My laptop at the time was a 15" Dell Inspiron 8300 or something; it had a 1.5Ghz Pentium 4 (mobile version), 512 MB RAM, and a display resolution of 1400x1050. It was a four year old hand-me-down from my dad.
The desktop he had me using was an 800MHz Pentium III with (I think) 256MB RAM on a 15" CRT with a max resolution of 1280x1024. Oh, and it blue-screened at random.
I eventually did get a new desktop, but I had to do it by subterfuge. The boss was going to hire a new guy, so he bought a brand new desktop for the new guy (who would be a salaried employee, where I was hourly, though I worked full-time). The new guy ended up not getting hired, so I brought up (for the third time) that my machine was bluescreening at random (bad hard drive, I think), he sighed and said "fine, take the new machine".
The dumb thing is, the boss was averse to spending money on new desktops (not to mention the software on those desktops), but he'd readily blow $500 on $200 worth of server RAM...
No. The really dumb thing is that when I gave him one month's notice that I'd be leaving - I chose a month because a) I knew that far in advance, and b) work was somewhat hectic, and everyone was busy, so I wanted to give him plenty of time to find a replacement for me - he stopped giving me work. He literally paid me for a month to do nothing, constantly putting me off with "in a minute" and "as soon as I get off the phone".
You know the t-shirt that says "go away or I'll replace you with a very small shell script"? I spent some of that spare time replacing one of my co-workers with a series of small shell scripts (for which he was eternally grateful)...
Does the original question asked check their employee's bags every night for confidential documents? Mandate no USB drives?
I worked for a small business that started doing crap like that. The lead programmer brought in his own laptop to work on, instead of the crappy machines the boss had laying around. Then *I* brought in my own laptop to work on (which, while orders of magnitude crappier than the lead programmer's laptop, was orders of magnitude better than the crappy desktop the boss had allocated for me). My productivity immediately doubled (larger screen, faster processor, and more RAM help immensely when you spend your day mangling delimited data files).
Fast forward to several months later. Of the six employees in the company (including the boss), three of us were bringing in our own laptops. The boss, the lead programmer, and myself. Out of nowhere, we get an e-mail from the boss saying: "Due to a client's security concerns, employees are no longer allowed to bring in personal laptops. Except [the lead programmer], because he needs it." (He also banned iPods, a policy which only affected the other peon employee.) Never mind that we were still allowed to connect remotely from home with full access to the entire network.
That's fine and all, if a client really did request it... but I asked the lead programmer about it, because he was in the meeting during which this policy was supposedly decided upon. He claimed it was never discussed, and he had no idea where it had come from.
I sent an e-mail to the boss about it, telling him that because switching to my personal laptop had increased my productivity dramatically, prohibiting me from using it would result in a corresponding decrease in productivity that would be quite beyond my control. He didn't seem to care. I never did figure out why he enacted that policy.
The United States of America (commonly referred to as the United States, the U.S., the USA, or America) is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district.
So whenever someone does not prosper but did paid tithing, he probably has done something bad.
That's not quite what I was getting at. Think of it more like this - God promises prosperity on the condition of obedience to the law of tithing. However, God is judging not simply our obedience, but our intent in obeying the commandment.
If I plan to use the surplus that such obedience would give so that I can spend more time gambling, I doubt God is going to be particularly willing to give me that money.
Now, other than that, I think the promise given by the law of tithing is fairly universal, but you can't look at individual instances, you have to look at the long-term situation of a tithe-payer.
What I'm saying is, the average tithe-payer will be more prosperous on average, over his or her lifetime, than the average non-tithe-payer. No, I don't have any statistics or anything to back that up, but my own observations among friends and family certainly support that hypothesis.
I'd guess though, that a social welfare system, like we have in the Netherlands, is a better system than tithing.
Tithing, in my church at least, is not used for such things. We have an efficient welfare system that has been well-funded through other voluntary offerings. The U.S. welfare system is orders of magnitude crappier than my church's welfare system - enough so that other countries have modeled their budding welfare system on my church's. (No, I don't have a source handy for that.)
