Even when you change from the non-existent version of me (a time before I existed) to the newborn but still unaware of their own existence version of me, that it doesn't make me a conscious non-theist.
No. But once you become self aware, you still aren't a Christian until someone tells you to be.
I didnt say Christian.
I know. Your weaseling has been obvious from the start of this conversation.
Of course people can gradually grow in their knowledge of God getting information from various sources. But that doesnt negate the possibility that they have always thought God exists.
Yeah, it really does. "Something exists but I don't know what" is literally insane.
Even if you are an instinctive non-specific theist.
You mean instinctive theist.
I meant exactly what I said. Your instinctive theism is non-specific. You may think there's "something else", but until you were exposed to Christianity, that something else looked absolutely nothing like any of the Christian gods.
Someone who has always thought God exists. Someone who never chose to be a theist.
But who very definitely chose to be a Christian.
Being a "theist" is utterly meaningless, given the existence of thousands of mutually incompatible claims about the gods.
The evidence for this is simple; Were it not the case, we would expect to see Christianity (or at least, theism) suddenly arising in non-theist cultures. But Jains and Buddhists (for example) don't bear theist (much less Christian) children, not even occasionally.
OK
Call me a Jain then.
Why? You are NOT a Jain. You are a Christian.
I see your argument falls apart if and when a Jain makes the claim to have been born that way - not remembering a time when they didn't think of themself as a godlike past-eternal soul. Nobody ever taught them that karma is real. They've always thought that it's a self-evident truth, an axiom which does not need to be proven.
Yeah, that's just as much bollocks for the Jains as it is for you as a Christian.
Karma is not only not a "self-evident truth", it's observably false. Plenty of good people have shit lives; Plenty of really nasty people have long, happy and sucessful lives doing things they love to do.
The only way to salvage the idea of karma is to posit two things that are totally nonsensical:
- People continue to exist after they die
- In that "afterlife" they get what they deserve, despite not having done so in life
Not only are these things implausible; Not only do they lack any supporting evidence whatsoever; But the idea of an afterlife requires the demonstrably impossible idea of dualism to be true. Which it ain't.
The whole idea of karma relies on its proponents believing that
things are true if we want them to be true.
That's horseshit.
You're a pick-and-mix Christian, with a bizarre belief that all other religions are just misunderstandings of your own perfect sect.
No. Your argument fails irrespective of the truth or falsehood of the belief the person claims they have always held.
It really doesn't. When you believe something that is false, you are simply wrong. It is irrelevant whether or not others are also wrong.
You are clearly NOT a Buddhist.
Your argument fails even if I claim to have always been a Buddhist.
Your response
is.... but, but, but, you're NOT a Buddhist. You're NOT a Jain. You're NOT a Mormon. You're not a Muslim They cant all be right... They don't believe in YOUR God...
But these red herrings don't address or refute the ability of someone to have always held that religious view.
They leave you needing to explain how any of those views can be true, given the observation that people have the religion they were taught to have, and not the one true religion that you believe to be correct.
You seem remarkably embarrassed (and probably rightly so) by your Christianity; It appears that you would rather ignore its many contradictions, and that you use a more woolly and vague "theism" as a shelter against Christianity's obvious contradictions and absurdities.
That might work for you; But it doesn't work for your audience, who don't have any interest in protecting you from cognitive dissonance.
There are thousands of religions. They contradict each other, and they deny observed facts, and many (like Christianity) are internally contradictory too. They aren't compatible with each other, and suggesting that they are is absurd.
If you want to claim that your footy team are the best team ever, a simple observation that other teams often defeat them is proof that you are wrong.
To then turn around and say "a footy team wins every match, so as a footy fan, my team always wins" is to demonstrate a woeful lack of understanding of the very sport you claim to be so passionate about.
If you want to claim that somebody who doesn't care about football
at all should start following your team, then pointing out that all teams are basically the same team, because they all play footy, is not only wrong, contradictory and absurd, but also a futile effort that is structurally unable to succeed.
That's what you are doing here with religions in place of teams, and theism in place of football.
There's no such thing as "theism", as far as a discussion of belief is concerned, any more than there is such a thing as a devoted fan of football teams
in general.
You pick a team, and support it. Supporting Collingwood doesn't make you a fan of Juventus, or of the Dallas Cowboys; and being a Christian doesn't make you a Jain or a Buddhist.
