What can't ever a Nazi torturer take away from an atheist, what can't he never take away from a theist(faithful)?

What!?!

It’s like a riddle. I’m sure the answer is that God is always with the faithful, but atheists are all alone, but… I think there may be some typo issues.

Um, as well as some offensiveness issues. Among other things.

May get the award for most awkwardly phrased question, but I’m sure the answer is the usual pro-christian propaganda agenda.

@EmpressPixie and at least a double negative, unless that’s intentional.

I wonder if it has something to do with the the spelling. ‘atheist’ and ‘a theist’ differ only by the space within? But I don’t know the answer to the question.

@Grisson: If you know the question, you’re doing better than the rest of us :)

What can’t I know don’t for world word war. Yeah frizzer if there nothing guess I you know?

Blink…Blink @judochop I don’t know what you just said, but I think it qualifies for ‘Great Answer’ to the question.

It’s quite obvious that the atheist gets to keep his/her “a”... while the theist simply goes without.

Damn the Nazis…

Glad I could be of service.

@Grisson Here ya go

@syz Ahah! Well now that makes sense! :o)

It’s a riddle.

Answer: pancakes?

you guys still don’t get it.
One(a theist) dies still with faith which noone is able to snatch away from you, and other(atheist) dies with nothing
everything was able to be taken away since atheists don’t have faith .

By the way this isn’t to make anyone angry or any lesser, just a thought .

Hey look at that seVen just asked ANOTHER bullshit question to push his own views. i did NOT see that coming.~

A question with only one answer? SeVens answer? Hmm…

That’s silly. You can so take someone’s faith. Communism, hello. Not everyone reconverted to their faith after it.

@tinyfaery – gasp

I liked @Grisson‘s answer better :P

@EpressPixie maybe but not majority as in my motherland Poland where for many years under Soviet control communism we’re still faithful and underground churches thrived.

Many people lose their faith in Room 101.

I’m just saying. You can take someone’s faith. Not everyone will lose faith, but some will.

Also: Poland underground churches were kind of awesome. Because they were all illegal in a church sense to as they were mostly Catholic in name, but real priests were training new priests and calling them ordained, but you have to be ordained by the Pope and the Pope wasn’t ordaining anyone there. So then after the Pope had to figure out what to do: ordain the priests or not. On the one hand, they helped keep the faith alive, on the other they were impersonating members of the clergy.

Also, the Poles have special historical experience of remaining the same despite all attempts to do otherwise, making their reaction to Communism unsurprising but still impressive.

If I was an atheist and a Nazi tortured me to death, that would probably mean I didn’t tell him what he wanted to know. In war, silence is worth more than faith, so I would die with more than a theist.

I don’t actually know anything about communism but I wanted to wade in and deposit my two cents.

Seriously: If you were in WWII and a Nazi tortured you to death, it wouldn’t actually mean much of anything. I think we’d consider most people who interacted with Nazis to have been tortured to death except for those who were flat out shot. Much of it was not at all for information. Medical experiments, information, to find the right gas mixture to most effectively kill the most people, people who were gassed (from all accounts, it was NOT pleasant), etc.

I get it but I don’t get it

You can’t take faith from an atheist because they don’t have faith to begin with. And you can’t take faith from a theist either because then they wouldn’t be a theist to begin with.

Does that make sense?

If a Nazi or (anyone else) killed a theist and an atheist at the same exact moment:

The theist’s faith would disappear at the exact same time as the atheist’s realistic expectations.

Can you believe it? I’m too appalled to make a joke!

Why does it have to be a Nazi?
Couldn’t any old torturer do?

I understand the point, but I agree with Empress Pixie. You can certainly lose your connection with your soul and your faith. It happens all the time, with or without torture.

Sense

Nice, knotmyday.

I think that the theist would be at a crucial point to loose his faith. How can a God allow someone to torture you to death. Does it really seem like anyone is watching over you as you are burned with hot irons and sexually abused? Does God look away as you beaten to a bloody pulp or does he just not care? If he exsists how could he let these things happen?

At least the athiest wouldn’t have to change his views because he doesn’t have unrealistic expectations of humanity. There are no guardian angles. There is no God. There’s no invisible anyone to care about you as you are tortured to death.

I think the answer to this poorly worded riddle should be:
A theist can loose his faith in God but an athiest wouldn’t loose his faith in science.

@fireside: the Internet seems to have a long and enduring history of people mentioning Hitler and/or Nazis. See Godwin’s Law

@bodyhead: If an atheist has faith in science, is he an atheist? Or is his science his God?

@laureth – i see, so the Nazis are the uber badmen. I always thought that it was General Zod from Superman II

@laureth I think fireside was more going for “why these specific torturers, any torturer would do”, to which I think the answer (and the same underlying cause of what’s lead to Godwin’s Law) is the desire to use something incredibly emotional and distasteful so that people don’t actually think about what’s going on as much as they react on emotion.

