I have not said there is no evidence. The Bible, for instance, is evidence. And if you're going to just reply that the Bible is fiction, tell it to someone who will confirm your sense of self-worth, because I don't want to hear it from you.
that just because YOU believe what makes you feel good doesn't mean other people do?
Jeez. I believe what I believe because I feel it's reasonable--not because it makes me happy. I wouldn't and *couldn't* make myself believe that, say, my grandpa didn't die, if he did, because I'd rather believe he was still alive.

The Bible is not evidence, it's a book filled with the same assumptions you're making. It's not evidence of anything any more than the Qu'ran is evidence for Islam and the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads are evidence for Hinduism, or Drawing Down the Moon is evidence for magic. You're getting close to saying "the Bible is true because God said so, and we know God exists because the Bible said so."

Nobody has measured the answering of prayers on a logorithmic scale or something that would make you wet your pants in belief, but prayers are answered, and believers do find satisfaction and support. And if you claim coincidence, I remind you that however often something happens, it could still be coincidence. "Oh, what a surprise, my foot moved when I asked it to! What a coincidence!" You say medical science shows how that happens, and I can respond that it's still a coincidence. Everything you believe is still based on probability, and when those things are shown to be incorrectly predicted, scientists race off to understand how they were wrong. Some scientific theories are just one way of understanding something that could be understood other ways. Gravity, for instance, has been understood by people before as the will of a god holding us down. Their proof was the same as yours, you just believe in a different cause, which could one day be proven wrong. What if we drilled to the center of a planet and discovered a device generating a gravitational pull, not that the planet's core was or the orbit was. Your theory would be wrong. Everything you believe could be coincidental, as you mgiht say of a prayer being answered. You choose to believe they are not coincidences, and for reasons other people may choose to deny the same way you choose to deny prayers and God.
You think prayers are answered. Great. Muslims think *their* prayers are answered, Hindus think theirs are, wiccans think that their "magick" works, and et cetera. Are all of you right? Or maybe all of you interpet events to believe that your prayers are answered, because of your religions? Gee.
The problem is, you can't say, "watch," and demonstrate even a strong CORRELATION between member of group X praying for Y and member of group X getting it, much less a *causal relationship*. If you could pray and make something appear on my desk, and I went "woah", and you prayed and the color of my clothing changed, and I went "holy crap!" and such, that'd be one thing. As such, you pray for something, and then it may or may not happen--but either way, you claim it's God's will. That's not very sensible. Believers find satisfaction and support in prayer (or meditation--in fact, did you know that a deeply meditating Buddhist monk and a Franciscan nun in a violent frenzy of prayer have the exact same brain state?) because that's how the human mind *works*.

Again, "you could be wrong." Well, YES. I *could*. I acknowledge that, and if something indicates it, I will change your mind. But the fact that scientific theory "could be wrong" does NOT mean that it's just as sensible to believe anything as it is to believe solid scientific facts. You're not even trying to explain that faith is sensible, you're just saying, "well, you could be wrong!"

And, no. "Gravity is a god holding us down" is a baseless assumption. "Gravity is the effect of mass on spacetime that causes masses to attract" is provable both mathematically and empirically, and has been proven both ways. If you honestly can't see the difference between "gravity is a god holding us down" and the scientific explanation of gravity, well... it's you who needs that barber to lop off part of his skull.


There are numerous old ways of understanding things, such as the Golden Rule of geometry, or Pie, which are not exact, and very likely will be bested by science in the future. Yet you still use them, knowing they are not right, just closer to the "truth". All of science could be seen in that manner by a believer, if they desired. Maybe it works for survival in this world, but it's not the whole truth. Unless a believer sees God as solely a prime mover, they know that things continue to happen because God allows the world to continue. Were he to choose to stop it, the world, and all the scientific ways of viewing it, would cease to be.
Uhh... I don't think you even know what you're talking about, here. Pi is an irrational number defined as the ratio of a circle's diameter to its circumference. We can calculate it to any amount of digits past the decimal point. What in the world do you mean, pi will be "bested"? That makes no sense. And the golden rule is a math concept that says for any fraction x/y, you can multiply both x and y by the same number and the fraction's value won't change. What the hell do either of these have to do with anything, and how will they be "bested"?
And what do you mean, I use them even though they're not "right"? I used 3.14 in homework assignments because it's a close enough approximation *for our purposes*. Somebody building a suspension bridge will use a value calculated out to significantly past that. No, those values aren't *exactly the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter*, and they aren't meant to be *exactly* so. What's your point?

Having that sort of self-centered belief is a problem. So long as you don't think so, there's no reason for you to find anything else, like religion. You're too proud of yourself to think about anything else.
Proud of myself? please. What a ridiculous assumption--you don't accept my religion because you're too arrogant! Maybe I don't accept your religion because it makes no sense and is totally irrational and unevidenced, hmm?
Having that sort of a belief is NOT a problem. Meaning is an inherently subjective thing--something has meaning TO something else. I could easily say that your claim of "life is about so-and-so" is an excuse to justify your religious beliefs. But that'd be just as dumb as what you said, so I won't.
Congratulations for making an unfounded assumption as to what life's about, and then assuming that others don't believe it to make themselves happier.

Depends on what you call running out of oil. In your world, the car won't function because it's run out of oil. The point of faith is that the oil of things isn't necessarily corporeal.
No, see, running out of oil also happens because of the gremlins... or sometimes it just happens, but has nothing to do with the gremlins, it's the gremlins that make cars stop working. Here, I have a book explaining the mystical origin of the gremlins, how they designed the universe so that people would eventually invent cars, and why they make them fail, and why you can't detect them!
How is faith in these Undetectable Gremlins different from faith in God? For that matter, how is your faith different from a Hindu's faith? You can't BOTH be right. Mutually exclusive things. And yet, you both have faith.

The point is you're still talking physical proof. You want to see God and be told to believe in him. You won't get that opportunity, unless someone upstairs takes pity on you in a Doubting Thomas sort of way. Even if it did happen, you'd probably simply say it was some sort of illusion caused by a projector of some sort.
I don't "want" that--I'm impartial to it. But seeing God in a convincing manner--I think that God could very easily demonstrate that he wasn't an illusion--would be pretty convicing, yes. So would one of a number of things.

If you base all your actions and thoughts on what you can directly perceive, there's no way to accept anything supernatural.

You believe it's reasonable to say there is no God or gods. Believers see that as totally unreasonable, for a variety of reasons you fail to recognize, or see as coincidental or childish. For instance, some people see existence itself as reason enough to believe in God. You prefer to believe in a huge coincidence in the universe. You see that believe as superior, and are happy with that assumption.
"We disagree." Great, I knew that already. You still haven't made a single point as to why faith is a good reason to believe something or a good way of figuring out what is and isn't true.
I can explain exactly why critical reasoning, or the scientific method, or one of a number of things is a good way of figuring out what is and isn't true. It's not very hard--there's a reason I believe in and use them.

Maybe you should think about trying to do that for faith. "It makes me happy" doesn't quite cut it.


Pride is one of the strongest weapons of the Devil.
Then check yourself for it, because whenever you type a post like this, it just DRIPS with a superior, sneeringly condescending "oh you poor heathen you just don't get it" attitude.
Laugh as you will.



I am not yet born, console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.