Re: God based on personal experience?



John Brockbank wrote:

"bob young" <alaspectrum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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John Brockbank wrote:

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"Martin" <martin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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On the wiki.answers.com web site someone asked "Is god real or made
up"? My answer was removed (and i tried to be evenhanded) and this
statement was put in its place:

"If you are referring to the Christian "God", then his (God is
generally imagined to be male) existence is self-referential. Since he
is supernatural, God cannot be explained by natural reasoning or
scientific evidence. A persons belief in God is based upon personal
experience, thus self-referential. It is up to the individual to
decided in his/her own mind if a God exists or not."

How do you answer the personal experience argument? (I noticed that
faith was not mentioned.)

The argument says nothing. Its always a matter of personal choice
whether
or not to believe something when there is no conclusive evidence either
way. Indeed one can also believe things for which there is evidence
against .. its not sensible or rational, but not everybody is :)

The reply as given seems to me to be a bit clumsy, using the term
self-referential more than once in a way that seems to claim to be
defining
the term but isn't. It is also much too subtle as an answer. One can
not
'decide whether God exists or not in one's mind', because that
construction
of words actually means that God is not real.

It isn't real so end of story

Including the phrase
'generally imagined to be' is straight atheist preaching.

A person who believes God is real will say yes, and a person who does not
believe God is real will say no or I do not believe it.

Brilliant

You should not
accept any other person's answer but instead think about whether you
believe. You might change your mind about the matter.

Tell that to a youngster who at age three is about to be 'programmed' by
it's
'Pre-programmed' religious parents


I think that answer is truthful and correct, so it will not be liked much
by
believers. To my own children I added that it does not actually make any
difference whether you believe or not.

Good. I changedmy opinion, or at least my advice is hardly needed

When they were older I added that
joining a particular religion might mean that one has to follow their
rules,
which are definitely baloney, but one should certainly treat with respect
other people's reasonable views.

Always.

Too bad some ultra religious maniacs in the middle east cannot do the
same.
They teach ther children that eveyrthing bad comes from America, for no
other
reason that America largely has a different god and a different set of
beliefs
! Religion is partly based on fear, and they insist on proving it.

Bob
Humanist, atheist, realist, sentimentalist Brit.
Member of S.M.A.S.H.
(Sarcastic Middle-aged Atheists with a Sense of Humor)

Man creates his gods in his own image,
then spends the rest of his life
manipulating them to his heart's content

R E L I G I O N - it is all in the mind,
an escape from life's realities and hardships,
sixty percent ritual, forty percent fantasy




Ah, well you see, the question was not about religion. Religions exploit
the idea of God, and in order to make their own version different they come
up with variations and rules which of course might be arbitrarily decided
just for the purpose of differentiation. Some of that is phoney, and some
seems a genuine rejection of an aspect disagreed with. A phoney can be
exemplified by the beginning of the large scale non Roman Catholic branch of
Christianity because an English king did not want to recognise a higher
human than himself, or at least partly that. A genuine one has been when a
religion is separately invented with no knowledge of others, say Eastern
ones, or pre-Christian ones such as Judaism which sees no reason to change
when the new craze comes along.

The question was about whether God is real, and the problem is that the
question is a scientific one, presumably the answer must be assumed to be to
a child asking the question. The reason I say problem is that to understand
the concept of a scientific question requires a considerable education which
even a large proportion of adults do not have.

I will give an immediate bit of exerience for that statement. On the radio
today I listened to a phone in on the topic of whether it would be better if
religion was abandoned, or something like that. I heard a few minutes of
it, including the comment by the final caller that even if religion was to
blame for some bad things, it should not be abandoned, after all, the
survival of the fittest lead to Auschwitz but we do not abandon Darwinism.

The man was saying that Socialism, Communism, fascism , capitalism, Roman
Catholicism, and so on, were the same type of thing as the explanation of
speciation by natural selection which he termed Darwinism. Damn gloomy I
found it.

Anyway, I also happened to catch 5 minutes of news on a TV channel named
Russia Today last week, and heard that in Russia a bill has been introduced
which will make it illegal to tell fortunes or promote Jehovah's Witnesses.
No wonder they were the first in space despite their questionable type of
government.

With their own brand of Christianity on the rebound I heard it said that the
Russians are far from pleased about recent overseas Christian influences.

Who said religion and politics don't go hand in hand ?

.

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