Pornaddict since '92 said:
So what you are saying is that's it's all about spelling??
N.b. "well thought out." Selective blindness? LOL!
Judas << "Just give me a sign!" Is that what you're after? Doesn't quite work that way. As I said before, if something satisfies you that God doesn't exist, then there's your disproof for you and it's clearly subjective. At the moment, neither of us knows 99.999...% of everything that can be possibly known, do you agree? It's not a question of "evidences," as it were, it boils down to abandoning faulty "disproofs" and preconceptions -- don't these distort our ability to understand things clearly? No matter how conclusive a bit of logic may seem to you, it will never be incontrovertible. Btw, deist and theist are two completely different things.
i havent read any of the other posts,.. but i would say most people that believe in a religion and dont question a thing about it are 10x more intellectually lazy than say me, an athiest.
Technic << Maybe, but "people that believe in a religion and dont question a thing about it" have nothing to do with this discussion. We have also abandoned the idea of intellectual laziness and are concentrating on the question of "finality and closure." It's often worth ascertaining how the discussion has progressed!
Beliefs are not "choices." They are voluntary states of mind based on many things like desire for the truth of the belief, the language used in discussing beliefs, etc. ...So for a god-person to tell me that I am "misguided" and need to "choose" God, is ignorant.
??? Who's doing that anyway?
protovack << "Voluntary"
does imply choice, by definition, so there's no real differentiation here. Yes beliefs are multi-faceted. More often than not, the desire for the truth of the belief distorts it, making it more of a bias.
I think there was a link posted here before to
Summa Contra Gentiles by St. Thomas Aquinas, addressing these very issues with great depth and insight. Here it is again. Indubitably worth the read.
http://www.nd.edu/Departments/Maritain/etext/gc.htm