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Originally posted by madnessinmysoul
reply to post by Jinglelord
You don't believe in god. You are an atheist.
Your own words were that you didn't believe in god, that makes you an atheist.
Originally posted by Jinglelord
reply to post by madnessinmysoul
I think even if you did pray and got a deep spiritual answer how could you say definitively that it is anything more than a very active imagination giving you the answer you wanted?
No matter what anyone says it boils down to belief and that is why after consideration God and Tinkerbell are one in the same it is only the blind trusting belief that will define your certainty as to the existence of either.
I have never once in my life heard of a proof of God that an open mind couldn't interpret to be an indication of any number of realities. A "Miracle" isn't proof of God, it is proof we don't understand how everything works and some things that happen are not explainable...
Originally posted by sinohptik
Are you trying to convert someone?
I have seen this several times recently. It is reminiscent of something else, very eerily similar, that i cant quite put my finger on... Perhaps others have noticed the same similarity.
Either way, "proof" of god depends on its definition. If one were to define god in a certain way, they could prove he exists. i could say "god is every single thing that we see, including us. science is merely attempting to understand and explain god."
The only way to argue such a thing would be in the application of the word, or semantics.
Originally posted by madnessinmysoul
Then you're not arguing for the existence of 'god', you're arguing for the existence of the universe. You're merely shifting the goal posts in a manner to make the statement a tautology.
Originally posted by Sherlock Holmes
Originally posted by madnessinmysoul
Then you're not arguing for the existence of 'god', you're arguing for the existence of the universe. You're merely shifting the goal posts in a manner to make the statement a tautology.
That's not shifting the goalposts. It's called pantheism. This was the version of God that Einstein believed in.
You are merely proving sinohptik's point by disagreeing on what constitutes ''God''.
You apparently do not think that pantheism constitutes anything other than a belief in the objective reality of the universe, whereas others, myself included, think that pantheism is a valid form of God that should be considered in anyone's declaration of beliefs or disbeliefs.
A big flaw with defining one's self as an atheist, is that it doesn't tell people whether the person doesn't believe in God or whether they believe that God doesn't exist.
The even bigger flaw in the term, is that the definition of ''God'' depends on the individual who declares themselves to be an ''atheist''.
This bigger flaw is what I believe the poster was alluding to.
Originally posted by bogomil
reply to post by sinohptik
In the territory of concepts/abstracts where deductive logic ends (causality breaks down) language becomes so imprecise, that semantic confusion usually ensues.
I can follow your thoughts about looking at the same universe and the same planet (momentarily disregarding hypotheses of observer-created existence, which I don't carry too far anyway) via individual (possibly acquired) perspectives.
According to the above I can also agree on the communication problems arising when concepts are imprecisely represented semantically from different perspectives.
If distinctly different from your two first (hypothetically) perspectives and (hypothetically) semantic representations of your perspective, you here give the option of other perspectives and other semantic representations. Fine.
(I'll skip the 'hypothetically' now, only implying it).
If the three quotes are a connected chain of reasoning, not good. Then you have framed the situation into your parameters, which relates to ultimate absolutes of your choice, leading back to your perspective and your semantics.
I suggest an alternative approach on this. Disregard 'absolutes' and center on optional perspectives. In each perspective language has a somewhat specific meaning, relating to the perspective.
Take alpha and omega. In the perspective context of the 'nameless' ultimate (which isn't all that nameless after all, but goes under the names of Ain Soph, Tao, Satori, Nirvana, BrahmaN, the alien god), alpha and omega has one meaning.
From a 'Jahveh'/universe-totality perspective alpha and omega means something semantically different.
From a perspective of indifference alpha and omega means nothing.
This sounds stilted and oversophisticated, but we use this perspective-based distinctions all the time. Take the word 'spring' and consider the necessity of stating a perspective, before it gives meaning.
My personal position as a metaphysicist starts FROM a mundane perspective and goes TOWARDS an open-end trans-mundane situation, of which I know very little (though I can speculate).
A religionist absolute perspective and its corresponding semantic representation 'threatens' my process through the inclusion of any perspective with 'absolutes'.
As I see it, our resident agnostic-atheists have been exposed to a massive campaign the last 2 or 3 months from religionists, with the aim of semantically twisting the agnostic-atheist perspective into an 'absolute' perspective (and consequently enforcement to use corresponding absolute semantics).
There has been a constant pressure of baiting the agnostic-atheists into 'absolute' grounds, and I strongly suspect you of doing the same, albeit at a very sophisticated level, where your 'absolutes' at the surface are toned down, but nonetheless still are present somewhere down the line.