For example, had seVen said, “What can’t the US Government take from those being waterboarded in detention centers?” we might not react the same way. The idea is to say Nazis! Omg! Bad! and not really think about it.

And if that’s not the idea, then perhaps you shouldn’t use such emotionally charged hypothetical situations.

It could also have something to do with the fact that SeVen is from Poland, i think.

oh damn. that’s it. I quit “other fluther motive speculation”

@EmpressPixie = )

@bodyhead – can’t a theist have faith in science too?

@grisson: Science is not a god to any atheist I know about. To believe in God, see, you need to take a leap of faith. And science is all about taking that leap of faith out of the equation and seeing what really can be proven – no faith required.

Oh I got it I just don’t understand how this question or should I say why this question is being asked here? Not trying to be rude but what’s with all the faith questions? It seems to me like seven is trying to convert some of us. No offense seven, I do like you very much but cmon man. What’s bothering you bro?

@laureth: Actually, I always thought quantum mechanics required a certain leap of faith, but that may just be me.

Poland has been overtaken so many times, by so many people that he could have used many examples. While it is true that none hated the essence of Polishness in the same way that Hitler seems to have, he could have just as easily talked about the horrifying things that Communists did. They are still emotionally charged, but less so.

I disagree with you that faith is not needed to believe in science. I cannot see individual atoms but I believe they exist. It’s simply what we have faith in that’s different. My faith is based on repeatable, predictable outcomes.

If your faith is based on repeatable, predictable outcomes, then anything at all would require faith. I would need faith that the sun will come up tomorrow, and I would need faith that putting my hand in fire would burn it. However, I do not see this as faith – faith is, to me, something that is believed in the absence of proof. (I have faith that my husband loves me, for example.) I draw a line between “faith” and “reasonable expectation based on previous experience.” One is based on reason, the other, not.

I just love seVen’s questions.

@laureth: Well, you do need faith. You know the chair you are sitting on is made of atoms and sub-atomic particles all moving around at a very rapid pace and yet you have faith enough that the forces holding it together are strong enough to keep from dumping you on the floor.

And you can also lose faith. A physics professor of mine once demonstrated this by suspending a cannonball-like weight on the end of a very long cable in the lecture hall. He stood with his head against the wall and placed the ball right at his face and lectured about air resistance and pendulums as the ball swept out across the room and about every 5 seconds would rush up to his face and stop just centimeters from smashing his head against the wall.

Intellectually, we knew that the ball would stop. It’s what he was teaching us about, but still he could get no volunteers to stand in his place. I understand the science, but did not have the faith to stand there and see that massive ball heading toward my head.

Did you have any reason to expect that the ball would be perfectly calibrated to stop at your head, the way it was engineered to do so at Prof level? I don’t think I would. I see that as a perfectly reasonable thought.

While I, myself, have never seen atoms, I have every reason to believe that their existence has been confirmed by testing and experimentation. They can be expected to have the same properties, time and time again, behaving in the same way. We may have to agree to disagree (and that’s okay), but I see the rigorous testing through the scientific method as being antithetical to faith.

While there are also people who believe that God exists, I have not seen any repeatable experiments or verifiable research done. I have seen no double-blind testing done as to the effectiveness of prayer on getting a pony or obtaining world peace. It would seem that God, if he’s answering these prayers, is highly irrational, granting some things to some people, nothing to others. Believing in something when the results are not repeatable, well, that’s faith, not reason.

I find it so hard to find Nazi torturers these days to settle such important questions.

It was a pendulum. First law of thermodynamics says it certainly will not gain energy. It will lose energy to air resistance. So there is no way it go higher in its pendulum swing than where it started.

But don’t ask me to put my head at risk to prove it.

religion/faith in God isn’t the only thing you can’t take from a person.
i don’t know if i’m reading this right, but from what i’m gathering at the moment, it’s implied that atheists die with nothing because they don’t believe in god. i’m not an atheist, but this really does not ring true in my mind.

@Grisson in my school we got a volunteer and it worked. We could get volunteers for anything.

You don’t need faith in science. Science doesn’t care. You won’t fall through the chair just because you don’t believe in subatomic forces.

~ So, science is like a security blanket?

~ A security blanket of faith…

~ given by god…

~ to protect us from Nazi torturers…

People are comparing science to faith and security blankets, which are highly emotional things. But Lightlyseared is right – science is not based in emotion. That’s the beautiful thing about it.

Ultimately, God doesn’t care either.

@seVen I’d rather die with no faith then to die with a false belief. (Not to offend any christians or theists)

I have a hard time imagining that many people manage to die without a false belief.
You don’t think you’ve ever deluded yourself about anything?
And you think you can keep that up for the rest of your life?

I’d rather not die at all.

@fireside That’s not what I mean, I don’t think I said that right. You most likley know what I meant, and since I can’t think of anyway to say it, I’m not even going to try to correct myself.

