Charlemagne wrote: ↑October 14th, 2022, 3:53 pm
Sy Borg wrote: ↑June 21st, 2022, 9:01 pmMostly, when quizzing theists, I look for signs of spiritual advancement, with unusually high levels of maturity, honesty, humility, goodwill, perceptiveness and a sense of inner peace. If those qualities are not manifest, then we are dealing with someone with no special knowledge to offer, just dogma.
I look for the same things when I am quizzing atheists. But I find a lot of anger, a lot of dismissiveness, a lot of very immature reasoning. Many atheists are downright dogmatic about their atheism, though there is no way they can prove God is impossible. I have been waiting all my 82 years for that proof and have yet to hear it.
Well, you don't find anger here and, until recently, no dismissiveness. I have been agnostic for much of my life. However, I looked long and hard into the issue over the past year, because I felt the key lay in NDEs and death comes ever closer. I was already unsure because Susan Blackmore had examined NDEs in detail over a period of years, hoping to find evidence that something extraordinary was happening. However, she was disappointed to find no decent evidence at all, and she became an atheist.
This year, I subscribed to a YT channel, where each video was an NDE account. I was ready to believe. What I noticed was that almost all of them were very, very culturally specific. Christians saw Jesus or God. Muslims saw Mohammed. Again and again. Yet atheists never seemed to see Jesus or Mohammed, despite their experiences being very similar otherwise. These were obviously not ontic experiences but death dreams.
So I now see that God is entirely subjective. There is no ontic component to God, and I am especially dismissive of young Earth creationism and intelligent design, the latter being a back door attempt to prove the former.
However, this is not being dismissive of God. The subjective domain is obviously beyond important!! Does it matter if God is in your mind because it's a big spirit bloke who hates gays exists, or if your ancestors over the last hundred thousand years all believed in personified forces of nature and that shaped your brain to believe? No. Still, importance is not ontology.
You will never find proof that God is impossible, just as you will never find proof that ghosts and leprechauns are impossible. It is impossible to prove that anything is impossible. As long as you keep your mental wall up and refuse to even consider alternatives, you can rest easy that no one will ever breach your defences.
More to the point, atheists don't claim that being so makes them better than Christians. However, Christians believe that they are better people than atheists - more moral, decent, fair, kind and compassionate. Many claim that atheists are sub-human animals, that theism is required to be fully human.
Yet, I frequently see theists behave dishonestly on the forum, especially in turning discussions into personal attacks. I have been on forums for decades and have had hundreds of debates with Christians - and atheists. I have rarely been impressed by the former, aside from a couple of theists who engaged in selfless volunteer work. But their conceptions and ideas, no, none have been even slightly impressive and many have been patronising, rude and dishonest to some extent. Yes, some atheists are angry and arrogant, but no less than the theists I encounter.
It's not their -isms that makes them arrogant and rude, it's their humanity. Theists claim that their religion helps them rise above that, but the evidence points to the opposite - that theism drives arrogance and hostility, especially towards vulnerable minorities. Given the claims of theism, it is fair to expect excellent character displayed in all dealings. The character failures I see in theists, again and again, only highlight the paucity of their faith.