My argument was that God's existence is no more or less logical than ours.
How so? We've found what may be microbes on a meteor from Mars. Not a smoking gun, but we're just about sure that's what it is. Life is logical. It happens. A living god, on the other hand, has no basis in reality. On what do you base the existance of god? Us?
Rocks are illogical if you compare them to snails
Say
what?
The similarities we are supposed to share with God does not make us authorities on His existence.
Then what makes you an authority? You seem to be sold on it, but you just said you are no authority. So how is your belief valid?
For the rest of your argument, you might as well have asked, what is the logic of love. You contend that is is purely to keep you with your mate. Do you see that happening?
Not only is it to keep you with your mate, but it is also to hold a family unit together, and keep friendships together. All of the above are beneficial to you as an individual. Strength in numbers. And yes, I do see it happening. As a species living on this planet (Not above it, as you seem to think) we share traits with other species. The bond of love is, for example, a typical, effective way to increase the chances of offspring reaching adulthood.
Love becomes a less and less logical alternative, as people "accept" their natural impulses.
Love is as natural an impulse as anything else. What makes it different from lust, aside from function?
If you were correct, it would have happened the othe way around
How so? Love doesn't have to conflict with other impulses. As an intelligent species, we can cheat or gamble or drink all while finding ways to stay with our wife/girlfriend/husband/boyfriend.
Besides, what about love where love is indeed illogical, where it holds no evident benefit to yourself even remotely?
In what case does love not benefit you? Falling in love with a less-than-attractive person might be disaterous socially, but otherwise, I see no other time love would not be beneficial.
What else will you do with all your faith?
You could put your faith in something visible, touchable. Something you can see. Put your faith in the Mets, or the doctor who's trying to save your wife's life. Rely on faith when the situation is completely out of your hands.
...but every day, you can change something. You can do something. To walk around every day and just leave it all up to your faith in god is the act of a coward. A gutless coward.
And it shouldn't be crushing. You can be crushed, but faith is what makes it possible to get up and go on after you have lost everything.
A little story: A childhood friend of mine had a mother who happened to be a Christian. She, at the age of 42, was divorced by her husband. A few months later, she moved the family to my street, and she promised to look for a job. Well, she got one. A week later, she quit. She told us, "God will provide." So, rather than getting up and going out to find a job, she simply sat around and waited for her teenage boys to bring home paychecks. She sat around, and read scripture, and decided that she didn't have to work. All she had to do was wait on god to drop a bundle of money on her. (Ok, so I'm pretty sure she wasn't waiting for pennies from heaven, but still) Point is, she took her "faith" and invested it in your god. She found nothing but an excuse to sit and home and milk her kids.
This is what faith did for her after she lost everything.
What needs to happen when you find yourself down, is to strive to pick yourself back up, relying on little help from anyone. Family, friends, maybe. But from god? Unless god is in the business of fixing the next lottery drawing, then you had better grab your bootstraps and get going on rebuilding your life.
Exhibit A: Job. God always comes though, the real trouble is with people who don't. It's one of the foundations of my own faith, that I can trust God to be there even when everything else has failed.
So this book is your evidence for god's existance?
Oh, and my faith prevents me from that? Can't I learn and prevent as well?
Yes, your faith prevents you from that. You have no trust in your own instincts and abilities as a human being so you have given up and "Found Jesus." It's a cop-out to responsibility. Your basis of right and wrong comes from a 2-millenia-old collection of stories, and is enforced by fear of eternal damnation. Rather than being a man, or accepting your role as a human, you've decided that the grim realities that exist are too much to handle. Face facts? Not you, or anyone who believes in what you do. "You mean we're here because it just happened that way? No way, I refuse to believe that! Where's the drama?" And there's the emotionalism coming through again. You can't find a meaning or a set of goals by yourself, so you throw yourself at the feet of an unseen deity in hopes of having one handed to you on a plate. How empty a shell of a human being you must be to accept those short-cuts, those high-roads, those morally-bankrupt guidlines for life. You haven't learned one damn thing in your time here, and so long as you stay in your little capsule, you never will. The only thing you have ever prevented is having to accept personal responsibility for your actions.
In a universe where life and the universe it inhabits was created, a Creator is perfectly logical.
Sure, but we are not in that universe.
That's forced logic, based on "what if".
And yours isn't?! You just said that in a unverse that is created, a creator is perfectly logical, but you have no basis to claim that our universe was created, aside from your crippling lack of understanding on how the universe works! At least in my case, we have evidence!
