God - do you believe?

[Castel]

Judging God on literal readings is fine IMO, but I do think it's worth noting that God-as-depicted-in-work-X isn't necessarily the God that any person believes in. So we cannot, at any time, necessarily point to someone who identifies with a religion whose foundation is work-X and insist they believe in every characteristic or action of the deity described in the text.

To say you can judge the religion in its entirety based on readings of work-X also seems a bit of a reach IMO. Religions are too fluid for that.

I don't see the problem here. If I say that the Islamic God as written is a sexist murdering pig, and that Islam, while fair for it's time is sexist and glorifies religious war, coming to me and telling me that you believe in a different type of Islamic God with some characteristics kept and others discarded is meaningless. Like I said, it's only useful in telling me that you are not sexist yourself.

I don't insist that they believe everything that is said in their holy text, I insist on claiming that if they discard the parts of the holy text that they find unacceptable, then they should realise that they're basically a heretical sect and should let comments like "The God of the Old Testament is an insane, jealous,genocidal maniac". If you do not believe that the things said in the book describe God good for you, but that's your thing no? I cannot go by what everyone believes. I go by the information everyone supposedly holds in high regard. As I understand it the Abrahamic faiths have a clear set of beliefs. If we were talking about some weird, all-inclusive religion that explicitly allowed for spin-offs I might see your point. If I were to say "All Christians are worshipers of a sexist, insane,jealous maniac" I suppose a case could be made for stepping in.

[Sci-2]

@Castel - I get what you're saying on judging gods-as-written. But "God of the Old Testament" isn't just the deity-as-written, since many people will think you are talking about the God they believe in as the OT is part of their initial source material.

(Interestingly enough, it was actually Stephen King who posits that no one believes in the same God.)

I think the more specific we are the better, why I'd separate the term God from any particular deity like Yaweh.

Aside -> I'm actually curious how many gods have been accorded One God status. Obviously Yaweh, and the God of the Greek philosophers. Some Hindus believe there is only one God who takes many forms, IME that's Vishnu though I understand others think it is Shiva or Devi (the Goddess).

[Eponine]

But religion, at its heart, seems to me to be reaching for truth. It's all spinoffs and alternate cosmologies and retcons. So it makes sense that people read something and feel the spiritual connection and decide: "This part is true."

But I was raised Hindu so maybe that's why I don't see the issue with belief-buffet.

Guess it depends on what "true" means.

I accept the belief-buffet insofar as someone can say that some things work for them as an individual and some things don't. But as soon as people start making truth claims on these things in relation to other people, there's a problem. It manifests when someone who was previously implying that Christianity is about what's true on an individual level then tells me that god has a plan for my life.

It also suggests that there's a higher "morality" than anything religion can come up with.

[polishgenius]

I'm a bit amused by how me sharing my opinion is pushing it onto anyone.

:laugh:

Dress it up how you like, but telling the religious folk that when we talk about our belief, the rest of you just laugh at us is clearly attempting to shame people into, if not losing belief, at least pretending not to have it in public. Which I wouldn't even have noticed, except you went on to say you only go on the offensive when someone tries to push their belief on you. Which, I hesitantly point out again, no-one did.

You're doing the Richard Dawkins thing of practicising exactly what you profess to dislike about religion, is what I'm saying here.

[Fragile Bird]

Castel, forgive me for needing to ask this, you may or may not have mentioned it in another thread and I've forgotten, but what is your background? I know you told me you were from Africa, but it's a big continent. You seem talk about Islam with good knowledge - is that your experience with religion? I hope I'm not being rude, I think most of us have given a background, and I may simply to be too dim witted to remember what you have previously said. :)

[DaveSumm]

You're doing the Richard Dawkins thing of practicising exactly what you profess to dislike about religion, is what I'm saying here.

I would personally say that, within this thread, it is impossible to push your views on someone else; we're here, we're reading the thread, we should all expect to find views other than our own. But then, what constitutes an invasion of your own space where we declare an opinion to be 'pushed'? Richard Dawkins has so far written a book about atheism, an accompanying TV series, and has done the obligatory press that comes along with it. I've never had him turn up at my door, I've never had to pay taxes toward building special schools to teach atheism, I've never had to sing atheist hyms in school. I personally don't think he's ever pushed anything on anyone.

It really worries me how warped a view of the world is needed to believe that religious people have a hard time in the world and are having their beliefs attacked. The reason atheists feel the need to speak up at all is simply to address the huge imbalance that religion enjoys. And I'm not actually talking about religious people, I'm talking about the indifferent middle ground whose general opinion seems to be 'why doesn't Dawkins just let everyone believe what they want'.

[Castel]

Castel, forgive me for needing to ask this, you may or may not have mentioned it in another thread and I've forgotten, but what is your background? I know you told me you were from Africa, but it's a big continent. You seem talk about Islam with good knowledge - is that your experience with religion? I hope I'm not being rude, I think most of us have given a background, and I may simply to be too dim witted to remember what you have previously said. :)

I don't think I ever mentioned it before now but I was raised in a predominantly Muslim West African community, where most everyone people I knew were (in theory) literalists. Most of my experience was with Islam , not that I remember as much of it as I would like to. I'm not sure that I speak with good knowledge as much as unjustifiable confidence.