Tithing is used mostly for the maintenance and construction of meetinghouses and temples, to fund missionary work, to fund the church's education system (print manuals and study guides, fund seminaries and institutes), and so on.
Fast offerings are used to fund the welfare system - to run canneries, to pay for shipping food to various locations, to buy foodstuffs and other necessities, and so on. The LDS Church has a very successful welfare system that is used to help not only church members in need, but people of many beliefs in disaster areas and other needy situations.
I've had the "old hag" experience many times, as have many people around the world, throughout history. Does this mean that the old hag really exists? Of course not.
What it means is that you can't use your own experience as proof for other people. If you choose to believe an old hag visited you, you're free to do so, and your belief is no more factually incorrect than believing you weren't visited by an old hag, since neither belief is provable.
I also dream of flying. Often. Lots of people do. Does that mean I'm really flying?
I didn't know we were talking about dreams. When did we start talking about dreams? When I talk about answers to prayers, I'm not talking about dreams.
And I did this where?
Referring to religious beliefs as "made up" is inherently a mocking statement, since you're implying that anyone who believes in God is either stupid or gullible.
What you refer to isn't "evidence".
Sure it is - personal experience is indeed empirical evidence. If you don't believe me I suggest you look up the definition of "empirical".
Allow me to rephrase: supposing members of the jury said that you were guilty, based on "religious evidence" that they had received. Would you accept that, because it was "valid" for them? How could you argue against that?
Quite easily - I would ask them how they can prove that their religious evidence is binding on other people.
You'll note that you're taking my claim and twisting it to include something it does not claim - despite the fact that I've explicitly said it does not include what you want it to include!
More accurately, I have specifically said that religious evidence cannot be binding on anyone other than the direct recipient of that evidence, because it is personal in nature. Therefore, no jury member can legitimately use some religiously derived belief that I am guilty of murder to convict me in a legal setting.
This is why when people talk about evidence for God, they're after evidence, and not your "religious evidence"
And that's exactly my point - those people will never be satisfied, because religion's evidence comes in the form of personal experience, not scientific experimental results. They're wanting religion to provide something that by nature it cannot provide.
I think you have to look at long-term effects, rather than individual occurrences. Sure, people have financial difficulties sometimes - but if you ask your mother what she would call her overall financial situation, summarized over her whole life, what do you think she'd say? I also don't think we should take "prosper" to mean "vaults overflowing with gold", I think we should take it to mean "we'll have everything we need".
You also can't ignore other effects. For example, if I pay tithing but I gamble excessively, I don't think God's going to prevent my house from being repossessed. Less obvious, if I pay tithing but I go around stealing candy from babies, God's not going to be inclined to keep my pockets lined with gold.
It occurs to me that even using the "privacy mode" in your browser isn't enough to hide your online activities from a determined law enforcer. All they have to do is get ahold of whatever log files the ISP keeps of your online activities - if the ISP is logging what IPs you connect to, you could be hosed.
Wow. I didn't say anything resembling "nothing bad ever happens to people who pay tithing". That's some freaky word-twisting you're pulling there.
Perhaps you don't understand the word "prosper". Maybe Spock's words will help you understand:
"Live long, and prosper."
See, "live long" and "prosper" are entirely separate concepts. It is not a contradiction to say that a prosperous man died in a plane crash at 27. Likewise, it is not a contradiction to claim that an 97-year-old man never prospered.
Or, if you're not a Star Trek fan, I'm sure the dictionary can help you figure it out.
Your "counter anecdote" is irrelevant, since it doesn't counter my original point:P
Let's say I do this, and I experience these things - how do we know that this isn't just an hallucination, or other mental experience?
"We" won't know anything - only you can know what you have experienced. Perhaps, were it a one-time thing, one could claim it as the product of an overactive imagination. But when it's repeatable and consistent, many times, over many years, what conclusion should I draw? (That's rhetorical, no need to answer.)