I don’t even know what the hell that means.

@fireside
Actually many a religion would debate that a personal god does in fact care. Now how this god can care while you faith is being chipped at and eventually broken by a Nazi torturer I don’t know.

My $.02 is simply that a theist has something that can be taken away while the atheist doesn’t. A torturer need simply bring in a 4th grade text book to start chipping away at a “faithful’s” faith. And come to thing of it, a person’s faith is actually a week point that is exploited in many forms of torture.

So I’d say a really good analysis of this of this little scenario would actually show that the faithful has everything to loose. While someone who has based their life in evidence and proof can not have those taken from them.

I didn’t read all these replies, but as a student of WW2 history, I do know a few things about Nazis. I won’t get off topic by sharing that knowledge, however. This question however, is quite possibly the most retarded thing I’ve ever read on here. Surely it could have been phrased better. Hopefully our good friend seVen will pick up a grammar book and take some notes. :-)

@evelyns_pet_zebra, oh, it gets more retarded… don’t worry.

@robmandu I think there were nicer questions you could have gone with. This is certainly one of the most completely unreadable questions I’ve read here.

@Noon – As I see it, God is the infinite, immovable, perfection and, as such, does not care because there is no swing of emotion. Religions have been formed around man’s understandings of that divine perfection. The prophets were the ones who connected with the infinite and were able to provide a series of instructions that would help the souls of humanity to progress towards God.

The state of the individual soul is not changed unless they lose their faith, that faith does not have to be dependent on logic and predictable outcomes. It is based on personal experience and a knowledge that resonates throughout your soul. You can feel it listening to good music, or meditating, or solving a mathematical equation, or painting a picture, or taking a walk, or watching the clouds, or closing your eyes…

That can’t be taken away if you know how to access it within yourself. The words in the books just teach you how to do that and how to best relate to others who are following their paths. Some people are doing most of the right things anyway without calling it a religion. That’s okay, there’s nothing wrong with that.

@fireside – If I were to believe in a deity, it would be something like you describe.

Nazi torturers may take away my life, but they’ll never take away my freedom!

very true astrochuck.

I was just having a Mel Gibson moment there. I’d better stop that before I start making anti-semetic remarks.

@fireside
Just for fun, can you read this link Theological noncognitivism
And then reread your post. It will give my perspective on why phrases like “God is the infinite” is cognitively meaningless.

And even if you “feel” that god is emotionless, does not mean that others do not teach otherwise (which was my point). Many religions preach of a god that is not only listening, but also has an opinion about what is going on. The god of the judeo-christian-islamic texts very much cares about what is going on and gets very angry when his will is not done. (But not angry enough to actually stop the Nazi from torturing someone)

@AstroChuck – your freedom to do what? :P

@AstroChuck Freedom!

hee hee hee Nice, Nimis

That’s great, Nimis. That’s a whole new look for me.

@Noon – that post seemed to indicate that anything having to do with the term God is cognitively meaningless to those who refuse to discuss something that lacks definition.

Sounds like an easy way to avoid a conversation.

Everyone’s names are cognitively meaningless by their definition because they describe a wide range of people meaning that “Jim” cannot be defined. So should we avoid having discussions that involve any names at all?

@Nimis – very nice

As if there was really any doubt…
…I have now officially confirmed
that I have way too much time on my hands.

@fireside
No, using the name “Jim” is cognitively quite meaningful. We understand that the sentence “Hey have you seen Jim?” That there is a human with the name Jim, and it’s assumed I know him and would recognize him if I saw him. Jim = someone with the name Jim. Quite cognitively meaningful.

Now if you were to say. “Have you seen God?” or “Have you found Jesus?”. These are not cognitively meaningful because there is no empirical way to describe god or “living” jesus.

Ok, but does that mean you found no cognitive meaning in what i said, which is very different from those two phrases?
I thought I was actually providing a definition to be used for a frame around my comments.

From your link:
“This can be confusing because of the widespread belief in God and the common use of the series of letters G-o-d as if it is already understood that it has some cognitively understandable meaning.”

By this standard, I could have a completely different understanding of “Jim” than you.
God is defined in each of the religions that use the word, so saying that it has no meaning is simply a way of sidestepping the conversation rather than working towards some cognitively understandable meaning for that discussion.

But the cognitively understandable meaning that you arrive at for that discussion may not be the same one for the next conversation. Simply put, the concept of God is too large to put into a simple box.

We could talk for hours about how different baseball teams have different meanings for “training” but it would still just be a distraction if the conversation was about who may win the World Series.

The problem is when you say things like “God is the infinite, immovable, perfection and, as such…” You are not defining god in any way that we can understand him. We don’t know what infinite means when applied to the word god. So we have not made any step to understanding what god is, we have confused it one step more. We don’t have a concept of what a god conscious is, much less what one is that is immovable.

