Well, then he may end up being wrong. Tough. Believing is simply holding something as true. It may be proven or it may not be.
Is it determined that we have free will? Or is it just part of being animate? Our ability to use higher thinking is a product of our evolution and being able to believe, to have faith and yet to have uncertainty is part of that higher thinking ability. We're capable of highly abstract thinking and this allows belief, faith, doubt and so on. It's very adaptable.
How could a god have difficulty proving it exists? Am I so powerful that my little skepticism confounds the slightest whims it has? How did it create everything around us, yet I completely shatter it's greatest desires simply by thinking logically? Why create reality in such a way as to make it's existence impossible? Why punish the smartest of us? Why give humans the one advantage of intelligence, then punish, or cower from those of us that actually use it? Why create all evil? Why perform so many abortions, then say they are immoral? Why create homosexuality then declare it immoral? Why inspire a bible so full of stupid and silly errors that it could only be written by ignorant people thousands of years ago then expect us to live by it? Why is god simultaneously so good and bad at everything? Why is it bad at anything?
If Yeshua was still wiggling on the cross after 2,000 years that would only be 2 days God time. He should have been able to manage that.
While the Bible does contain a lot of errors the real purpose of the stories is to illustrate one or more of the Ten Commandments. If you don't know what the real Ten Commandments are then none of the stories make sense. The stories don't have to be true to illustrate the consequences of following or disobeying the Ten Commandments. A reader, or listener, of the stories should be able to identify which of the Ten Commandments the story is about. And the purpose is to teach complete obedience and total loyalty to the Boss. It is like a military code of conduct but for everyone (at least the Israelites/Hebrews/Jews) since it is an ethnocentric Middle Eastern Jewish religious fairy tale. Why Gentiles think it applies to them is a mystery. Even the Bible says that you shouldn't believe Jewish fairy tales. And the God of the Bible was simply the series of men who rules the dominant ancient Middle Eastern empires as emperors or high priests of the Israelites/Hebrews/Jews. The biblical God bit the dust when the Babylonian Empire collapsed around 530 BC and the Babylonian emperor died. He is not ever coming back.
So, god is just a very stupid man who lived and failed thousands of years ago? Isn't that essentially what all atheists believe? The ten commandments aren't very good, like 5 of them are worth anything, and they can be derived from first principals without any bible.
I am fine with you exercising your free will, you just seem to have a problem with others doing the same. I am not here to fix your problems.
Secular progressives do not want people who are believers exercising our free will. They deny the true source of it and think that their ideology should distribute it to only those whom they choose to be privileged.
Well, both the skeptic and article are circular arguments,circulus in probando (circle in proving). The skeptic will argue the materialist tautology, "Everything is material; therefore, everything is material." As for the existence of a G-d, I can only repeat Wittgenstein, "I cannot say what does not exist." Well, both the skeptic and the article are circular arguments,circulus in probando (circle in proving). The skeptic will argue the materialist tautology, "Everything is material; therefore, everything is material." As for the existence of a G-d, I can only repeat Wittgenstein, "I cannot say what does not exist."
And speaking of miracles, when moses was given a few to put into his bag of tricks, and performed some of them, like the magical rod that God gave him, turning itself into a snake when cast down to the ground, the Pharoh called up his own magicians and illusionists(it is a very old trade, the trickery of magic) and they replicated the God Magic of Moses, with their own magic. Of course, Mose's snake gobbled up all of the other snakes, so I guess he won in the end, in the show of miracles and magic? I like the way an old Zen priest viewed magic......chopping wood and drawing out a pail of water from the well. I don't put much stock in the magic tricks and miracles that people demanded to see in the time of christ, and even prior to him. Instead I find some extraordinary things in what he taught while here walking among humanity and that he was willing to not change what he taught in order to save his life.
Sure and philosophical materialism, on which science is grounded, that matter is fundamental is an assumption that is outside the realm of science to determine. What is funny to me personally is that many of the atheists who try to use science to evidence their belief system, are not aware, or just ignore the fact of an assumption being involved at the very foundation of their atheism. Belief systems that are based at the ground level upon an assumption, are far from certainty. Indeed, just another opinion dressed in liars clothing.
