God

>I am open to it if there is any scientific proof.
Then you'll never believe. Not even religious, but God can't be proved with science, maybe can with philosophy.

I can see how it might work. Science only deals with the observable. So science and religion do not need to be adversaries exactly. My view is more like Flatland. If you are 2D, how do you gain an understanding of a third dimension? That's easy for us to claim to know. We are already 3D but when extrapolate that problem...

Why must anything be verified?

Fuck off with your solipsism.

Proof of the love of a mother to her child.
Proof of consciousness.

Next topic?

Yeah, but the big fucking difference between god and the coast is that I can go outside and measure the coast if I want.

Yet you don't, but have absolute faith that the coast is exactly the way it is drawn in the maps. You assent to authority, not the knowledge. Like a believer might assent to the authority of Church.

There's two trains of thought.

Everything is going to be alright.

Everything is going to be alright because I'm going to heaven.

Pick one.

I accidentally came accross this quote on a link from google for the mormon website. I tried to avoid reading it because it's advertising but I read it anyway.

So I start to read their scripture quote and it literally says everyone is weak. I hate that attitude; fuck you guys.

i believe in god morally, but not scientifically. i have no idea if an actual god exists in real life, but i still believe in him nonetheless as a sort of philosophical ideal i have.

Potato

I believe we live in a universe explicitly designed to fuck with us by some malevolent entity.
>Quantum bullshit
>Relativity bullshit
>Questionable cosmological bullshit
>The deeper we look under the surface of any subject, the more bullshit we discover

Pascal's wager nigga.

even if i'm wrong, leading a moral existence and devoting some time to meditation and spiritual exploration is only going to help me.

...

I am agnostic so I don't know.

>designed to fuck with us
More like the universe was designed without humans in mind, and we're just apes that happened to evolve with a slightly larger frontal lobe. Nobody ever guaranteed that the universe has to make any sense to humans, in fact, to think that a bunch of featherless bipeds stuck on a shitty planets were capable of gather so much information is crazy enough already, but we could hit the wall any day now and never progress ever again.

That picture is dumb.

Both are accurate representations of the behavior of nihilists. But the one on the left is how intelligent people act when confronted with the meninglessness of life. The one on the right is how children and manchildren react. Either you grow out of it and are no longer capable of partaking in hedonistic pursuits, hence the persistent depressive moods, or you remain a dumb child forever. If you're the manchild, good for you. I'm jealous.

what Zen is?

Sounds like you've set up your own imaginary panopticon

>Aquinas

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Try posting someone with LESS credibility, assuming you could possibly find someone! Aquinas is a shambles, an absolute brainlet and should be a source of embarrassment to Christians.

Pascal's wager is dumb af nigga

Zen is what it is

because the things i do that do not require objective proof don't make me go to church every Sunday or stone an infidel?

I believe in God because I was raised that way, and I've seen several flaws in the atheists' belief (fossil record, etc). There's no proof that God exists; religion is based on faith. Think of deities as the eldritch.

Mormons are idiots, though. Read up on some actual theology.

Literally salvation through faith. If proof existed then faith wouldn't be necessary, destroying the very foundation Christian religion is based on. You can choose to either believe the Bible as a literal history book with unflexible laws (plebs) or as a philosphical/theological text about our place in the world, the cosmos, morality, and meaning in a word that initially appears to not have meaninng. Does Jesus literally need to be resurrected? Or is the persistance and strength of his image in our culture and as a moral figure not resurrection on its own?

Interesting argument. All of it is true until the conclusion about the properties:

>perfect
If a flaw or imperfection is potentiality, wouldn't perfection also be potentiality?

For example, consider a painting. It has the potential of becoming a masterpiece, of becoming perfect. But at many times it isn't. It needs something to move it to be perfect.

I mean, technically all states of being (even metaphorical ones like perfection) are potentials.

>Immutable

If this initial mover moves thing, does that not change his desires? For example, why doesn't "God" just keep everything stationary. Or even better, why doesn't "God" make things "move" in a different way? Why this way? "God" is at every instance making "decisions" about the state he wants his world to be in.

All the other properties are correct. But if you think about it a pure, unique, eternal and godless universe could also be that initial mover.

>omnipotent
The universe is all that there is and the universe can take any form it "desires" so within its realm, it is omnipotent

>non-physical
The universe itself cannot be measured. It is the realm in which things can be measured, so it is non-physical

>eternal
We are assuming it is eternal

>omniscient
The universe is the realm in which knowledge exists, so it "knows" everything.

>only one
We are assuming there is only one

Therefore chirstcucks get cucked again, back to the drawing board.

I never said I needed god personally verified, just proven.

I can go look at pictures of the continents, or satellite feeds, or a plethora of things. There is no evidence to suggest God is real, so why would I believe it?

In other words, you are telling me I should accept any fact I'm given without any proof because it's presented to me as such because the alternative would be to admit that some things I believe are not personally proven by myself which is perfectly fine.

This entire argument relies on cause and effect and if there is no universe why is there cause and effect?

God can't be proven, period. There is no way to observe evidence of a god. Next, the problem with philosophically considering the existence of god is that at best you're going to get a bit of a logical loophole that describes the possibility of a god, but is ultimately useless because it requires some unobtainable piece of information to be complete.

Believing in something which has actually been observed, by a reliable source, and then recorded and then learned by you, and is then accepted by you because it is supported by observations that you personally have made, is very different from religion. Religion on the other hand is believing in something which has not been reliably observed by somebody (and if it was claimed to be observed from a "reliable" source, like somebody who knew Jesus and observed the stuff he did and wouldn't be lying or anything, it was observed some hundreds or thousands of years ago, and the history of the information you are now hearing is very vague and very incomplete). You also just simply can't observe any of what you are buying into in religion, and cannot support ANYTHING you are taught with anything you have observed yourself.

