Kenneth

Then I guess I just don't get it, because the knowledge that all those homeric, Greek gods were made up by the Greeks themselves (and without justification, proof, or evidence) is proof enough for me to regard them as 100% false, and 100% non-existent.

shadowind

i guess you could do the same to any relgion, once you decide they made them up without justification,proof, or evidence.

__________________
remember "for mere impulse of appetite is slavery, while obedience to a law which we prescirbe to oursleves is liberty"-rousseau: the concept of the general will "if we can not reconcile all opions, then let us endeavour to unite all hearts."-?"to be is to be perceived"-? "‘We can be as honest as we are ignorant. If we are, when asked what is beyond the horizon of the known, we must say that we do not know’-Robert G. Ingersoll

SirArthur

Pretty often we don't know who is right, or even if anybody is right, but we know those who are wrong.

The Olympus Gods are disproved by themselves, since they were claimed to live at the top of the mountain and nobody lives there...
The religions of the book put God in an unreachable place, so we can't disprove such God existence on the same way, but if you pick some of God's orders from the Old Testament or the Muslim Allah, you'll easily notice that "thing" can't be a God, at best it suits a Demon, if such thing exists.

This turns out because God implies "light", and "light" here is a metaphor to life or healing; when a God requests people to kill each other then you've a "God of Darkness" or a Demon.

Not to mention other issue, and this one should be easy since Jesus was on the World, but strangely it isn't at all. Christ is meant to be born at the Spring (about current April) on Nazareth at Census time... well, what Census?! We've no idea of a Census at that time. Did the Romans set up such a gigantic task to lost its data?!
And Pilate? What do we know about him? He was Procurator of Iudaea until 66 a.C. and was put of the office at the starting of the 1st Jewish uprising, which ended up with the destruction of Jerusalem and with Jews to be castaway to the diaspora. But was already called by Rome on about 36 a.C. due to his reckless and immoral behavior.
But in the end we don't even know if Jesus existed indeed... other than the Gospels (written far after his death), we've no other Historical data. All we've from him is a Jewish passage of questionable authenticity known as the Testimonium Flavianum that states Pilate may ordered to death somebody called Jesus.

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We can never have an idea of what we can achieve. All we can do is follow an interrogation and see where it may lead us to.

Kenneth

Good point. So if I consider the claims of each religion on a case by case basis, and test them for contradictions (in their bibles, prophecies, and teachings), historical inaccuracies, and utter falsities, then the uncovering of a certain religion's errors and falsehoods itself constitutes evidence that that religion is as false as the gods it purports to exist? This is a reasonable proposition. And even if we encountered a religion without any recognizable errors in its holy writings, the fact that they use discredited arguments for the existence of their God like the teleological or cosmological argument, then this in itself constitutes evidence that their God is false figment of their imagination. And since there really is no human religion which doesn't use one of these flawed arguments, I'll go ahead and administer a fatal preemptive attack on all of them

Vinterland

Each "invention" may have Divine origins just as any Deistic or Pan- philosophies may also be correct in describing God. The point of agnosticism is to not to be certain in absence of evidence and therefore, no one can be sure there is no God and be agnostic.
I like your enthusiasm! I will only question one point though which I bolded;
how do you know all these gods are not tricksters? Perhaps you and many are naive in believing that these religions accurately describe the attributes of their "God"? This concept in no way implies that the Deity is false, but that there is trickery about!

__________________
And on we walked. Suddenly we heard a voice crying, "This is the sea. This is the deep sea. This is the vast and mighty sea." And when we reached the voice it was a man whose back was turned to the sea, and at his ear he held a shell, listening to its murmur.
And my soul said, "Let us pass on. He is the realist, who turns his back on the whole he cannot grasp, and busies himself with a fragment."
—Gibran Khalil Gibran, “The Greater Sea.”

SirArthur

Vinterland,

Agnosticism is not only related to the Abrahamic God. You can be sure about that nonexistence but unsure about other God's or Deities.

__________________
We can never have an idea of what we can achieve. All we can do is follow an interrogation and see where it may lead us to.

Kenneth

But why do you say they may have had divine origins? How do you know that?


What??? Tricksters about what?

Vinterland

I know that very well.Apparently you agree with Kenneth's statements:
"So if I consider the claims of each religion on a case by case basis, and test them for contradictions (in their bibles, prophecies, and teachings), historical inaccuracies, and utter falsities, then the uncovering of a certain religion's errors and falsehoods itself constitutes evidence that that religion is as false as the gods it purports to exist? This is a reasonable proposition."

If yes, then I'll have answered you as well in my response to Kenneth.
Kenneth,
Say if you've gone to Mount Olympus looking for Zeus and did not find him sitting in his great chair. You turned over every rock and boulder, searched every crevice to find the king of gods...doing all this while Zeus laughs at you from above. Zeus, fairies, God; it doesn't matter one bit how you define God, all can only be known to exist as "supernatural" and any specific qualites and condition of a god (ie: all loving, resides in our hearts/inside an active volcano) said by anyone person concerning the "supernatural" is pretty much random.