The great Empiricist, John Locke, once referred to matter as, "that which I do not know." When I sense (sense perception, or sense impression is the empiricist relation to the object, or thing--John Locke, David Hume) the color red, does this fact form a state of mind (seeing red) which is a subjective state? Locke uses the term “ideas” with three meanings: Sensible qualities, sense-data, and concepts/universal ideas. In this sense empiricism is idealism. And when empiricism demands the universal categorical imperative that all judgments be based on sense experience, then empiricism has become pure speculative idealism. As a school of thought Naturalism rejects any reference to the supernatural and believes the world can be adequately explained by scientifically verifiable concepts and principles exclusively. There are varying degrees of radicalism among the academic spokesmen for naturalism, but they all fundamentally view the world, as mechanistic matter understood best by empiricism, or the scientific method call logical positivism. So we can refer to this school as Materialistic Naturalism and is really a family of allied philosophical schools of thought that embraces logic, empiricism, behaviorism, materialism, atheism, secularism, humanism and even political conservatism. Each school reinforces the other and understands Humans as unique by virtue of being more complex than animal life. Logical positivism is a philosophy of science that originated in the Vienna Circle in the 1920s as a form of extreme empiricism. It proposed that science be based on observable verified empirical facts. Positivism’s most famous contribution is the “verifiability theory of meaning” that says a statement is meaningful if and only if it is empirically verifiable. This school of philosophy no longer formally exists and disbanded in the 1920s because the verifiability principle itself could not be verified. But Positivism still has a strong influence in the sciences today. It is a serious problem for a philosophy to not meet its own criteria of meaning. While the verifiability principle seems to work well for existential claims (There is a virus), or negative universals (Not all Scotsmen are right handed) it has problems with universal claims like “All ravens are black.” The scientist would have to observe every raven that ever existed in order for the proposition to be know as true or false, i.e., to be meaningful. Or take the proposition that “All objects on earth fall at the same rate.” Good luck verifying that one. There were other problems. The word “FACT” is the modern god of our time. Everyone thinks they know what is a fact is, but even the famous Logical Positivists found that “fact” was a difficult concept to nail down and that “fact” is really an ideological artifact-- a fragile one at that. This once great god however has been outsourced to a lesser god in the business world called, “data.” It is interesting that the Greek word “pragmata” means both “fact” and “business.” The Logical Positivists define knowledge as “reports” of experiential fact, and of logic whose rules are “conventionally” established. This assumption is embodied in the “verification principle” which says a formula, proposition, or statement, which cannot be checked by observation of the world, or by deduction from conventional definitions has no meaning. So we have already moved from the world to language. This is one hell of a leap! Positivism is really a disguised doctrine (the proper term is “metaphysical theory,” but this word is illegal in positivism) of language, and not about the world. Worst, it presupposes the very world and language that it is supposed to explain. The world is constructed “sense datum,” and makes assumptions about the “construction.”
The Jesus character taught that the stars will fall to the Earth and that diseases are caused by demons. He seems like he was an idiot instead of a god.
It is evident that you don't know what the real Ten Commandments are. You need to read the fairy tale.
Ok, let's go through them: 1. You have to believe in me. (does absolutely no good in real life) 2. don't make any pictures of me (again, absolutely worthless) 3. whenever you talk about me, you can only kiss my butt (once again useless) 4. you have to waste at least one day of seven telling me how great I am (actually does some good in establishing a precedent for days off, but otherwise worthless) 5. be cool to your parents. (actually worthwhile, if your parents are good, although many aren't, and lets be honest, by the time you are old enough to digest this, if you don't like your folks, then that's it anyway) 6. don't murder. (good one, but essentially the same one everyone else everywhere on earth thought of without christianity, and it still hasn't reduced any murders) 7. don't bang married chicks (good one, but again derivable from first principals) 8. don't steal... (ditto) 9. don't talk crap about someone else (ditto) 10. don't be jealous (not bad, but useless) So, maybe 5, but also nothing groundbreaking that others didn't have and were kinda self evident anyway. Balanced against the bad stuff in that book, I don't see an argument.
Let God prove it.... heal an Amputee "Why won't God heal Amputees?" http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/ "Is God real, or is he imaginary? It is one of the most important questions in America today. "
Sorry, but THOSE ARE NOT THE REAL TEN COMMANDMENTS. They are just laws except for the 1st and 4th ones. The actual Ten Commandments are found in Exodus 34:11-28. All of the biblical stories are based on Exodus 34:10-28. The reason why people believe in the fake ones is because they have never read the fairy tale for themselves and they have been brainwashed by lying preachers, media, and popular culture all of their lives. The lie that sells the fake Ten Commandments is one of the most successful lies in human history.