The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

by cofty 2596 Replies latest jw experiences

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  cofty

  In any event. I am 100% open to convincing evidence of God's existence. So far I haven't seen any.

  Are you 100% open to doubting the existence of God? Have you truly critically looked at why you believe in God and why others don't and given them equal opportunity? - Viviane

  This seems to sum up the responses we have read in this thread.

  Theists begin with an image of an omnipotent, omniscient, all-loving god. An image that is to be found nowhere in the bible. When faced with the reality of natural evil they refuse to even consider the possibility that their presuppositions may neeed to be revised. Instead they resort to an endless variety of excuses, none of which deal with the actual dilemma.

  Since we ae drowning in metaphors here is one more. Consider a woman who discovers after her wedding, that the man she had come to know as loving and generous was actually an abusive and violent husband. To what lengths will she go to make excuses for him, protesting that he must have his reasons for his behaviour, before she finally admits he is not the person she thought he was?

  At least the OT worshippers of Yahweh had a realistic relationship with their god.

  Summary so far...
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  flamegrilled

  So which ego goes first, flamegrilled? I offer an alternative analogy and you flame it. Argumentative, no attempt at dialogue.

  I agree jgnat. It's not productive. I am simply demonstrating how unproductive it is. I am accused of having weak analogies, and weak they would be if I were trying to apply them to the "big picture". It seems impossible to reason here on a single point at a time without multiple people deciding that you should have actually tackled several points, or all of them, at the same time. The reason is clearly that acknolwedging one rational point at a time undermines Cofty's assertions. If anybody will actually engage in dialogue then I am happy to do that, but I am not going to repeatedly defend my analogies from willful misapplication of them.
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  DJS

  Cofty, Simon, Snare and On the Way Out (and others),

  We need to compile the best of the couter-theist responses and arguments you all have provided on this forum so that we can simply copy and paste it into replies and responses to the the ridiculous statements made by so many theists. Compile, summarize and hit the send button whenever needed. You guys have made so many compelling arguments that it is difficult for me to understand how any can leave the WT, come to this site and still remain tied to their theist beliefs. For long. And they will be much better off once they leave them behind. I wish we could convince them of this, but it seems they have a mental block.
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  flamegrilled

  Since we ae drowning in metaphors here is one more. Consider a woman who discovers after her wedding, that the man she had come to know as loving and generous was actually an abusive and violent husband.

  It's difficult to know what you are arguing for at times Cofty. An absence of God, or an abusive god?

  You claim that you have all the facts necessary to make a life and death decision, but if God exists then by definition you are missing information which may be relevant. That is not so in the case of the wife of an abusive husband.
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  THE GLADIATOR

  flamegrilled

  I once had a friend who was a devout Mormon. He told me that was given a book that showed Mormonism to be false. He read the book and was shocked, his faith damaged. He then slowly went through the book again, one sentence at a time, disproving to himself every comment. He told me that his faith was restored. Job duly completed, he burnt the book.

  What you appear to be doing, is breaking the big issue in to small pieces which you can then examine one by one. Once you have tackled each small piece you put them together again and declare that you have answered the big question. The difficulty is that whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
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  jgnat

  I know you were making a demonstration, flamegrilled, but at your own admission I'm a fairly intelligent woman. Your dissiing of my approach pretty well kills any desire on my part to engage you in dialogue. I don't care if you feel the same way. Man up and deal with the issues put before you.
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  cofty

  Flamegrilled. Please stop complaining about not being permitted to make your point. I have asked you 3 times to lay out your big picture.

  Stop hiding behind trivial analogies that are only substitutes for an actual answer laid out in full in your own words. I am giving you carte blanche to make your case, just be as succinct as possible.

  You have argued for 80 pages that drowning a quarter of a million people is a loving act if seen from some other perspective. Now is the time for you to explain in full. You have the stage. Put up or shut up.
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  bohm

  flamegrilled:

  You claim that you have all the facts necessary to make a life and death decision, but if God exists then by definition you are missing information which may be relevant. That is not so in the case of the wife of an abusive husband.

  We never have all possible information. In the case of the abusive husband, she might say: Who are you go guess which reasons he may have for beating me? Do you know *everything* relevant to my relationship with him? Do you know *everything* about my husband?

  If yet he beat her at an inch of her life again and again, would we not at some point say: "Yes I dont have all information, but until I get that I am justified in concluding he is a bastard and now i am going to call the police".

  I do not know everything there is to know about the world or about ethics. If god exist or not that remains true, so what is the point? Having granted you that, can we get back to the topic? Perhaps you could answer the question i posed a few pages ago:

  You claim a dog could not possible know every motive a human may have for doing things to the dog (or allow things to be done to the dog) the dog does not like, such as showering.

  But we are not talking about an unpleasant shower. We talk about a mom seing her child drowning. To expand your dog-example to include that little fact:

  If we saw a person allow dogs to be drowned by the thousands, and he was able to prevent it at no significant cost or effort, would we be justified in concluding there was a problem in claiming he loved every single dog?
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  jgnat

  flamegrilled, regarding whether we are dealing with an argument about an absent God or an abusive God. Way back near the beginning of this thread, I offered a third scenario, an impotent God. At least if we divest God of all-power, we can retain the perception of all-loving.

  By patient repitition, I believe Cofty has made his position clear, and thanks to my own gentle prodding he has tightened up his simple protest. In the face of natural evil, the Christian ideal of an all-powerful and all-loving God fails.

  We then end up with three possible outcomes, all of which knock down the Christian (theist) ideal. Is God all-powerful but abusive? All-loving but powerless to intervene? Or doesn't exist at all? In any case the Christian (theist) has a dillemma.

  Wait, there's a fourth. An all-loving and all-powerful God allows earthly horrors to happen because of an unknowable (to us) larger plan, and He rebalances it all in our true heavenly home anyways. Cofty suggests first that this is a cop-out (It's a mystery) and also cruel anyways. An all-loving God surely would prevent needless suffering in the first place.
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  flamegrilled

  I know you were making a demonstration, flamegrilled, but at your own admission I'm a fairly intelligent woman. Your dissiing of my approach pretty well kills any desire on my part to engage you in dialogue. I don't care if you feel the same way. Man up and deal with the issues put before you.

  It was evident from your first comment that you were not interested in dialogue so nothing much has changed. My estimate of your intelligence was made prior to your declaring the analogy as weak. If you truly didn't understand the analogy and its limitations then I may have been wrong about that. Either you didn't bother to consider it or you are just jumping on the bandwagon of Cofty's posse who cry "weak/broken analogy" every time they don't like a conclusion.