The difficulty of talking to Atheist

[znr]

Upon further inspection it seems you're pushing your opinions pretty hard, maybe doing a bit of free traffic to your web site?

 

[JGG]

I find talking to atheists to be very easy. Now, forcing an athiest to believe, that's another thing (we should not aspire to be doing).

Wait, you're not supposed to be forcing people to believe?

 

[znr]

I haven't received that memo, JGG.

Wait, you're not supposed to be forcing people to believe?

 

[Colter]

To quote Nietzsche:

"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."

A major part of the epistemological basis of science (and most of philosophy) is the problem of discerning our personal, subjective experiences with objective reality. Anyone can feel things and say they understand they know the way the universe works, but I also know many people conflict on this universe and that people often get the nature of reality just wrong, much like the insane do.

The question emerges: how can I differentiate between subjective opinion and genuine reality? The only way is to, at some point, generate a tangible effect upon the world in a clear way or to extrapolate from already accepted facts through careful reasoning.

Merely feeling a bunch of emotions does not prove anything beyond the fact that you feel emotions. Just because you connect those feelings with something else does make it the origins true unless you have something tangible to back it up. Merely getting a bunch of people together who connect their feelings to the same thing doesn't change anything; it just adds more people to the mix who can't back up their claims.

Unless there is something to distinguish your claims from either being true or false, then your claims are pretty much subjective, and should be dismissed as such.

The religionist doesn't demand that the scientist translate his material findings into spiritual proof, neither should the materialist demand that the religious transform their spiritual findings into material proof. Both are valid except that the Atheistic scientist so called, distorts reality by focusing on one aspect of it to the exclusion of the other, even denigrating the religionist as insane. One can be both scientific and spiritual.

"The materialistic sociologist of today surveys a community, makes a report thereon, and leaves the people as he found them. Nineteen hundred years ago, unlearned Galileans surveyed Jesus giving his life as a spiritual contribution to man’s inner experience and then went out and turned the whole Roman Empire upside down."​

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"Reason is the proof of science, faith the proof of religion, logic the proof of philosophy, but revelation is validated only by human experience. Science yields knowledge; religion yields happiness; philosophy yields unity; revelation confirms the experiential harmony of this triune approach to universal reality.

The contemplation of nature can only reveal a God of nature, a God of motion. Nature exhibits only matter, motion, and animation — life. Matter plus energy, under certain conditions, is manifested in living forms, but while natural life is thus relatively continuous as a phenomenon, it is wholly transient as to individualities. Nature does not afford ground for logical belief in human-personality survival. The religious man who finds God in nature has already and first found this same personal God in his own soul.

Faith reveals God in the soul. Revelation, the substitute for morontia insight on an evolutionary world, enables man to see the same God in nature that faith exhibits in his soul. Thus does revelation successfully bridge the gulf between the material and the spiritual, even between the creature and the Creator, between man and God.

The contemplation of nature does logically point in the direction of intelligent guidance, even living supervision, but it does not in any satisfactory manner reveal a personal God. On the other hand, nature discloses nothing which would preclude the universe from being looked upon as the handiwork of the God of religion. God cannot be found through nature alone, but man having otherwise found him, the study of nature becomes wholly consistent with a higher and more spiritual interpretation of the universe." UB 1955​

 

[Colter]

No, religion asserts understanding. You don't actually possess it.



No, religion asserts wisdom. You don't actually possess it.



Good, because they're not. They are, at best, exercises in imagination.

So, you assert an opinion, but you don't actually possess it? That's rich..

 

[Colter]

"Moral evaluation with a religious meaning — spiritual insight — connotes the individual’s choice between good and evil, truth and error, material and spiritual, human and divine, time and eternity. Human survival is in great measure dependent on consecrating the human will to the choosing of those values selected by this spirit-value sorter — the indwelling interpreter and unifier. Personal religious experience consists in two phases: discovery in the human mind and revelation by the indwelling divine spirit. Through oversophistication or as a result of the irreligious conduct of professed religionists, a man, or even a generation of men, may elect to suspend their efforts to discover the God who indwells them; they may fail to progress in and attain the divine revelation. But such attitudes of spiritual nonprogression cannot long persist because of the presence and influence of the indwelling Thought Adjusters.

