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I am religious and believe in free will

70 (27.6%)

I am religious and do not believe in free will

10 (3.9%)

I am not religious and believe in free will

113 (44.5%)

I am not religious and do not believe in free will

61 (24%)

Total Members Voted: 249

[origamiscienceguy]

And to assume that all 4 of the gospel authors lied is also laughable since they each died very painful deaths (except maybe Luke) and you would assume they would stop lying if they were threatened with death.

Imagine yourself in the place of the Apostles, after the Crucifixion. Your great saviour is dead, his followers will lose faith in the face of persecution or die out. You're hiding out, but you know it can't last. So what can you do to do what Jesus would have wanted you to? Lie. Say he rose from the dead and promised to return. Keep hope alive for the rest of the Christians. Keep up the act, even unto death, so that more may come to learn the Saviours' teachings and be saved.


Not saying the above's what happened, but things are always more complicated then two or three or even five or six possibilities could account for. Don't make the mistake of oversimplifying things to make something you want to be true seem more plausible.

After he came back to life, I would be telling every body and their grandmother.

[Rolepgeek]

That would be "not religious", no?

No, that's "Not sure I'm religious and" I'd think?

I would say the adjective of 'religious' means practicing a specific religion. If you're agnostic, you're usually not practicing.

[Arx]

Hmm. I'm not sure what to vote for, seeing as I go with us having what feels like free will (and acts like free will) but isn't because lol predetermination. Probably the second, I guess. But maybe the first, because it acts like free will?

[Orange Wizard]

Basically no free will == determinism/predestination/reprobation/etc.

[Bohandas]

For the life of Jesus and his miracles, you would have to assume that all 4 gospel writers were lying. However, people seem to take other much-less evidence texts as more reliable than the new testament. For example, the Trojan War. If you compare the reliability of the works that describe the battle of troy and the new testament, it is almost laughable to assume that the new testament is fabricated because you would have to how out practically every ancient writing as well. And to assume that all 4 of the gospel authors lied is also laughable since they each died very painful deaths (except maybe Luke) and you would assume they would stop lying if they were threatened with death.

That's a false analogy. Nobody believes in the fantastic elements of the trojan war; people who were magically invulnerable and magic flying sandals and bags containing the west wind and people turning into pigs and a beauty pagent in heaven and bullshit like that; they just believe that ancient Troy was besieged, and they've only started to believe that because of archaelogical that's turned up over the last century. Even the ancient greeks were skeptical of the illiad and odyssey; The historian Thucydides said that Homer had clearly inflated a lot of numbers and made stuff up for the sake of drama.

EDIT:
Relevant to the other aspects of the current discussion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True-believer_syndrome
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails

[Vilanat]

Who killed the last prophet of Islam?

An angry tribeswoman whose people had just been conquered

no? he died in his bed from an illness/old age.

[Bohandas]

Also, there's plenty of people who convert because they believe God's spoken to them. So that second part isn't quite true. I mean, if you had a vision or a dream like that, would you assume you were hallucinating, or that god was talking to you? Why bother making you think you have hallucinations when you won't even believe it?

False dichotomy. While anyone who realizes the implications of solipsism could, if sufficiently reticent, dismiss any divine experience as a hallucination no matter how significant, that could also apply to literally anything but their own qualia. Almost all people can still be convinced by experience, that experience just has to fit the magnitude of the claim and not demonstrate signs of falsehood. Dreams and visions are already the realm of hallucination, even people who believe in divine vision will admit this for other religions.

Even a dank euphoric atheist like me could be persuaded of at least the substantial power and existence of the Christian God with a satisfying display, but that display is not "I prayed for something plausible and then it happened" or "My terminal illness went away on its own". Try "resurrecting someone who's already started rotting or was cremated"

Yes. As was supposedly promised in the vision at the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel 37:1-13

"...I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. He asked me, “Human, can these bones live?” I said, “Sovereign Lord, you alone know.” Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones"...So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet—a vast army...then he said to me..."Then you will know my name is The LORD, when I open your graves and bring you up from them.""

http://biblehub.com/ezekiel/37.htm

Hmm. I'm not sure what to vote for, seeing as I go with us having what feels like free will (and acts like free will) but isn't because lol predetermination. Probably the second, I guess. But maybe the first, because it acts like free will?

Yes. Will isn't necessarily free.

[Orange Wizard]

That's a false analogy.

Ironically, that's also a false analogy. The gospels were written a few years after the fact, and the Iliad/Odyssey were written centuries down the track by an unrelated third party who was compiling stories passed down over that time. There's a decent chance Homer himself knew what he was writing was corrupted and unreliable.

I'm not saying it's definitely perfect, but the NT in general has a darn sight more historicity than ancient Greek epics. It's an awful comparison.

If you want to compare it to the Old Testament, then you might have a better argument, at least with Genesis etc. Stuff like Chronicles, Daniel, Ezra, and a number of the prophecies were written down at or close to the time of occurrence, and match up (at least a little) with other sources from around the time.

