Is belief or unbelief more reasonable?

Don’t try to get me into that.

It is fair to say that your problem is not inability to explain this. Your problem is that you’re wrong. The fact that I have not accepted any particular set of supernatural propositions is not itself the adoption of any proposition. And plausibility of any particular set of propositions is potentially an issue, but plausibility is a non-issue with regard to a non-proposition.

I don’t see what that would have to do with it. Obviously the demonstration that life began, or consciousness arose, through the action of a supernatural agent would also, thereby, demonstrate the existence of that agent. But that’s not been demonstrated.

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We can use your daughter’s clever perspective here - your evidence of the existence of God depends as to whether you are pouring or drinking the Kool-aide. :rofl:

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No I am talking about the harm that is done to people by Christians who harm people with their insistence that SSM is wrong, abortion is wrong, transgenderism is wrong, pre-martial sex is wrong and must be outlawed by a mostly secular society.

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Kindly return my olive branch when you are done with your victory lap… :wink:

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I was sent this and it seemed relevant to the discussion. In 1961 CS Lewis wrote an article about space travel, which he in turn likened to a search for God and wrote an engaging article. The doodles are cool too.

For me, the question of falsifying Jesus never arose. My experience of Him has been too real to deny.
After 18 years of being a christian, I see three options to explain this experience:
a) Jesus is real and His word is true.
b) I am being deceived by some other entity who is claiming to be Jesus.
c) I am being fooled by my brain/body in some way and this experience of God is psychological in nature.

I believe it’s “a” because of Gods fruit in my life. One cannot really “falsify” belief… one has to live it or not.

Sure, I could point to the evidence for the resurrection and such, but I wasn’t aware of this evidence when I came to the faith. I found myself absolutely certain that Jesus had resurrected upon reading the bible for the first time in my life. It was a conviction thay bypassed everything and just arrived in my mind fully formed. Its ultimately a work of the Holy Spirit.
My advise to those who really want to know the Truth is to humble themselves and pray. God will answer.

As a christian, it’s a work of grace that beings a person to the point of faith. Human depravity is a real thing and only the grace of God can being anyone to a point of having genuine faith.
Being an Arminian (in theological terms), I will also point out that a person’s response to God’s grace (for example the general revelation of God’s existence and traits through nature) is also important. He who has, will receive more.

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That, by the way, is the same advice the Mormon missionaries give me: read the Book of Mormon, and pray that God will tell you whether it’s true or not. And I have been in rooms full of people who say that they have all done this, and that God has answered in the positive. So, when God tells them these things, is God just joking?

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C.S. Lewis is totally over rated.

Hasn’t COVID shown that all the world’s religions, all the prayers to God, all the dogma, doctrines, myths and legends are meaningless, purposeless, and useless in the natural world? Isn’t it obvious now that only when we unite together in science can mankind be saved, not from sin, but from a naturally occurring virus?

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I vote c)

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No @thoughtful, that is not what I said.

I said “There is not a single proposition “unbelief”, it is a compound of lack of belief in a number of propositions …”

I will note that I’m not the only person here having problems with you. @John_Harshman was driven to reply to you “Yes. I’m sorry, but I don’t have the energy to try any further explanation.” when you showed that you were oblivious to the fact that you were misunderstanding him.

You also totally misinterpreted @Puck_Mendelssohn’s “It’s what you’re left with when none of the various salesmen of belief has left you with anything other than that feeling you have after leaving a particularly smarmy used car dealership.”
His implication was clearly that he was comparing the “various salesmen of belief” to a “used car dealership”, explicitly smarmy, but implicitly also more interested in a quick sale than in truthfulness.

@thoughtful, if you cannot be bothered to take the care to fully evaluate what we are saying, rather than cutting it down to a cartoon caricature of our statements, and to thoughtfully evaluate its implications, rather than making wild leaps of illogic, then you should ask yourself why we should bother to engage with you further?

I have expressed a distinct lack of interest in further engagement throughout this thread, based largely on similar problems with you on the earlier thread, yet you seem intent on dragging me back into it. I may be more impatient than most, so that may mean that I’m not the best sparring partner for you. I definitely put a very high value on precision, so find you endlessly frustrating.

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You dont have a vote in this case… :slight_smile:

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Try it yourself and see…
In case, you do this and get an answer, we can discuss further details.

Tbh, the cartoon caricature was on purpose. I felt that none of you were actually engaging with my questions honestly. I decided then I would do a caricature. Then perhaps you would realize you weren’t actually answering the questions and realize that I found your answers to be ridiculous. Finally I decided to explain they came off that way because they were begging the question since you didn’t seem to be understanding the point of the caricature.

@John_Harshman actually did answer the questions, but I found his answers to be formulated to poke at me and my belief rather than explain what he believes. So I called him out on it, by rewriting what he wrote to make his answer also look ridiculous.

Dialogue becomes fruitless if you believe that. Try assuming, for the sake of argument, that your interlocutors are being as honest as you are trying to be.

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Maybe it was rather a case that:

  1. These issues are more complex that you are willing to admit.

  2. That whilst making valiant attempts to engage not-particularly-meaningful questions, we simply weren’t giving you the answers you wanted.

Do you know what I find “ridiculous” @thoughtful?

  1. Your claim on the previous thread that you have evaluated Christianity skeptically.

  2. Your assumption that falsifiability is an appropriate standard for ancient religious beliefs, when the standard is often problematical even for modern scientific issues.

  3. The following claims:

None of these issues (with the possible partial exception of whether all the letters attributed to Paul were written by the same person) would appear to be not even remotely falsifiable.

Particularly given this:

Even assuming a body turned up that some people assumed to be Jesus (and I’ve no idea why they would do so), and even assuming usable DNA survived (not a certainty after so long a time, except under exceptional circumstances), we have no DNA verified to belong to Jesus to compare it to. So how would we prove that it was Jesus’ body?

Ridiculous.

Addendum. I don’t find any of your reasons “Why is belief more plausible than unbelief?” to be any more credible, but as they seem to be fairly standard apologetic responses, and have therefore been already argued to death here and/or on other forums, I don’t see much reason to flog that dead horse.

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That was not clear. I thought you were honestly engaging with the subject. My apologies for giving you too much credit. Congratulations: you have become a troll.

Apparently she isn’t trying to be honest, so that standard isn’t a good one.

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Only your psychiatrist does. Another possibility can be d) drugs. :grinning:

I was being too subtle, I admit. I did toy with “trying and failing” but that felt mean.

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Never tried drugs in my life…
As for psychiatrists, believing in the resurrection of Jesus is not a mental illness.

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