I think the point is that there is, at least for many, the perception of something. About 90% of the answers I get to the question, what convinced you, was "my personal experience." When asked what that experience was, the answers are often a feeling (love, acceptance, relief), all very powerful influencers to a primate mind. I believe religion is a virus-like thing that a small percentage of people are born immune to, and the cure is a resolutely secular community.

Of course you have to promise that if they don't have enpugh faith they can't see the house. They just have to pretend its there! If they don't see it it is them at fault!

The theistic reply is you did it wrong. My reply is, it's a strange imaginary God you believe in. More vile than your imaginary devil.

@paul1967 Exactly. What sort of God offers a promise and then maybe says yes or maybe says no. No, either the god is God, or it's BS to manipulate.

But the Christian god in particular is revealed to be fiction because of evolution. Evolution disproves the Creation fantasy and thus the Christian dogma of human sacrifice. As if human sacrifice would be relevant to: THE God! Of course, the whole of cosmology disproves the Creation myth as well, but perfectly agrees with evolution. What a coincidence.

Whenever there's a disaster, and I hear people say, "I'll pray for them." I reply, "try doing for them instead of praying for them. You can feel good about doing something instead of feeling good about doing nothing."

@paul1967 That was one of my biggest questions when i was a christian. God is supposed to control everything so why did he allow the tragedy to happen just so people could pray that he would fix it. Why didn't god stop it from happening in the first place and why does god have to put us through pain so that we will come worship him

@abyers1970 If there is a “Creator” he doesn’t interact with me in any detectable way. If the Bible is his attempt at communicating with me, it’s reassuring message of love is lost on me. The Bible’s failure to match scientific observations and testable theories only fuels my doubt of his existence. The Bible speaks of a vengeful angry God who is more vile than any dictator in human history. These facts seems to be ignored by those who worship him and I can’t for the life of me understand why.

@paul1967 The God of the Bible will kill a couple for lying about selling a piece of land and kill women and children of opposing tribes that did not harm the Jewish people but yet he calls a man that slept with another mans wife and had her husband killed in a battler the "Apple of his eye?

@abyers1970 None of what you said seems to matter to a Christian. I hear, yeah but that’s the Old Testament as if it was a completely different God. Or they will say, you don’t know the mind of God so you can’t judge his actions. My favorite is when they blame the victims. I don’t know how they close themselves off so fully from reality.

@paul1967 Here's the funny part of it all and i never realized this until i left christianity. Jesus said that you don't change one tittle of the law. A tittle is the little squiggly lines in Aramaic. So whatever the law is in the Old Testament Jesus said don't change it. However Paul comes along and says that the law is no longer good and we don't live by the law anymore. So who do you choose? Jesus or Paul. Most christians seems to choose Pauls interpretations instead of Jesus. One of the many contradictions in the bible.

@abyers1970 I’ve debated that point with a fair number of Christians. If you like quality Christian documentaries, this is an excellent description of how Paul took over the Christian religion.

@paul1967 I'll check it out. I may have watched it before. This is the video that made me open up my eyes about Christianity

Jesus never said he was God. His disciples said that. I believe that Jesus lived and he probrably performed what could be considered Metaphysical miracles. I know hypnosis and i can tell you some things i've learned to do could be considered miracles in their times but it's all mental.

@abyers1970 I watched the entire video. It was very interesting.

I don’t know if Jesus was a real person or a legend, but if I had to come down on one side or the other I would say he was probably a real person. As far as metaphysical miracles, All I can say is people see and believe what they want to see and believe.

Agreed...People choose to lie to themselves because this way it makes sense to them ... LOL...filling that void... LOL

It's even more nefarious than that because I'm still alive, and I can tell others that you're a fraud. Christianity avoids that bad press by silencing you, so they can keep selling more and more bridges. "I have a magical bridge I'm selling that will allow you passage over all your evil sins and straight into your new glorious afterlife. It will be there for you when you need it. Only one left so, don't miss out."

Over the years I have asked more than one xian if they believed in a talking snake and a talking donkey -- and in each occasion, they had NO idea what I was talking about. I could kinda let the donkey thing slide, because it is perhaps a little less known (by most xians) but......the snake! It is central to the "Fall of mankind", yet, they could not relate. Go figure. Larry in western Kentucky

I was raised Catholic. The entire time I went to Catholic church we were discourage from reading the Bible, telling us that they will teach us all we needed to know.

I had never picked up a Bible until I was a teenager and started going to a Baptist church with my best friend. It made no sense then, and it makes no sense now.

Well, that's an improvement of a sort. There was a time the accused would have been called a profit instead of insane. So secularism is making the faithful more aware.

Ah one of my favourite words and so useful when listning to stupiidity weather religious or not.

