Topic: Why do you believe God exists? - page 7. (Read 7902 times)

No I advise following the Judeo-Christian tradition.

This is the tradition that holds the following up as the ultimate rule, purpose and message of the Bible.

Christianity: Matthew 7:12
"So  everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets."

Judaism: Hillel the Elder
"What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn."

See: Superrationality and the Infinite

Now you can choose to reject that truth and get hung up over some esoteric detail of the brutal tribal realities of ages past. However, in doing so you reject the greatest force for freedom in history. You leave both yourself and your offspring vulnerable to future slavery in service to whatever technological or ideological tyranny comes along next.

That is your choice to make.

I hope you are not suggesting we follow the Judo-Christian tradition.  You know the one that keeps women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen or the one that kills gays or atheists in the city squares.

You are right. As you said, the secularism religion brought all that stuff you mentioned, which is some of the most tyrannical stuff around.

Freedom comes from moral self-control. There is no other way to achieve it.

The West especially Europe has forgotten this which is why freedom is now in decline throughout the western world. If you look at our current secular society and don't see the stagnation increasing corruption and intellectual incoherence and yes declining freedom then you have closed your eyes to reality.

This video from Prager University highlightes this point well.

Freedom and Moral Self-Control

There are all sorts of historical and tyrannical regimes founded in religion. From ancient Egypt which invested tyrannical powers in their god king Pharoh to modern day North Korea which proclaims divine proprieties in its leader Kim Jong-Un.

What is common to all of these tyrannical regimes is their incompatibility with the Judeo-Christian tradition. This is why every tyranny eventually turns its arrows or guns on Christians and Jews. They represent an existential threat to tyranny.

Christians in case you didn't know are the most persecuted group in the world currently. Last year approximately 100,000 Christians were killed because of their beliefs.

I thought the religious regimes were/are the most tyrannical.  Maybe you got this backward.

Secularism is what brought women's rights, gay rights, equality of races and genders etc.  Which thought is more flexible, religious or secular?

Which system is more coercive?  Secular or religious one?  Think about it before you post again.

Hint: Secular does not necessarily mean communist, socialist or some other dictatorial system. 

This has happened before and will happen again. Every tyrannical regime seeks to suppress belief in God for belief in God and the laws that derive from that belief ultimately undermine tyrannical control.

Thus belief in God must be attacked or at least twisted and controlled by any seeking to impose a coercive system upon humanity.

I'm well aware of your arguments supporting god. They are indeed better than 99% of religious nutjobs or badecker. They are however just another silly try to justify your beliefs in God. You are obviously intellectual an cannot accept god exists without any evidence so you have to have something. Your arguments however fail because they can be applied to any kind of God, even one that you could make up right now.

There been an increase in temperature over recent decades that is established scientific fact. The global measured increase is just under 1 degree centigrade over the last 100 years or so.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/GlobalWarming/page2.php

The idea that the warming is caused by human activity, however, is unproven theory.

We know from the historical record that there have been large swings in temperature in the distant past long before mankind could have had any appreciable impact on the climate.

The default hypothesis should thus be that observed temperature variations are not caused by humans until we have ruled out external factors like cyclical variations solar output or orbital mechanics as a primary cause.

Did you know that Mars is currently undergoing global warming too?
https://m.washingtontimes.com

Man made global warming is a theory one that is widely accepted by climate scientists. It's also probably false.

If you want to understand what is actually going to happen with climate in the next few decades I really do recommend watching Professor Zharkova video above her research and reproducible model is in my opinion a genuine scientific breakthrough.

You can already see the signs of retreat. The global warming salesman know they will soon be exposed as charlatans. That is why global warming has morphed into "Climate Change". I will laugh if it goes full on Orwellian and we start hearing about how man made CO2 is causing global cooling.

Scientific theories are only the best explanation for something if they are arrived at from a genuine objective search for truth rather then an attempted to secure funding or drive an agenda. Even then they only represent the most plausible answer based on our current information. Other possibilities exists and it is always a mistake to confuse theory with fact.

God is an a priori Truth. If you take the time to learn epistemology you will learn that all knowledge including scientific knowledge has a priori at its foundation.

It is no coincidence that the corruption of modern science is occurring simultaneously with the rise of atheism among scientists.

If they are, the world is full of geniuses. Why? The Bible is the most-published, most-distributed book of all time. And the world is full of religions, including aspects of science.

Is it possible that these guys are geniuses? 

How do you know?  There are many people who have not been diagnosed yet.  Many politicians, CEOs are psychopaths.  Religious people who hear or see things that are not real are mentally sick.   Anyone who hears or sees things that are not real (Jesus or Muhammad riding on buraq are good examples) is insane.

