Dear theists, are you angry at me because I argue with you?

[Lion IRC]

If 90% of reported religious experiences partially or wholly corroborate the existence of divinity then that becomes a useful starting point. Whether or not they are unanimous, and can be questioned ever more closely right down to the nth degree, doesn't detract from the preliminary question - God(s) yes or no?

 

[Rhea]

If 90% of reported religious experiences partially or wholly corroborate the existence of divinity then that becomes a useful starting point. Whether or not they are unanimous, and can be questioned ever more closely right down to the nth degree, doesn't detract from the preliminary question - God(s) yes or no?

Can you explain what you mean by “corroborate”? If al of their personal experiences contradict each other , why would their combined existance say something greater?

 

[Rhea]

If 90% of reported religious experiences partially or wholly corroborate the existence of divinity then that becomes a useful starting point. Whether or not they are unanimous, and can be questioned ever more closely right down to the nth degree, doesn't detract from the preliminary question - God(s) yes or no?

Can you explain what you mean by “corroborate”? If al of their personal experiences contradict each other , why would their combined existance say something greater?

Bear in mind that we one had a Christian on here who told her faith story and how she was playing volleyball outside under a bees nest and didn’t get stung was her Personal Proof of a god. When we pointed out that she said her story happened at night and they only saw the nest the next day, and this suggested the bees were dormant due to it being, you know, night time, she became very alarmed.

 

[Lion IRC]

Can you explain what you mean by “corroborate”? If al of their personal experiences contradict each other , why would their combined existance say something greater?

 

[Copernicus]

If 90% of reported religious experiences partially or wholly corroborate the existence of divinity then that becomes a useful starting point. Whether or not they are unanimous, and can be questioned ever more closely right down to the nth degree, doesn't detract from the preliminary question - God(s) yes or no?

First of all, lets admit that we are not talking about 90% of religious experiences corroborating your god. Indeed, claims about the nature of the experienced deity can vary wildly and even contradict claims about other "divine" experiences. Secondly, the mere fact that people associate their experiences with a god only means that they are predisposed to belief in gods, not that those gods actually exist. The vast majority of atheists know that they are in the minority, but they also know that an argument from popularity of belief is a fallacy. So I see it as incumbent on atheists to come up with explanations of why so many people would hold that belief if there were no such thing as gods.

So what is a plausible explanation of why so many people believe in gods, if those gods are just imaginary beings? Certainly, hallucination and misinterpretation are plausible explanations and certainly true in some cases. But what reasonable explanation could there be for a claim that none of the experiences have anything to do with a god? Why is belief in gods ubiquitous in human cultures, even in cultures that have been isolated for centuries from the outside world?

A lot of us have come up with such explanations, and they deserve to be taken as seriously as the theist claim. One of the most common explanations is simply that human beings are prone to attributing animacy and agency to physical objects and forces. Theism is ubiquitous, but animism is even more widespread around the world. People mistake inanimate objects all the time for animate beings (See anthropologist Steward Guthrie's Faces in the Clouds). Forces of nature have always been mysterious to primitive cultures, so it is no big mental leap to conclude that intelligent agencies are behind them. And maybe that hair-trigger tendency actually has some evolutionary (survival) value. Hence, the tendency to personify inanimate forces--to see controlling agents behind natural phenomena--leads to widespread belief in gods. So, when people experience extreme emotions--awe, fear, wonder--they can naturally jump to the conclusion that they have had a "divine" experience, when, perhaps, all they experienced was a flood of endorphins in the brain.

 

[southernhybrid]

Here's a story that might be convincing to some. It happened to me when I was still a somewhat theistic agnostic. Here goes. When my son was 8 months old, he fell out of a second story window while my younger sister was playing with him. I'll spare you the details of how this happened. Anyway, we picked him up in the driveway and drove to the military base hospital which was only about a mile away. My ex was a Baha'i so he asked all of his Baha'i friends to pray all evening. I think the prayer they used was something like this. "Is there any remover of difficulties save god? Say. Praise be god. All are his children and all abide by his bidding." If you're not familiar with this religion, imo, it's an offshoot of the Muslim faith, but a lot more gentle and tolerant. It was started around 1850 in Iran, then Persia.

While my infant son was semi conscious when we took him to the ER, by the next morning he was bouncing up and down in his hospital crib. They kept him in the hospital for about a week because that was common over forty years ago and I later realized that they suspected us of fowl play. He is now 47 years old and a very successful computer programmer, despite his head first leap out of a second story window at the age of 8 months. Now, I imagine that a lot of people would say that was proof that a good god healed him, and the prayers worked. I wanted to think that but I also knew that sometimes infants suffer severe head injuries and have complete recoveries, while others die or end up with moderate to severe brain damage. To me, it just made more sense that we were very fortunate in that my son didn't suffer severe brain damage. If you are a Christian, would you be able to accept that the god that Baha'is worship is the real god, or do you think there are other versions of god besides the one that you worship? I don't know if you're a liberal or conservative Christian and that would make a difference in your perspective.

