Philosophical Vegan Forum

@humane homonid - well said

Hi revankatal,

This was an interesting post. I hope you stop trolling elsewhere and stay around to participate in serious discussions. I think we can all learn a lot from each other.

revankatal wrote:I'm a christian, I'm a firm believer. ATTENTION: I'm not here to change your views and beliefs so don't try to change mine. I can't convince you and you can't convince me. END OF STORY.

Only a closed minded person can not be convinced of something that is true.

I'm open minded. Are you?

I want to know what's true. If you happen to be right on this subject, then I want to be corrected so I can join you on the right side.

If you're wrong, wouldn't you want to be corrected so you can become right?

revankatal wrote:I'm here because I think, and I like to be around people that think, and I believe It's healthy to be around others that are totally different from myself. If not, then how would I learn?

Well, you can't learn if you're closed minded.

But if you're open minded and you want to learn- why would you be so against discussing the subject?

I respect people who ARE here to change our beliefs- people who are willing to have discussions, and argue in favor of their beliefs.
If you're not willing to lift a finger to justify your beliefs, then why have them?

In the same sense, I am here to get you to rethink some of your beliefs (not necessarily all of them).

revankatal wrote:QUESTION: if you are an atheist, and right here right now I prove to you God exists, he appears in front of you, angels come down, a burning laptop speaks to you. what would you do then?

I accept logical argument as proof. I don't accept direct sense experience for such exotic and unusual situations. We're all prone to hallucinations, and seeing, hearing, and feeling things that are not real.

e.g. if a god came before me and spoke to me, I would believe I was having a hallucination. I would not necessarily believe it. I think another poster said something similar.

If a human being came to me and showed me a logical argument proving that god existed, then I would accept it, and henceforth believe it until shown otherwise by a more compelling argument.

However, if a god came before me, and showed me a good logical argument, I would then believe that a god existed, and could then consider the possibility that I was not hallucinating.

A logical argument is good whether presented by a human or a hallucination- it's just the argument that matters.

revankatal wrote: If you could prove there was NO GOD, first id be shocked... then honestly a lot of things will make more sense.

That's one of the indications that something is probably true. When things make more sense under theory A than theory B, theory A is more likely.

If you honestly admit that Atheism would make a lot of things make more sense, then why aren't you honest enough to accept Atheism as true?

revankatal wrote:But in the end if all my belief did was make me a good, honest, productive member of society... it wasn't all that bad.

But that's not what your belief is doing.

See above: it is not making you honest. If it made you honest, then it would make you an atheist.

Based on the evidence you presented in this forum, it's not making you good either- a large sampling of your posts are talking about killing pigs like it's fun. That's morally perverse, and gives me the impression that your belief in god has given you a sense of self righteousness that has made you very dark.

Productive member of society? So is every other person who believes in capitalism- which is a real thing. God didn't do that for you, greed did.


If Christians were really all good people, I probably wouldn't ever say a word against them or their beliefs.

revankatal wrote:I'm a christian, I'm a firm believer. ATTENTION: I'm not here to change your views and beliefs so don't try to change mine. I can't convince you and you can't convince me. END OF STORY.

Actually, you could convince me, in principle. All you need is compelling, overwhelming evidence.

QUESTION: if you are an atheist, and right here right now I prove to you God exists, he appears in front of you, angels come down, a burning laptop speaks to you. what would you do then?
QUESTION: If you are a believer of a god (christian, muslim, hindu, etc etc) what if right here right now I prove to you God doesn't exist with some fact or science discovery. what would you do then?

Firstly, welcome to the forum!

Secondly, on to your questions:
If you could prove to me god exists beyond a shadow of a doubt, then I would need to find out more about this god, and what he wants and who he is.
Id have a lot of questions for him.

Since I'm not a theist, i can't answer that question. If I try and put myself in the shoes of when I did believe in some kind of a god, I would say that I would probably go through a period of depression and sadness for having lost the potential of an afterlife. After that, Id have to pick up myself and get back to living.

Only a closed minded person can not be convinced of something that is true.

I'm not closed minded, i just wanted to establish why I'm here. I'm not a religious nutcase who thinks everyone should believe what i believe. I'm establishing that I'm here to talk and to share opinions.

revankatal wrote: I'm not a religious nutcase who thinks everyone should believe what i believe.

Those people aren't any more nutcases than you are- they just actually care about the fate of other souls.

If you really believe in anything like heaven and hell, and salvation, and you really believe that non-Christians are destined for hell, and you had any shred of human decency left in you, you'd try to help them reach heaven instead of dooming them to eternal torment because you couldn't be inconvenienced to lift a finger in making a coherent and rational argument for your beliefs (which is the only thing that would be required to convince us all to become Christians).

We're not hard to convince of things. If something is true, we want to believe it.

