After reading a sizable amount of your responses, I have to ask if your interest is truly in finding weak points of your religion, or if you are merely trying to defend your beliefs to a (largely) atheist audience—possibly hoping to win a few converts, or at the very least trying to reassure yourself of your beliefs.
No, I don´t try to defend my beliefs to you. I don´t even want you to convert. I want you to walk your own ways in life and come up with your own conclusions. I am used to debate religion with christians myself. Many of the arguments used by people here, such as inconsistences in the Bible, are the same arguments I have used myself, when arguing with fundamentalists and conservative believers. The problem is, I am not one of those.
The male stereotypes of the Father and the Son and the lack of mother and daughter are to me, some of the strongest evidence for why christian churchs are the results of politics rather than divine intervention. Another is the fact that even amongst many protestant christians, Paulus is considered a higher authority than Jesus himself, or in other words, some christians assign the gospels lower priority than the interpretations of a mortal man who never met Jesus. (A teacher I once met actually said that the words of Paulus was such a good explanation of what Jesus most probably meant, that we therefore should disregard the words of Jesus himself to some extent.)
The hipocrits here downvoting all of my comments, even those not related to this, simply does it as a punishment for my insolence, something they think they are entitled to because of their Tribal status as atheists, and my inferior status as a theist. I must admit I was originally expecting more of this community.
Where I was raised, people rather looked down on christians and not the other way around. I can honestly not imagine how it is to live in a place where people look up to you if you say that you are christian.
I value critical thinkning and I understand that this is impossbile if you are not free to think about whatever you want. I read all kinds of science and I love physics. That passion has been with me longer than my outspoken christinaity and I have come to respect ordinary scientists alot more than I respect someone who tells me that she/he is a rationalist. Thomas Bayes was a Presbyterian minister and Alber Einstein was a hardcore theist and none of these guys are famous for that, because they did not waste all their time arguing religion with atheists.
The amount of upovotes you got here proves to anyone actually reading my comments and understanding them, just how little you actually pay attention to my what I actually say and just how pointless it is for a theist to try to discuss religion here on LW. But I am used to that people harass you just because you tell them that you are christian. Still others value reason more than compassion.
I believe in a God that willingly exposed himself to the same evils that we face and who sacrifaced his life for us, because he loved us. I believe in love and compassion. I believe in forgiveness and an open mind. I share the same values as many atheists, the difference is that I believe in a God that share those values aswell. For monotheists it is not a question of which God to believe in, it is about that we try to learn about that God and who that is. The most important messages Jesus tried to teach us, whether he was mortal or not, is that we should love each other and that children are the saviours of this world. I believe in a God who knows us, our shortcomings and our doubts, who knows our fears and our pain better than we do ourselves, becuase “he” knows what we are missing. God is not a male, but rather genderless, the ultimate power, who will stay with us, alwyas, in love. I believe in love, that is my personal and universal God.
The hipocrits here downvoting all of my comments, even those not related to this, simply does it as a punishment for my insolence, something they think they are entitled to because of their Tribal status as atheists, and my inferior status as a theist. I must admit I was originally expecting more of this community.
This is an example of the kind of thing that convinces me you’re not here for genuine questioning. A person who is truly trying to doubt, and who specifically asked for others to raise questions of their own, would not call those other people hypocrites. And note that you’re calling people hypocrites in response to, of all things, downvotes? All of this says to me that your primary attitude toward the people here is one of hostility. Ask yourself this: is hostility really the right way to respond to questioners whom you yourself asked to question your beliefs? Moreover, is it psychologically realistic that a person with genuine doubts would become so hostile toward his/her questioners at so slight a provocation? Maybe I’m misreading you here, but somehow, I doubt that’s the case.
We’re not the ones drawing the tribal lines here; you are. Maybe your original comment started out as a genuine request for discussion; I don’t know. But somewhere along the line, that sincerity of doubt got lost, and this became another one of those tired, rehashed debates about Christianity versus atheism. You’re on the “Christianity” side; we’re on the “atheism” side. That’s how you’ve labeled us in your mind: as enemies on a different side of a tribal war. Arguments become soldiers, any ground conceded whatsoever is viewed as some sort of “loss”, and that’s why you’re so eager to accuse everyone here who disagrees with you of hypocrisy.