The thing is that weird things and amazing recoveries happen to people all the time. If there was a god, why would she choose who to heal and who to allow to die? It's this type of thing that helped me on my path to atheism. An interventionist god made no sense unless god was a real bitch who played games with people's emotions. But I can see how what happened to my son might allow some people to think what happened was due to a divine intervention. Of course, from my perspective, I would wonder why god let my sister allow my son to jump up and down on a sofa bed that was next to a screened window that was open? Why not just prevent that from happening in the first place?

 

[rousseau]

A lot of us have come up with such explanations, and they deserve to be taken as seriously as the theist claim. One of the most common explanations is simply that human beings are prone to attributing animacy and agency to physical objects and forces. Theism is ubiquitous, but animism is even more widespread around the world. People mistake inanimate objects all the time for animate beings (See anthropologist Steward Guthrie's Faces in the Clouds). Forces of nature have always been mysterious to primitive cultures, so it is no big mental leap to conclude that intelligent agencies are behind them. And maybe that hair-trigger tendency actually has some evolutionary (survival) value. Hence, the tendency to personify inanimate forces--to see controlling agents behind natural phenomena--leads to widespread belief in gods. So, when people experience extreme emotions--awe, fear, wonder--they can naturally jump to the conclusion that they have had a "divine" experience, when, perhaps, all they experienced was a flood of endorphins in the brain.

This just about sums it up.

Attributing agency to things would have had survival value in a hunter-gatherer world. Better to assume that twig snapping is due to a predator, rather than random chance.

Now that agriculture has removed many of us from the need to worry about predators, the next logical target of our curiosity is our own existence. But the tendency to assume the predator is still there.

If this doesn't make sense to whoever is reading, then you need to study evolution. If you are unwilling to study evolution, then I can only conclude that you're not interested in understanding whether or not religion is a natural phenomenon.

 

[Lion IRC]

...First of all, lets admit that we are not talking about 90% of religious experiences corroborating your god.

I'm not defending Christian Particularism.
If any one of those claims among the 90% is even partly true then atheism is false.

From there we can move on to debate whether it's a tusk or a tail or a trunk
...or an entire elephant.

 

[abaddon]

If any one of those claims among the 90% is even partly true then atheism is false.

Are any one of them even partly true?

"What determines if they're 'true' or maybe 'partly true'?" is a valid question.

"What do you mean by 'religious experience'?" is another.

That anyone calls them "religious experiences" doesn't mean they are. They might be experiences/feelings available to humans generally whether religious or not. They might be interpretations mistakenly paraded as experiences. If you see a rainbow and it's emotionally overwhelming and you describe that as "the hand of God reached out and touched me", you've left experience behind and entered into abstract interpretation. "Awesome rainbow" is true for you subjectively. But "hand of God" is just a figure of speech that got reified into a "thing" or event that "really happened" though it didn't.

That's why the content matters. That's why saying "I had a religious experience" has to be followed with a description of it, or there's no point in even mentioning it. That the label exists doesn't mean the thing exists.

 

[Hermit]

If 90% of reported religious experiences partially or wholly corroborate the existence of divinity then that becomes a useful starting point.

What method would you recommend for testing the validity of those religious experiences? Is there one by which you can confidently assert that President Bush had a religious experience when god apparently told him to go to war, but bin Laden did not?

In another forum this question was asked: What would it take for you to believe in God? I thought of a scenario that might work, at least for an interventionist, personal one. A lot of Christians (and not only Christians, come to think of it) believe in the power and efficacy of prayer. Well, it should be possible to empirically test for the existence of their God. Gather, say, 40,000 people suffering from trachoma and divide them into four groups. One will be treated by doctors, one will be prayed for, one will be prayed for and treated by doctors and one will be utterly ignored. The result will be pretty convincing if the prayed for groups fare best. If it doesn't, of course, it proves nothing. Perhaps God was busy having a shit at the time, or maybe he just hates some sinners and gave them trachoma as punishment. Or he might have played his favourite trick: he was testing his followers' faith.

Still, if experiments of the kind I just sketched can be repeated with similarly favourable results for the prayed for groups, it could be said that evidence for a personal, interventionist God has been provided.