Face it, you aren't basing your logic on information you already have, but on information you still hope to gain
Again, that statement makes more sense against you. You have no information about god. None. No evidence or fact. Nothing. At least we have a meteor which has these tiny things on it...looks like bacteria...smells like bacteria...tastes like bacteria...but we can't be 100% sure...yet.
You can say life is logical, but how does that make a random car accident logical?
You really have no idea what logic means, do you?
Cars + Road = Possibility of collision
What isn't logical about that?
but which came first, chaos or logic?
Let's not even go there, because you have no fucking clue what you're talking about. Logic isn't something that
happens. You haven't seen something illogical, and you never will.
Being able to explain something does not make it logical, as anybody who has ever been cheated on will attest.
Oh bullshit. But Ok, fine, let's use that example:
Man + Woman + Natural desire to mate with each other = Man and Woman Mating with each other
Completely logical, Jenyar. Just because it doesn't exactly makes sense to
you when it's
your girlfriend who just banged Biff Burley in the back seat of his Chevy Lumina doesn't mean it doesn't make sense in reality. Your perception of the event doesn't change the truth. There is a natural desire to mate. Simple.
What you are saying is that logic is relative.
Read above and you'll see I'm saying the exact opposite.
The logic you speak of can't be representative of the whole system. It's nothing but meaning attributed to an otherwise meaningless action. The murderer might have had a reason, but that doesn't make his action reasonable.
Reason is relative, but logic is not. Logic is the greater picture, and reason is your personal ability to achive understanding of a certain situation. An example:
Reason:
A man shoots you in the groin. You try and try, but you cannot see his actions as reasonable. But because of his mental instability, he sees it as perfectly reasonable. After all, in his warped mind, your crotch was compelling him to do it.
Logic:
A man cuts your nipples off. You try and try, but you cannot see it as illogical. Becuase of his mental instability, the possibility of his committing some outrageous act such as nipple-hacking makes this case completely and totally logical.
If evolution is neccessary for life to "work", then its general necessity would make it seem like it is the controlling factor, but it might only seem that way because you can't imagine a larger controlling factor.
Of course I can imagine a larger controlling factor. Shoot,
somebody did, otherwise you wouldn't believe in god right now! The cruelty of this is that there is no larger controlling factor. The necessity is the controlling factor. That is why there is evolution. If god had created everything to work, then there would never have been changes in any species. Evolution wouldn't exist. Yet, it does. And it's been observed and proven. It's fact.
You simply don't have the priviledge to know what life without God would be like.
Sadly, you really believe that.
An analogy could be, what would life without sustenance look like? Dead.
You are a walking oxymoron, wrapped in hypocricy, shrouded by redundancy.
Sure there are electrical and chemical happenings in the brain. But are you a slave to them? Have you never not acted on impulse? Have you never chose a wife? Is one potential mother of your children just as good as another?
We aren't slaves to impulse all the time. As intelligent beings, we can think our way around some situations. But as far as instinct, yes, we are a slave to that. One wife is just as good as another? Yes, so long as I am attracted to both, or both are caring people. This is why love isn't a single experiance. We love more than once. We love many, many, many times over. Because we are suited "perfectly" for many, many differnet people.
You accept that we are born with some kind of subconscious, self-preserving knowledge, like which features would make your children better suited for survival, yet you deny that belief in God might be one of those self-preserving impulses. If you don't have knwoledge about the origin over one kind of instinct, why presume you have knowledge over the validity of another? Why should SargentLard suppress an instinct because you don't realize its significance?
I deny that god is a self-preserving impulse becuase it ISN'T. Sargentlard isn't suppressing instinct, asshole, he's trying to deprogram himself. No one is born believing in god, just as Sargentlard wasn't. He told his story! Weren't you listening? Of course you weren't; you were taking the bits that didn't fit and throwing them out. He was raised in a religious household; he's had god spoon-fed to him from his earliest days. There wasn't ever a time where the people around him talked in a way that implied god
didn't exist. It's the same thing as Santa Claus, or the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy. Same friggin thing. There is no instinct here, Jenyar, it's brainwashing.
How do you, ultimately, know what is good for you or for him?
I know what's good for humanity, and ignorance isn't it. What if someday a meteor the size of Texas really is heading for us? Will god save you then? Or will it be our laser rockets launched from Mars?
JD