I don’t respect people who don’t proselytize. I don't respect that at all. If you believe that there's a heaven and hell, and people could be going to hell, or NOT getting eternal life or whatever, and you think that uh, well it’s not really worth telling them this because it would make it socially awkward…and atheists who think that people shouldn’t proselytize, just leave me alone, keep religion to yourself… uh, how much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize? How much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that?
I mean if I believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that a truck was coming at you and you didn't believe it, and that truck was bearing down on you there's a certain point where I'd tackle you and this is more important than that.

-Penn Jillette

Here's a link to a Christian website which talks about Penn a bit, and evangelism:

http://notashamedofthegospel.com/online ... re-gospel/

This is the video that the video link is broken to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6md638smQd8


A real Christian would believe that his or her religion is rational, and has some basis in reality- and so would believe that such an argument can be made.
A real Christian would care enough about the souls of others to bother thinking about it, and making that argument.
A real Christian is, fundamentally, focused on evangelism.

If you're a fraud, that's fine. Christianity isn't true, so nobody's souls are actually in danger.
But that does speak to your character, and lack of honesty and compassion.

The only way you would be able to convince me you had a shred of either (honesty or compassion), is to either admit your religion is probably false and become an atheist, or try to save our eternal souls.

Something to think of.
Just one of the many reasons I believe most Christians are intensely evil, hateful, and selfish people at heart- you don't seem to be an exception in any regard.

revankatal wrote: I'm not closed minded, i just wanted to establish why I'm here. [...]
I'm establishing that I'm here to talk and to share opinions.

To what end, do you think? Just amusement? Killing time?
If you've established that you don't want anybody to try to change your mind, that basically you refuse to change you mind and you don't want to know if you are mistaken (which is closed minded, by the way), and you don't care what we believe and don't want to correct us if we're mistaken and show us the right way-- how is that sharing opinions on these matters?

You just want to talk about Justin Beeber or something?

revankatal wrote:QUESTION: If you are a believer of a god (christian, muslim, hindu, etc etc) what if right here right now I prove to you God doesn't exist with some fact or science discovery. what would you do then?

I would investigate further the matter with the possibility of being an atheist.

thebestofenergy wrote: Psycology has already proven that living for eternity without the possibility of death would be horrifying, after a thousand years you're in the same environment. What would you do after a million years? After a billion? After billions of billions of billions of years? You would certainly lose your sanity. It'd be a really scary scenario to me. For how much try, I can't imagine a hell, a never-ending suffering.

Infact mainstream christianity (Catholic/Orthodox/Mainline Protestant Churches) has a different definition of eternity. The 'absence of time', an 'everlasting present', something that was shared even by Plato, Aristotle...

Every serious theist/atheist apologist should have a philosophy degree, but most haven't it, that's why I stopped losing my time with these autors.

pizza wrote:

thebestofenergy wrote: Psycology has already proven that living for eternity without the possibility of death would be horrifying, after a thousand years you're in the same environment. What would you do after a million years? After a billion? After billions of billions of billions of years? You would certainly lose your sanity. It'd be a really scary scenario to me. For how much try, I can't imagine a hell, a never-ending suffering.

Infact mainstream christianity (Catholic/Orthodox/Mainline Protestant Churches) has a different definition of eternity. The 'absence of time', an 'everlasting present', something that was shared even by Plato, Aristotle...

Every serious theist/atheist apologist should have a philosophy degree, but most haven't it, that's why I stopped losing my time with these autors.

It doesn't matter what some philosophers say. The afterlife described by the Bible is heaven and hell. And hell is a never-ending suffering.
If by an everlasting present you mean that you don't have the capability to use your brain and there's no time (and you can't possibly use brain function if time is stopped), then you're as good as dead. There's no difference between existing or not.
If you had the capability to use your brain, then it'd be a torture without the possibility of escaping from it.

thebestofenergy wrote:The afterlife described by the Bible is heaven and hell. And hell is a never-ending suffering.

Not really, the "bible" doesn't exist, it is a mix of books wrote in different epochs with different eschatological views. Most of The Old Testament does't even share the heaven/hell theology (see for example Ecclesiastes 9:5-6: For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even the memory of them is forgotten. Their love, their hate and their jealousy have long since vanished; never again will they have a part in anything that happens under the sun.)

thebestofenergy wrote:If by an everlasting present you mean that you don't have the capability to use your brain and there's no time (and you can't possibly use brain function if time is stopped), then you're as good as dead. There's no difference between existing or not.
If you had the capability to use your brain, then it'd be a torture without the possibility of escaping from it.

1) You'll have no brain in the afterlife
2) If there is no time how can it be stopped?
3) Why would you escape from it? There is no motion (in the Aristotelian-Thomist meaning of this word), just an everlasting present of beatific vision.

thebestofenergy wrote: It doesn't matter what some philosophers say.

Without at least some philosophical studies you'll never have the conceptual categories necessary to discuss this matter with an academically educated christian, thus you'll be forced to debate with fundamentalist trash who will not change their mind because also of their poor education. In most cases non educated apologists are just wasting their time and it's very sad because they could study instead.