This profound experience of the reality of the divine indwelling forever transcends the crude materialistic technique of the physical sciences. You cannot put spiritual joy under a microscope; you cannot weigh love in a balance; you cannot measure moral values; neither can you estimate the quality of spiritual worship.

The Hebrews had a religion of moral sublimity; the Greeks evolved a religion of beauty; Paul and his conferees founded a religion of faith, hope, and charity. Jesus revealed and exemplified a religion of love: security in the Father’s love, with joy and satisfaction consequent upon sharing this love in the service of the human brotherhood.

Every time man makes a reflective moral choice, he immediately experiences a new divine invasion of his soul. Moral choosing constitutes religion as the motive of inner response to outer conditions. But such a real religion is not a purely subjective experience. It signifies the whole of the subjectivity of the individual engaged in a meaningful and intelligent response to total objectivity — the universe and its Maker. UB 1955​

 

[Eight Foot Manchild]

So, you assert an opinion, but you don't actually possess it?

You're not stating opinions. You're making claims about the nature of reality, which you cannot substantiate. You will be called out on it.

 

[Hetta]

I find talking to atheists to be very easy. Now, forcing an athiest to believe, that's another thing (we should not aspire to be doing).

 

[Colter]

You're not stating opinions. You're making claims about the nature of reality, which you cannot substantiate. You will be called out on it.

You have no monopoly on reality, you will just as well be called out on that.

 

[bhsmte]

I find talking to atheists to be very easy. Now, forcing an athiest to believe, that's another thing (we should not aspire to be doing).

How does one force anyone (believer or not) to believe anything?

 

[Eudaimonist]

You have no monopoly on reality, you will just as well be called out on that.

It's more of a cartel.


eudaimonia,

Mark

 

[Eight Foot Manchild]

You have no monopoly on reality

Of course not, which is precisely why you're invited to substantiate your assertions at any time.

 

[Colter]

Of course not, which is precisely why you're invited to substantiate your assertions at any time.

If you are going to find the God that is substantiated in the presence of my faith, you will need to do that work yourself, and if you ever do find a God of your own subjective understanding, you still won't be able to explain it in a way that satisfies the skeptic of your former hiding place in the so called science of logic.

 

[Eight Foot Manchild]

If you are going to find the God that is substantiated in the presence of my faith, you will need to do that work yourself,

You are the positive claimant. The burden of proof is yours, not mine.

and if you ever do find a God of your own subjective understanding, you still won't be able to explain it in a way that satisfies the skeptic of your former hiding place in the so called science of logic.

If you've categorically written off logic as your means of demonstrating your assertions, you don't get to just stop there. Your next step is to demonstrate your assertions by some other means. Your 'god', as it stands, is indistinguishable from any other imaginary concept.

 

[Colter]

You are the positive claimant. The burden of proof is yours, not mine.



If you've categorically written off logic as your means of demonstrating your assertions, you don't get to just stop there. Your next step is to demonstrate your assertions by some other means. Your 'god', as it stands, is indistinguishable from any other imaginary concept.

* I am not obliged to prove that I know the presence of God to you in your arbitrary court of law. It's even hypocritical for you to make a transcendent value judgment on the worth of my faith then retreating back to a mechanistic prosecutorial platform which presumes uniformity in the analysis of everyone's reality.

* But you compel me to ask, by what technique of logic do you claim to know that I do not know-God?

 

[Archaeopteryx]

* I am not obliged to prove that I know the presence of God to you in your arbitrary court of law. It's even hypocritical for you to make a transcendent value judgment on the worth of my faith then retreating back to a mechanistic prosecutorial platform which presumes uniformity in the analysis of everyone's reality.

* But you compel me to ask, by what technique of logic do you claim to know that I do not know-God?

