What is your justification for believing in the supernatural?

I like the question; "Could it be that we are wrong about most things we believe, and about most things we think we know?"

Most likely the answer is yes. But that should not deter us. Failing is the best way to learn how to succeed.

I have often asked the question of how we can even justify the question of gods.



Good point...made by several people.

I have absolutely no problem asking the question: "Could what we consider the universe actually just be a particle in an experiment being conducted by beings in a much larger portion of the megaverse?"

Atheism is ostensibly the doctrine (note the word doctrine) that there is no God. Some atheists support this claim by arguments. But these arguments are usually directed against the Christian concept of God, and are largely irrelevant to other possible gods. Thus much Western atheism may be better understood as the doctrine (there's that word again) that the Christian God does not exist.

Agnosticism may be strictly personal and confessional--"I have no firm belief about God"--or it may be the more ambitious claim that no one ought (ought is morality preaching, hence religious) to have a positive belief for or against the divine existence. Perhaps only the ambitious version invites an argument. A promising version might combine something like William Clifford's dictum that no one ought to hold a belief on insufficient evidence with the claim that the existence of God is evidentially indeterminable. Both of these claims, of course, have been strongly contested.

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church—the official exposition of the Catholic Church's Christian beliefs—the Commandments are considered essential for spiritual good health and growth, and serve as the basis for social justice.

Don't mind me.

Gods are justified on the basis of the regulation of behaviour. Particularly sexual behaviour.

The atheist and the agnostic need to answer the question I'm afraid and if they put it on Ignore, or thumb it down, they are wittering.

—the Commandments are considered essential for spiritual good health and growth, and serve as the basis for social justice.

What Christians want to know is how these aims are to be met by the legislative process and particularly regarding sexual behaviour.

Even with 90% of Americans having religious beliefs these aims are not being met too well so what would happen if those beliefs were entirely in abeyance.

The atheist and agnostic panel's obvious fear of the sexual question, when it is the nuts and bolts of the whole edifice, highlights the utter pointlessness of everything they say.

Sexual hang-ups and timid, ladylike delicacies are hardly the basis for a rational discussion and quickly lead to such things as --"Could what we consider the universe actually just be a particle in an experiment being conducted by beings in a much larger portion of the megaverse?" and other similar metaphysical nonsense.

I have a theory that if the gorgeous only daughter of a devout Christian multi-millionaire had the hots for an atheist or an agnostic he would be on his knees at the altar rails with head bowed and praying like billyho as fast as he could get there.

The whole genesis of anti-Christian ideas is the rejection of the sexual prohibitions of Christian teaching. The justifications for the rejection, wierd and wonderful as they tend to be, soon displace the original source, most obviously with homosexuals, and take on a life of their own and become a matter in which pride is obsessively involved due to the number of witnesses who cannot be wished away.

The Christian God is justified on the basis of the non-legislative regulation of sexual behaviour. Thus the atheist and the agnostic get the regulation of sexual behaviour generally without feeling it applies to them personally. Nice eh?

As Setanta said--it's hilarious

I rarely do, as most of what you post seems nonsensical, so laced with irony and sarcasm that it's hard to distinguish jest from honest opinion, if you ever gave one...

That's honest opinion which you have avoided confronting. It is not really an opinion. It's a fact which you are avoiding confronting for personal reasons.

—the Commandments are considered essential for spiritual good health and growth, and serve as the basis for social justice.

The atheist and agnostic panel's obvious fear of the sexual question, when it is the nuts and bolts of the whole edifice, highlights the utter pointlessness of everything they say.

Sexual hang-ups and timid, ladylike delicacies are hardly the basis for a rational discussion and quickly lead to such things as --"Could what we consider the universe actually just be a particle in an experiment being conducted by beings in a much larger portion of the megaverse?" and other similar metaphysical nonsense.

I ain't never seen nothing like this nowhere before not ever.

I assume, or hope, that it is not typical of American discourse. Do you guys spend a lot of time in beauty parlours?

I was raised Catholic. Became an agnostic at about age 25 or so (I'll be 76 in August)...although I really did not use the word "agnostic" to describe myself until I began formally debating in letters to the editor...at around age 35.

Sitting on the fence concerning God, or even a reality that involves a god, is tantamount to sitting on the fence concerning beliefs in unicorns and flying spaghetti monsters.

It's nonsense. Just because the idea of gods serve that function in a social context, that is a matter of shared beliefs, not validation of the belief that gods are real and have anything to do with the creation of the world.

The commandments are inherited from older cultures than those Christianity happen in.

What's the link between Frank's statement and "sexual hang-ups and timid, ladylike delicacies"?

Well, ya see that there's a quintuple negative (if I haven't miscounted, now), so that makes it a genuine negative, and not a negated negative (that means a positive for some of us that are as sharp as a pencil without a lead, I say now, a pencil without a lead--ya know?--as bright as a burned out light bulb.)

To acknowledge what you do not know – is a display of strength. To pretend you know what you truly don’t – is a display of weakness.

Yeah, but you don't put as much weight on your ambivalence about the existence of unicorns and flying spaghetti monsters, which you rather offhandedly dismiss, as you do your ambivalence about the existence of gods.