I can tell you my my left toe is pink, and that has cognitive meaning, you can go and check if my toe is pink. If I told you that my soul was pink, you would not have any better understanding of what my soul is. Because we have no shared concept of what a soul is, much less how the attribute pink relates to it.

God is immovable really means, nothing. Because you have not defined god in anyway that the word immovable applies.

Fair enough. Sorry if you got stuck on the first ten words.
Glad to see that laureth was able to make it past the first sentence into the heart of the discussion.

Sorry to assume that you would realize that my comments apply to your whole post. You are talking about my soul as if you have knowledge of what a soul is.

Let’s take a quote from the middle of your post and see how well my position applies.

”...experience and a knowledge that resonates throughout your soul…”

Saying that experience and knowledge can resonate, and more so, resonate through something called a soul which apparently has the physical ability to resonate even though it is not physical?

The point is your post sounds nice, but really doesn’t mean anything.

The soul is of the spiritual worlds of God, is associated with the body and shares the experiences of the physical world. This is based on my understanding of the words of the prophets and is what I believe.

My post doesn’t have to mean anything to you, just as the wiki info about theological noncognitivism can look to me like grammatical mumbo jumbo with the intent to distract.

Sorry, will you need a definition for “mumbo jumbo” now before we can go on?

Nope, “mumbo jumbo” is cognitive, got it.
I would however like a definition of “spritual worlds of God” ;-)

How about the term “Love”?
Does that create a cognitive dissonance for you?

This can be confusing because of the widespread belief in Love and the common use of the series of letters L-o-v-e as if it is already understood that it has some cognitively understandable meaning.

As for the spiritual worlds:

Likewise the rewards of the other world are the eternal life which is clearly mentioned in all the Holy Books, the divine perfections, the eternal bounties, and everlasting felicity.

The rewards of the other world are the perfections and the peace obtained in the spiritual worlds after leaving this world; whilst the rewards of this life are the real luminous perfections which are realized in this world, and which are the cause of eternal life, for they are the very progress of existence.

It is like the man who passes from the embryonic world to the state of maturity, and becomes the manifestation of these words: “Blessed be God, the best of creators.” The rewards of the other world are peace, the spiritual graces, the various spiritual gifts in the Kingdom of God, the gaining of the desires of the heart and the soul, and the meeting of God in the world of eternity. In the same way the punishments of the other world, that is to say, the torments of the other world, consist in being deprived of the special divine blessings and the absolute bounties, and falling into the lowest degrees of existence.

He who is deprived of these divine favors, although he continues after death, is considered as dead by the people of truth.
(Abdu’l-Baha, Baha’i World Faith – Abdu’l-Baha Section, p. 324)

——
And before you ask about “the divine perfections”:

When a soul has in it the life of the spirit, then does it bring forth good fruit and become a Divine tree. I wish you to try to understand this example. I hope that the unspeakable goodness of God will so strengthen you that the celestial quality of your soul, which relates it to the spirit, will for ever dominate the material side, so entirely ruling the senses that your soul will approach the perfections of the Heavenly Kingdom. May your faces, being steadfastly set towards the Divine Light, become so luminous that all your thoughts, words and actions will shine with the Spiritual Radiance dominating your souls, so that in the gatherings of the world you will show perfection in your life.

Some men’s lives are solely occupied with the things of this world; their minds are so circumscribed by exterior manners and traditional interests that they are blind to any other realm of existence, to the spiritual significance of all things! They think and dream of earthly fame, of material progress. Sensuous delights and comfortable surroundings bound their horizon,  their highest ambitions centre in successes of worldly conditions and circumstances! They curb not their lower propensities; they eat, drink, and sleep! Like the animal, they have no thought beyond their own physical well-being. It is true that these necessities must be despatched. Life is a load which must be carried on while we are on earth, but the cares of the lower things of life should not be allowed to monopolize all the thoughts and aspirations of a human being. The heart’s ambitions should ascend to a more glorious goal, mental activity should rise to higher levels! Men should hold in their souls the vision of celestial perfection, and there prepare a dwelling-place for the inexhaustible bounty of the Divine Spirit.
(Abdu’l-Baha, Paris Talks, p. 98)

Ok I might just have to throw in the towel. Hopefully for those who have been following they now realize what I was trying to get at. You post is now FILLED with theological noncognative terms. Which renders just about all of it, meaningless to me (and just about anyone who appreciates empirical evidence).

lol, yeah there are a lot of words and terms to cross reference and examine. it could take some time before one was able to cognitively assess those statements. It would be much easier to dismiss it and that’s okay.

I guess the basic premise that God is something beyond human conception is something that i can accept and recall with when looking at the rest of the writings. It’s not something that I am going to get hung up on when considering the validity and similarities of the wealth of spiritual experience across the world.

I am not so sure Love exists either, but I’m willing to go looking for it and from what I hear and based on previous personal experience, you know it when you find it.

