Crowstep
10hr ago
Literally nothing. I don't even have any notes in my wallet.
What are you keeping it for? In a situation where the electronic banking system goes down for a meaningful amount of time, I'd rather have food stockpiled than cash (although you can of course have both).
Crowstep
12hr ago
I personally pray for God to end wars at least once a week.
And God ignores your prayers, and the prayers of the billions of other Christians who have also prayed for this obviously good thing for centuries. Can you see how, to an outside observer, this might make it seem like you're not actually asking as if someone is listening? God looks down on, say, the mass murder of Christians by ISIS as part of his benevolent plan and doesn't intervene. But apparently he does intervene to help you meet your wife?
I believe that the existence of a supernatural universe (not a specific deity) is pretty obvious based on simple logic.
I also believe in the existence of the Christian God not through logic, but through the personal experiences of a person whom I know very well.
Would I be right to think that the latter came before the former? Because from my experience and reading, people turn to religion for emotional reasons, and then the apologetics come after to see off the logical doubts.
intelligent people who are religious do in fact believe that God exists, that he answers prayers, and that he intervenes in the world. It isn't just compartmentalization and going along with the culture in which one grew up.
My model of it leans less on people going along with what they were raised in (although the statistics show that conversions are basically a rounding error, religions grow through the cradle), and more through motivated reasoning. That's what I mean by compartmentalisation. Applying wildly different standards to God that to the ones you apply to everyday life. I don't think any religious person believes in God in the same way that they believe that things fall down when you drop them or that the sun rises in the morning. But motivated reasoning, applying different standards to religious beliefs than normal beliefs, and positive mood affiliation leads to 'belief in belief'.
Don't you find it a little odd that an organisation that is extremely sure about the existence of God, creation, the resurrection and about how the church is the only source for salvation suddenly starts admitting its own fallability on a topic that might offend modern audiences? I doubt the medieval church was so unsure about something so profoundly fundamental. It smells an awful lot like Mormons getting sudden revalations that e.g. polygamy is no longer okay or that African Americans are now allowed in the priesthood.
I'd also add a thought that comes to me when I read theological discussions, it's all just words, words, words. If hell was real in the same way that the earth's molten core is real, people would look for evidence, run tests and experiments, apply lessons learned from similar fields. There would be a real answer. Instead we get an understanding of existence that is based purely on written and spoken words, and people can come to basically any conclusion they want.
Crowstep
1d ago
Force them to turn back or have their boats tipped over
Turn backs worked extremely well for Australia. And I really doubt that the public would erupt into anger that these poor defenceless 25 year old men were getting sent back to the hellscape that is...France.
Also, the government did literally import Afghans in secret, in addition to letting them come across in small boats.
Crowstep
1d ago
It's not like new atheism won in the end
I would say it did. Sure, people don't spend much time arguing on the internet about the existence of God any more, but that's because atheism won so decisively there wasn't much left to argue against. Only about 5% of Americans attend church every week. In the UK, only about 1% of the population attends Church of England services weekly.
Crowstep
1d ago
There is a creator, and there is creation
And why did he change his mind?
By that I mean, for infinite (?) time God was there and there was no universe. Then he created the universe. But if God is perfect and there was no outside force acting on him (how could there be?) then what caused him to move from being content that there was no universe to desiring that there be a universe?
That intersection of a finite (maybe) universe and an infinite God always bothered me.
Crowstep
1d ago
Mitt Romney seems very American to my eyes, although that might just be the whole manicured politician get-up.
Crowstep
1d ago
Are you religious? If so, could you give any examples of why you think these things are true?
Because the median religious person certainly doesn't act as if their faith is true. People still get sad when their relatives die and are still scared of death themselves, even though they (supposedly) believe in heaven. They claim that God answers prayers but then don't ask for anything that couldn't happen in a Godless world (e.g. God ends all war and cures all disease tomorrow) because it might ruin the spell when it doesn't happen. Even the Pope himself suddenly turns into an agnostic on the topic of hell in spite of Catholic doctrine.
The model of religion as 'belief in belief' is much more consistent with what we see.
Crowstep
2d ago
The ubiquity of religion suggests that the instinct to religion is strongly embedded within the human psyche
Isn't that evidence against any particular religion's factual truth? If every human culture creates its own myths, it takes a tremendous amount of parochialism to say 'the thousands of other religions that human societies have created are all superstitions, but the particular religion that I was born into is in fact objectively true'.
I'm an atheist, albeit a protheistic (or really pro-Christian) atheist. Clearly, secular modernity isn't working, given how miserable and childless we all are. I'd love to believe in God.
At the same time, I genuinely struggle to understand intelligent people who do believe in God. I know intellectually it's compartmentalisation, but I can't put myself in that position. The world is so obviously not a supernatural one, prayer does nothing, there is no evidence of God exerting his will at either the small scale or the large one. The world as we all see it is completely compatible with the non-existence of God and so clearly not compatible with anything but the weakest form of Deism. And I'm tempted to agree with Penn Jillette's 'hardcore atheism', which is I don't believe in God, and I don't really believe that believers do either. That's why nobody ever prays for falsifiable things that an omnipotent God could do (e.g. all the Russian guns in Ukraine stop working) and instead prays for psychological stuff (please give me resilience to endure) or stuff that would happen in a Godless world (my chemo-treated cancer goes into remission).
The closest I ever come to religious feeling is either when I'm feeling especially grateful for my life, or when I consider the question 'why is there something instead of nothing?' which genuinely does boggle the mind. But neither leads me to conclude that a jingoistic, jealous Caananite war god manifested as a pacifist peasant and then killed himself in order to forgive humanity for committing the sins he designed us to commit and knew we were going to commit when he created us.
Crowstep
3d ago
can not own guns
Banning ownership of something for a certain group is very hard to do if that thing is abundant in society. Your suggestions seem to imply that 'not allowed a gun' = 'cannot get hold of a gun'.
Case in point, teenagers are not allowed to own or carry knives in the UK. This law is completely useless at stopping teenage stabbings, because literally every teenager can grab a paring knife from his parents' kitchen before he goes out (plus laws against possession aren't actually enforced).
By contrast, even hardened adult criminals in the UK rarely use handguns, because they are genuinely hard to get hold of. Because there are no legal reasons to anyone to own a handgun (even most police don't have them) there simply aren't many guns for criminals to use.
Crowstep
5d ago
I don’t understand how the idea that God is benevolent and all powerful became more popular than there being a malevolent or indifferent God out there.
Because nobody is going to turn up every Sunday to worship a God who hates them, or at best, doesn't care about them.
And the simplest solution to the problem of evil is that God doesn't exist. Suffering exists because the material universe is indifferent to it.
I read somewhere that Stranger Things could only have been set in the 1980s, because the 'kids on bikes having an adventure' only works if the kids are allowed outside. The decline does seem to have happened a bit later than that, but the principle is correct.
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