Sometimes your mental illness will still allow you to function in today's society without causing too much harm to yourself or others.  There are of course the Jesus camps for kids etc. which cause some real and life lasting harm.
 
Look up the definitions before you proclaim your truths.

There is nothing to debate.  We all share the same reality, and if someone perceives this reality differently, well, they are either geniuses or delusional.

In the future, religious beliefs will be classified as mental delusions.  It is a matter of time.  Science will march forward and push the Bronze Age myths to the footprints of history.

Once the church will lose its political power, the con will be over.

These guys are not mentally ill though, they are practitioners of major religious institutions, they are church leaders and pastors etc. We are forcing God into a box by saying that God must do this or do that in order for us to believe.

They are delusional because other people don't see what they see.  So by the definition, they are delusional.  Many people in the mental wards see things that others don't see.

I like how you always talk out of your ass, placebo effect does not cure cancer, ever or any other deadly disease and there is no evidence of it.

Whatever you want to call it, it is not the way to the truth, clearly. I mean how many people claim they have seen ghosts? Aliens? Demons, etc etc. They all believe their experiences are real, all religious people believe they saw their god and yet not all gods can exist at the same time so we at least know some of them have to be wrong. What's the way to determine the truth, then? No way, personal experiences are useless.

Yes, but they believe their experiences were real, they don't need us to believe them. They know what they saw, we don't know what they saw. We don't believe them, we call them "delusional"

Quite the opposite. Placebo effect acts in both directions... to heal and to make ill. You've heard of people who died after the doctor told them they only had a couple months to live. Did they die because of faith in what the doctor said?

The basic idea of placebo effect has to do with what you believe. You believe this way or that, and you prove it by what you do. It is happening all around us in politics and all of everyday life. People do what they do because they believe that way.

Placebo effect is simply bodily regulation through belief. Often people don't know that they are using placebo effect. Double blind medical studies prove this out.

Trying to force yourself into a position of believing yourself cured doesn't work very often. Why not? Because the thing you accidentally focus on is the thing that you are trying to push out of your mind. You focus on it because you are trying to force it out. But by focusing on it, you are really keeping it in mind.

We don't know enough about the psyche to easily fathom its inner workings. Placebo effect cures some cancer. Placebo effect out-performs medicine. We might be finding out that placebo-effect/faith is the only medicine, and that Big Pharma medicine only acts like placebo effect in the central systems of the body.

Since the question about placebo effect exist, we are really only guessing that medicine does anything at all.

Incidentally, you fail to answer me realistically, because you know that I am right, and you can't force yourself into believing the garbage you say. You are using a form of placebo effect, and you are using it against yourself.

No. Placebo effect exists, that's true, however you will not be ''cured'' by placebo effect alone. No one has been ever ''cured'' from cancer due to placebo. It's true that when it comes to pain relief treatments, the placebo effect can play a big role and a lot of people can feel better even though they are getting worse. This is because the placebo effect is a psychological effect not physiological. The brain is the responsible of pain and other symptoms, pain is literally a fabrication of your brain and the placebo effect can stop it, however that's where it ends, it does not heal you from deadly diseases.

michaelkelly8798, is a deluded automaton, he probably cannot tie his shoes never mind understand anything in biochemistry or biology.

Pope was just echoing what PAS (Pontifical Academy of Sciences) has been saying for years.

http://www.pas.va/content/accademia/en/publications/acta/acta23/arber.html

When you get right into the reason why some medicine seems to heal people, you have the same thing. Here's what happens.

We get some medical testing that shows biochemically in the lab that a particular medicine works. Then in live testing, some people seem to be healed by the medicine in question. Some are not. The thing we don't understand enough, is the working of the psyche, to be able to say for a fact that it was the medicine that healed them.

Well, if it wasn't the medicine, then what was it? Maybe 90% of the healings are placebo effect... faith (even in animals). Maybe, when it comes right down to it, close to 100% are placebo-like effect.

Maybe being healed by medicine has to do with the treated person subconsciously recognizing, through his nervous system, that there is some biochemical activity going on from the medicine. And then he heals himself by what he feels through his nervous system. The medicine action doesn't really have anything to do with the actual healing in a biochemical way.

Some studies suggest that placebo effect heals in as many as 30+% or the cases. We simply don't know enough about the psyche of people in general to know if it is more or not. And the medical doesn't want to do these kinds of studies in a big way. Do enough of them to make it look like we are studying placebo effect. But don't do enough to take business away from Big Pharma.