There are questions that we can't answer - but that means we can't answer, it doesn't mean a made up answer is correct.
It doesn't mean you're right to make fun of people who believe answers you think are stupid.
What does "only valid for the person who originally receives it" mean?
[...]
If you were accused of murder, would you try to sway the jury with promises of "religious evidence", and say that one person's proof you were guity wasn't valid for other people?
My answer to your first question will answer your second question.
Religious evidence is only binding on the person who receives it. For example, I believe I have received answers to my prayers, specifically I believe that I have been told by the Spirit that my church teaches the true gospel of Christ; I cannot use this to show that you've done something demonstrably wrong, I can only use this to know whether I have done something wrong (or right).
So no - if someone else somehow had proof that I were guilty of murder, that proof by nature cannot be religious.
Actually it's worse than that - there's (contradictory) evidence both ways, except that the only people who care enough to look for it are hopelessly biased one way or the other, and you're well aware of what confirmation bias can do...
Hence, all inconsistencies can be seen as evidence that the religion is correct, because your faith wouldn't have to be tested if it weren't correct:-)
Personally I'd qualify that to say "all external inconsistencies...". Any religion worth anything should be self-consistent. (That's my major quibble with most of modern Christianity, by which I mean protestants and Catholics alike.)
At any rate, I wanted to thank you for discussing this with me. I found the discussion very interesting, and I realize that some of the things I have said were insulting to religion in general, and yours in particular. I want to thank you for responding even-tempered and peacefully.
I enjoyed the discussion as well. I don't take offense from jabs at my religion; you might say I'm fairly desensitized to it by now. I realize this is a topic that can easily rouse tempers, so I do my best to stay rational:)
Comcast is doing that intentionally (only redirecting www.* NXDOMAINs) - at least according to the Comcast engineer who e-mailed me about it (to clarify one of my posts) when this topic came up last week.
Or are you saying that the Church's current interpretation of the New Testament is different from yours?
I'm not just saying their interpretation is different from mine (it is), I'm saying that the Catholic Church's current doctrines only vaguely resemble the teachings found in the New Testament.
Now, when I say "New Testament", I'm willing to let you refer to any version you like (except the one used by the Jehovah's Witnesses). Yes, even the version considered canonical by the Catholic Church.
For example, Pope John Paul II said that while the Church's worship of the Virgin Mary is not explicitly mentioned in the New Testament, he claimed that "the evidence is there". Too bad nobody has ever shown where, and too bad the scriptures actually contradict the worship of Mary.
You may indeed find my beliefs insane, considering your opinion on religion in general, but at least my beliefs are self-consistent and don't contradict my own books of scripture;)
If you're curious, I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (sometimes known as "The Mormons"), and (speaking to a more broad audience) yes, I'll answer anyone's questions (or, *sigh*, accusations) via e-mail (since this thread is quite long enough as it is).
How about you show me that you're genuinely interested in finding scientific evidence, rather than expecting people to believe your "experiences" as being what you assume them to be?
Ah - and there we come to the crux of it.
I don't want anyone to believe in God because of my experiences. I want people to see that I say I've had experiences, and then want those experiences themselves - and I'm more than happy to tell them how to do it.
I certainly wouldn't mind scientific evidence of God's existence, but I think it's irrelevant. My reason is this:
Science's focus is on tangible evidence that is sharable with other people.
Religion's focus is on intangible evidence that is only valid for the person who originally receives it.
They are not contradictory (quite the opposite). Relying on personal experience is not an invalid way to come to conclusions, it's merely not scientific - but we've already determined that religion is not science, so that should come as no surprise. Science and religion are orthogonal concepts with orthogonal goals.
In other words, no religious evidence can, by itself, convince another person of a religion's veracity; that can only happen individually.
Unfortunately, people who insist on scientific evidence are almost always unwilling to even attempt to get the individual experience-evidence that religion offers.
