Oof... Salty loser... Spamming is not cool, mkay
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Yeah.... See, that's what I was getting at... You believe in a personalized version of god, which is going to have different requirements for his followers depending on who you ask.
In which case, either the rules for getting into heaven are pretty loose, or a hell of a lot of Christians are going to hell for believing the wrong things.
There are over 50,000 denominations of Christianity based on differing interpretations of the 900+ English versions of the bible.
It seems to me like you never resolve the disagreements, and instead just fracture into a separate branch and then claim the other side aren't real Christians.
Since all of you are asserting knowledge of the truth, and none of you are demonstrating a way to verify that knowledge, I think none of you are actually pursuing truth.
I mean you claim to believe a story chock-full of supernatural elements.... and yet you can't demonstrate the existence of anything supernatural in the slightest. That makes it a fairy tale as far as I'm concerned.
The difference is I don't go around professing faith and absolute belief in scientific theories, nor do I waste my time pouring over them thinking absolute truth is buried in there somewhere as long as I magically come to the correct interpretation of what it says.
Most all the 50,000 denominations agree on the essentials of following Jesus, and admit each other to be true followers. Most all the disagreements are about nonessentials (and politics), not about truth. The occasional exceptions are usually easily distinguished because of several marks of disunity with the core at the same time: that is, a so-called "denomination", that really does reject all others, that refuses other truth teachers than its selected leader, and that usually doesn't go Bible only, is easily recognized as a cult instead of as a denomination.
I just linked you demonstrated ways to verify knowledge of truth about these things. Most all denominations agree broadly with such elements in verifying such knowledge. Nobody professes absolute belief as if we are capable of doing anything absolutely; people profess that absolute truth exists and we can approximate it and apprehend it better over time. Logically, if you believe there is no absolute truth, there's no absolute standard by which your relative belief can be tested or held right or wrong; no belief would be better than any other. Rather, most atheists are just practical agnostics, they do have some things they believe to be more in harmony with some external standard than other things.
You did fall into a trap by changing my definition from "unexplained" to "supernatural". When you investigate what people mean by "supernatural" they always go back to "unexplained". Now let's make that a real test case. There are over a dozen scientific (usually atheistic) theories of the origin of the universe. Every one of them necessarily appeals to the unexplained somewhere or other. Further, most of them contradict each other in their technical descriptions. Should I reject all the atheistic theories as not pursuing truth because they contradict, and should I reject them as fairy tales because they don't explain everything and thus contain events that defy "natural" law ("supernatural" because unexplained by us)? No, that's no reason. Rather, the existence of competition indicates truth exists and people are seeking it. The existence of broad agreement in simpler facts of life indicates that agreement can be achieved in the harder facts too.
Do you wish to make good on your pursuit of truth by treating me as a person who can be persuaded to greater truth than I already have? If there's no god, I'd want to know that, wouldn't I? Is it possible that by finding areas we agree on there might be a basis for us to trust each other to dialogue about disagreements? There would be no point in it if we're just here to sound good to ourselves and to reassure ourselves in what we already believe; rather, exposure to alternate viewpoints is helpful in science in establishing which viewpoint is most in agreement with external reality (absolute truth). c/Atheist relies on the scientific method, but are you prepared to recognize how to use that method, and its natural limits?
Would Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, and Catholics say they are all true followers of the same Jesus?
Then how come you refused to verify anything when i asked?
Just because you WANT to know something doesn't mean you can. When someone makes an unfalsifiable claim with no way to ever verify it, I think the logical thing to do is disregard them.
The lack of evidence against their claim doesn't demonstrate anything other than that the claim is of such a baseless nature that it's impossible to gather even the slightest bit of evidence either way.
Just cause you want to know the nature of the universe doesn't mean you get to know. Just because you pretend to know doesn't mean you do.
I don't think I know the answers, But I've seen enough to disregard the one you are putting forward about a sentient magic supernatural being who created the universe for fun.
Roman Catholics admit that there are "separated brethren" among the Eastern Orthodox and Protestants, who for their part admit that there are brothers among the Roman Catholics. That's following the same Jesus.
Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons frankly admit they follow a different Jesus and regard themselves as separate from the mainstream denominations, who for their part regard them as cultists. JWs believe in a created Jesus, while Mormons believe in a deified Jesus separate from the Father. Christianity teaches instead that the man Jesus is also God and one with the Father. But to discuss these propositions is fruitless while one does not have a good working definition of god or man, or of epistemology of historic investigation.
I didn't refuse to verify anything, I began by verifying core principles of seeking truth, and, since you haven't built on those core principles by admitting that the pursuit of truth has a goal of leading somewhere, there hasn't been reason to build with you. I only answer your questions because it's a habit of mine. You may have me confused with someone who is anxious to tell you a view of truth for self-validation purposes. If you are interested in the core elements for the purpose of finding agreement rather than for the purpose of criticizing details, we could proceed; but first it's probably better to agree that we are indeed both pursuing an absolute truth outside ourselves by the process you describe of experimentation and testing.
Yes, unfalsifiable claims can be dismissed. (For instance, the many universes principle can be dismissed because it postulates that many universes exist similar to our own but that cannot be detected in any verifiable way; that's unfalsifiable because there is no measurable difference between the presence and the absence of many undetectable universes.) That fact is why I linked you to falsifiable claims, i.e. those that can be validated or invalidated by scientific or historical principles.
Yes, my desire is insufficient to prove that I do know, or get to know, even a small set of facts of the nature of the universe. That is why I pursue truth, so as to keep apprehending more of it. The scientific method assumes that the pursuit of truth does generally lead to apprehending more of it, and that's all I ask from atheists who use it.
Now, you think I'm putting forward "a sentient magic supernatural being who created the universe for fun". But I said nothing about those details here, nor do my links indicate the details you state. Analytically, (1) I explained that supernatural, same as magic, refers merely to the inexplicable. When man doesn't know how something happens scientifically, it's still supernatural; when man finds out how, it's not anymore. Man doesn't know how lightspeed variance or symmetry breaking works in the scientific origin models, so they remain in the realm of supernatural, much as science doesn't own that word (it's not me shirking the word). Science is fine with saying unexplained, though, for the aspects of the various origin theories that defy the known laws of physics. The whole quest, after all, is for new laws that transcend the current laws and explain these yet-unexplained phenomena; that was Hawking's method. (2) We can get to discussing sentience once we know what it is in ourselves and how to recognize it outside ourselves; that comes later in the logical discussion than absolute truth does. (3) "Fun" is a rather odd assumption from what I said and not in my links at all; but generically it refers to whether the universe is purposeful or not, which like sentience requires first the recognition of what purpose is and how to recognize it.
Therefore what I'm putting forward to start with is merely what all science admits: nobody knows all the laws of the universe, or the theory of everything, and every explanation and model contains portions that are unexplained. The Standard Model of physics has not resolved quantum gravity; the Big Bang theory has not resolved the first Planck instant; these admittedly unsolved, open problems defy all known laws and so it's entirely proper to call them "supernatural", meaning unexplained by known law. (Science of course presumes they can be explained by unknown law, but so do I. Definitionally, though, we speak either in the frame where some things are unexplained, or in the frame where some explanations are unknown; we don't get to waffle.) The unexplained in all these theories "supersedes" (transcends) known law, and honest atheists admit that.
If you're willing to suspend what you think I'm putting forward, and to stick to what is a reasonable inference from observation as you claim, we can investigate the starter proposition: namely, that all scientific theory and progress in history involves a recognition that certain phenomena remain unexplained, and that this recognition is likely to continue even as more is explained. Even Hawking admitted that achieving a theory of everything would still only mean that a few could describe the current unexplained phenomena sufficiently that the theory's broad outlines could be grasped by the many, and thus recognized that the achievement would only answer questions by exposing mankind to new questions, just as scientific progress has always done.
If I'm being totally honest, nothing you have said so far has been interesting enough for me to even pretended to read that giant wall of text. If you wanna take out like 80% of the fluff and repost that comment at a reasonable length I'll be happy to continue this discussion.
But you need to be respectful of my time and attention, and a comment like that is not.
You believe in a god that literally supersedes nature, the universe, space and time, and the laws of physics, because you think he created all of that.
Refusing to own the label "supernatural" is to deny the very god you claim to worship.