G'day Yadda,
It might be a bit hard to convey my thoughts and feelings with a summary, mainly because semantics always comes into it, and also because it's a skill in which I'm not overly proficient.
Firstly, I think that it's a mistake to throw every religious person and every atheist into a specific category; there's lots of greys in between.
Quote:Atheists are realists.....
.....whereas, religious people are people who believe in faerie tales?
I think that a lot of people throw away their rational thought for something that they
want or need to believe in. Unfortunately, I think that many of them swallow a whole load of bs which serves the specific agenda of their thought controllers. This can sometimes lead to believing in fairies, yes.
Quote:As we know, it is impossible to prove a negative.
Correct?
We can only
assume beyond reasonable doubt where there are no given absolutes, such as in mathematics.
For instance: The madman that killed his neighbor for no apparent reason would be put in jail or an institution even though he stated that God told him to do it.
Quote:On the other hand, it is possible to prove a positive.
For the same reasons, a provable positive is also not absolute. It's just beyond reasonable doubt.
For instance: You say that a person exists because you can see him/her standing right in front of you and so does everybody else around you.
But unbeknowns to you or everybody else, the person that you see in front of you is actually just a holographic figure that has been conjured up using new technology.
Quote:Does the experience of a[nother] person become [in fact] invalid, because YOU have not shared such an experience?
Of course not, I'm very interested in people's experiences.
I've had inexplicable experiences in their bucket loads. Some minor, and some very profound.
In some ways I consider that I'd be lessening the personal value of those experiences by simply saying "Oh that must God speaking to me, so I must now believe everything that a religion tells me about it".
I'm much more interested in looking at quantum physics for possible future explanations.
Quote:And you begin to tell the natives of that time, about things from the distant future.
And you tell them [for instance] that it is possible for....
1/ A man-made metal 'bird' of gigantic dimensions [a 747 Jumbo], weighing 300 tons, to fly through the air.
2/ And that it is possible to build a machine which can send images, and messages [by radio waves], many miles away, through the ether, to other people.
I believe that almost anything imaginable can be possible.
Now put me back in time 2000 years with one of those giant metal "God birds" and let me show them "actual" images of God and let them hear the voice of God, and let me tell you, nobody would know anything about Christianity or Islam because the world would be
Amaddian....Hoo hoo hah ha!i