No, it would take no time to look them up. They are by definition not cognitively assessable. You put it beautifully just now. When you say “God is something beyond human conception” you are saying we can’t understand it. It nullifies any meaning attributed to word God. It’s like saying “Wow!! this tastes so good, I mean one can’t actually taste it but it is tasty”

That’s cool. I once had a three hour long conversation with someone who brought a half dozen books and about 50 pages that he had printed out, highlighted and notated.

What the conversation basically came down to was that on two of the hundreds of pages he had in front of him he found an inconsistency. Spirit was used with a capital “S” in one writing and with a lower case “s” in another.

This was all he needed to decide that there was no point in continuing.

The mind is always looking for distractions that take away from one’s focus.
If you want to get stuck on the basic premise, that’s okay.

Maybe some meditation practice would help.

This is just my point of view, and the only one from which I can speak. I believe that when terms like “good fruit” and “divine tree,” it’s not necessarily a theological noncognitive, it’s just a metaphor. If it’s something we are to try to literally understand, it becomes (imho, again) absurd, but if we take it as a symbol, we’re hunky dory.

I do not turn into a spiritual tree bearing spiritual peaches that can be made into spiritual pie that’s delicious with spiritual whipped cream, which is some of the hyperbole we can get into if we try to take spiritual metaphors too literally. However, a person can bear “fruit” such as charity, kindness, and empathy. “By their fruits ye shall know them” had very little to do with actual fruit – and if we try to understand it in an “actual fruit” kind of way, that’s where it gets all noncognitive, since it obviously doesn’t happen.

Amazing how many answers this question has gotten.

@AstroChuck – that’s because of the clear formulation.

Haha

@laureth – i agree completely. Trying to put “spiritual fruit” or “Divine tree” in literal terms is similar to counting the number of “begets” in the Torah in an attempt to determine the age of the Earth.

As far as I can tell, the theory behind theological noncognitivism is just an attempt to muddy the waters. It was probably a reaction to those who took every word of the bible as a literal truth and has about as much relevance.

Saying, “I cant process that thought” is the same conversation ender as “The bible says so” and doesn’t aid anyone except the one who wants to avoid an in depth discussion.

@AstroChuck – getting nervous about your record? : )

Nah. I don’t think you can really call my thread a true record breaker as it’s more of a game. I’m fine with someone breaking it. Although, I don’t think this one will do it though.

I mean, yes! I am worried.

Noon, wow those are some pretty unique arguements there. I’ve never heard them before and think they are fantastic.

Good luck with Firside. He’s one of my favorites to argue religion with because he doesn’t resort to personal attacks and is actually pretty well versed in holy matters.

@bodyhead
It’s actually an interesting strain of logic/philosophy that I’ve only recently fell into. But I have to admit it has much to say and if your someone who loves to pick something apart logically then I recommend you take a look.

Keyword to google/lookup:
Ignosticism
Theological Non-cognativism
Non-Cognativsm
Verificationism

@laureth
Metaphorical language is beautiful. It’s appreciated by all languages. The thing is that it leaves everything up to interpretation and is used for it’s abstract nature. When people start using it to explain how things “are” is where I have a problem. If fireside were to be writing poems about his feelings on this topic that would be one thing. But to construct sentences that proclaim knowledge of something, or proclaim something as fact, that is when the theological non-cognitive issues arise.

@bodyhead – Oh yeah??? well so’s your mom!!! err…I mean, thanks. You guys are a lot of fun too.

@Noon – I’m still not sure how an intelligent person can see ignosticism as anything but the philosophical equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting, “nyah, nyah I can’t hear you” over and over again.

i mean, the etymology alone should tell you something:
From English prefix ignorant, ig-, as in ignorant, + gnostic, knowing

You really want to use an argument that assumes you are ignorant of knowing? : )

Refusing to discuss God on those terms would also negate any discussion of Love, Happiness, Freedom, Justice, etc. These are all things that you feel with your heart even if you mind is having trouble cognitively processing the emotion. They can’t be put in a simple box either and by refusing the discussion all you are doing is negating your input.

Fireside, love, freedom, etc are all definable if only in each persons perception. They are actually defining that persons view of what that is.

If each person’s perception of God is different, wouldn’t that doom some quantity of people to have a glaring wrong perception of what God is.

To say God is beyond comprehension or that God is infinity dooms humanity to worship a dumbed down version of God. We probably also envision a dumbed down version of heaven. If God is so perfect, he could have given humans the abilty to comprehend him. Why wouldn’t he?

…or, at the very least, make the Bible clear and easy to understand.

Ok, well you have to understand that my position on religion is based on my belief in the validity of the prophet’s messages. I believe that there have been 9 major manifestations of God and it is their teachings that inform humanity about the nature of God.

Religions have been formed around their teachings and have been attempting to understand “divine perfection” for years. The thing that appeals to me about my faith is that the words of the prophets are all verifiable and can be viewed in their own handwriting.

