| bimmylee said: My argument is specifically about whether or not God exists. Let's stay on-topic here. Faith has everything to do with it. By not believing in God, a person is taking a leap of faith by assuming (without evidence) that we are all here accidentally. What you are believing is no more probable than what I am believing. (And if probability does not matter to you, then who cares if the life of Jesus was "improbable" or even "impossible"? It still happened.) Not good enough for you? Let's consider human rights. The ideal of human rights says that each human being is of infinite worth. There are three possible sources for our conviction concerning human rights: GOD - Are humans given intrinsic value and rights because they are created by God in his image? Certainly not... too many people don't believe in God, so we need to find another basis for human rights. NATURE - Does nature show us that it is natural to honor the individual? Definitely no... natural selection and Darwinian principles are all about the strong preying upon the weak, which contradicts everything we believe about human rights. POSITIVE LAW - Did we create morality through law, custom, etc. because it makes society work better? No way... genocide is considered "wrong" only because those in power say so. But the whole point of human rights is that it enables us to turn to the majority or the strong and insist that they honor the interests of the individual. A society that can create human rights can also end them, and we instinctively know this to be utterly wrong. So where do human rights come from? Are they just "there"? Is it that we don't create them, but rather discover them as we reflect on our long experience with wrongs and injustice? Without the existence of God, the fine-tuning of the universe and also human rights just "happen" with no explanation. If God exists, then these things are no longer improbable, but probable. While this is not proof of God, it does show two instances of leaps that one who disbelieves in God must make... instances where it takes more faith to disbelieve than it does to believe. |
I'll copy my edit from before:
For your benefit I will compare drugs and religions. Both have mind altering effects. In most cases both are extremely addictive, both can make a person feel a feeling of elation. Both have cause great turmoil in society, both can pass from parents to children easily. Both are used as an escape from reality, both are used as something to comfort someone when one is weak. The only difference is, that drugs are a physical body which can be consumed, meanwhile religion is an idea. Otherwise religions and drugs share far too many commonalities for religions to be considered anything other than a plight.
Religions had their uses back in the tribal days when rulers needed tools to control their people so a tribe couls survive and reproduce. That's why all tribes which believed in the supernatural survived, they could easily be controlled. However these tools are obsolete and antiquties in the modern world. Something not needed, something extremely primitive.
If you read the story I linked, I'd love to hear why that is less plausible than your Jesus Christ.
And then address this:
Faith has nothing to do with it. The only thing that has to do with it is just how far you are willing to believe your imagination or that of others. In the case of Jesus, the right word isn't faith, but gullability. Is a person gullible enough to believe something like Jesus, or is he not. Here is the definition of faith, complete confidence in a person or plan. That implies 100% belief, maybe if the world was only black and white, like the Bible would have us believe, then that is certainly true, not falling for the implausible would be the equivalent of 100% complete confidence that it did not happen. However such is not the case, there is an infantesmally small chance that the guy named Jesus actually guessed everything right. It's small, but not complete, and that makes all the difference between faith and just plain common sense. So no, faith has absolutely nothing to do with it.
I can't help but laugh at your human rights argument. This is your premise "The ideal of human rights says that each human being is of infinite worth." Do you realize human rights have never been defined by anything? Yeah we have a definition right now, but the Aztecs had a whole different set of human rights, and the aboriginals had a whole other set of human rights, and the Japanese another set of rights. Even in today's world people can't completely agree, for instance the right to a gun. Different countries have different human rights, and yes they all share some very basic ones, but even those didn't exist in some countries . Who knows what will happen in the future. Already your premise is not correct in the present, the "the ideal of human rights says that each human being is of infinite worth" is false already. In China you aren't allowed to have a second child, therefore the 2nd one is most definitely not seen as having "infinite worth." Your very basic premise you built your entire argument on is false, and by association your very argument.
Simply put, human rights are defined by what is most convenient for the people with power at a given time in history, and nothing more. You really don'thave to look too far back in history to see this is true.