Not only are you shifting the burden of proof, insisting that you are somehow exempt from all epistemic standards, but you've given Eight Foot Manchild the means to do the same in answering your question. He could simply say that he is not obliged to show you how he knows that you do not know God, and that it is hypocritical of you to even ask him, as though his claims are to be held to some sort of epistemic standard! He just knows - isn't that enough?

 

[Colter]

Not only are you shifting the burden of proof, insisting that you are somehow exempt from all epistemic standards, but you've given Eight Foot Manchild the means to do the same in answering your question. He could simply say that he is not obliged to show you how he knows that you do not know God, and that it is hypocritical of you to even ask him, as though his claims are to be held to some sort of epistemic standard! He just knows - isn't that enough?

The man child barged in on post #115 and made this assertion:

"Religion has no epistemology whatsoever, and has gleaned zero facts about anything."

Ive responded with some quotes from he UB:

"Reason is the proof of science, faith the proof of religion, logic the proof of philosophy, but revelation is validated only by human experience. Science yields knowledge; religion yields happiness; philosophy yields unity; revelation confirms the experiential harmony of this triune approach to universal reality."<----the Uranta Book 1955​

But this is what Atheistic scientist types do, they come out from behind their barricade of cold facts and test tubes, make subjective assertions about the spiritual truth content of a religionist experience, then run quickly back to the lab and pretend as if they spend their days running all their decisions through rigorous logical proofs.

"If universe reality is only one vast machine, then man must be outside of the universe and apart from it in order to recognize such a fact and become conscious of the insight of such an evaluation."​

"If man is only a machine, by what technique does this man come to believe or claim to know that he is only a machine? The experience of self-conscious evaluation of one&#8217;s self is never an attribute of a mere machine. A self-conscious and avowed mechanist is the best possible answer to mechanism. If materialism were a fact, there could be no self-conscious mechanist. It is also true that one must first be a moral person before one can perform immoral acts."​

Any scientific interpretation of the material universe is valueless unless it provides due recognition for the scientist. No appreciation of art is genuine unless it accords recognition to the artist. No evaluation of morals is worth while unless it includes the moralist. No recognition of philosophy is edifying if it ignores the philosopher, and religion cannot exist without the real experience of the religionist who, in and through this very experience, is seeking to find God and to know him. Likewise is the universe of universes without significance apart from the I AM, the infinite God who made it and unceasingly manages it.​

Science lives by the mathematics of the mind; music expresses the tempo of the emotions. Religion is the spiritual rhythm of the soul in time-space harmony with the higher and eternal melody measurements of Infinity. Religious experience is something in human life which is truly supermathematical. <-----the Urantia Book 1955.​

 

[Colter]

"The magical and mythological parentage of natural religion does not invalidate the reality and truth of the later revelational religions and the consummate saving gospel of the religion of Jesus. Jesus&#8217; life and teachings finally divested religion of the superstitions of magic, the illusions of mythology, and the bondage of traditional dogmatism. But this early magic and mythology very effectively prepared the way for later and superior religion by assuming the existence and reality of supermaterial values and beings.

Although religious experience is a purely spiritual subjective phenomenon, such an experience embraces a positive and living faith attitude toward the highest realms of universe objective reality. The ideal of religious philosophy is such a faith-trust as would lead man unqualifiedly to depend upon the absolute love of the infinite Father of the universe of universes. Such a genuine religious experience far transcends the philosophic objectification of idealistic desire; it actually takes salvation for granted and concerns itself only with learning and doing the will of the Father in Paradise. The earmarks of such a religion are: faith in a supreme Deity, hope of eternal survival, and love, especially of one&#8217;s fellows.

When theology masters religion, religion dies; it becomes a doctrine instead of a life. The mission of theology is merely to facilitate the self-consciousness of personal spiritual experience. Theology constitutes the religious effort to define, clarify, expound, and justify the experiential claims of religion, which, in the last analysis, can be validated only by living faith. In the higher philosophy of the universe, wisdom, like reason, becomes allied to faith. Reason, wisdom, and faith are man&#8217;s highest human attainments. Reason introduces man to the world of facts, to things; wisdom introduces him to a world of truth, to relationships; faith initiates him into a world of divinity, spiritual experience.