I think Madness is doing OK, considering the semantic traps he's exposed to constantly. He doesn't impose anything on me.
It's ofcourse possible, that I have misinterpretated your position completely. I'm open for that.
Originally posted by bogomil
I agree, though I'm uncertain as how to interpretate "experientally based concepts" precisely. As I understand 'concept', it's either something which is formed in your mind as a result of a chain of speculations or it's a semantic construct (E.g. when vehicles operating with engines were constructed, they were called 'auto-mobiles'. A rather reasonable choice). I make the guess, that you mean the first version: Something being a result of speculations. A long life including much contact with teachers, psychologists, new-agers, fringe- or exotic religionists and assorted idealists have taught me the dangers of speculation, if it's not done with rigorous care. Many of said types have the attitude, that "If it pops up in my mind, it MUST exist somehow, somewhere", and this is possibly a reason for the popularity of 'observer-created existence' and 'parallel dimensions/universes' in such circles. An endless relativism, with 'somewhere' where all and everything REALLY does happens, so "I'm right and you can put your norms and structures, where the sun doesn't shine...ha, ha, gotcha". Or they just fill out the gaps with semantics. Concepts are wonderful; it would have a once-in-a-lifetime experience to listen to the Copenhagen group drinking beer and speculating wildly. (Sigh, they don't make them like that anymore.) But when concepts start to have their own life and act as reference points, we get nukes and 'better dead than red'.
That is a truly wonderful post you linked to, and I'll presume on some of your time commenting.
My own position on ATS is often that of a third option in the black/white polarizations between atheists and theists (of all kinds). As third options usually are outside the scope of black or white, I appear to be standing vaguely in the middle, at best seeming to present platitudes just to make people notice that I exist. And on the ground of "if you're not with me, you're against me" I can even be an 'enemy'. Being both old, and by general character grumpy, I'm soon involved in meaningless extremist positions, where I'm alternatively seen as 'white' or 'black', and to my shame, act as if I am.
I last week finished a pie-throwing contest on ATS with a new-age-christian-pseudo-scientist, who skipped 50 years of science/philosophy-of-science/epistemology/theology debate, and via his own (but never defined or demonstrated) 'grand unifying theory' went directly from 'quantum entanglement' (whatever that is) to the old man in the sky and the old man's specified personal quirks.
At informal ground ("My kind of science is as good as yours") and at formal ground ("you didn't understand your 'official' scientific education") my opponent in this pie-throwing contest seems to live in an unbreakable loop. Such situations regularly and eventually resulting in: "I don't believe, you actually HAVE a scientific education; you're just lying".
First: The word 'God', the nightmare of 'general semantics'.
Observation from practical examples of the more primitive kind of christian evangelism: "We (my comment: 'we' ??????) all look for the same G-d (or whatever). Christians, muslims, hindus, buddhists, cosmic deists" etc.
Disregarding that buddhists don't have the monotheistic creator-god concept, that 'informed' hindus include 'BrahmaN' together with Brahma (where christians exclude Ain Soph from their somewhat similar Jahveh to Brahma (=the creating 'god') and that cosmic deists are undecided on where 'dualism' takes place.
Amongst the more 'informed' debaters on ATS this is sometimes understood, albeit with other labels (and at the 'label' level then creating its own confusion), but when the various positions get to the point of semantics on semantics, I think something has been missed on the way there. You can TALK about ditch-digging (like the japanese professor on buddhism, who wrote an endless series of books on 'The simplicity of zen'), but you don't have much of an understanding until you actually have dug some ditches.
Existence can allegorically be compared to a puzzle. The bits have to be put together to give meaning, but you can't FORCE them to fit together. And ofcourse you can't invent bits, even if this is possible conceptually. Even IF existence is observer-created, there's still an observer (who is this guy????) and still a creation to consider as 'fixed' points. (If interested, I can do 'transcendent' also as an extension of this).
So from as many 'perspectives' I can master, I can personally not see the difference between the christian 'god', the spaghetti monster or Tinkerbell. They are all the result of individual or collective processes of laying the puzzle from a very limited 'methodology'. As soon as christians acknowledge, that this is a 'faith' I'm satisfied. It places it on the level of 'faiths' in general, where self-preservation should be enough to respect different layings of the puzzle.
Darn, I've started preaching now myself. It's my recent consumption of coffee being responsible. Coffee is a strong mind-altering substance, which only ought to be sold on prescription to the terminally apathetic.