the concept of everlasting existence.
 
Then believers and non-believers should just agree to disagree. You cannot prove he does not exist and we can't prove he does.
 
jamesda3 said:
I am far from one of those guys. I am not yelling at anyone nor attacking anyone. I am stating my opinion getting attack and fighting back. What am I suppose to do state my opinion get attacked and not respond?

I do not condemn people who do not believe it is not my place to judge, but I do not want to see anything happen to anyone if they choose to live out their lives and not believe.

The only response I usually get from anyone when they are trying deny God is lack of proof and yet there is no proof that he does not exist.

If I was coming across in the wrong way you could help better explain God for me on here instead of attacking my technique. It is the job of every Christian to witness to the nonbeliever.

I apologize to anyone on here that I come off to as a douche I can be at times but that is not who I am. I get very defensive during religious threads and I apologize for that.

When it comes to the nonbeliever I think it is safer to take Paschal's stance.
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Isn't that pretty much exactly what you are supposed to do, per Jesus' example?
 
It's all in the delivery. A gentle and polite rebuttal is one thing, where a strident and arrogant calling out is another. James has said repeatedly that he doesn't want to think about things before typing them, and that his ungrammatical delivery is just who he is.

James, I'd speculate that most of your "attackers" are put off not by your faith, but by your defensive style and your insistence that they agree with you. God asks us to stand up for Him, but your aggressive proselytizing doesn't seem to work very well.
 
DistrictDeacon said:
What rational proof of God's existence do you have?
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"Reality" itself is something of a chimera if Einstein, Bohr and Planck are to be believed.

Rationality is based on a finite scientific sytem which is designed to measure that which is within a time-space continuum. God's claim is "Eternal" therefore the agency of God-head is not susceptible to an "adequate explanation" using the formulaic tools we have to communicate with. When we converse we jump from tense to tense (time to time) and the language is an inadequate purveyor. Who among us has not tried to relate something miraculous only to feel that we butchered the personal experience? The language does not have the capacity, nor does the math nor any other of our reasoning tools to express a relationship because the tools and axioms are time bound.

There is a reason that a religious avatar like Christ would make this demarcation point between the finite and the infinite. In order to gain "the Life" you must be born again. He immediately reprimands the literalist scholar Nicodemus and chides him to think beyond the purley physical constructs of his thought and see the metyaphysical conquest of time-space ( which Einstein himself claimed as "artificial" and even unreal).

It is no mistake that Christ worked in a much richer language and that the Greek Koine and Coptic translations of Aramaic reveal that Christ had 3 words at his disposal when referring to "Life". The 3 forms of the word "Life" coincide with "Beos" (biologic), "Psyche" (comprehension of carbon reality) and the resultant "Zoe" (Eternity). Christ's claim is that one must "overcome" the limitations of the first two in order to achieve the Eternal aspect which underlies all.

Salvador Dali had a great description of this achievement which mirrors Einstein's own example to us...that what we see is not necessarily what we think were are seeing. Our perceptual capacities break reality down into something recognizable and practical (and we are thankful, for as Nietzche said "if Truth were revealed in its entirety it would blow a man apart")

Dali called this "world underlying a world underlying a world" a state of "nuclear mysticism!"
 
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Lectro said:
"Reality" itself is something of a chimera if Einstein, Bohr and Planck are to be believed.

Rationality is based on a finite scientific sytem which is designed to measure that which is within a time-space continuum. God's claim is "Eternal" therefore the agency of God-head is not susceptible to an "adequate explanation" using the formulaic tools we have to communicate with. When we converse we jump from tense to tense (time to time) and the language is an inadequate purveyor. Who among us has not tried to relate something miraculous only to feel that we butchered the personal experience? The language does not have the capacity, nor does the math nor any other of our reasoning tools to express a relationship because the tools and axioms are time bound.

There is a reason that a religious avatar like Christ would make this demarcation point between the finite and the infinite. In order to gain "the Life" you must be born again. He immediately reprimands the literalist scholar Nicodemus and chides him to think beyond the purley physical constructs of his thought and see the metyaphysical conquest of time-space ( which Einstein himself claimed as "artificial" and even unreal).

It is no mistake that Christ worked in a much richer language and that the Greek Koine and Coptic translations of Aramaic reveal that Christ had 3 words at his disposal when referring to "Life". The 3 forms of the word "Life" coincide with "Beos" (biologic), "Psyche" (comprehension of carbon reality) and the resultant "Zoe" (Eternity). Christ's claim is that one must "overcome" the limitations of the first two in order to achieve the Eternal aspect which underlies all.

Salvador Dali had a great description of this achievement which mirrors Einstein's own example to us...that what we see is not necessarily what we think were are seeing. Our perceptual capacities break reality down into something recognizable and practical (and we are thankful, for as Nietzche said "if Truth were revealed in its entirety it would blow a man apart")

Dali called this "world underlying a world underlying a world" a state of "nuclear mysticism!"
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Where did he say this? Serious question, I have never heard this before.
 
TWDeac said:
Where did he say this? Serious question, I have never heard this before.
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I mean spacetime is just a construct to get around Euclidean perceptions of dimensional space. String theory and m-theory are constructs as well. They are ways of studying, understanding, and perceiving, but are they "real" or are they "artificial"?

Einstein is a good example to use here because he very much was able to extricate his rational, mathematical mind from his personal spirituality. He even had some fairly theistic worldviews, among my favorites is:

"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest-a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty."
 
TownieDeac said:
I mean spacetime is just a construct to get around Euclidean perceptions of dimensional space. String theory and m-theory are constructs as well. They are ways of studying, understanding, and perceiving, but are they "real" or are they "artificial"?

Einstein is a good example to use here because he very much was able to extricate his rational, mathematical mind from his personal spirituality. He even had some fairly theistic worldviews, among my favorites is:

"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest-a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty."
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I wasn't thinking of it from that angle. Got it.

That is a great quote. I don't think I've seen it before.
 
DeacDiggler said:
It's all in the delivery. A gentle and polite rebuttal is one thing, where a strident and arrogant calling out is another. James has said repeatedly that he doesn't want to think about things before typing them, and that his ungrammatical delivery is just who he is.

James, I'd speculate that most of your "attackers" are put off not by your faith, but by your defensive style and your insistence that they agree with you. God asks us to stand up for Him, but your aggressive proselytizing doesn't seem to work very well.
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TY and you are right. I am going to stop, I can't ask simple questions about my daughters well being to get opinions anymore without people calling her satan spawn so I am just not going to talk about religion anymore.
 
jamesda3 said:
TY and you are right. I am going to stop, I can't ask simple questions about my daughters well being to get opinions anymore without people calling her satan spawn so I am just not going to talk about religion anymore.
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come on people :rulz:
 
Making fun of grammar and sentence structure is one thing; the tags about his daughter are over the line. Definitely violates the don't be a douchebag rule.
 
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