(Note: I have downvoted none of your comments myself, but I can understand why some others have been doing so. As MarkusRamikin pointed out, you’ve been doing surprisingly little to make your position arguable, either for or against, and the insults and accusations of “hypocrisy” you’ve been hurling at people really haven’t been helping the matter. At any rate, a bit of advice: don’t take karma all that seriously. People aren’t downvoting due to some personal or tribal vendetta. Treat downvotes simply as slightly noisy signals of what LW users do not approve of, and would like to see less of in the future. As the age-old saying goes, “It’s nothing personal.”)
The point of looking at your belief’s real weak points is that it’s easy to find strong points to attack, and thus one can feel like they’ve engaged with their doubts when in fact they have avoided them.
Is asking us to find the weak spots of your particular flavor of Christianity attacking a weak point, or attacking a strong point? If you look back over your comments, you will note a number of times when you talk about not expecting people to understand, or pointing out that you don’t believe the various things that people are pointing out as weak spots in other forms of Christianity. It seems to me that this allows you to claim that you have exposed your beliefs to attack and them have survived—when, in fact, that is not so.
To elaborate, consider the following:
The amount of upovotes you got here proves to anyone actually reading my comments and understanding them, just how little you actually pay attention to my what I actually say and just how pointless it is for a theist to try to discuss religion here on LW.
Is this what it looks like to attack a weak point, or a strong point? Was the goal here to reach mutual understanding, or to show that LWers aren’t capable of discussing religion?
Note that in the comment that started this all, you claimed that you had found some weak spots on your own. Why, then, are you not talking about those? Suppose you knew that at the end of this conversation you would be a convinced atheist, and you were trying to minimize the amount of time it would take to get to that conclusion. Would you have said the same things in the same way?
(I apologize for the Bulverism, but in this context it seems unavoidable. Just asking you to search your motivations doesn’t seem likely to succeed, because I want to raise this specific hypothesis.)
I’d never seen the term Bulverism, but I don’t think what you are doing would classify. You aren’t saying A is false because Okeymaker likes B, you’re saying the extraordinary claims with lack of extraordinary evidence doesn’t provide much prove A.
And that lack of good evidence does not seems not to matter… which makes me wonder how a discussion can continue. Questioning the motives of the discussion is goal clarification, without which there is no discussion.
I didn´t want to influence the eventual weak points that others knew of by telling about my own. That would be contra-productive.
Is asking us to find the weak spots of your particular flavor of Christianity attacking a weak point, or attacking a strong point? If you look back over your comments, you will note a number of times when you talk about not expecting people to understand, or pointing out that you don’t believe the various things that people are pointing out as weak spots in other forms of Christianity. It seems to me that this allows you to claim that you have exposed your beliefs to attack and them have survived—when, in fact, that is not so.
Aha! A valid question at last! My answer is that I did not estimate the rate of success by asking that question HERE to be more than about 40%, but if I would estimate the same question again, I would assign it about 5% probability. But aksing here would not diminish the chance for me to learn something new. Some contradicitons in the canon-gospels that polymathwannabe has indirectly introduced me to caught my interest, even if they were displayed at a website that was called. “The church of theists sucks.” Hehe. But rest assured, I do not intend to just ask YOU about weak points!. I have constantly been thinking about my doubts for years, and not until lately I have started to come to terms with them. Understand that I did not TRY to come to faith in Jesus, at least not deliberately. (When I was a kid my mom once said I could be a hindu for all she cared and the majority of my friends are atheists.)
If someone actually had asked about my own weak points earlier on I would have told them. To those who asked in a PM, I gladly have shared my doubts. But right now I don´t want to expose them as much, in this hostile environment, caused by a few. All the crap I get here has finally forced me to realize that it will probably not be worth the effort to discuss here. I mean, a religion is not such a big deal if it´s teachings are compatible with laws and morals that co-existing non-believers hold, and still people here treat religious beliefs like the plague? I don´t see why. THIS would be intersting to know. Because there is no threat to anyone else in what I believe. The reasons for my moral may be irrational to some extent, but not a potential danger.