Well, the evidence I offer that I can hold my end of the bargain is exactly the same your church offers:-)
Not quite;) Things I've seen from personal experience (and what I have observed among family, friends, and neighbors):
- If I pay tithing, I become financially prosperous - If I live according to the principles of healthy living (moderation in general, abstinence from alcohol, coffee, tea, and drugs, etc) I live healthier and longer - If I read scriptures and pray with my family, and we're happier together, and we fight amongst ourselves less - If I attend church regularly, and I am happier the rest of the week (compared to weeks where I don't go to church)... and so on and so forth.
Look, I'm not trying to convince you to convert to my religion, I'm just trying to say that there is evidence, if you bother to look for it, but most of it is stuff you have to experience yourself.
Even if religion does turn out to be some giant placebo, I won't regret anything - I'd rather be happy than live the woefully messed up lives I see my dad's siblings leading.
When you say that "christianity" doesn't, I'm not sure what you actually mean by that.
I'm referring to the gospel as taught by the New Testament, and not to the (I'll put this nicely) convoluted mess of insanity that the Catholic Church has made of it. (No offense to any Catholics out there.)
I didn't say it's science - I compared it to science, saying it's similar in that way.
Scripture actually gives us a clear hypothesis with a verifiable result, in many cases. One example would be tithing. Malachi 3:10 tells us if we pay tithing, we will be prosperous (in terms of temporal things).
So, there's a simply hypothesis: If I pay tithing, I will prosper.
Guess what? It hasn't failed me yet. And if that weren't enough, the one month I didn't pay tithing was the very same month I ran out of money!
So let's see. This test is repeated bi-weekly or monthly over a decade, proving itself every single time. And yet you want to tell me it's a coincidence that I haven't run out of money in a decade other than the one time I didn't pay tithing?
But if that weren't enough, you want me to believe it's a coincidence that the same promise has held true for my parents for thirty years.
And if that weren't enough, you want me to believe it's a coincidence that the same promise has held true for every other member of my church since 1830!
You know, if it were just me, I might accept "coincidence" as an explanation, but you're way past the limits of plausibility here.
Oh, and guess what - you could test it too, if you actually wanted to know whether any religion were true, instead of just stubbornly insisting that they're all a farce.
Likewise, the fact that you have a good life does not mean that religion granted you this.
So it's a complete coincidence that my dad is the only member of his family that didn't wander away from religion, and yet he's the only member of his family whose life isn't woefully screwed up (in terms of finances, relationships, and health)?
"Coincidence" ceases to be meaningful when it's repeatable and long-term.
Furthermore, if I can pray and get answers, many times over several years, who are you to tell me I didn't actually get any answers? Just because you don't believe it's possible doesn't mean it isn't possible.
You are left with god deliberately creating men with instincts to behave in a manner that is contrary to his commandments and would lead men to do most all the cruel and evil things they do.
You answered it yourself:
It is true that not all people behave that way all the time, we have intellect and are capable of choosing to act contrary to our base instincts
Now, I didn't say these base instincts don't exist - I said that our desires are neither good nor bad.
What is good or bad is what we do with those desires - the man who rapes women as a result of his sexual arousal is evil. The man who does not, is not.
You're misinterpreting what Christians believe about free will, temptation, and so forth, and using your misinterpretation to claim that if there is a God he is psychopathic. It would make much more sense to judge Christianity by its actual beliefs, rather than by the supposed beliefs you're inventing for it.
(Replace Christianity with $RELIGION, if you like. My point remains the same.)
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Depends. Does the kingdom ostensibly give its citizens the right to bear arms?
Yes, it was as bad as it sounds.
My laptop at the time was a 15" Dell Inspiron 8300 or something; it had a 1.5Ghz Pentium 4 (mobile version), 512 MB RAM, and a display resolution of 1400x1050. It was a four year old hand-me-down from my dad.
The desktop he had me using was an 800MHz Pentium III with (I think) 256MB RAM on a 15" CRT with a max resolution of 1280x1024. Oh, and it blue-screened at random.