When talking of a divine watchmaker type of god, one that is the ultimate cause of everything and then just lets it tick away no such experiment can be devised because unlike the meddlesome Christian, Muslim or Jewish gods that divine watchmaker will not interfere with anything, I am okay with the existence of one, but what is the point? We just move the mystery of existence from one place to another, in which case we may as well take heed of that animation Jobar posted earlier.

​

 

[Copernicus]

...First of all, lets admit that we are not talking about 90% of religious experiences corroborating your god.

I'm not defending Christian Particularism.
If any one of those claims among the 90% is even partly true then atheism is false.

From there we can move on to debate whether it's a tusk or a tail or a trunk
...or an entire elephant.

Or you are imagining an elephant when, in fact, they are just stumbling around in the dark and imagining things.

 

[Rhea]

Can you explain what you mean by “corroborate”? If al of their personal experiences contradict each other , why would their combined existance say something greater?

You forgot to draw in the atheist, who tests, moves around, asks others, tests again, backs up, looks more carefully, measures, asks more questions and says,

“Hey, you people, it’s an elephant!”
And then they all refuse to look around or ask questions themsleves and continue with their conclusions that it’s this one tiiny wrong label.

This is actually a very amusing graphic for you to consider meaningful. It looks a lot like a metaphor for people inssting on the beliefs of their parents as true without giving curiosity to the veracity of the information or credence to anything else that anyone else experiences.

 

[Hermit]

 

[Learner]

I like Prof. Keith Parsons interesting explanation which is often heard and generally shared by many atheists: Why do Christians have "personal experiences" or "hallucinations"?

I also like Craigs response.


(please excuse the vid title ... its all I could find of this particular segment)

Not everyone can click on videos. Please provide a summary or transcript.
(Please always do this - it’s rude to make people invest 3-4 minutes to get your 10 second point)

Been a few days before getting back but sorry about that . It was in regards to the "personal experience" (and the usual response to them) which would have better been attached to previous post quoting Lion #191.

Apologies if you lost 3-4 minutes of your invested time.


Thanks to Copernicus's transcription in post #195 BTW (1 rep)

 

[Rhea]

Been a few days before getting back but sorry about that . It was in regards to the "personal experience" (and the usual response to them) which would have better been attached to previous post quoting Lion #191.

Apologies if you lost 3-4 minutes of your invested time.


Thanks to Copernicus's transcription in post #195 BTW (1 rep)

Thanks. I didn’t lose time because I can’t click on videos. But in general, it’s awfully sweet when folks will write a sentence.

 

[southernhybrid]

If 90% of reported religious experiences partially or wholly corroborate the existence of divinity then that becomes a useful starting point. Whether or not they are unanimous, and can be questioned ever more closely right down to the nth degree, doesn't detract from the preliminary question - God(s) yes or no?

Of course, visions, hallucinations and dreams don't prove anything. And someone who survives a horrid disease or injury is not proof of divine intervention. But, I don't think you answered my earlier question. If a person from a very different religion, claims to have a religious experience that proves that his/her god or gods exist, do you accept those experiences as truth? Or do you only take the words of Christians who have religious experiences as truth? Just wondering your take on that.

 

[Lion IRC]

Even Christian religious experiences of divinity can be interpreted differently.
Those blind men in the picture could be self-professing Christians.

I don't need to debunk the experiences of competing religions
a) Because I'm not an atheist
b) Because they're fairly easy to harmonise with biblical theism.

 

[rousseau]

So what is it about the religious that they aren't able to carry on a conversation in good faith? I mean, the last twenty or so posts in this thread pretty much painted a 500 square metre billboard of crystal clear evidence right in Lion IRC's face.. and yet.. nothing.

With the level of scientific understanding out there, including anthropological studies of things like say.. religion, it should be a no-brainer to figure it out. And yet.. somehow we're in a never-ending spin-cycle of trying to explain that 1 + 1 = 2.

I just don't get it.

 

[Rhea]

Even Christian religious experiences of divinity can be interpreted differently.
Those blind men in the picture could be self-professing Christians.

I don't need to debunk the experiences of competing religions
a) Because I'm not an atheist
b) Because they're fairly easy to harmonise with biblical theism.

So you’re saying all of those other religions are true as practiced?

Including every flavor of Christianity?
Including the ones that believe Jesus is not divine?

They are all true at once?

What is this, Schroedinger’s Religion?

 

[Learner]

There has never really been any contradictions in regards to "many religions", since the biblical theology acknowledges other old religions and has a whole list of various "gods" written in the bible.

Of course these are referred to as; false-gods. Even Zeus is mentioned like other pagan gods. I would not find it surprising with the bible (and being far more consistent than other religions imo) that these gods mentioned in the bible are the very same pagan-gods, more or less, known under various names in various languages.