Was the goal here to reach mutual understanding, or to show that LWers aren’t capable of discussing religion?
To me it was reaching mutual understandning, that is why I bothered answer so many comments. If I failed horribly, at least I honestly tried.
I do not blame you for your Bulverism in this comment. I find it well used and justified. Since I do believe, I can´t see how I would become an atheist, but I do not fear to become one. From my current perspective I believe that God will care for you who are atheists aswell, even though you do not believe in God, if you already value love above all else and honestly try to treat others well, just as well as you treat yourself. (I count in friendship and compassion in love.) Since I believe that God works this way, I won´t fear becoming an atheist before I have already became one, and then I will think to myself, that I had no reason to fear becoming one in the first place, since there is no God.
I mean, a religion is not such a big deal if it´s teachings are compatible with laws and morals that co-existing non-believers hold, and still people here treat religious beliefs like the plague?
If you’re not willing to discuss the weak points of your religion, you can’t claim that its teachings are compatible with the morals of other people. After all, how do you know this? Maybe they’re not compatible, and that’s one of the weak points you won’t discuss.
I can honestly not imagine how it is to live in a place where people look up to you if you say that you are christian.
That is a statement about your own lack of imagination and lack of thinking ability. Saying things like that invites downvotes much more than being Christian.
The hipocrits here downvoting all of my comments, even those not related to this, simply does it as a punishment for my insolence, something they think they are entitled to because of their Tribal status as atheists, and my inferior status as a theist. I must admit I was originally expecting more of this community.
That’s passive aggressive and ignores that this community does have well respected Christians with karma > 2000 and 96% approval rate.
The idea that you get downvoted because you are Christian is an excuse.
The most important messages Jesus tried to teach us, whether he was mortal or not, is that we should love each other and that children are the saviours of this world. [...] I believe in love, that is my personal and universal God.
I don’t know much about the different sects of Christianity, but I do know when someone is being overly belligerent when they shouldn’t. The fact that you’re acting so belligerent about this is what originally made me wonder if you were really trying to question your beliefs. (As dxu said, a real person trying to question their beliefs wouldn’t attack people they asked to help in the first place.)
No, I don´t try to defend my beliefs to you. I don´t even want you to convert. I want you to walk your own ways in life and come up with your own conclusions.
If the atheists are wrong and you’re right and God does exist, I’m sure they’d like to know about it so they can update their beliefs! And if they’re right and you’re wrong, wouldn’t you like to know about it so you can update your beliefs? After all, there’s only one reality out there, either God exists or he doesn’t. If you really think you’re right about God existing, you should be trying to convert us.
After reading a sizable amount of your responses, I have to ask if your interest is truly in finding weak points of your religion, or if you are merely trying to defend your beliefs to a (largely) atheist audience—possibly hoping to win a few converts, or at the very least trying to reassure yourself of your beliefs.
No, I don´t try to defend my beliefs to you. I don´t even want you to convert. I want you to walk your own ways in life and come up with your own conclusions. I am used to debate religion with christians myself. Many of the arguments used by people here, such as inconsistences in the Bible, are the same arguments I have used myself, when arguing with fundamentalists and conservative believers. The problem is, I am not one of those.
The male stereotypes of the Father and the Son and the lack of mother and daughter are to me, some of the strongest evidence for why christian churchs are the results of politics rather than divine intervention. Another is the fact that even amongst many protestant christians, Paulus is considered a higher authority than Jesus himself, or in other words, some christians assign the gospels lower priority than the interpretations of a mortal man who never met Jesus. (A teacher I once met actually said that the words of Paulus was such a good explanation of what Jesus most probably meant, that we therefore should disregard the words of Jesus himself to some extent.)
The hipocrits here downvoting all of my comments, even those not related to this, simply does it as a punishment for my insolence, something they think they are entitled to because of their Tribal status as atheists, and my inferior status as a theist. I must admit I was originally expecting more of this community.