I eventually did get a new desktop, but I had to do it by subterfuge. The boss was going to hire a new guy, so he bought a brand new desktop for the new guy (who would be a salaried employee, where I was hourly, though I worked full-time). The new guy ended up not getting hired, so I brought up (for the third time) that my machine was bluescreening at random (bad hard drive, I think), he sighed and said "fine, take the new machine".
The dumb thing is, the boss was averse to spending money on new desktops (not to mention the software on those desktops), but he'd readily blow $500 on $200 worth of server RAM...
No. The really dumb thing is that when I gave him one month's notice that I'd be leaving - I chose a month because a) I knew that far in advance, and b) work was somewhat hectic, and everyone was busy, so I wanted to give him plenty of time to find a replacement for me - he stopped giving me work. He literally paid me for a month to do nothing, constantly putting me off with "in a minute" and "as soon as I get off the phone".
You know the t-shirt that says "go away or I'll replace you with a very small shell script"? I spent some of that spare time replacing one of my co-workers with a series of small shell scripts (for which he was eternally grateful)...
Does the original question asked check their employee's bags every night for confidential documents? Mandate no USB drives?
I worked for a small business that started doing crap like that. The lead programmer brought in his own laptop to work on, instead of the crappy machines the boss had laying around. Then *I* brought in my own laptop to work on (which, while orders of magnitude crappier than the lead programmer's laptop, was orders of magnitude better than the crappy desktop the boss had allocated for me). My productivity immediately doubled (larger screen, faster processor, and more RAM help immensely when you spend your day mangling delimited data files).
Fast forward to several months later. Of the six employees in the company (including the boss), three of us were bringing in our own laptops. The boss, the lead programmer, and myself. Out of nowhere, we get an e-mail from the boss saying: "Due to a client's security concerns, employees are no longer allowed to bring in personal laptops. Except [the lead programmer], because he needs it." (He also banned iPods, a policy which only affected the other peon employee.) Never mind that we were still allowed to connect remotely from home with full access to the entire network.
That's fine and all, if a client really did request it... but I asked the lead programmer about it, because he was in the meeting during which this policy was supposedly decided upon. He claimed it was never discussed, and he had no idea where it had come from.
I sent an e-mail to the boss about it, telling him that because switching to my personal laptop had increased my productivity dramatically, prohibiting me from using it would result in a corresponding decrease in productivity that would be quite beyond my control. He didn't seem to care. I never did figure out why he enacted that policy.
Hate to burst your bubble, but saith Wikipedia:
The United States of America (commonly referred to as the United States, the U.S., the USA, or America) is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district.
(Emphasis mine.)
So whenever someone does not prosper but did paid tithing, he probably has done something bad.
That's not quite what I was getting at. Think of it more like this - God promises prosperity on the condition of obedience to the law of tithing. However, God is judging not simply our obedience, but our intent in obeying the commandment.
If I plan to use the surplus that such obedience would give so that I can spend more time gambling, I doubt God is going to be particularly willing to give me that money.
Now, other than that, I think the promise given by the law of tithing is fairly universal, but you can't look at individual instances, you have to look at the long-term situation of a tithe-payer.
What I'm saying is, the average tithe-payer will be more prosperous on average, over his or her lifetime, than the average non-tithe-payer. No, I don't have any statistics or anything to back that up, but my own observations among friends and family certainly support that hypothesis.
I'd guess though, that a social welfare system, like we have in the Netherlands, is a better system than tithing.
Tithing, in my church at least, is not used for such things. We have an efficient welfare system that has been well-funded through other voluntary offerings. The U.S. welfare system is orders of magnitude crappier than my church's welfare system - enough so that other countries have modeled their budding welfare system on my church's. (No, I don't have a source handy for that.)
Tithing is used mostly for the maintenance and construction of meetinghouses and temples, to fund missionary work, to fund the church's education system (print manuals and study guides, fund seminaries and institutes), and so on.
