The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

Thought so too, but found this: http://www.amazon.com/Meditations-New-Translation-Marcus-Aur...

Nice attempt at distraction. But you see I don't need to know the answer to that question (nor do I need to know everything) to know the correct answer isn't bronze ramblings of goat herders who got everything about the natural world wrong and who invented the concept of god to explain the world they misunderstood and feared in the first place. The only question worth asking is if Christianity and religion in general is true. And all evidence points out that it is decidedly not true.

There are two kinds of beliefs. One is based on evidence, logic, reason, testable repeatable experiments. Rational mind has no option but to accept their truthfulness (sometimes after laborious examination of evidence or step by step verification of logical deduction). You could go on and deny obvious truth, but that leads to cognitive dissonance and is rather mentally taxing. The other belief is opposite, it is not based on any evidence at all and it is called faith. You are believing things without having sufficient or any evidence for it. Note also that all religions are faith based. If they were based on evidence, religion would be a branch of science, it would be a scientific theory (which is the highest pedestal a scientific hypothesis can be placed upon, only mathematics has theorems).

There is now strong evidence that theistic gods i.e. gods that care about human beings, that interfere in their lives, that tell you what you should do, what you should eat, on what days, who you may sleep with and in what position, gods who break the known laws of nature for their people, god who stops the motion of the sun around earth so certain people in the Bible can finish their work, god who takes "our" side in a war, a god that gives itself body so it can kill it to save the humanity are man made invention.

Religion comes to us from other human mammals who not only know there is a god, but they also know his mind what he wants us to do. And how do they know? Revelation of course, god told them something often times contradictory what he told others. And the religious never even seek evidence for their extraordinary claims. But revelation is useless and unreliable as a way to discover truth

Revelation can only ever be relevant to the person to whom something is revealed. As soon as that person shares and relates the revelation to someone else, it becomes a testimony at that point. And then it becomes a matter of trusting that person for the claim they are making. Also, the person to whom something is revealed should be apprehensive and wonder which is more likely that laws of nature have been bent in their favor no less, or if perhaps they are under apprehension.

Revelations are dime a dozen. Numerous people have claimed that something has been revealed to them. Even worse different people have claimed same god has revealed things that are contradictory to the things god has revealed to other people. In Christianity god reveals himself as a human, he dies on the cross, and resurrects. In Islam, Jesus is not only not the son of god, he never died on the cross and never resurrected. Believing otherwise will have you condemned to hell. In Christianity god says love your enemies, in Islam he says kill your enemies and apostates. Yet it's the same god, and both sides claim divine revelation for the "wisdom" they preach.

Content of revelation paints a picture of a god who is quite frankly incompetent, stupid and has morals lesser than average decent human being today. And most importantly he leaves it to chance what you will believe about him and if you will be damned to eternity.

What religion you get indoctrinated into has very little to do with its truthfulness, but everything to do with where you were born. If you were born in Saudi Arabia for example you would be a Muslim defending Islam right now. Yet both Islam and Christianity and Judaism (the three desert dogmas) all claim to posses the true and perfect words of the creator of the universe.

And isn't it incredibly stupid of a supreme, intelligent, omnipotent, omnipresent being to demand belief in him without evidence? God would presumably know that people would invent scientific method as the only sure way to discover truth. Yet he leaves such important things as if you will be damned for eternity to belief without evidence leading to three desert dogmas that teach completely opposite things about him. Yahweh himself besides being stupid is rather evil god. Look how he behaves exactly as you would expect the people of that age that invented him to behave (he orders genocide of neighboring tribes that worship other gods, enslavement of women and children etc, just read random book of old testament). By the way he was never meant to be god of all, he was meant to be a god of a single tribe (otherwise a lot of stuff god says and orders makes no sense). Evolution of competing religions and the fact we have multiple religions like this is exactly what you would expect to see if religion were man made.

All metaphysical claims and especially all physical claims made by religion were proved to be wrong. And would you expect it any other way really? Religion was our first approximation of cosmology, medicine etc. But like all first approximations it proved to be completely wrong. Jesus casts out demons to heal people, he heals lepers instead of healing leprosy, no germs ever mentioned in the Bible (naturally no germ theory of disease either).

But now we know better. We know how solar systems are formed, we know how planets are formed, we know how life evolves, we even know how a universe can plausibly come from nothing. We really don't need god to kick off any of these things any more. Besides positing an intelligent god capable of creating universes, god that always existed, or that spontaneously came into being is assuming a lot more than assuming the same about the universe itself i.e. dumb matter. Occam's razor cuts him out of existence as superfluous assumption that does not explain anything.

Agreed. If X does not have any observable evidence in my world, it might as well not exist to me (though it might exist Elsewhere(TM)).

But people who brandish the "evidence based" argument do not mean that. What they mean is that if X does not behave in a particular way for which it is feasible to design an experiment, then X ought not to exist.

In practice, what happens is that if I claim to have had direct experience of X, they will dismiss it out of hand and go trying to shoehorn some explanation which does not offends their world view. And if I go further and point out that there are millions of people who have had similar experiences during history, they will blast that we are all a bunch of brain-washed idiot sheep.

Personally speaking, and to make it clear, I have had a couple of experiences that make much more sense if you consider that there's more to reality than what scientific materialism would be willing to accept. Maybe there's is perfectly materialistic explanation that is yet unknown to us, but maybe there's not. I simply point out that accepting the limits of our own ignorance is a more philosophically sound position than to dismiss evidence before considering it.

Again you fail to reason correctly. It's not that if you can't devise an experiment for X that X does not exist. It is more that you speak of X, X does things for you in this material world, etc. yet you have never seen X but you trust other human mammals who told you there is X, and you never even asked for ordinary evidence for X, let alone the extraordinary evidence it would require to prove the claims.

>But people who brandish the "evidence based" argument do not mean that. What they mean is that if X does not behave in a particular way for which it is feasible to design an experiment, then X ought not to exist.

No. It means that if X does not behave in such a way that it is physically possible to design an experiment, X most probably is not a sensible concept for anything other than "the idea of X".

The problem here is that subjective experiences are highly malleable and have never particularly corresponded directly to objective reality without further interpretation. So your subjective experiences are explainable in three possible ways:

* You subjectively experienced something we don't have a theory for yet, but which is part of physical reality. We will eventually figure out how to test it and construct a theory of it. This is very unlikely.

* You subjectively experienced something whose underlying causal basis is so highly complex that the interaction may not be repeatable (ie: whatever you interacted with could be capable of choosing with whom to interact or not, and when). This is extremely unlikely.

* You had a subjective experience that does not correspond to any external reality. This is quite common, actually, and the most probable option.