Where I was raised, people rather looked down on christians and not the other way around. I can honestly not imagine how it is to live in a place where people look up to you if you say that you are christian.
I value critical thinkning and I understand that this is impossbile if you are not free to think about whatever you want. I read all kinds of science and I love physics. That passion has been with me longer than my outspoken christinaity and I have come to respect ordinary scientists alot more than I respect someone who tells me that she/he is a rationalist. Thomas Bayes was a Presbyterian minister and Alber Einstein was a hardcore theist and none of these guys are famous for that, because they did not waste all their time arguing religion with atheists.
The amount of upovotes you got here proves to anyone actually reading my comments and understanding them, just how little you actually pay attention to my what I actually say and just how pointless it is for a theist to try to discuss religion here on LW. But I am used to that people harass you just because you tell them that you are christian. Still others value reason more than compassion.
I believe in a God that willingly exposed himself to the same evils that we face and who sacrifaced his life for us, because he loved us. I believe in love and compassion. I believe in forgiveness and an open mind. I share the same values as many atheists, the difference is that I believe in a God that share those values aswell. For monotheists it is not a question of which God to believe in, it is about that we try to learn about that God and who that is. The most important messages Jesus tried to teach us, whether he was mortal or not, is that we should love each other and that children are the saviours of this world. I believe in a God who knows us, our shortcomings and our doubts, who knows our fears and our pain better than we do ourselves, becuase “he” knows what we are missing. God is not a male, but rather genderless, the ultimate power, who will stay with us, alwyas, in love. I believe in love, that is my personal and universal God.
This is an example of the kind of thing that convinces me you’re not here for genuine questioning. A person who is truly trying to doubt, and who specifically asked for others to raise questions of their own, would not call those other people hypocrites. And note that you’re calling people hypocrites in response to, of all things, downvotes? All of this says to me that your primary attitude toward the people here is one of hostility. Ask yourself this: is hostility really the right way to respond to questioners whom you yourself asked to question your beliefs? Moreover, is it psychologically realistic that a person with genuine doubts would become so hostile toward his/her questioners at so slight a provocation? Maybe I’m misreading you here, but somehow, I doubt that’s the case.
We’re not the ones drawing the tribal lines here; you are. Maybe your original comment started out as a genuine request for discussion; I don’t know. But somewhere along the line, that sincerity of doubt got lost, and this became another one of those tired, rehashed debates about Christianity versus atheism. You’re on the “Christianity” side; we’re on the “atheism” side. That’s how you’ve labeled us in your mind: as enemies on a different side of a tribal war. Arguments become soldiers, any ground conceded whatsoever is viewed as some sort of “loss”, and that’s why you’re so eager to accuse everyone here who disagrees with you of hypocrisy.
(Note: I have downvoted none of your comments myself, but I can understand why some others have been doing so. As MarkusRamikin pointed out, you’ve been doing surprisingly little to make your position arguable, either for or against, and the insults and accusations of “hypocrisy” you’ve been hurling at people really haven’t been helping the matter. At any rate, a bit of advice: don’t take karma all that seriously. People aren’t downvoting due to some personal or tribal vendetta. Treat downvotes simply as slightly noisy signals of what LW users do not approve of, and would like to see less of in the future. As the age-old saying goes, “It’s nothing personal.”)
I know this is a totally tangential issue, but: No, he really wasn’t. See, e.g., this Wikipedia article.
Then what exactly is going on here?
The point of looking at your belief’s real weak points is that it’s easy to find strong points to attack, and thus one can feel like they’ve engaged with their doubts when in fact they have avoided them.
Is asking us to find the weak spots of your particular flavor of Christianity attacking a weak point, or attacking a strong point? If you look back over your comments, you will note a number of times when you talk about not expecting people to understand, or pointing out that you don’t believe the various things that people are pointing out as weak spots in other forms of Christianity. It seems to me that this allows you to claim that you have exposed your beliefs to attack and them have survived—when, in fact, that is not so.
To elaborate, consider the following:
Is this what it looks like to attack a weak point, or a strong point? Was the goal here to reach mutual understanding, or to show that LWers aren’t capable of discussing religion?