Fast offerings are used to fund the welfare system - to run canneries, to pay for shipping food to various locations, to buy foodstuffs and other necessities, and so on. The LDS Church has a very successful welfare system that is used to help not only church members in need, but people of many beliefs in disaster areas and other needy situations.
I used Dogpile, back in the day; it would show you the results from ten or so other search engines.
I've had the "old hag" experience many times, as have many people around the world, throughout history. Does this mean that the old hag really exists? Of course not.
What it means is that you can't use your own experience as proof for other people. If you choose to believe an old hag visited you, you're free to do so, and your belief is no more factually incorrect than believing you weren't visited by an old hag, since neither belief is provable.
I also dream of flying. Often. Lots of people do. Does that mean I'm really flying?
I didn't know we were talking about dreams. When did we start talking about dreams? When I talk about answers to prayers, I'm not talking about dreams.
And I did this where?
Referring to religious beliefs as "made up" is inherently a mocking statement, since you're implying that anyone who believes in God is either stupid or gullible.
What you refer to isn't "evidence".
Sure it is - personal experience is indeed empirical evidence. If you don't believe me I suggest you look up the definition of "empirical".
Allow me to rephrase: supposing members of the jury said that you were guilty, based on "religious evidence" that they had received. Would you accept that, because it was "valid" for them? How could you argue against that?
Quite easily - I would ask them how they can prove that their religious evidence is binding on other people.
You'll note that you're taking my claim and twisting it to include something it does not claim - despite the fact that I've explicitly said it does not include what you want it to include!
More accurately, I have specifically said that religious evidence cannot be binding on anyone other than the direct recipient of that evidence, because it is personal in nature. Therefore, no jury member can legitimately use some religiously derived belief that I am guilty of murder to convict me in a legal setting.
This is why when people talk about evidence for God, they're after evidence, and not your "religious evidence"
And that's exactly my point - those people will never be satisfied, because religion's evidence comes in the form of personal experience, not scientific experimental results. They're wanting religion to provide something that by nature it cannot provide.
Am I the only person to took that to a binary->ascii converter thinking gardyloo was actually saying something?
I think you have to look at long-term effects, rather than individual occurrences. Sure, people have financial difficulties sometimes - but if you ask your mother what she would call her overall financial situation, summarized over her whole life, what do you think she'd say? I also don't think we should take "prosper" to mean "vaults overflowing with gold", I think we should take it to mean "we'll have everything we need".
You also can't ignore other effects. For example, if I pay tithing but I gamble excessively, I don't think God's going to prevent my house from being repossessed. Less obvious, if I pay tithing but I go around stealing candy from babies, God's not going to be inclined to keep my pockets lined with gold.
It occurs to me that even using the "privacy mode" in your browser isn't enough to hide your online activities from a determined law enforcer. All they have to do is get ahold of whatever log files the ISP keeps of your online activities - if the ISP is logging what IPs you connect to, you could be hosed.
Does anyone really know what data ISPs keep?
Wow. I didn't say anything resembling "nothing bad ever happens to people who pay tithing". That's some freaky word-twisting you're pulling there.
Perhaps you don't understand the word "prosper". Maybe Spock's words will help you understand:
"Live long, and prosper."
See, "live long" and "prosper" are entirely separate concepts. It is not a contradiction to say that a prosperous man died in a plane crash at 27. Likewise, it is not a contradiction to claim that an 97-year-old man never prospered.
Or, if you're not a Star Trek fan, I'm sure the dictionary can help you figure it out.
Your "counter anecdote" is irrelevant, since it doesn't counter my original point :P
Let's say I do this, and I experience these things - how do we know that this isn't just an hallucination, or other mental experience?
"We" won't know anything - only you can know what you have experienced. Perhaps, were it a one-time thing, one could claim it as the product of an overactive imagination. But when it's repeatable and consistent, many times, over many years, what conclusion should I draw? (That's rhetorical, no need to answer.)
There are questions that we can't answer - but that means we can't answer, it doesn't mean a made up answer is correct.
