The experience excuse

Christians & Muslims, instead of providing objective evidence, use the excuse that their god is something to be experienced rather than to be proven.

I don’t work that way. I became an Atheist from an experience of bullshit church masses l, reading bs fantasy stories from the bible, listening to a pastor bullshit on stage for a few hours, & not seeing evidence for a deity. Holy books & evidence of a religious movement were not good enough of a sale to make me ever become a Theist.

How come Theists need evidence for a car sale, insurance that sometimes fucks everyone over, but when it comes to their religion and their invisible imaginary friend then they’re just fine & dandy?

They complain about having to pay for financial crap or something that they can’t see or understand, but when it comes to their religion there are no complaints. You can’t see religion but you see enough to know that’s it’s horse shit.

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“God works in mysterious ways” :pray: :innocent:

/sarcasm, if anyone wondered

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Do you know that “experience” has no scientific explanation?

Look at the concept of qualia and the hard problem of consciousness, and you will understand what I mean.

@JESUS_IS_WITH_YOU,

STOP inserting your qualia discussion into other debate strings!

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You get that there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of reputable journals on mind, brain function, thought and so on, right? Just because YOU can’t define whatever BS you’re claiming can’t be defined, doesn’t mean there aren’t scientists out there who actually do understand them.

UK Atheist

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Evidence is still very important and should hold religion accountable. Sorry you disagree. But obviously you do it because scientific evidence doesn’t benefit your superstitions.

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I don’t have an answer . . . but religion can be very compelling.

I had a lot of religious tendencies when I was much younger, which is odd because neither of my parents were religious.

Religion provided a comfort that can be compared with a drug, and–like beating an addiction–requires insight, hard work, and withdrawal in order to move forward.

Maybe this helps?

I will not enter into a discussion on this topic because it has already been debated. If you disagree with anything I say, just provide your evidence.

I’m sorry to inform you that this is not the only piece of evidence proving materialism wrong—there are even stronger pieces of evidence that matter is not what you claim it to be.

Anyway, there is something I don’t understand. You don’t have to change your mind or believe anything, but why do atheists, who supposedly rely only on reason and logic, feel attacked when confronted with arguments that clearly show the possibility of God is reasonable?

I mean, have you seen me telling you what to believe? I haven’t. I simply present evidence that could open the possibility of considering the idea of God seriously. That’s all I do. So where is the problem?

And where is the problem if the conclusion is that the possibility of God exists? Is this offensive to you? Is this an attack on you?

Well, you are assuming that being an atheist is not a drug too. Anyway, the problem is not exactly what you believe but how you believe it.

Is religion comfortable? That depends on what you want to achieve. Religion imposes many norms and rules that are not necessarily comfortable, but in the long run, they can make your life better.

For example, when you learn to love your enemies—to understand their humanity, to see that they are not so different from you—or when you think, “What if this person I hate were my son?” and similar reflections, it broadens your mind and gives you a deeper understanding of different situations in life.
But to do that, you have to let go of your own hatred.

And look, you don’t need to believe in God or any religion to act lovingly toward others. But if you start doing these things, you might have experiences that change your mind. And even if you don’t experience anything, at the very least, you will have become a better person.

So, is religion a drug? Well, that depends on how you take it.

Why, you never address it honestly anyway, handwaving and sophistry is all you offer in response. go to any of the threads where you’ve peddled this nonsense, and anyone can see your irrational unevidenced and unfalsifiable claims have been torn apart.

The material universe exists as an objective fact, you have offered not one shred of objective evidence that anything exists beyond it. which is no doubt why you keep dishonestly trying to reverse your burden of proof, with argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacies like this one.

They don’t obviously, as you are lying I suspect, since you have present no rational arguments for any deity here, so no one is going to be duped by your lie here to believe you have achieved this anywhere else.

No you haven’t, that’s another lie, I encourage anyone to use your profile and read every post you’ve offered in order to confirm this for themselves.

