ARGH. AAAAAAAARGH. A good portion of the post got accidentally deleted. And it was a really, really, really long one. ARGH. *wallbang*
Nevermind. Found it.
Thing is, if you believe the Bible (though admittedly, you pick and choose, which I believe is pointless but that's not what this is about)
THE BIBLE IS NOT ONE BOOK. IT. IS. A. COLLECTION. OF. THEM.
Sorry for that outburst, I didn't think I would have to repeat this.
, God has smited people, eaning that he obviously can and has no aversion to it,
In the books of the Biblical collection I don't believe in, yes.
The fact that that is an option implies that God likes rapists and murderers and that, as they haven't been not-made.
Their choices to be murderers and rapists are their choices, not God's.
I'm sorry, but you've said that the reason you prefer Jesus to Mohammod is Jesus gained less. It's really bugging me that you haven't explained why that makes him right. Others have said this already, but at the very most, that would mean he thinks he's right.
I think his subjective experiences are true because I have faith that they are. Again, when it comes to things strictly-tied to subjective experience, you can only have trust that the experiencer is telling the truth, and because of the circumstances, I am inclined to believe that He is.
Sure he could have been dillusional, but that wouldn't have affected his charisma, or he wouldn't have gained the followers he gained. Saying that dillusions affect conviction is unfounded, and even so this all conjecture.
Being mentally ill does effect your people skills, because you can't control your delusions. Its a bit unlikely that all of his delusions worked in his charismatic favor when acquiring followers.
Either way, if that's your only reason to believe Jesus over other prophets, then surely Saiddhatta Guthama would be the obvious choice. After all, he was born in riches and chose to give them all up. Evidentally, this guy not only had less to gain than Jesus, he also lost so much more. In this case, obviously, life doesn't matter as each believed the next life would be better (or in Sid's case, that it would end the suffering).
I actually do believe his experiences could be true, I just haven't finished my exhaustive research on them yet.
Four gospels written by followers of Jesus. And, hell, they contradict each other.
Can you provide specific examples? From my research, they sync up pretty well, and each one adds different, but non-contradictory, information.
When the Japanese believed the Emperor was a living god, there were tons of literature about how he was divine and powerful. Why is it different when it's about Jesus?
Because Jesus is not a ruler. If you said "The Japanese Emperor is not a living God" when they believed that, bad things would happen to you. Saying "Jesus is not a living God." will not lead to a whole bunch of people attacking you at the time of Jesus living or now.
But the people? The majority? They wanted to believe that they could be forgiven for their sins. They wanted to believe in a heaven, and that their horrible lives would be better after death.
Why wouldn't they just believe that they are automatically sinless at birth and automatically go to heaven, and why would they want to believe that the person who say, murdered their entire family with the exception of them, won't get any punishment because he got saved?
That's how beliefs survive. Judaism survived Egypt's extravagence and Rome's hedonism by being morally rigid, and so not being absorbed. The same is said about Jesus. There were tons of 'messiahs' around his time, it's just that Jesus' teaching were sufficiently different to Judaism that they couldn't be consumed back into the faith.
If there "tons", please present a list of ten different messiahs forming new sects of Judaism living from 6BC-33AD.
Or a more modern example- voodoo. Sure, the original religion has been pretty diluted and mixed with Christianity, but it's still sufficiently different to be regarded as a different religion. A cool one, too. Their death god has sunglasses and a top hat, guys!
Please do research before saying something ignorant like that. For one thing, Maman Brigitte is a goddess, or more accurately, a Loa (or Lwa, I forget which) and she can be traced back to an Irish saint.
Unless you were referring to the psychopomp Papa Ghede, whose depictions differ, and the one you mentioned in one of many. Papa Ghede is said to be the first man to die, and I would assume such an ancient human would not have or prefer the items you mentioned, but I digress.
The thing is, you can tell that people think like you do, as thier actions are predictably similar to your own. That's why empathy is possible.
Or maybe they are similar to my own because my mind is making them all up, and I'm the only living, thinking thing in all of reality?
And a noice higher pitched than you can hear is logical, too. If you know that pitches change, and there is nothing that really limits the pitch, then logically the pitch will continue to be higher than your hearing.
But if I am told a song that consists of noises I can't hear sounds like Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water, I would have to have faith that it does because I can't hear it.
The afterlife is different, as the only thing you are able to compare it to is life. However, because the default stance is that there is no afterlife, then you only have Life with nothing to compare it to. When I say life, I don't mean being alive, I mean the world we can experience.
Yes, you can only express concepts that have are inequivalent to the world now with metaphors, what is your point?
If it's belief in something that you cannot experience for yourself, then it is belief without evidence.
Can someone who can't smell have evidence that certain poisons smell like walnuts? They can have faith that it does, but they can't experience it forthemselves.
"Paranormal" encounters are simply events that people are incapable of explaining, or explainable events that people are overly willing to ascribe to "paranormal" causes. There is a scientific explanation for every "paranormal" event that has ever been described (except for those fabricated or exaggerated so as to exclude the actual scientific explanation), that mankind, at the time of the event, did not have the scientific knowledge to explain the event is not evidence that the event was "paranormal", simply that man was not knowledgeable enough to explain it.
How do we know that other explanations of it are incorrect without knowing the actual explanation? Thats silly.
As for people's beliefs in the afterlife from an early point, that was there attempts to explain death and other natural phenomena when they didn't have the knowledge, or the intelligence to use that knowledge, to explain natural phenomena. But now we can explain most natural phenomena previously ascribed to supernatural causes. Why is the Norse belief that lightning was Thor out for a stroll any more valid as an explanation for lightning than the Christian belief that we all go to heaven when we die as an explanation for death?
Because we have no explanation for what happens to the thinking consciousness of a human after they expire, wherein we have an explanation of lightning.
Furthermore, basing your beliefs on reality on what people thought while less knowledge about reality is a bit silly.
"Less knowledge"? We still don't know what happens in a subjective experience of a human being once their bodies stop functioning anymore than the people of Jesus' time did.
It may be callous to dismiss the experiences of others, but it isn't callous to dismiss their interpretation of those experiences. What people once thought was holy fire coming from the sky is now known to be ball lightning. Same experience, different interpretations. One is based on superstition, the other on science. The one based on objective fact is objectively true.
Yes but what we experience after we expire is not ball lightning, nor do we have any explanations of what happens as clear as the ball lightning's explanation.
Again, all subjective experiences are also objective experiences, it is the interpretation of the experience that is subjective. One person's experience with the "after-life" could have been a dream, a psychotic episode or a bad drug trip. It is ridiculous to dismiss the scientific explanations of a phenomena before the "paranormal" explanations.
But there is no scientific explanation of our subjective experience of reality after our bodies cease function. Does it just "end"? What would the "ending" feel like? Would we be aware of this "ending"?
In fact, it is ridiculous to even consider "paranormal" explanations before first disproving all the scientific ones.
What scientific explanations?
Again, his experiences are not subjective, his interpretation of them is. Any interpretation of an experience that occurred in this reality that is not supported by the physical laws of this reality is a false interpretation of that experience.
Why are we confined to the physical laws of this reality when He is clearly referring to another reality?