It doesn't mean you're right to make fun of people who believe answers you think are stupid.
What does "only valid for the person who originally receives it" mean?
[...]
If you were accused of murder, would you try to sway the jury with promises of "religious evidence", and say that one person's proof you were guity wasn't valid for other people?
My answer to your first question will answer your second question.
Religious evidence is only binding on the person who receives it. For example, I believe I have received answers to my prayers, specifically I believe that I have been told by the Spirit that my church teaches the true gospel of Christ; I cannot use this to show that you've done something demonstrably wrong, I can only use this to know whether I have done something wrong (or right).
So no - if someone else somehow had proof that I were guilty of murder, that proof by nature cannot be religious.
but new evidence seems to contradict it
Actually it's worse than that - there's (contradictory) evidence both ways, except that the only people who care enough to look for it are hopelessly biased one way or the other, and you're well aware of what confirmation bias can do...
Hence, all inconsistencies can be seen as evidence that the religion is correct, because your faith wouldn't have to be tested if it weren't correct :-)
Personally I'd qualify that to say "all external inconsistencies...". Any religion worth anything should be self-consistent. (That's my major quibble with most of modern Christianity, by which I mean protestants and Catholics alike.)
At any rate, I wanted to thank you for discussing this with me. I found the discussion very interesting, and I realize that some of the things I have said were insulting to religion in general, and yours in particular. I want to thank you for responding even-tempered and peacefully.
I enjoyed the discussion as well. I don't take offense from jabs at my religion; you might say I'm fairly desensitized to it by now. I realize this is a topic that can easily rouse tempers, so I do my best to stay rational :)
even if said stories clearly contradict all relevant evidence we have.
If you find yourself with spare time and nothing to do, I'd be interested to see this evidence you supposedly have (via e-mail, of course).
Comcast is doing that intentionally (only redirecting www.* NXDOMAINs) - at least according to the Comcast engineer who e-mailed me about it (to clarify one of my posts) when this topic came up last week.
I hadn't noticed that the first time... I think maybe you're right.
Or are you saying that the Church's current interpretation of the New Testament is different from yours?
I'm not just saying their interpretation is different from mine (it is), I'm saying that the Catholic Church's current doctrines only vaguely resemble the teachings found in the New Testament.
Now, when I say "New Testament", I'm willing to let you refer to any version you like (except the one used by the Jehovah's Witnesses). Yes, even the version considered canonical by the Catholic Church.
For example, Pope John Paul II said that while the Church's worship of the Virgin Mary is not explicitly mentioned in the New Testament, he claimed that "the evidence is there". Too bad nobody has ever shown where, and too bad the scriptures actually contradict the worship of Mary.
You may indeed find my beliefs insane, considering your opinion on religion in general, but at least my beliefs are self-consistent and don't contradict my own books of scripture ;)
If you're curious, I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (sometimes known as "The Mormons"), and (speaking to a more broad audience) yes, I'll answer anyone's questions (or, *sigh*, accusations) via e-mail (since this thread is quite long enough as it is).
How about you show me that you're genuinely interested in finding scientific evidence, rather than expecting people to believe your "experiences" as being what you assume them to be?
Ah - and there we come to the crux of it.
I don't want anyone to believe in God because of my experiences. I want people to see that I say I've had experiences, and then want those experiences themselves - and I'm more than happy to tell them how to do it.
I certainly wouldn't mind scientific evidence of God's existence, but I think it's irrelevant. My reason is this:
Science's focus is on tangible evidence that is sharable with other people.
Religion's focus is on intangible evidence that is only valid for the person who originally receives it.
They are not contradictory (quite the opposite). Relying on personal experience is not an invalid way to come to conclusions, it's merely not scientific - but we've already determined that religion is not science, so that should come as no surprise. Science and religion are orthogonal concepts with orthogonal goals.
In other words, no religious evidence can, by itself, convince another person of a religion's veracity; that can only happen individually.
