wegs,
For example, he never asks me why I believe? Or what I believe?
I'm certainly interested to find out what you believe and why you believe it, if it's something you'd like to share.
In my experience here, a lot of people are very cagey about exactly what they believe and why when it comes to religion. I think one reason for that is that a lot of people regard that stuff as deeply personal and so not be shared with more-or-less anonymous strangers on an internet forum. I think another reason is that religious people here often want to present as small a target as possible when they discuss what they believe and why, because they fear that they won't be able to adequately account for or defend their religious beliefs against likely criticism from the atheists and skeptics here.
I guess that, because this is so often the pattern I see here, I sort of assume as a matter of course that religious people aren't going to share whatever it was that made them so certain that their God is real and their religious beliefs are true.
It's not all on one side, either. I have at various times shared parts of my personal history of religious belief here. When I have done so, I have been told on more than one occasion that I was never a "true" Christian and even that I never "really" believed in God in the first place. I have been told direct personal experience of god belief does nothing to negate my supposed inability to understand what it means to be a believer or what it's like to "truly" know God. What this tells me is that the theists who say these things don't really understand the journey that takes a believer from theism to atheism. Their assumption is once an atheist, always an atheist, along with the usual tropes about how one needs to "deny" God in order to become an atheist and so on. The idea that somebody could actually not believe in God is alien to them, so they assume that all atheists have a kind of deeply buried god envy that they have to try to hide behind a thin veneer of rationality.
I can only surmise that it doesn't matter, because all believers are categorized in a similar way - we are ''irrational.''
I don't intend that as an insult, just a statement of fact. I'm sorry if it sounds harsh.
But let me be clear. It's not that I think it is irrational to wonder whether there might be something "bigger" than us, or even whether there might be a personal being of great power in control of the universe. What's irrational is believing that you know the answer to those kinds of questions for sure, especially when the objective evidence for the existence of gods of any kind is so unpersuasive. I think that it is highly unlikely that subjective religious experiences are anything other than tricks the human mind plays on itself, because as far as I am aware there is no objective evidence that there is anything more to them. Moreover, we
know that similar experiences can be produced in other ways, including with drugs.
Nor do I think it is possible to know that God exists via any sort of philosophical reasoning from "first principles". As far as I can tell, all of the major philosophical arguments for God - the argument from design, the ontological argument, the cosmological argument etc. - are flawed in one way or another, or at least have been the subject of heavy criticism from professional philosophers.
But, honestly, I'm not seeking approval or for James to believe in my belief system. I'm more interested in just keeping religious/spiritual expression, freedom of choice.
I'm all for personal religious freedom and freedom of choice, provided it does not hurt other people. Unfortunately, organised religion has long track record of hurting other people for one reason or another. This is not to say that organised religion has been totally a negative thing, by the way.
One important aspect of my interest in discussing people's religious beliefs with them is to learn what makes them so confident they are right. In my discussion with theists, I don't set out to "deconvert" them so much as to ask them to closely examine the reasons they believe what they believe. I find that, mostly, religious beliefs are held uncritically, usually from a young age. Most strongly religious people spend most of their time surrounded by like-minded people. The truth of the shared belief is assumed and seldom discussed, other than in contexts in which presumed authorities (e.g. the bible) are used to give an uncritical kind of justification for the belief. It's like looking at only one side of an issue as a matter of course, never honestly considering the alternative.
I completely get it that religion can be a great source of comfort and can provide a ready-made community or in-group. I understand why questioning the core of the belief system makes people uncomfortable - even angry, sometimes. There is potentially a lot to lose when you lose your religion. Lots of atheists from deeply religious backgrounds report being ostracised by close family and friends who honestly believe they have gone to the devil. Or else, those friends and family feel it is their duty to "save" the atheist from the very real and frightening hell that their God tells them the atheist will inevitably be going to, and so spend their time trying to bring the errant atheist back into the fold. Needless to say, the damage done to relationships when this kind of thing happens can be serious and life changing.
They are his assumptions, basically he believes that ''most'' Christians think this way or that way, because of some cherry picked verses.
What I am saying is that there's so much immoral stuff in the bible that good Christians have no choice but to follow some parts of the bible while ignoring others or making up excuses as to why those other parts are no longer relevant. As a result, most modern Christians can't really claim to be "following the bible". What they do is to follow their own consciences and give credit to God or the bible for that.
I understand your points, but believing in God (or having faith in a higher power) is irrational...to you. You can find it irrational but that doesn’t make it objectively so. On the contrary, I don’t find it irrational if someone chooses to not believe in a higher power, but it’s possibly irrational to not be open minded to why others do. If you have never really tried to understand why many people believe in God, or follow a spiritual path, then how can you be so sure that their beliefs are “irrational?”
If something is irrational (lacking rational justification), it isn't just a matter of it being irrational
to me. That's the thing about rationality: in principle anybody can check for him or herself.
I completely agree that it's possible to reach a different set of conclusions about gods than the ones I've reached, but I think that's only possible if one makes a very questionable (read unjustified) set of assumptions.
If you've read almost anything I've posted in the Religion forum here, you should be aware that I spend a significant portion of my time here trying to understand why it is that theists believe in their gods. I ask a lot of questions. I get a lot of dishonest answers and I see a lot of people try to avoid answering altogether. Now and then, I get an honest answer, but you'd be surprised at how rarely I see that from the theists who come here to take down the evil atheists.
Personally, I find the actual
content of religious beliefs to be one of the least interesting things about religion. Since all the major religions are hundreds of years old at a minimum, their worldviews are inevitably limited. The writers of the great religious texts did not have the benefit of the findings of modern science (and, by "modern" here I mean pretty much anything post-Renaissance). They lived in a world that was largely mysterious, their vision confined to a single planet in a solar system that would be completely unremarkable were it not for accident that it happens to contain our intelligent civilisation.
On the other hand, I find people fascinating - what they do, how they think, what makes people different from or similar to one another, what they value and why, how they relate to one another, the whole human condition. I'd say I'm a humanist, but I don't like that label because I think it has a tendency to downplay the importance and moral significance of other kinds of life. A
lot of people hold religious beliefs. I am
very interested, for all kind of reasons, both in the what and in the why. What is common to all or most religions? What differences are there? What is the source of all that? What is the psychology of it? Overall, is religion a good or a bad thing?