Note that in the comment that started this all, you claimed that you had found some weak spots on your own. Why, then, are you not talking about those? Suppose you knew that at the end of this conversation you would be a convinced atheist, and you were trying to minimize the amount of time it would take to get to that conclusion. Would you have said the same things in the same way?
(I apologize for the Bulverism, but in this context it seems unavoidable. Just asking you to search your motivations doesn’t seem likely to succeed, because I want to raise this specific hypothesis.)
I’d never seen the term Bulverism, but I don’t think what you are doing would classify. You aren’t saying A is false because Okeymaker likes B, you’re saying the extraordinary claims with lack of extraordinary evidence doesn’t provide much prove A.
And that lack of good evidence does not seems not to matter… which makes me wonder how a discussion can continue. Questioning the motives of the discussion is goal clarification, without which there is no discussion.
I didn´t want to influence the eventual weak points that others knew of by telling about my own. That would be contra-productive.
Aha! A valid question at last! My answer is that I did not estimate the rate of success by asking that question HERE to be more than about 40%, but if I would estimate the same question again, I would assign it about 5% probability. But aksing here would not diminish the chance for me to learn something new. Some contradicitons in the canon-gospels that polymathwannabe has indirectly introduced me to caught my interest, even if they were displayed at a website that was called. “The church of theists sucks.” Hehe. But rest assured, I do not intend to just ask YOU about weak points!. I have constantly been thinking about my doubts for years, and not until lately I have started to come to terms with them. Understand that I did not TRY to come to faith in Jesus, at least not deliberately. (When I was a kid my mom once said I could be a hindu for all she cared and the majority of my friends are atheists.)
If someone actually had asked about my own weak points earlier on I would have told them. To those who asked in a PM, I gladly have shared my doubts. But right now I don´t want to expose them as much, in this hostile environment, caused by a few. All the crap I get here has finally forced me to realize that it will probably not be worth the effort to discuss here. I mean, a religion is not such a big deal if it´s teachings are compatible with laws and morals that co-existing non-believers hold, and still people here treat religious beliefs like the plague? I don´t see why. THIS would be intersting to know. Because there is no threat to anyone else in what I believe. The reasons for my moral may be irrational to some extent, but not a potential danger.
To me it was reaching mutual understandning, that is why I bothered answer so many comments. If I failed horribly, at least I honestly tried.
I do not blame you for your Bulverism in this comment. I find it well used and justified. Since I do believe, I can´t see how I would become an atheist, but I do not fear to become one. From my current perspective I believe that God will care for you who are atheists aswell, even though you do not believe in God, if you already value love above all else and honestly try to treat others well, just as well as you treat yourself. (I count in friendship and compassion in love.) Since I believe that God works this way, I won´t fear becoming an atheist before I have already became one, and then I will think to myself, that I had no reason to fear becoming one in the first place, since there is no God.
If you’re not willing to discuss the weak points of your religion, you can’t claim that its teachings are compatible with the morals of other people. After all, how do you know this? Maybe they’re not compatible, and that’s one of the weak points you won’t discuss.
That is a statement about your own lack of imagination and lack of thinking ability. Saying things like that invites downvotes much more than being Christian.
That’s passive aggressive and ignores that this community does have well respected Christians with karma > 2000 and 96% approval rate.
The idea that you get downvoted because you are Christian is an excuse.
I don’t think you do well in that front.
I don’t know much about the different sects of Christianity, but I do know when someone is being overly belligerent when they shouldn’t. The fact that you’re acting so belligerent about this is what originally made me wonder if you were really trying to question your beliefs. (As dxu said, a real person trying to question their beliefs wouldn’t attack people they asked to help in the first place.)
If the atheists are wrong and you’re right and God does exist, I’m sure they’d like to know about it so they can update their beliefs! And if they’re right and you’re wrong, wouldn’t you like to know about it so you can update your beliefs? After all, there’s only one reality out there, either God exists or he doesn’t. If you really think you’re right about God existing, you should be trying to convert us.
Can you please explain why you believe in your God, and not all the others?
Are you Weedlayer?