Do you believe in god?

[Grey Acumen]

Sri Lumpa said:

Grey Acumen said:

Oh good fucking grief, this is so retarded. all this does is show the limitations of your own perceptions. I mean, hell, I can even come up with a proper response to this: God creates himself, only more powerful. Tadah! God is all powerful

1.) Ok, poor phrasing on my part, rephrase it with "can god create ANOTHER being more powerful than him?" if you prefer

thus you should not be attempting to express his capabilities through rational numbers. What you should be using is infinity, which is a constantly increasing number that no matter how high you count, you keep going. Hence God's powers may constantly be growing as well. I can never get over just how narrow minded someone has to be to think that God, a "ALL POWERFUL" being who is responsible for creating and maintaining the continued operation of the entire universe, is supposedly going to be constrained to the same mental limitations, perceptions, and awareness as a human being, ei NOT ALL POWERFUL. It's like a man thinking he can accurately tell his wife exactly what childbirth will feel like, or like an Amish computer tech service, or hollywood depicting reality.

2.) Actually I believe that it is much more likely for god to be constrained by lack of existence and hence NOT POWERFUL AT ALL rather than limited in power.

You think infinite power, and thing that I think limited power whereas I think lack of power due to lack of existence is the most plausible alternative.

Though a god (or being in general) could very well have created the universe without being all powerful, he would just need to be very, very powerful so that to us he would appear all powerful without being so.

Also, in order for someone to do good, they have to believe that there is a universal good and bad, not subject to the opinion of the masses. Otherwise all they are doing is what other people want them to do.

I do believe in a universal good and bad. It is just that I believe that it exists regardless of the existence or nonexistence of any particular deity and that a chaotic god giving us immoral commands does not make said command moral, it makes said god immoral.

In essence the existence of god and the existence of morality are orthogonal to each other, hence why I call myself orthotheist.

Even if the god of the bible or the koran or the vedas revealed itself in a theoretically undisprovable manner and offered me conversion to its faith (say, because he thinks I'm a nice guy and hates to see me go to hell because I don't believe in him) I would not jump at the occasion and instantly convert to judaism/christianity/islam/hinduism but would also need to know that his moral were good morals (either because I already think so or because he can convince me by logical means why they are; though being very powerful he could doubtlessly change me to believe them to be regardless of whether I would find them good or abject of my own volition).

3.) You could say that one of the differences between you and me is that I consider all the gods to be part of the masses whose opinion you do not want to be subject to whereas you pick out one of them whose opinion you say you subject yourself to (though you probably don't as I am sure there are plenty of things in the bible that god did, said, or inspired its authors to write that you would disagree with).

If you believe in a universal good and bad, then you essentially are believing in the most basic fundamental principles of god, upon which all other teachings are founded.

Wrong, godhood does not imply goodness as plenty of religions have had evil gods. It is only the narrowminded judeo-christiano-islamic view that think that due to them postulating only one full god that they view as omnibenevolent no matter what atrocities he commits.

EDIT: And yes, I know that isn't a perfectly mathematically accurate description of infinity, but the point still stands. People keep thinking of All Powerful as this static point that never changes, when anyone who has ever seriously attempted to better themselves know that perfection is NEVER a destination to be reached, but an ever increasing goal to be continually strived for.

4.) But this is not what the bible says (haven't read the koran so I would have to ask superchunk on that), it says that god is perfect, not that he strives to be. It is the bible that implies said point stands still and that god is there and that we humans should be striving for it.

1.) Like I said, limited perception on your part. Light is exhibits properties of both a particle and a wave, I don't recall any recent science explaining how this is possible. Same thing, God can create something that is not himself that then is himself.

2.) Scientifically, that's the flaw in your arguments. Your arguments are based on the idea that the more we learn about Science, the more we learn that God can't have done. In the typical description, God CREATED the universe and is responsible for it's motion and how it operates, hence the most science can claim is "Oh, I see how we can do the same thing, I bet when God did this, the universe exhibited similar properties"
The issue at hand here is that if I'm right about God existing, then circular logics are going to be necessary because of the very properties of his existence that defy the limitations of the physical universe because he is the one who created them. He is literally a being that, by his most basic description, has to have existed outside the bounds of the physical universe. HE CREATED IT, hence he "existed" before it. We are bound by the physical laws because we can only exist in and perceive the physical universe that we are in, however, as it's creator, God must have existed at a point in which those laws did NOT exist.
However, for your points you have offered various "logical" tests as "proof" of God's inexistance. However, EVERY SINGLE ONE of these arguments are all based on the initial idea that God doesn't exist. The only issue is that scientifically, that is unsound. So by that fact, if you want to believe in God, you must rest those beliefs on proofs that conflict with the very laws that supposedly dictate your own beliefs. My beliefs of God is "why" and Science is "how we can do what god already knows how to do" has none of those conflicts. circular logic? perhaps, but just like rock paper scissors and yinyang and nature itself, a flow is often a sign of harmony and balance

3.) Actually, my beliefs are founded on the fact that people are not perfect, nor is language, and politics only makes things worse. I don't make the mistake of going "well, it said it in the bible, I must kill and stomp out anything that seems to conflict with the bible" because the first thing that you should do is check what the bible says (a book written by man) against the 10 commandments (direct words of god) though still, currently written in language invented by man wich is not perfect, hence needing to be carefully reinterpreted every so often in order to avoid loss of original intent. Most religions forget this, but I don't, which is why my beliefs aren't bound to the same stupid logical falacies that most religious documents have their doctrines peppered with.

4.) Again, limited perception on your part. I never said God wasn't already perfect, I said perfection is constantly increasing. God is not constantly striving to reach perfection, he IS that ever increasing point of perfection. Hence no matter how "perfect" we are able to make something (not in theory, in reality), there is always a way to improve, or become more accurate. So there isn't any conflict with what any bible has said and what I have said.