God is Imaginary
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Your comments trivialize this issue and are simply false. I’ve never argued that I know God exists only “because the Bible tells me so.” I take the position of St. Thomas Aquinas. The existence of God is a “preamble to faith.” We can know the existence of God through reason. The proof of this is that most people have a fundamental openness to belief in God. There are things about the world and human experience that points us to God’s existence.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean, so forgive me if I'm misinterpreting. But I could not disagree more that the tendency of people to be religious is proof (you said God, specifically, but I expanded to just mean religiousness). 99% of the world could believe it (or anything), but that alone doesn't mean it's real.0 -
I just realized that I was reading this statement too literally, Wineplease.There is proof of God, through the life of Jesus, in the bible.
Again, I think you are wasting your time trying to "prove" the existence of God. Yet, you didn't say what I thought you said, that the Bible proves the existence of God. I disagree that it's "the life of Jesus, in the Bible" that shows me that God lives and moves; it's my experience of God's life and movement that shows me the authors of the Bible might be talking about the same experiences.
But I can see that you were saying something more subtle than "the Bible says, I believe it, that settles it."0 -
I'm not sure I understand what you mean, so forgive me if I'm misinterpreting. But I could not disagree more that the tendency of people to be religious is proof (you said God, specifically, but I expanded to just mean religiousness). 99% of the world could believe it (or anything), but that alone doesn't mean it's real.0
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From this I inferred that there must be some basis for this nearly universal tendency.
One fairly obvious potential reason, from my point of view, is that belief was evolutionarily advantageous to humans. The things that come along with religion (shared culture, traditions, guidelines for behavior, etc.) could have helped believers pass on their genes.0 -
I'm not sure I understand what you mean, so forgive me if I'm misinterpreting. But I could not disagree more that the tendency of people to be religious is proof (you said God, specifically, but I expanded to just mean religiousness). 99% of the world could believe it (or anything), but that alone doesn't mean it's real.
Most people found it reasonable to believe that the earth was the center of the universe. Most people found it reasonable to believe that the earth was flat and if you sailed long enough you would fall off. Ignorance does not equal proof.0 -
Most people found it reasonable to believe that the earth was the center of the universe. Most people found it reasonable to believe that the earth was flat and if you sailed long enough you would fall off. Ignorance does not equal proof.0
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Our experience of a "flat" earth is the fundamental building block of eventually discovering that it is actually a sphere.
That sounds like something you just made up.0 -
That sounds like something you just made up.0
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And expanding from our experience of a supreme meaning-giving reality (God) may lead to a theological Copernican revolution in which there is nothing like what we call God.0
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And expanding from our experience of a supreme meaning-giving reality (God) may lead to a theological Copernican revolution in which there is nothing like what we call God.0
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What I cannot agree with is that the supreme ground of meaning is fundamentally nonexistent.
That's more or less what I think. The only meaning to our lives is what we give it ourselves. Life doesn't have its own inherent meaning.0