Do you believe in God?

Ooohh Armchair psychology. Lucky us!

The objection is they disagree ABOUT SUPERNATURAL MAGIC CLAIMS ... which clearly are just made up and made up and made up, over and over by so many cultures. By your apologetic, lightning (and a million other things) once nearly unanimously attributed to God, all exclude the "beliefs" of people like Benjamin Franklin, and so Benjamin and Tesla and Edison etc. are the ones with the "problem." Sorry, but LMAO. My beliefs are natural and demonstrable, yet your tack is to smuggle in the legitimacy of supernatural beliefs based on popularity. That's not to say I don't accept any non-standard versions of reality, even spiritual ones, but it is to say when you make up a thousand religions there is an inherent problem there with respecting reality or even caring about it. They tend strongly to be poetic, not metaphysics.

The point about the different religions is to point up that each group is presuming theirs is "the true one," and they need to fully realize that they are merely indoctrinated in that blind orientation. They mistake their doctrine for reality, the two are interchangeable in their thinking. But they aren't in reality.

Along these lines I just finished Tolstoy's "A Confession" last night. And, after enormous consternation seemingly well beyond that in Ecclesiastes, he arrived back at the position of simple faith and simple life is the great placebo for such existential angst about meaninglessness and death. He didn't use the word placebo, but it seems to be that, that it helps tremendously regardless of whether it is true/real. Great read and very short (70 pages). PDF on line.

Look up how they drilled to the deepest part of the Earth, before or after..... and they either lied, or they drilled to hell. Can someone explain those youtube videos to me? Like, where can we get, "They didn't drill to hell."??? lmao. I'm too clouded for this. So, they drilled to hell and nobody talks about it. Nice.

god is a poo poo face

I would say that there is also no denying the subjectivity that underlies, rather that IS, the nature of existence. To the extent that science disregards or poo poo's this fact -- the fact that the only thing we know for sure is that we are a subject -- it is a caricature of a rational scientific method. Yes science tests for repeatability and verifiability toward an understanding of the natural world. It is not the essence of life. And when it disregards and discounts this essence, this fact under all the other facts, it loses its bearings as to what is what.

And so when you experience something and science says in effect, "Repeat it or it didn't happen, repeat it or it means nothing" ... it has lost its place, lost its rational intent. Underneath all the objects is the subject, even the subjective experience of those objects. This is more important than, say, the atomic mass of helium (or any other testable fact).

There is much discussion that Popper's falsifiability standard is oversimplified and often mis-applied. Sean Carroll has discussed this. Science is a method and a tool: not an ultimate arbiter of what reality is. So, to the extent that the scientific method struggles with matters of subjectivity, that doesn't counterfeit the experiences of subjectivity/subject but rather is a limitation of the scientific method.

Well I see god has showed up in the All-Star Game slam dunk contest. While millions starve, are slaughtered, are tortured. That's the brain on spoon fed religion. The kid is very young and its understandable, easily forgivable ... but it just points up once again what canned religion is.

Slam-Dunk contests are full of False Gods...

I might have posted in this thread before, but I believe in God, JEHOVAH of the Old and New Testament.

As soon as someone presents evidence that gods exist the conversation can start. The Universe existing and behaving in a relatively orderly manner is no evidence that gods are behind it.

God doesn't exist but the Flying Spaghetti Monster definitely does

In my estimation, most self described religious people worship false gods. They don't consciously realize this, but under surface, they know they don't know. That isn't to say they aren't seeking something they genuinely believe (that is, know) exists. They just don't know what that is yet. And maybe they never will. But don't count out all the dunkers.

Is that because most players lose or because you don't think God cares about dunk contests?

Which ones are the true ones and how do you know?

[Asked to Grok 3]
Which movies have the following idea:
The protagonist forgets who he really is, but later in the story, he remembers and takes his rightful place.

Grok:

It’s probably just a coincidence that we keep telling this story over and over..

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” André Gide.

aye nothing new under the sun.

If you hadn't been exposed to it -- as an adult, a child, whenever -- do you think you would look at the world and think: "You know, there was probably a man born of a virgin 2000 years ago, surely he was the savior, he probably created the cosmos and human life, he probably murdered nearly the entire human race including infants and fetuses in a Great Flood" ... etc. etc.

No. Look at the story for what it is, look at it for the way it tests against what you know about reality. "Well, a lot of superstitious people believed the magic story then and kept telling it" is hardly a defense. It is what it is -- a religious story. A magic story from ignorant, superstitious, savior rabid times. Where savior stories were a dime a dozen, where savior stories were the novels and movies of the era, where savior stories were profitable and profligate.

Is life likely? How many sperm are successful to create life and how many are destroyed? How many dead bodies are there in humanity’s history?

In the battle of life vs death, ‘what is likely’ is not on life’s side. What is practical and rational, the wide path, is in service to death.

The story of the soul isn’t practical and it isn’t rational. That’s because it serves life.

So when you appeal to practical reality, when you appeal to what seems more likely, are you sure you’re the good guy?

