Probably the one where people admit that it's the only thing stopping them from murdering random people
The best ones from my extended family was hedging their bets. They believe just in case their is. I hate to break it to them but if he is all knowing. Wouldn't he banish you anyway for not truly believing. But I didn't want to get into a fight so I dropped it. But I do laugh sometimes when I think of the Christian god as some kind of protection racket mobster.
So basically something similar to Pascal's wager?
Pascal’s Wager. Totally ignores that there are hundreds of gods and religions, trending toward infinity if you count all of human history and potential other worlds. The wager only works if it’s one religion versus missing out on the afterlife.
There's also one massive miscalculation in there.
What if the "real god" prefers non-believers to believers in the wrong gods? What if he's jealous, and only his believers and non-believers go to heaven, while all believers of wrong gods go to hell?
I wouldn't say it was weird, I think it's one of the better arguments since it only relies on pure hard nosed practicality, but it still doesn't hold water for the reasons you say. I think at least within the constructs of what it considers, it's logical, it's just that it fails to consider too much, among which, whether or not belief in the existence of something like that can just be chosen on the basis of what would be practically expedient.
It could be demonstrated to me that belief in Santa Claus can have material benefits, and failure to believe will mean that, if he does exist, you will no longer receive gifts. With that logic it would make more sense to believe in Santa Claus than not to, since there's no downside to believing and being wrong and a potentially negative consequence to lacking that belief and being wrong. The problem is that, I can't sincerely believe in something that for all intents and purposes I can say I "know" isn't real simply because I would like to enjoy the hypothetical benefits and avoid the hypothetical consequences. I can say I believed in Santa Clause, if doing so meant that someone was going to give me gifts, but saying it and believing it are distinct concepts so the wager would be more persuasive as a means of deciding whether or not to declare belief in something than believe it.
I'd also say, the fundamental point of it (that finite cost in life is worth the chance at infinite reward or avoiding infinite punishment) is pretty abysmal morally. Pretty easy to justify atrocities for any concept of God that way as a rational approach to life.
I was indoctrinated on Ray Comfort, I knew who it was going to be before clicking on the link
I once met a guy who became a priest because he had a religious experience while talking to a chair.
The weirdest one I ever got was in highschool, someone said "how can you not believe in god, god is love" and I still don't understand how that's meant to be an argument.
That kind of phrasing always seems they assume that not believing is the same as rejecting and therefore you too believe in the existence of God/god.
They just completely miss the point.
Ah yeah "all atheists just hate god," I forgot that was a thing. Could be the case, it was a long time ago
Hahaha I love that this is written as "he had a religious experience WHILE talking to a chair", not "he had a religious experience AND talked to a chair". Dude's just having a normal conversation with a chair and then something weird and unexplained occurred that put him on the path to god. I wonder if the chair was as convinced.
Well I'm being a little deceptive for the joke of course, but he just felt like Jesus was sitting in the chair and then talked to the invisible Jesus.
The guy ended up doing a bunch of stuff at my highschool and which really bugged me because he only ever had surface level religious phrases to say (motivational speaker kinda stuff but with more Jesus) that glossed over some really big issues we were all facing at the time.
I only recently tossed a Handbook Of Christian Apologetics by Tacelli & Kreeft. I was never devout, let alone outright brainwashed into anti-science nonsense, but at the cusp of my reddit atheist phase I figured a question this big deserved a fair shake. So I got a big ol' book of the best arguments anyone had. They all sucked. So that was that.
The one that made me put the book down and go 'yep, atheist' was "the argument from magic." You think about moving your hand. Your hand moves by thought alone. Magic! Therefore, Jesus. I fucking wish I was exaggerating.
Took another decade to figure out the people pushing these arguments don't actually give a shit about being right. The point is performing loyalty to the ingroup. There's a conclusion, and it comes from people above you, so your job is to make whatever mouth noises get there. Consistency and logic are neat features if you can manage. A monotheistic god is only the purest expression of that tribalist worldview.
Thank you for leading me to find this book. I will enjoy reading it.
On the hottest day of the year a few years ago, the Mormons were out door knocking in their little suits. They were clearly not having a good time so we invited them in for a cold drink just to offer them some respite from the afternoon sun.
They got me to read a passage about Joseph Smith going into a cave and feeling euphoric and were like "well how do does that make you feel" and I'm like "what? I know people who've had more convincing experiences than that who still aren't religious because they knew they were on drugs"
They came back again a few times until it was clear we're absolutely not becoming Mormons.
I sometimes wonder if it occurs to them that we were probably better christians than most actual Christians they've met, even without the blackmail.
"I don't personally understand it, therefore God did it" (Argument from Ignorance, or God of the Gaps fallacy)
I hear this with regard to evolution, chemistry, bacteria, weather. They don't know how something works, that's proof enough for them. Eventually they say "then how was the universe created? There had to have been a creator!" (First cause argument) Or "The eye is so complicated, it had to be designed" (Watchmaker Fallacy)
I used to listen to The Atheist Experience podcast, but it got repetitive hearing the same arguments from religious people, over and over. I also didn't like how mean the hosts could get sometimes, but I understand their frustration..
Matt used to he a firebrand on the Atheist Experience. He's moved on to The Line show and continues with call-ins.
His "meanness" has been refined and aimed strictly at bad faith actors who call in. People who are honest and straightforward don't get yelled at.
Not in God per se, but this puzzle came up at the Radio Shack I used to work at when I was 18. I didn’t have an immediate explanation for how it was possible.
My co-worker used it as an example of how some things are unexplainable. Therefore, y’know, God.
“Because I can’t cope with the world unless I believe the bad people will go to Hell.”
My pastor said of eugenics that "this is where ideas like evolution lead". He was trying to "prove" the existence of his god as a sunday message. He'd tried to lay it out as a proof, but all of his points were either tangential (like this one, even if you assume it to be sound) or fallacious.
It was the most wild argument I've heard because this wasn't something he'd just thought of in the moment. He'd prepared a script for this. Someone, presumably, had proofread that script. This, combined with all of the other failed attempts at proof present in the message, was what broke what remained of my faith. So now I can say that I was decoverted by my own pastor, which is wild too!
Isreal
It was so roundabout and specific that I couldn't possibly remember the details, but there was apparently a certain baseball player who got an unbelievable score, which was in some way both a holy number and statistically impossible.
They knew all the details and connected it to the player's own questioning of religion, but I thought it was absurd. Somebody, somewhere, made a very specific play in baseball? Doesn't sound that unbelievable.May I put my own believe and thinking of the topic "God"?
I see God as something real in a metaverse. Everyone has a copy of God in our Brains. God is just a Blueprint, similar to a program or a peace of code. When multiple people believe in the same God, they feel and think in the same direction and apply the rules that the blueprint is given.
I see lots of benefits of having some more powerful being in your mind. To process emotions better that are too strong to handle alone with no hope. But there are also many cases where great mathematicians could go so far, because they tripped into infinities and understood many patterns. A god being is just our structure of society.
The sad part about the believe of god is that people think its more than real. That people should die because God wants to and etc. Because in our Physical world exists nothing that has to do with god. Its all Natural Selection, DNA code executing the right proteins to build things and neurons learning the patterns.
Someone told me one time they believe in specifically the christian god because the world is so perfect, and i was like what fucking world are you living in and how do i get there?
It also doesn't make any sense why it would be the Christian god if that's the reasoning because I think rather a lot of different religions would happily take credit for whatever it is they thought made the world "perfect" so why would the Christian claim to this perfection be any stronger than any other?
Anything, anything, random mutations.
