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Goodbye Jesus

From an ex-fundy, why give up on "God" altogether?


faithevoloved

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5 hours ago, LogicalFallacy said:

 

I always wonder when people say "oh its all so fine tuned" why they find it so much wonder that they can live in a world they can live in. I mean if they couldn't live in it they wouldn't be marvelling about it would they? I don't find it particularly amazing that life arose in a situation that's suited for life.

 

In any case, I think I ought to leave a link to the Leaky argument for fine tuning claims: 

 

 

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Sorry to hear your bad news, Margee. Hugs to you.

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You guys/gals are making my old brain work hard tonight.    I'm not that intellectual when it comes to physics, but to me the "fine tuned" idea (which I am only vaguely familiar with) doesn't take a whole lot of intellect.  By fine tuned I assume they mean it is tuned to support life as we know it??  And it is pretty marvelous.  But if you look at the enormous (infinite)? picture of time, the earth has only supported life as we know it for a VERY BRIEF period of time.  And with a very large asteroid it might start all over again. Would it still be considered fine tuned??

 

 LOL, and how long would it take for concepts of Gods to appear again?  When you think of all this, "hugeness", we seem pretty insignificant, which some have a hard time accepting.  And contributes to visions of infinite heavens with a loving father???  And would help to believe everything was made in 6 days!  And might end at any time!

 

Am I out in left field on this?? 

 

Dang! Now you got me depressed!  I may run out and find a fundy church where I can go through the proper rituals, contribute money weekly, and spend eternity with a guy wearing a robe and sandals, with streets paved of gold!  Just what I always wanted!!  (If they let me take my motorcycle with me)

 

HA. This started out serious, but I got on a roll!

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Early religious leaders certainty understood human egos, and how to manipulate people.

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1 hour ago, Weezer said:

I'm not that intellectual when it comes to physics, but to me the "fine tuned" idea (which I am only vaguely familiar with) doesn't take a whole lot of intellect.  By fine tuned I assume they mean it is tuned to support life as we know it??  And it is pretty marvelous.  But if you look at the enormous (infinite)? picture of time, the earth has only supported life as we know it for a VERY BRIEF period of time.  And with a very large asteroid it might start all over again. Would it still be considered fine tuned??

 

Yes, basically. The technicality is that the observable universe is not the entire universe. So a major handicap for the fine tuned arguments is found there. And just based on what you're saying above, even within the observable universe life represents a fraction of time, in only one particular place that we have confirmed. That hardly constitutes a universe, designed intentionally by a literal transcendent being of some type, specifically for the purpose of producing life. It's just a way of apologist's grasping at straws and special pleading for their pet beliefs. 

 

I really wish people would start looking at the big picture, as theists, and understand the pointlessness of making untenable claims. They are completely unnecessary. People really ought to consider keeping their pet beliefs to themselves and not embarrassing themselves by trying to argue for and / or prove things which are not provable. You wanna believe in ghosts, great! Why is it so important (to the point of destroying credibility or making a fool of oneself) to try and make everyone else believe it as well? There's really no where to go with it. It's the same with gods. There's no where to go with it. 

 

Maybe new generations will start growing up aware of the futility involved and it can fade away more and more into a non-issue. 

 

 

 

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6 hours ago, LogicalFallacy said:

 

You could be an apatheist agnostic atheist?

 

You don't know if a god exists and you don't care, and you don't believe one exists? :D 

 

That has a catchy ring to it: 

 

"Don't know, don't believe and don't care!" 

 

That would make a good shirt!  

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12 hours ago, Joshpantera said:

 

That has a catchy ring to it: 

 

"Don't know, don't believe and don't care!" 

 

That would make a good shirt!  

Shall we trademark it? 😀

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 11/12/2019 at 3:36 PM, faithevoloved said:

Sure, I get wanting to throw your hands up and give up religion. I'm one of those guys who begged for years to be healed of my mental health issues and speak in tongues, or otherwise have a major conversion experience, but that never happened. However, I just don't understand why people completely give up on God because they've had bad experiences in the church. Why is the only option atheism when you don't get what you want from God? Why can't the options be:

 

1) Atheism

2) Maybe Christians are wrong/have only part of the truth...so I'll make it my life mission to figure this out for myself.

 

Sure, I gave up on going to fundamental Christian churches myself. However, I still believe in a higher power/source/God. Why can't your disillusionment with God/church lead you into a least exploring other options e.g. new age or something?

 

 

 

I'm late to the party, but I'll reply to the original post. When I realized that fundamentalist beliefs were absolutely wrong, I thought that maybe there was something to liberal Christianity, so I investigated. What I realized was the liberal theology is less honest than fundamentalist theology. Fundamentalists say that the Bible is 100% true and 100% consistent from beginning to end, and that's due to inspiration. They say (I don't know about all of them, but I always heard) that if you find one error or inconsistency, you might as well throw the whole thing out.

 

Liberal theologians admit all of the errors and inconsistencies. They teach that revelation is continuous, and that the bad stuff in the Old Testament is the result of the authors' not understanding what the god really was trying to tell them. If you want to believe, there's a great appeal to that. "God never wanted slavery, it just took him until the 19th century to get that across to people!" Well what kind of a god is that?

 

What I ultimately realized was that the god Christians believe in, the gods the ancient Jews believed in ("gods" plural, if you carefully read your Old Testament), and all of the other gods people believe in today or have ever believed in, are the result of speculation about what a god would be like if there were such things as gods. But there's absolutely zero evidence that such things exist!

 

So why would I go for something like New Age religion, that's even more speculative. It's all just people thinking stuff up and following through on their imaginations for way, way too long, so that they convince themselves and others that what they've thought up could be and probably is real.

 

But developing hypotheses that you never bother to test is not the way to know anything. I don't believe in anything beyond the physical because nobody has come up with a compelling argument for the existence of such, much less any evidence to back up their hypotheses.

 

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