Do you believe in God?

Reality isn’t in my own mind, or yours.

Reality is what is true about the world.

What we perceive as reality is what our senses communicate to us about the outside world.

It’s not that hard.

Right, for you, ultimate reality is the furniture. Truth is the furniture. You’ve simplified life into meaninglessness.

Good luck with that. I have no interest in your version of truth and reality, and I reject your notion that it applies to me too.

And reality is a religious story, the one his is peddling, and all the rest of the religious stories are not reality. Easy. Piece of cake.

I came across a real crime story that was revealing. A son was convicted of murder on foolproof evidence, and the mother in the aftermath said over and over and over, "I believe in my whole heart he is innocent ... I believe it in my whole heart, I believe it in my whole heart, I believe it in my whole heart."

She is using belief to trump reality and truth. It's belief employed to such ends, belief instead of respect for reality, belief to smuggle in some favored claim.

Sound familiar? It's the same overly fanatical insistence that something is true in the face of its dubious reality. When a person just cannot extricate themselves from some particular religion, any of the myriad of them, they use this "I believe, I believe, I believe" overzealousness as a substitute for a reasonable epistemology.

Amen.

Do you share Desertcat’s definition of reality?

A good steward of life is willing to explore the transcendent rather than sentence himself to a life of meaninglessness where ultimate reality is meaningless facts about meaningless objects.

Ignoring your interpretation of Biblical passages, you're applying a double standard to yourself. You've criticized craig for claiming to know the mind of God, but then you argue that the qualities you mentioned are proof that the Bible isn't God's word, implying that you have knowledge what God's word would be.

He has a romanticized view of nature as progressive, feminine, and hopeful. He uses Christianity as a scapegoat which he views as backwards, toxic, and immoral.

This (scapegoating) is a service Christianity is willing to provide, but what if the only nature story humans can exist in is Darwinian (my claim) and all the toxicity + immorality is actually more Darwinian than Christian?

Desertcat doesn’t seem to romanticize nature in the same way. He is much more of a strict empiricist rationalist, which cannot address the problem of meaning since it denies human subjectivity and desire.

The desire for meaning can only be seriously addressed by assigning truth and reality to it, which means assigning truth and reality to the human experience.

Christianity promises that lasting meaning is an entitlement (through the soul).

When the desire for lasting meaning becomes frustrated, then you can enter into the Christian story and collect what belongs to you.

Here again we see the unabashed, ignorant, self-blind, subconscious unwitting indirect assertion that "either you believe my religion or your life, life itself, and the existence of the cosmos is meaningless." For all the sophistry, the substrate of it is pure ignorant, indoctrinated kindergarten stuff.

No, I apply its principles to itself. And when the Bible says 1. god is love, 2. love keeps no record of wrongs, and 3. god (who is love, don't forget) slaughtered the human race for doing wrong .. .it has contradicted itself to such a catastrophic degree that the stories are obviously made up and cobbled together.

That alone cancels the literal truth of the story. The doctrine couldn't possibly be any more conflicted within itself. I don't know what god thinks, but I know some of the things he doesn't, that is, if "he" existed.

"God" in my book is the quantum field. It amplifies all into (seeming) existence (i.e. creates all), houses all knowledge (i.e. is omniscient), and is everywhere. And it supplies all the meaning the cosmos has to offer, that meaning not being "Well, Jehovah said it apparently in an ancient book of fables so that's our purpose.").

So the quantum field is more your “God” than nature now? How long has this been the case?

I know you’re always speaking to some imagined spectators when replying to my posts, and never to me, but I don’t belong to a religion. My core religious identity is Non-Christian, meaning I affirm the truth of the Christian story but consider myself an outsider to it.

So this idea that I’m trying to get people to declare themselves part of the Christian social group is not true.

I use this forum like a strategy forum. My relationship to group identity is, at best, complicated and mostly antagonistic.

Exactly what do you think quantum mechanics is .... supernatural? No, it's the substrate of the nature we witness and experience.

I was talking about the more familiar visceral definition of nature. I get your point that technically QM is nature, but it’s so abstract that I have trouble imagining how someone can hold onto to it consistently in daily life so as to relate to it much at all.

Of course, unless you work in the field.

I don't relate to it per se in a quotidian way, but to its spiritual manifestations, which, most to the point, is the nature of human consciousness (as opposed to the nature of ancient superstitions).

What evidence is there that life has any meaning other than what we personally give it?

What is your good reason for rejecting it? Just wanting to have meaning doesn’t mean it exists in reality.

Reason hits a wall at this point. It’s not reason which allows you to sacrifice your imperfect forms of meaning in order to take the all-in leap (full belief) into a deeper lasting meaning.

I would call it ontological. It requires full commitment to the point of irrationality.

This is the dividing line of spirituality, turning yourself over to the spirit of truth.

The one who makes this move will be chosen, but you have to aspire to be chosen and believe you will be chosen first.

Your reason will never give you permission to make this ontological leap. If you are waiting for permission, you’ll never stop waiting.

Still, a man acts when it’s time to act.

So truth doesn’t matter? You would rather believe in that which you can ascribe meaning, not in what is likely true?

Truth has no spirit. Something is either true or not. Turning yourself over to the spirit of truth just means you want your favored beliefs to be true regardless of their lack of evidence.

Evidence needed.

Reason isn’t permission. You are rejecting reason and calling it permission to make a leap to the irrational.

We can go round and round in this but no god has ever cared enough about us to provide tangible evidence of their existence.

Haven’t we already established that random empirical facts about the physical world with no use to human meaning are undesirable?

So then why couple ‘truth’ with random empirical facts about the physical world rather than couple it with human desire for meaning?

You are acting like random empirical facts about the physical world are inherently meaningful by saying “So truth (random facts) doesn’t matter...”

Do you really believe that? If I start telling you endless random facts about the furniture, will it be inherently meaningful to you?

Your version of truth (random facts) doesn’t matter to me as a human, correct. I associate truth with meaning / goodness etc.

From my current position, why would I choose to adopt the random facts version of truth?

Truth is what matches reality. Aspects of reality can be good or bad, but there is no evidence it has any inherent meaning, the only meaning that which we wish to ascribe it.

You are calling reality “random facts” because you wish it to have some intrinsic meaning, but you can’t demonstrate it has any. Certainly not from the Bible, which is clearly contradictory, says false things, and never demonstrates that anyone fulfilled its messianic prophecies. It demonstrates no more meaning GeForce our lives than Harry Potter books.