To say that God didn’t make the Bible easier to understand is assuming that the Bible is not subject to the errors of humanity. Christ was not alive when the Bible as written and he did not sign off on the text. That means that it is man’s interpretation of the words of the divine prophet.

It seems as though noncognitivism is conveniently situated around religion, but you can take the same hypothesis and say that many things that we use as a basis for our lives are non-existent and therefore not valid.

If terms like love and freedom cannot be defined except within each individual, then how can America have as its core principles “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”?

Is America not a valid nation because of the intangible qualities espoused in our founding documents?

Life, liberty and the persuit of happiness are all pretty straightforward. God is not. Three out of four of those things is definable. God is not. It’s unfair to compare something we can comprehend to something we cannot.

And Firside, I wasn’t specificly alluding to the bible up there. I was just saying, why didn’t God make us with the ability to understand him?

We do have the ability to understand God, it’s just that our human egos that get in the way of our higher nature.

The pursuit of happiness is pretty straightforward?

This can be confusing because of the widespread belief in Happiness and the common use of the series of letters H-a-p-p-i-n-e-s-s as if it is already understood that it has some cognitively understandable meaning.

Does happiness mean the same thing to me as it does to you? What defines happiness? Does happiness manifest itself differently to different people among different circumstances? How do you know when you are happy?

Same thing still applies to Love. How do you know when you are in love? How do you describe it to others? Does everyone have the same understanding of love? Is love the same every time it appears.

Theological noncognitivism…concludes that religious language is meaningless because it is not verifiable.

How do you verify Love or Happiness?

Knowledge of God rests in the heart, not the head.

Wait, is that sentence straightforward? Do you think I mean the literal heart, or are you used to working with concepts that may be a little fuzzy? If not, fair enough. Some people have a greater ability to conceptualize than others. “Does not compute” just seems a bit robotic to me and I think that humans are capable of so much more.

Not the humans that supervise me.

@fireside
Yes ig- from ignorant. And I would rather admit ignorance than fake knowledge. And by calling myself ignostic also implies that I believe you (and everyone else for that matter) ignorant to the definition of god, not just me.

As for your Love, Happiness argument. I’m just going to keep this one simple. Love and Happiness have been shown to have physical attributes. Research in brain chemistry have shown them to be “real” and in a way “tangible”. Sure how you may experience happiness is slightly different than how I experience happiness, but if we are given the same chemical known for making people “happy” we both experience “happiness”. Or if we had our brains scanned while we were experiencing “happiness” we would have similar parts of our brain active.

Do you see how this is a far cry from your noncognative definitions of God? I can say happiness is a firing of these neurons in reaction to these chemicals (Ok, I can say that, but I’m not really a neuro scientist so don’t actually know which chemicals and where) blah blah blah. This is a cognitive definition.

Knowledge of god resting in our hearts is noncognative. Where in our hearts? Why our hearts? Why not our spleen? If I say knowledge of god rests in my spleen, is he more or less powerful than the knowledge of your god resting in your heart? What does “Knowledge of God rests in the heart, not the head.” mean?

Fair enough.
I prefer to believe that humans are more than logic, you don’t.

But it does make me think of Spock frm Star Trek. It was his human side that allowed him to feel emotion. Not his logical side.

But on a side note, I was having a conversation with someone last night and think that i know where seVen got the idea for this thread.

“If a prisoner felt that he could no longer endure the realities of camp life, he found a way out in his mental life – an invaluable opportunity to dwell in the spiritual domain, the one that the SS were unable to destroy. Spiritual life strengthened the prisoner, helped him adapt, and thereby improved his chances of survival.”

Victor Frankl
Man’s Search for Meaning, p. 123

@fireside
I think someone who believes this life was their first last and only life would have just as much conviction to survive. I would even say more so than anyone who thought there was something after this life.

As for your Spock comment. I don’t think I ever said emotion was illogical. I think humans are in fact much more than logic. But If you are going to talk about facts, or express things as facts, they should hold up to logical scrutiny.

I’m talking about belief, not fact. I never said that what i believe was absolute truth.
Just like every religion, that’s all you can do when talking about something beyond our conception.

Just because we don’t have all the answers is no reason to discount the wealth of spiritual experiences around the world. Also, did you happen to see Monty’s thread about the chemical reactions that cause spiritual experiences in the brain? Sounds like these experiences can be recreated by stimulating neurons also.

Do we know that the existence of the trigger in the brain means that there is God? No, but we can wonder at the purpose. The same way that we can wonder at the existence of love and emotion or opposable thumbs. They are all a part of how we developed so they must serve some purpose.

How do you cognitively process love? Do you think about the chemicals in your brain and the blood reactions as the entirety of love? Seems pretty empty to experience emotion by cataloging the physical symptoms and assuming that there is nothing more to it.

@fireside
“I’m talking about belief, not fact. I never said that what i believe was absolute truth.”
Forgive me if I have chosen to believe in facts. And forgive me if I find your statement ignorant.