As an agnostic you can't believe that your "proven" predictions based on religious statements or doctrine are based on the actual Deity. Can you prove Christianity or similar religions accurately describe the gods in their respective texts? Maybe God is a maelvolent being that divinely inspired all of them, bestowing upon them all differing accounts to explain the world so that It may enjoy seeing them at war with each other. Go ahead and make predictions, scientists have "disproved" the most literal interpretation of Bible that describes an earth made about 6,000 years ago, but in regards to the metaphysical it could still be true. With something as arbitrary as God and "the supernatural" it's a more or less a waste of time, imo (for me at least) to bother thinking about. Anything can be true when you some Pan-guy claiming their god is trying to gather consciousness in this universe so it can become One again; you just can't bother with that crap unless you want a headache because that's the nature of faith and they're up to their assholes in it. It also doesn't matter that their claims are more rational, it still cannot be proven or disproved for now. I have one more thing to add that may be the most important: when I add proven and disproved in quotations I mean that for something to be objective (defined as dealing with truth), you must have all the evidence to form an objective argument. I cannot support arguments that claim to disprove specific gods because they may be missing data. For something to qualify as objective you have got to have all the data. Do you?


Vinter

__________________
And on we walked. Suddenly we heard a voice crying, "This is the sea. This is the deep sea. This is the vast and mighty sea." And when we reached the voice it was a man whose back was turned to the sea, and at his ear he held a shell, listening to its murmur.
And my soul said, "Let us pass on. He is the realist, who turns his back on the whole he cannot grasp, and busies himself with a fragment."
—Gibran Khalil Gibran, “The Greater Sea.”

SirArthur

Sorry, you go beyond agnosticism to the pure "fence sitting".

You can disprove and eliminate some religions on your way, Zeus was put there and isn't there... so, why you keep believing on it?!

The Islamic and Jewish God is a bloodthirsty creature, such creature doesn't qualify for a "God" if by God we understand a supranatural being of kindness, at best it qualifies for a God of Death, or a Demon - a supranatural being of destruction.
The whole point, on the given examples, whether Allah or Yhowah exists or not it is irrelevant, if comes for them to exist they would be Demons, not Gods, and as so must be fight against, not worshiped.

The Christian God, that I'll believe to be the same as Jewish and Islamic on the day I get drunk, can't be disproved, we're just uncertain of both existence; Jesus and God.

So, I do not state we should go on "preemptive attacks", but we, Agnostics, have to use our brain to see what worth or is worthless to expect and seek for evidence of that God's existence.

__________________
We can never have an idea of what we can achieve. All we can do is follow an interrogation and see where it may lead us to.

Kenneth

The "Zeus" you're describing isn't the Zeus of the Greeks. So in reality--assuming you are correct--Zeus never really existed: the god laughing from above is a completely different god. He may be a God, but he certainly isn't Zeus. Plus I allowed for some bizarre, random exception (the likes of which you have just described) of a God when I stated that for all we know right now, a God could exist. Moreover, if you're willing to accept as legitimate propositions the gods of the Greeks, then you're not justified in second guessing the Greeks' own religious descriptions. If you acknowledge the possibility that Zeus may exist, then you have to take what the Greeks say about him at face value. And because of that, I may point out any errors, contradictions, fallacies, and outright untruths about those gods. If I can destroy the credibility of what they say about their gods, then I can destroy the credibility of the Greeks as being decent religious prophets period and hence discredit those gods' existence entirely.

Yeah, they're random because we humans have merely been fantasizing about gods for centuries: the universal inconsistencies and differences in earthly religions prove this. I'd warn you about using the word "supernatural" because it has been used for centuries by the religious to make up bogus explanations for natural phenomena like the origin of man, diseases, natural disasters, and practically all of modern biology and chemistry. If you want to trust their explanations of everything, go right ahead. I say they've had their chance--and blew it.

What??? Know what, never mind. Continuing...

Again, if God were actually an evil being, one totally unlike the God described in the Bible, this only proves that the God of the Bible never existed. And if this evil God inspired all the earth's religions, it only proves that the human revelations of God still had it wrong and described completely different gods. Again, I am not fighting against the mere idea of the existence of a God (we don't have enough evidence for that yet), but only humankind's flawed conceptions of their Gods. Humans can be wrong and have been wrong, my friend--that's all I'm saying.

The kind of "metaphysics" you're talking about was only a respectable branch of philosophy until the scientific strides of Darwin and others showed us how much they were wasting our time. Decent metaphysics must conform to scientific reasoning and laws. If not, it has as much value to us as astrology and alchemy. If you still want to play around with our concept of reality and assert that turning a pebble into a piece of gold may still be objectively possible, go right ahead.

Really? I have a mind to put that guy in a straitjacket.

They are disproven at the moment you disprove the false data they already contain.