I failed to find anyone engaging this post from well over two years ago.

The skeptics here (at the time) one would presume had the means, motive and opportunity to refute the argument and failed to even ATTEMPT to do so.

Maybe someone would like to engage the argument?

Easy enough. Perhaps the world is not meaningful and any meaning we do perceive is the result of our flawed perception and not actual evidence for any meaning in the world. If that is the case, the whole argument is moot. It would not be the first time our naive perception of the world was inaccurate. In fact, most of the developments of science essentially are showing that the reality of the world is quite different from our perception of it.

Thank you for engaging the argument

Most certainly a possibility. However, if the world is not meaningful then neither our perceptions of the world nor our musings about its nature are meaningful either. If the world is not meaningful, then this very discussion itself has no meaning.

Certainly a possibility. Which means science itself and its conclusions would be meaningless. Of course, we can only know that a perception is "flawed" if we can know the actual state-of-affairs of the world. If the world is meaningless then there is no "evidence" for anything. It would seem to be a category fallacy to assert there can be "evidence" for something that is meaningless. Science itself is only a meaningful activity if the subject being investigated is itself meaningful.

As I suggested earlier, one can never even in principle know if our perceptions are valid or not unless the world itself is meaningful. Only if the world itself is meaningful can be make meaningful claims about the world.

Once again, if the world itself isn't meaningful, then a "meaningful" activity like science would be impossible.

In short, this very conversation itself is only meaningful if the cosmos itself is meaningful (i.e. intentional, not accidental.)

Right from the start, question #1, we see an intensely stubborn dogmatic orientation that "only god can make the world meaningful." This is a bit of a trick as well, because it isn't really the world we seek meaning for, but our life. What is the meaning of the Andromeda Galaxy and some quasar millions of light years away is not a pressing question to the vast majority of human beings.

Looking at it more realistically and locally, anything that we care about has meaning for us. If you care about what happens to your children, that's because it is meaningful to you. Is it meaningful to some quasar in a bumfuk galaxy? That's a ridiculous, loaded question. MEANING IS FOUND IN AND IS COMMENSURATE WITH EXPERIENCE. Meaning is in experience for human beings, regardless of whether life and the cosmos are "accidental." The purpose of life is to experience life, because experience is the great teacher. To look to supernatural gods to spoon feed us meaning is primitive and superstitious. No one has produced any evidence for any of the untold gods proposed by mankind.

The treatise offered is so spectacularly mired in religiosity that it cannot fathom things that are not religious proclamations. How did he get from "the world" is either theistic or accidental? As if there is no possible non-accidental source except his god claim. That's just pure indoctrination and made up religious dogma. Nothing more.

When you put your hand on a hot stove and jerk it away, it's because it is meaningful to you. To overlook this basic kind of meaningfulness and insist on a supernatural meaning for everything, is just poppycock, pie in the sky, magical thinking. If the theist can get outside of this magical thinking even for a minute, hard for them to do admittedly as they compulsively spew dogma, they might see that blind religious assertions are completely unwarranted as a reasonable or evidence based explanation for the cosmos.

If we are trapped within the limits of our perception, and we are, this is true also for theists. They don't get to get around that fact by magic claims. Any revelation they claim to get directly from god is also a perception, and so cannot be trusted as reporting on anything about actual reality.

"Demonstrate that their is no evidence for the death and resurrection of Jesus" is a comical flipping of the burden of proof.

The whole thing just smacks of, "I wanna believe, I wanna believe, I wanna believe ... I refuse to be reasonable on the subject of religion. Now watch me deviously construct arguments that support my wish."

I think we might mean different things by “meaningful”. I am taking that to mean that there is an underlying purpose to the universe. If there is no such purpose, then that does not imply that musings about reality are ultimately futile. The universe is, to our perceptions, far from random. We can certainly talk about objective observations that we all agree upon. We can use those observations to derive a model of reality about the universe. If you want to call this meaning, then fine. But meaning in this sense certainly does not require a deity. We already do this via the scientific process without the necessity of invoking a deity. The regularities of the universe are sufficient to allow this.

Anticipating your next argument: “why does the universe have such regularities” (with the implication that these make a deity necessary). Well, quite honestly, from a scientific standpoint we don’t fully know. But that’s ok; the work of science is always incomplete. Studying what we can about the universe reveals certain symmetries in the universe. These give rise to the various particles and forces of the standard model of physics, which can be used to explain why the universe is what it is and how it has evolved from its past state. What is the ultimate source of these symmetries - that is uncertain. Perhaps they are manifestations of a larger symmetry. Perhaps when inflation occurs only those inflationary bubbles, like ours, possessing certain initial conditions that lead to symmetries are stable enough to evolve into a condition where intelligent life becomes possible. Truthfully, since as far as observable universes go we are limited to a sample size of one, it may be difficult to get a satisfactory scientific explanation for this. Even so, a deity is still not necessarily implied. One (or more) might exist, but the regularity of the universe does not make it necessarily true.