“Just because we don’t have all the answers is no reason to discount the wealth of spiritual experiences around the world.”
It’s not that we don’t have all the answers we have no answers. That is a big ol’ zero on the answer board. You may have a point if the spiritual experiences had provided some answers and therefore are bound to provide more, but they have not provided any, which gives me just cause to discount them.

I did not see Monty’s thread but I assume you are talking about the frontal lobe and the research that has been done on frontal lobe seizures causing “religious” visions. This would be a perfect situation to prove something god related. Imagine if triggering this section of the brain in large group of people all brought back the same message, the same knowledge, the same experience. That would, beyond a reasonable doubt, prove very much the existence of something beyond us. Oh wait…..but that isn’t what happens. People who have experienced said seizures have completely different experiences, everything from believing they have met god to believing they are god.

Yes, I understand that love is a complex chemical reaction in my head. Does that mean it lessens my experience of it? Does it mean that I Love my husband less? Hell no. I mean I understand that taking ibuprofen causes all these chemical reactions to reduce swelling and that is what lessens my pain. Does that mean that now that I understand the chemical reaction behind it, I don’t have to take it? no.

Ok, if you think my comments are ignorant, so be it.
That won’t limit my life in any way.

I don’t think anyone in this thread is ignorant or making ignorant comments. There’s no law that says you do or don’t have to believe evidence. When it comes right down to it, you choose what you believe. I choose to be an atheist.

I think is was said best when someone stated in another thread that we actually believe in the exact same thing. One of us just thinks the axioms that make up the universe are of divine origin. There’s no need to poo poo someone else’s arguement. They might be closer to the truth then you are.

The only person who knows God’s will because he speaks with him personally is George Bush. God told Bush to go to war in Iraq. I know that because Bush said it in a press conference.

Fireside, to me, and I will admit that I verge on Vulcan more then most, I think that ‘spiritual evidence’ is an oxymoron. It’s almost like saying ‘imaginary evidence’.

You guys are getting a little heated there. Be nicer then you think you should be and your point will seem more valid then it is. The second your opponent resorts to underhanded attacks, it makes you look right as hell.

I apologize for the ignorant comment. It was an attempt to bring back the link that fireside had made between ignostic. But on rereading was probably a bit harsh.

However, using my slip as just reason to debunk all I have said is a cop out.

I wouldn’t use a minor slip of the ego to debunk any relevant points of which there are a few.
Body is right though. Once someone resorts to name calling, it is generally a sign that they have a weak argument.

I still just don’t see any difference between the usage of the term Love and the usage of the term God to convey complex ideas that are not always specific or consistent. To me it is just a disingenuous logic game, but that’s me.

@bodyhead – spiritual experience, not evidence : ) You can’t say something is imaginary if it happens to people. the most you can hypothesize is that they misnamed the experience.

—
I guess to sum up my beliefs, faith is a lot like positive thinking. If I were to really dumb it down, I would recall the story of the Little Engine that Could.

If the little engine didn’t get up a head of steam and have faith that moving forward would get him up the hill, then he would have been stuck at the base of the hill saying, “I refuse to accept that I can get up that hill until I am provided with some empirical evidence.” If someone came along and showed him that they could get up the hill, then his response might be, “Sure maybe you can make it up the hill, but that doesn’t prove that I can.”

Leaving God out of it since that is such a difficult term to understand:
If people have faith in a spiritual self that is free from the individualistic trappings of the ego, then they may choose to focus on that higher self. The more people that focus on their higher self, the more likely that humanity as a whole will rise to a higher level of interaction.

If there is nothing else but these 70–80 years, then it may as well be a fight for survival and the individual ego may overpower that higher purpose.

I would prefer to believe in the uplifting of humanity through God’s word and I feel that I have found a religion that meets the criteria that I had in my mind.

But hey, to each his own.

@bodyhead-
“When it comes right down to it, you choose what you believe.”

Not sure I agree with that. I never made a decision to be an atheist. I just don’t believe in God. How exactly do you make a choice as to what you believe in?

@fireside
Yep, I’ll be the first to say that when someone resorts to ad hominem attacks, they are mostly likely the one with a weaker argument. For the record the “attack” was directed to your statement. And as I stated before in my apology, it was a bad attempt to bring back your calling ignostisism ignorant. which if I wanted to get all picky, would be you calling my beliefs ignorant, but that is neither here nor there

As for your analogy, I love it. That you for “really dumb[ing] it down”. The problem is that it kinda proves my point. Having another train, of similar situation, go up the hill is empirical evidence. He would be stupid to not admit that going over the hill is quite possible.

But in actuality, the train analogy doesn’t work. Because the steam engine is quite understood. It could be explained to the train, and the math could actually be worked out for whether or not the train could get up the hill. In an attempt to extend your analogy to “knowing god”. I would say that it would be more like a train without tracks or engine or wheels, telling another train without tracks, engine, or wheels that they most definitely could get over the hill, even though neither of them ever have.