Unfortunately, people who insist on scientific evidence are almost always unwilling to even attempt to get the individual experience-evidence that religion offers.
Well, the evidence I offer that I can hold my end of the bargain is exactly the same your church offers :-)
Not quite ;) Things I've seen from personal experience (and what I have observed among family, friends, and neighbors):
- If I pay tithing, I become financially prosperous ... and so on and so forth.
- If I live according to the principles of healthy living (moderation in general, abstinence from alcohol, coffee, tea, and drugs, etc) I live healthier and longer
- If I read scriptures and pray with my family, and we're happier together, and we fight amongst ourselves less
- If I attend church regularly, and I am happier the rest of the week (compared to weeks where I don't go to church)
Look, I'm not trying to convince you to convert to my religion, I'm just trying to say that there is evidence, if you bother to look for it, but most of it is stuff you have to experience yourself.
Even if religion does turn out to be some giant placebo, I won't regret anything - I'd rather be happy than live the woefully messed up lives I see my dad's siblings leading.
When you say that "christianity" doesn't, I'm not sure what you actually mean by that.
I'm referring to the gospel as taught by the New Testament, and not to the (I'll put this nicely) convoluted mess of insanity that the Catholic Church has made of it. (No offense to any Catholics out there.)
I didn't say it's science - I compared it to science, saying it's similar in that way.
Scripture actually gives us a clear hypothesis with a verifiable result, in many cases. One example would be tithing. Malachi 3:10 tells us if we pay tithing, we will be prosperous (in terms of temporal things).
So, there's a simply hypothesis: If I pay tithing, I will prosper.
Guess what? It hasn't failed me yet. And if that weren't enough, the one month I didn't pay tithing was the very same month I ran out of money!
So let's see. This test is repeated bi-weekly or monthly over a decade, proving itself every single time. And yet you want to tell me it's a coincidence that I haven't run out of money in a decade other than the one time I didn't pay tithing?
But if that weren't enough, you want me to believe it's a coincidence that the same promise has held true for my parents for thirty years.
And if that weren't enough, you want me to believe it's a coincidence that the same promise has held true for every other member of my church since 1830!
You know, if it were just me, I might accept "coincidence" as an explanation, but you're way past the limits of plausibility here.
Oh, and guess what - you could test it too, if you actually wanted to know whether any religion were true, instead of just stubbornly insisting that they're all a farce.
Likewise, the fact that you have a good life does not mean that religion granted you this.
So it's a complete coincidence that my dad is the only member of his family that didn't wander away from religion, and yet he's the only member of his family whose life isn't woefully screwed up (in terms of finances, relationships, and health)?
"Coincidence" ceases to be meaningful when it's repeatable and long-term.
Furthermore, if I can pray and get answers, many times over several years, who are you to tell me I didn't actually get any answers? Just because you don't believe it's possible doesn't mean it isn't possible.
Let's see you do better ;)
Ah - but you only know that it's bad because other people know it's bad (i.e. they told you). If those people didn't know, you wouldn't know either.
Besides, I didn't say that the child had to actually do the bad thing, I just said he had to be capable of it.
There is very clearly something deeply and fundamentally wrong with you, if the only way you can make your arguments is by ignoring logic.
You are left with god deliberately creating men with instincts to behave in a manner that is contrary to his commandments and would lead men to do most all the cruel and evil things they do.
You answered it yourself:
It is true that not all people behave that way all the time, we have intellect and are capable of choosing to act contrary to our base instincts
Now, I didn't say these base instincts don't exist - I said that our desires are neither good nor bad.
What is good or bad is what we do with those desires - the man who rapes women as a result of his sexual arousal is evil. The man who does not, is not.
You're misinterpreting what Christians believe about free will, temptation, and so forth, and using your misinterpretation to claim that if there is a God he is psychopathic. It would make much more sense to judge Christianity by its actual beliefs, rather than by the supposed beliefs you're inventing for it.
(Replace Christianity with $RELIGION, if you like. My point remains the same.)