Mad Viking wrote: People tend to find the gods they are looking for.
Then the test would be what kind of God do you want? If you want the right one, you'll find him. Sounds like a good test to me.
I see. So there are as many "right one(s)" (gods) as there are inquisitors?
No, there's one. If you want him, you'll find him. If not, you won't.
"Surely he knows that DCP, The Nehor, Lamanite, and other key apologists..." -Scratch clarifying my status in apologetics "I admit it; I'm a petty, petty man." -Some Schmo
Mad Viking wrote:You are refering to the Mormon god, right? How do you explain the vast array of differing answers that he gives to the inhabitants of this rock?
I don't explain it. Not my problem. I found God. What use is there in trying to figure out what everyone else is saying about him when I can talk to him directly?
"Surely he knows that DCP, The Nehor, Lamanite, and other key apologists..." -Scratch clarifying my status in apologetics "I admit it; I'm a petty, petty man." -Some Schmo
Mad Viking wrote:You are refering to the Mormon god, right? How do you explain the vast array of differing answers that he gives to the inhabitants of this rock?
I don't explain it. Not my problem. I found God. What use is there in trying to figure out what everyone else is saying about him when I can talk to him directly?
It isn't what others are saying about him. It IS what he is saying to them. Why does he (the Mormon god) say different things to different people? He seems to base it along the lines of where people are born or what the beliefs of their parents are. There are a few anomolies to this rule, but it holds the majority of the time. If you can talk to him directly, you should ask him about that.
Mad Viking wrote:It isn't what others are saying about him. It IS what he is saying to them. Why does he (the Mormon god) say different things to different people? He seems to base it along the lines of where people are born or what the beliefs of their parents are. There are a few anomolies to this rule, but it holds the majority of the time. If you can talk to him directly, you should ask him about that.
Maybe he's not telling them that. Maybe they're making it up. I don't tell them this very often because they get uppity when I do.
God doesn't give me great insights into everyone else's spiritual life and I'm glad he doesn't. I wouldn't want mine broadcast that way.
"Surely he knows that DCP, The Nehor, Lamanite, and other key apologists..." -Scratch clarifying my status in apologetics "I admit it; I'm a petty, petty man." -Some Schmo
Mad Viking wrote:It isn't what others are saying about him. It IS what he is saying to them. Why does he (the Mormon god) say different things to different people? He seems to base it along the lines of where people are born or what the beliefs of their parents are. There are a few anomolies to this rule, but it holds the majority of the time. If you can talk to him directly, you should ask him about that.
Maybe he's not telling them that. Maybe they're making it up. I don't tell them this very often because they get uppity when I do.
God doesn't give me great insights into everyone else's spiritual life and I'm glad he doesn't. I wouldn't want mine broadcast that way.
You acknowledge that he could very well be telling them something else. For being sublimly confident that you have found the "right god", you seem to have little concern for whether he is being straight with you or giving you the whole story.
antishock8 wrote:So, the "test" is you have to believe in nonsensical b***s***. If you don't believe it, you suffer for a 1,000 years because you failed to allow yourself to be bamboozled.
Holy. s***.
Then again for some hell might feel like coming home.
If home is your lap, then hellz yeah it's home. Seriously. No. I mean... Seriously.
It makes no sense to say, as is often argued, "yes, but an intelligent designer is a more likely hypothesis than a trillion-to-one chance of the parameters randomly coming out that way", since you have no way of assigning a probability to that. For all we know, the odds of an intelligent designer existing are a googol to one. (You could attempt to argue that the number of people who believe in one form of religion or another speaks of its high probability, but there is no demonstrable correlation between that number and the numerical probability of that hypothesis being true.) And even if we had reason to believe that an intelligent designer was the more likely hypothesis, that still doesn't mean that it's true, unless the probability is 1.
Most things do not have a probability of one. We all believe that the sun will continue shining tomorrow (although clouds may obscure it), but there is a nonzero chance that the sun will be destroyed before then by some aliens that zap it to bits to make way for a new hyperspatial bypass. Also, there are events with the probability = 1 which may never occurr. If you flip a coin forever, the probability that you will get two heads in a row sometime is 1, but it is possible that it will never happen.
Furthermore, current cosmological evidence suggests that the universe is infinite in spatial extent
Really? I have never heard that. I thought the universe started out smaller than a dot and then expanded quite rapidly, but I didn't think it ever expanded infinitely fast (as would seem to be the logical requirement for it to be infinite in spatial extent).
One of the popular models has the universe being always topologically equivalent to a copy of R^3. In the The Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) model with K<=0, each spatial slice is a constant curvature space of infinite extent but with density approaching infinity at one goes back toward the time of the big bang. In these K<=0 models, it was only the observable universe that was once crammed into a dot. But there was, at any positive time, a whole R^3 full of such dots each destined to fill out a volume as large as what we can now observe. In the K>0 case, the whole universe (not just the observable universe) was a tiny dense copy of S^3.
when believers want to give their claims more weight, they dress these claims up in scientific terms. When believers want to belittle atheism or secular humanism, they call it a "religion". -Beastie
yesterday's Mormon doctrine is today's Mormon folklore.-Buffalo
Tarski wrote: One of the popular models has the universe being always topologically equivalent to a copy of R^3. In the The Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) model with K<=0, each spatial slice is a constant curvature space of infinite extent but with density approaching infinity at one goes back toward the time of the big bang. In these K<=0 models, it was only the observable universe that was once crammed into a dot. But there was, at any positive time, a whole R^3 full of such dots each destined to fill out a volume as large as what we can now observe. In the K>0 case, the whole universe (not just the observable universe) was a tiny dense copy of S^3.