[Graknorke]

You can't prove the Biblical god exists if your basis is the Bible being false.

Well the Bible isn't entirely true, from things we know as actual measurable facts. And given its authority is that it comes from an infallible narrator, I'd say it's a long way down from "reliable".

[Rolepgeek]

You can't prove the Biblical god exists if your basis is the Bible being false.

Well the Bible isn't entirely true, from things we know as actual measurable facts. And given its authority is that it comes from an infallible narrator, I'd say it's a long way down from "reliable".

Bible was written by, what over a dozen different people? As far as I know, that's not where it's authority comes from. I mean, to the people who say 'bible is infallible and must be interpreted literally', maybe, but a source being unreliable, and a source being wrong, or even just inaccurate, are separate events. A reliable source can be wrong, and an unreliable source can be right. It's just the probability. And if someone has other reasons to believe it, like, say, two thousands years of history with even now probably around half the planet believing Jesus of Nazareth was a person who existed, contentious status as Son of God and True Final Prophet No For Real This Time Guys not withstanding...

And don't get me wrong. I'm not making the 'billions of people can't be wrong' argument. Well, not in that precise way, rather. Scientific consensus sometimes ends up being wrong. Noticeable theological consensus can be hard to come by, partially because the ones they do reach a consensus just kinda disseminates into culture and thought patterns in a similar way to science (the philosophical idea of morally corrupt versus morally honorable actions, or the idea of the mind being separate in some ways from the body; and yeah there are always fringe groups who challenge these but you get the point).

But nonetheless, there's a sort of pseudo-spiritual consensus that people look at when the Abrahamic religions were so massive. Jesus was a real person, as far as I know. Miracles or not, someone started the damned thing. And while tradition is fairly sufficient to explain it's survival past Constantine or so, it still had to get off the ground. And while it's certainly plausible Jesus was a really convincing dude with a couple of delusions, or the most successful con man in the history of the Earth, a lot of people find that to be an answer that fares worse under Occam's Razor than 'well maybe he was just telling the truth'.

So 'hey some things were lost in translation' or 'there were some errors down the years before the age of printing press' or 'the earliest existing copy of the bible is from 400 AD so who knows what got screwed up'(I may have the details wrong on that one) are all valid viewpoints. But they don't prove it false. At best you prove it to be unreliable, so people can't, well, rely on it for all their ideas. It's not an argument against theism, it's an argument against this very specific branch of theism as compared to all other branches plus non-theistic viewpoints.

Or, tl;dr and maybe just more understandable way of putting it...

Don't make symmetrical arguments unless you have proof and they don't. The field of science is in a tad bit of trouble recently, which makes it difficult to use, as there have been peer reviewed studies that 'proved' psychic powers exist, and peer reviewed studies that 'disproved' their existence. Not invalid, mind you, I'm just pointing out that expecting it to automatically support you overwhelmingly above them is....unlikely, unless it's the simple stuff like dinosaurs and age of the earth and whatnot.

"It could have happened just as coincidence, without God, so it doesn't count" is on the same level as "it could have been God, without chemotherapy, so it doesn't count". I believe one of the two is more accurate, but nonetheless symmetrical arguments are fairly useless without backup. Argue from a position of weakness instead; in this way it becomes a position of strength. Assume it's true, point out things this should lead to, allow them to correct misinterpretations....dialogue. Converse. Don't rhetoricize. And while I don't believe anyone here does it, I'll say it anyway because a. I'm a hypocrite, b. This should definitiely keep getting longer, and c. I hear what amounts to it all the time and I'm sick of it.

"They use it too" is not an excuse for poor debate behavior. Ever.

[Orange Wizard]

Bible was written by, what over a dozen different people?

Hundreds, IIRC.

[Teneb]

However, people seem to take other much-less evidence texts as more reliable than the new testament. For example, the Trojan War. If you compare the reliability of the works that describe the battle of troy and the new testament, it is almost laughable to assume that the new testament is fabricated because you would have to how out practically every ancient writing as well.

The texts describing the Trojan War are pretty much historical fiction. It is incredibly unlikely that any of the characters in the stories either existed or were like they were described. The only thing we can know for sure is that there was a Troy (several, actually, each built on top of the others' ruins) and that there was a war (probably with the greeks) that destroyed it. In short, those texts are anything but reliable sources for anything other than studies for how greeks recounted stories.

I know a lot of people posted it, but hey.

[Loud Whispers]

Who killed the last prophet of Islam?

An angry tribeswoman whose people had just been conquered

no? he died in his bed from an illness/old age.

Yeah, with his blood vessels constricted after he ate poisoned lamb

The most natural of deaths

[wierd]

are you sure it wasnt from all the cholesterol and saturated fat? I mean, lamb is hardly a lean meat.

[Loud Whispers]

Well the lady who poisoned him told him it was poisoned and his m8 who also ate the lamb died almost immediately after eating it too