To summarize, I accept science because it is supported with things I really have observed myself, even if I technically haven't personally observed every phenomenon taught to me.
I do not accept religion because it is not supported by any legitimate evidence I have personally collected and is not taught by a reliable source.

You could literally make the same argument against all of history.

And? History is completely worthless.

What if a god exists who sends everyone except atheists to hell?

the god many people believe in (omniscient, omnipotent and good) can actually be disproven.
Google the "problem of evil" .
Always find it funny how you can disprove this god, but not Zeus, Ra or Odin.

Also, no true morality can be achieved if it is based on a fear of hellfire/ desire for Heaven. As any such morality is very selfcenterd and in my opinion not morally good.

His assumption that the coast is the way that it is drawn is not a scientific conclusion. Yes, we accept certain things without having observed evidence for them. The reason for this though is that we don't have the time to absolutely prove every single bit of information that's thrown out way. I'm sure that if the question of the coast being the way it is on a map was more of an issue, people would likely demand more evidence for it. And actually, there are people who study those sorts of things and who question how accurate our maps are, or who attempt to make the best flat representation of our round planet. We then accept their authority because we don't have the time to study it ourselves, and there is no opposing evidence to the accuracy of their maps yet, and we also have no evidence that their maps are false. We aren't immortal, and we only have so much time in our lives, so we cannot give that much attention to every detail which does not affect us heavily. We demand scientific evidence for a god because we feel that that question has a much greater impact upon us than the exact shape of the coastline. Therefore the question is afforded much more of our time, considered more often, and evidence is more highly demanded.
And again, if the details of the coastline affected me in the same way that religious laws would affect me if I accepted them, then I wouldn't simply accept what's written on the maps. I would seek further evidence.

(Continued in the next post)

(Last reply continued)

I also just think you're flat out wrong about the things we do or do not have to put faith (alone) into. We don't necessarily have faith in the authority that gives us the map, but we know definitively that it is possible to observe the coast. What we have faith in is that the coastline shown to us is accurate and is the actual coastline, and that the authority that gave it to us is not lying about the details, but we still know that a coastline exists. When considering god, the question does not lie in the details, but in the very existence of the subject itself. I have observed that there is a coast. I don't definitively know every detail about that coast, but I know that it is there. I, however, have not observed that there is a god, and therefore do not trust the details given to me about it or the authority that gave them to me, since that authority is claiming the existence of something which cannot have it's existence proven. This makes the religious authority significantly less trustworthy than the scientific authority. The scientific authority gives me provable information, and encourages it's own beliefs to be scrutinized, evaluated, reevaluated, revised, observed, etc. while the religious authority tells me to simply accept what is given to me, and not to question but to have faith in absolutely everything they say, even though the very heart of their ideology is fundamentally impossible to even prove the existence of.

>in my opinion

There's a problem right there. There is no true morality. Morality cannot be objective, and therefore cannot be used to critique any religion, unless it's a critique of the fact that that religion states the existence of an objective morality.

>Morality cannot be objective
The only way you could say that is if you don't know what "morality" means.

True, i do believe you can "rate" moral thinking though, even though non are absolutelly true or perfectly good.
Rate it either on how much they relieve total suffering, or simply on the basis of you're own instinctive empathy.

I know that this creates problem but there is truth to be found in paradoxes.

After reading a lot of contradicting books on moral philosophy i have become a great fan of jacques derrida , give him a try!

Yes, science is much more concrete than history. We cannot be certain about history, but we can be certain of the things that we can observe and study and prove at whatever point in time. I do not know without a doubt that Pythagoras was anything like what is written in the history books, but I can tell you that the Pythagorean theorem works. That is something I can take from the history book, use, measure, and observe it being correct.

Now, technically scientific/mathematical laws are not infallible. We cannot know what we do not know: there is always the possibility of new evidence being found that contradicts the conclusion we have come to, but that doesn't invalidate the existing evidence, just that we need to add to it.

And when we actually consider history, we do have a logical system for establishing the validity of history/historical sources. Historians will also recognize, analyze and consider the degree of inaccuracy of their sources. The Bible and other religious texts are not high up on the scale of historical accuracy anyways.

Now that's just false

I choose to believe because it is an exercise in radical freedom to do so.

I would never say that morality should not be discussed or evaluated. Just like anything with people, common moral beliefs or instincts can be used to find what's generally considered moral. It is also possible to simply consider what's healthy for a society, and then deem those things moral. It's just a bit vague at times and, like you said, generates a lot of problems.

Pffft

Then explain to me what morality is, and how it may be objective.

Whatever you define morality to be, any individual will have developed their own unique values to fit into that definition.

If you seek the most beneficial action as the objectively moral thing to do, you must answer what is the thing that is actually benefiting from the action. If a decision is a cost benefit analysis, and the moral action is what does the most good (benefit) with the smallest amount of bad/evil (cost), how would you quantify that in order to find the objectively moral action? What is good and what is bad cannot be defined, as our perception of them is learned through our material conditions and experiences, which are unique to each individual.

>however I am open to it if there is any scientific proof
>scientific proof
>scientific

popsci fan are the worst

Morality is about what is correct; what will occur in the future.

A god that doesn't drag me to church on Sundays. I fucking hate that.

Nothing outside of mathematics can be proven, period. There is no way to observe evidence of anything.

Define correct, and what you mean by "in the future"

If there's no way to observe anything, then how is math any different?

If I can't trust my observations of the physical world, how can I trust the symbols and ideas used to represent those observations?

If the world plays tricks on me, why would that not apply as well to math, which is used as a representation of the patterns found in the world around me (which is apparently not observable)

>which is used as a representation of the patterns found in the world around me
>found in the world

Math transcends the world.