You’re projecting, you have not provided any objective evidence that a deity exists or is even possible, and your arguments are relentlessly irrational, and your injection of panpsychism everywhere is tedious, when it a) does not represent objective evidence for any deity, and b) is, as you know, untestable, unevidenced, unfalsifiable, and unscientific. Again I encourage anyone to fact check this for themselves, and they can see you are a relentless liar on here.

The assumption that the atheists here, and elsewhere, don’t already do this, and have always done this, typifies the arrogance of religious apologists that rack up here to preach at us.

Again the sheer arrogance of that claim speaks for itself. You’re the one peddling an archaic superstition that endorses homophobia, misogyny slavery, indiscriminate mass murder, including wars of ethnic cleansing, sex trafficking prisoners, even children, infanticide and torturing babies to death, and genocide, so do fuck off with this arrogant lie about atheists.

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So you’re rejecting my assertion that there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of reputable journals on mind, brain function, thought and that there are scientists out there who understand what you apparently dont?

Is it? Given that everything so far demonstrated by science is natural (materialistic) and you’re claiming that there is more with absolutely no (ZERO, NADA, ZIP) evidence, it is clearly YOU rather than us that needs to provide evidence. In the meantime I and others get to sit back and laugh at the deluded nutball with invisible friends and an inability to provide a shred of supporting evidence.

There are no “reasonable” arguments that demonstrate the existence of your god any more than any other gods. Do you believe in Thor and Odin? If not, why not? What about Zeus or Apollo? Ra? Quetzalcoatl? The human race is great and making up stuff like gods and goddesses, noy so good at supporting it.

And I refer you to my comment above.

I don’t believe in gods or goddesses but equally I don’t deny the possibility … I don’t accept that you’ve proven that they exist or even that they might exist beyond a wizard wheeze!

UK Atheist

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He has zero interest in facts that undermine the snake oil of panpsychism. Like the fact that it is unevidenced, untestable, unfalsifiable, unscientific, and of course has no explanatory powers for human consciousness whatsoever.

Well I do, possibility must be demonstrated, he has failed to do so.

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Hmm… no, I just said that this problem is not solved and clearly shows that reality has a subjective dimension that we are unable to explain.
But this is my last comment on the topic; it has already been discussed, and everything has been properly debated. I only mention it to make it clear that this topic, among other things, is indicative of an elephant in the materialist room.

The most obvious interpretation of quantum mechanics is that obtaining information alters matter. And the effects of this information on matter are instantaneous—faster than light. We can’t send information this way, but we know that knowledge of a quantum system alters it instantaneously. There are papers on the issue that you can research yourself. Therefore, no, materialism in its classical form has been debunked by science unless you intend to redefine what matter is. Moreover, there are other things, apart from matter, like information, that we don’t fully understand but that have a measurable, objective effect on matter.

No. I don’t. To use a schoolyard phrase, maybe you do.

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Oh, I agree he’s failed to do so but, the nature of science being that nothing is proven beyond doubt, I can’t take any other position. Some would call that agnosticism but I think atheism covers it fine :slight_smile:

UK Atheist

But religion can sure come in handy to use in order to act particularly shitty.

Of course it would. But what sort of changes with what sort of side effects?

Really? Why would that make one a better person?

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Or worse…

(20 characters)

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Think of it as a good thing that they’re arguing with you. They’re trying to set you free from these cancerous beliefs that stress you out & keep you up some nights under threats of hell that someone in your life told you about. Life’s too short to sit around & stressing about after life insurance fraud sold to you from the village idiot :relieved:

Honestly, I have not found a less sectarian behavior in this place.

There are some studies showing better mental health in people with strong religious beliefs. But this is the kind of science you don’t like.

You don’t understand why hatred is bad?

I think hatred can be warranted, useful, understandable, even beneficial. It all depends upon what one does/n’t do with it.