@vikorr,
vikorr wrote:That God (the being) cannot be seen, touch, smelt etc is fact. You know this, and your talk about logic...is in the form of a diversion, enabling you to avoid acknowledging this incredibly obvious difference (and you don't acknowledge or deny it - you just avoid it). You do notice how often the word avoid applies to your behaviours?
You can't see/touch/smell/etc. the universe in its totality, yet you know it exists because of all the things you can see/touch/smell/etc. that exist as products of the universe.
Do you deny the existence of the universe because it's can't be circumscribed? No, so why God then?
Quote:
We cannot escape the inventiveness of the human mind, nor its abilities to make associations that can be right, wrong, or undetermined. We cannot escape that our minds can create attributes, and that we can create homogeneous ones at that. You call this Atheist twaddle (even though I am not an atheist). I call such recognition honesty, as it's impossible to deny outside of self deceit (as we absolutely can do this). I hope God exists, as I rather like the idea of God, but I am not certain of that fact.
Everything the human mind is capable of was a latent potential of the universe before humans ever emerged as species; or do you disagree with that?
Quote:You can't explain God not to exist without needing something else to attribute divine power/actions to.
Scientists offer the Big Bang. [/quote]
The Big Bang is an event. It is an interpretation of the universe in terms of universal expansion. It doesn't account for all the latent potential for everything that manifests within the universe, only the observation of redshift between galaxies, which is interpreted to imply expansion, which in turn is interpreted to be the result of an initial expansion from a single point.
Nothing in Big Bang theory explains the emergence of life, let alone consciousness, sentience, and/or intelligence.
Quote:However, when I say I am not certain that God exists - my view is that, if he/she/it does exist, it is not in the way portrayed by any of the major religions.
That's like arguing Captain Kirk doesn't exist in the way William Shatner portrayed him. Captain Kirk in fact DOES exist, but not as a flesh and blood human being but rather as an idea/character that emerged from Gene Roddenberry's mind, and the personality traits represented in the Kirk character are universal traits that can be found in many different minds and historical examples; so by limiting your thinking to the superficial level, you can deny the existence of something that actually exists in universal form outside of the narrow 'portrayal' you have construed in your mind.
Religion creates metaphors to teach people about things they don't understand yet, so if you debate their metaphors, you are just failing to understand what those metaphors are trying to teach about by wanting the metaphors to be more than just a representation of something deeper and thus less easy to describe than the material thing that serves as the metaphor.
Quote:Arithmetic isn't the only realm of cognition that exhibits universality. For any and every difference/discrepancy you can find/cite at any level, there is some connected level that is universal.
It was you that offered the example. It is up to you to show that the difference doesn't exist, as you continue to imply...rather than make vague allusions (or diversions) to some unnamed evidence. I've pulled you up on this type of behaviour before, where you claim deeper understanding, but never name/specify it, exhibit it, or articulate it, no matter how many times you were asked.[/quote]
I just gave you a Captain Kirk example. As I said, anything that seems culturally relative at a superficial corresponds with deeper values that are universal. You gave the example of burping being rude, so if you would examine the deep reason someone considers burping rude, you might find that it stimulates thoughts of vomiting and vomiting is unpleasant and is associated with illness and/or that nausea is contagious, like yawning; so whatever the reason someone has for disliking burping, it is something that comes from a deeper experience that is shared universally due to universalities in biological functions, etc.
Quote:You asked for two examples of relative truths. I gave them to you. There is a reason they are described as relative truths. Your answer is that if they understood at a deeper level, both sides of what is the truth would agree. Did anyone deny this? Relative truth occurs at particular levels of belief...that doesn't make them not relative truths (unless you want to redefine what truths and relative truths are to people). The same could be said for subjective truths like beauty - one person finds a piece of art beautiful, and the other doesn't, and such is driven by their:
- genetics
- understanding; and
- life experiences
Their perspective is true to both viewers of the piece of art. It doesn't make one person right, and the other wrong. Both views are true to each respective individual.
Regardless of what people find beautiful or ugly, the aesthetic experience is universal because people perceive sensory information in correspondence with emotions and other feelings. So you give children candy that's brightly colored with dyes and contains basically pure sugar mixed with some chemical aroma-flavoring and the children are programmed to like it because their different senses are getting stimulated simultaneously with their sugar/pleasure-response, but as people get older, they see that artificial flavoring and pure sugar are not really good for them so they start to appreciate other foods more.
The same is true of art. Kids might really like posters of their favorite cartoon characters while an adult begins appreciating more abstract art, but they still like certain themes more than others because they correspond with other experiences in their memory. Different people have different connections between memories and pleasure-experience but the fundamental experiences of sensory-perception, cognition, pleasure, etc. are universal.
Quote:You complain that I point your posting behaviours out - yet it is quite obvious, from having to point them out so often, that despite many explanations - that you continue to have great difficulty in engaging in logical conversation (which by definition tries its best to be free of self deceit. Free of self deceit is usually not hypocritical. Etc).
It is impossible for you to engage in discussion without peppering it with these kinds of accusations. I guess you're just really into winning debates so you use accusation as a way of putting the other person in defense.
You are more concerned with losing than with truth and that is what makes you a loser.