Faith most willingly carries reason along as far as reason can go and then goes on with wisdom to the full philosophic limit; and then it dares to launch out upon the limitless and never-ending universe journey in the sole company of TRUTH.

Science (knowledge) is founded on the inherent (adjutant spirit) assumption that reason is valid, that the universe can be comprehended. Philosophy (co-ordinate comprehension) is founded on the inherent (spirit of wisdom) assumption that wisdom is valid, that the material universe can be co-ordinated with the spiritual. Religion (the truth of personal spiritual experience) is founded on the inherent (Thought Adjuster) assumption that faith is valid, that God can be known and attained <-----the Urantia Book 1955."​

 

[Loudmouth]

Ive responded with some quotes from he UB:

"Reason is the proof of science, faith the proof of religion, logic the proof of philosophy, but revelation is validated only by human experience. Science yields knowledge; religion yields happiness; philosophy yields unity; revelation confirms the experiential harmony of this triune approach to universal reality."​

If faith is proof, then any statement can be shown to be true just by believing it is true. You have just demonstrated that "Religion has no epistemology whatsoever". Epistemology is a set of rules for determining what is and isn't true. According to you, there are no rules and anything can be true.

But this is what Atheistic scientist types do, they come out from behind their barricade of cold facts and test tubes, make subjective assertions about the spiritual truth content of a religionist experience, then run quickly back to the lab and pretend as if they spend their days running all their decisions through rigorous logical proofs.

They point out that you can't present objective evidence to support your claims, which continues to be true.

 

[True Scotsman]

"The magical and mythological parentage of natural religion does not invalidate the reality and truth of the later revelational religions and the consummate saving gospel of the religion of Jesus. Jesus’ life and teachings finally divested religion of the superstitions of magic, the illusions of mythology, and the bondage of traditional dogmatism. But this early magic and mythology very effectively prepared the way for later and superior religion by assuming the existence and reality of supermaterial values and beings.

Although religious experience is a purely spiritual subjective phenomenon, such an experience embraces a positive and living faith attitude toward the highest realms of universe objective reality. The ideal of religious philosophy is such a faith-trust as would lead man unqualifiedly to depend upon the absolute love of the infinite Father of the universe of universes. Such a genuine religious experience far transcends the philosophic objectification of idealistic desire; it actually takes salvation for granted and concerns itself only with learning and doing the will of the Father in Paradise. The earmarks of such a religion are: faith in a supreme Deity, hope of eternal survival, and love, especially of one’s fellows.

When theology masters religion, religion dies; it becomes a doctrine instead of a life. The mission of theology is merely to facilitate the self-consciousness of personal spiritual experience. Theology constitutes the religious effort to define, clarify, expound, and justify the experiential claims of religion, which, in the last analysis, can be validated only by living faith. In the higher philosophy of the universe, wisdom, like reason, becomes allied to faith. Reason, wisdom, and faith are man’s highest human attainments. Reason introduces man to the world of facts, to things; wisdom introduces him to a world of truth, to relationships; faith initiates him into a world of divinity, spiritual experience.

Faith most willingly carries reason along as far as reason can go and then goes on with wisdom to the full philosophic limit; and then it dares to launch out upon the limitless and never-ending universe journey in the sole company of TRUTH.

Science (knowledge) is founded on the inherent (adjutant spirit) assumption that reason is valid, that the universe can be comprehended. Philosophy (co-ordinate comprehension) is founded on the inherent (spirit of wisdom) assumption that wisdom is valid, that the material universe can be co-ordinated with the spiritual. Religion (the truth of personal spiritual experience) is founded on the inherent (Thought Adjuster) assumption that faith is valid, that God can be known and attained."​

The above is full of stolen concepts. Concepts such as "reason", "truth", "valid" and "knowledge are genetically dependent on the axioms of philosophy which you have stated are "false constructs". Therefore by your own admission the passage above is not true and can not be true. So what is your point in posting it.