Actually, that analogy was about positive thinking. : )
Its the same as when you go to a job. If you go in with an attitude that you won’t get the job, then you most likely won’t but if you go in with a positive attitude you will be more likely to succeed.

I left out God, since that was such a complicated issue.

Well, you’re all better men than me (not that I’m a man). I no longer make any attempt to have a considered, rational discussion about religion because the terminology and phraseology that gets tossed about as “proof” or “evidence” are just gobbledygook to me. I’ll stick to believing in things that can be scientifically supported or proven.

@syz
The voice of reason ;-)

@fireside
Please show me how I actually thinking I will get a job will get me a job? When an employer is looking for a new hire no part of interview is “Do you think you are getting this job? Oh you do? Well the job is yours.”

You are attributing powers to the act of “thinking positively” that it does not have. Walking into the job interview thinking you are going to get the job, didn’t get you the job. Possibly some of the side effects of that did (looking confident, upbeat etc.)

Someone who ‘thought’ they weren’t going to get the job, that was still able to convince the interviewer that they thought they were getting the job would do better than someone who ‘thought’ they were going to get the job, but was not able to convince the interviewer of that. (Sorry that was an awful run on sentence, but I am sure you understand what I mean)

To bring back your example. The train ‘thinking’ it can, didn’t get it over the hill, it was the ability of it to get over the hill that got it over the hill. If the train did not have enough coal it simply wouldn’t get over the hill, no matter how much it thought it could.

ok, so you don’t like God or positive thinking.
whatever.

Not a question of like. I “put faith” in the lack of evidence for god and positive thinking.
(Not actually faith, but it sounded good, no? Trust might be a better word, but with the understanding that when there is evidence for positive thinking or god we can talk.)

Not really sure what you were trying to say with your last post, but I’m not really interested anymore either. There is no point in continuing if you keep taking things I say and changing them to make your points.

I said “more likely to succeed” not “get a job” but again, whatever. The train analogy was the same idea. If someone looks at a challenge and says to themselves that it can’t be done, then they most likely will not try or will try with the expectation of failing. I never said that it wasn’t within the train to get up the hill.

If you think that people who walk around with a negative attitude have more success than people who walk around with a positive one, then that is fine.

That hasn’t been my experience, but to each his own.

Yea, I don’t check this as much as I once did so sorry about the late replies. Chuck, you do choose what to believe. You choose to believe in science and repeatable outcomes. You could choose to think that God did it and he controls every aspect of life.

Having a positive attitude is not restricted to religious people. I’m more of a realist myself but I’d like to think I have a positive attitude (especially where work is concerned).

Noon, I bust a gut laughing at your crazy analytical version of the little engine that could. Thanks for that.

I’m sorry. I don’t buy that. I can no more decide to believe in God than anyone who does can choose not to. Just try and believe in the Easter bunny. I don’t think it will work.

Lets put it this way. If you’re given two different theories of the universe, such as the big bang and god made everything out of clay that he magiced up. You choose to believe which one makes the most sense to you.

I do see your point though. I guess you don’t really choose which one makes the most sense to you.

Maybe I’m full of crap Chuck. Someone I was debating brought that deficiency to my attention.

If I learned anything from movies, it’s that you can make yourself believe anything. Just follow this simple recipe.

1. Play some nostalgic, sweeping orchestral music in the background.
2. Place your hand over your heart.
3. Close your eyes.
4. Breathe deeply in and out several times.
5. Whisper to yourself, “I believe… I believe… I believe…”
6. Open your eyes and…
7. Proceed to change the world, save your girlfriend, win the game, whatever.

—

You can thank me later.

rob, are you giving everybody the (blue) bird?

lol, i figured the trip saber was an inside joke

Shame on me for thinking that. I should have known you’d never flip anyone off. Right?

Only people I really, really like.

How in the fuck did I miss this!?

@asmonet – I feel your pain.

Mods let this stupid shit stand, but delete much better questions??

@The_unconservative_one – Perhaps it slipped through the cracks. Mods are busy sometimes.

If you think it is worth flagging, perhaps you ought to flag it. That will bring it to the Mods attention directly. As a member of Fluther, you too have the privilege of flagging.

@laureth except if you are on the iphone site in which case you can only look on and weep.

I like seVen’s questions because for one reason a lot of people seem to start answering them. And some cool dialogue comes about. Syz wrote this first, and I read it after saying it out loud first.

But still…..when it comes to this particular question…..

What?

Are we off subject to the question yet?

I can’t tell for sure.

I don’t know. Ask Dick Cheney—his DOJ lawyers obviously crafted the question.

Die with faith? You may have faith up to the moment of death but, I assure you, faith and everything else relying on consciousness goes away with the consciousness that sustains it.

A Nazi torturer and any other kind of torturer, for that matter, can take..

(A) Anything physical… and…
(B) Anything else that you give up.