I appreciate your excellent reply. If I followed the advice of my theistic friends and somehow convinced myself on faith that the word of God was real and let's say I have this overwhelming personal experience, can I now conclude that was God? Stepping back for a moment to examine the rules set forth to save my soul from eternal damnation, is it more likely that I made contact with a God? Or is it more likely I trick myself into a euphoric delusion of salvation by alleviating my guilt for all the bad things I have done in my life? All I ask of them is to acknowledge that the rules for freedom mirror a path to self-deception. And why would a God set a system for salvation that would mirror self-deception?

Being sighted confers demonstrable abilities. Communicating with God does not.

@paul1967 why do we have to think that god or a god or any god is some being that sits up above and judges us? I think that's the first issue and it originates from this incredibly stupid attempt by some faiths to stick to literal interpretations of their mythos. You can trace all this back to some real myopic dumbasses back in the first centuries AD who were over-relying on tying some general belief sets together as a means to unite diverse communities. Constantine showed this to be their conquer and unite method. The eastern influences didnt suffer from this same delusion. Their mythos was much more malleable and able to evolve. The Chinese beliefs ranged from natural order philosophies such as Taoism to societal order beliefs such as Confucianism. And that culture was co-evolving with the aryan influence through the Hindustan region creating the vedic traditions such as Buddhism and Jainism as well as impacting the Zoroastrians of the middle east. Until the strict Islamic influence crept in post 600 AD that whole area was a diverse and ever-changing group of civilizations with a major synthesis of community and beliefs that grew together.

Where that "bible" says god just say "consciousness" and read it all as fables like koans. Then you can include secular philosophies and the dissonance disappears. Now you can get back to figuring out the true nature of man and universe by SCIENCE and PHYSICS. This is where our minds should lie.

@Allamanda why convince them? if we're all inevitably going the same direction and their choice makes them happy then why bother them?

@paul1967
Fair question. I'd say our friends who are theists are often not consciously aware of the authentic processes at work in their own professed worldview. I suspect that many, if not most of them, have indeed fooled themselves just as you describe. I can say a couple of things about that. One is... that, evolutionarily speaking, if fooling oneself confers reproductive fitness, then to that degree, maybe it's not entirely a bad thing. Most thinking people find self-deception unacceptable though, as do I. So I have tried to become aware of the psychologically functional elements of the mythology in order to make use of them without fooling myself with a literal interpretation of what was surely "intended" as allegory.

Of course the science is far from "settled" as to whether religion is adaptive, exaptive, a random spandrel, or as Dawkins would have it, a pernicious viral meme. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that it confers some adaptive advantage, either directly as a fitness enhancer, or indirectly as a counterbalance to evolutionary mismatch. In any case, some studies show a correlation, at least, between religious practice and levels of self-reported happiness.

I agree with JeffMesser in that God need not be taken as a literal person, but is best understood as a personification of some greater principle. For him it is consciousness; for me it is reality, or nature. So for me, the study of science is, ironically, the study of God, metaphorically speaking. So any scientific evidence in nature is, itself, evidence of God. I believe the next survival hurdle our species faces is to find a way to keep the fitness-enhancing "baby" instead of throwing it out with the corrupted "bathwater" of religious literalism, which does, indeed, desperately need to be thrown out.

I think there are two identifiable levels (no doubt more than two) at which religious experience can work to some advantage. The first level does involve a particular type of self-deception, albeit a somewhat evolutionarily sanctioned deception. The other is a much less common, but pretty clearly evidenced, esoteric practice which can induce in the individual practitioner a cognitive state of psychological liberation which could easily be portrayed metaphorically as "salvation".

I think there is a place for "faith" in this latter, esoteric practice, but it is not faith in a literal God personage, but simply faith that such a liberation is possible - for the very reason that it is not transferable as data, and can be known only by having the experience. And achieving that experience can be obtained, usually, only by years of practice, during which, one can only have "faith" that what they are working for actually exists.

In this metaphorical context, the word "eternal" has a somewhat different meaning than the way we ordinarily use that word, and is well expressed by the Wittgenstein quote: “If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”

In a general sense, I agree with your advice, but I can't let them off unchecked. Too many of them push anti-science on innocent children and some of those children grow up to be politicians and judges. That Impacts my life.

@paul1967 I wasted 20 years trying and nothing. I feel better and happier when I just walked away.

@jdubose I respect you and appreciate your 20 years of service. I don't think it was all a waste because logic and reason can take time to take hold, and the more people inforcing logic and reason, the harder it is to ignore.

@paul1967 When I say walked away I don't mean give up. I mean refuse to engage.

I truly do have admiration for the attitude frequently encountered in some members of this site who are very dismissive of the propositions of religion, scoff at it as obvious nonsense, and feel no need to justify their lack of belief to anyone. Though by nature I am more inclined to mull over the most persuasive counters to such arguments, and think that by doing so I can provide something of value to others in the clutches of doubt, I feel that your approach provides something of value to the problem as well (just from a different angle, which is a good thing).

How people think and arrive at conclusions is important. These people are politicians, doctors, and teachers, and their influence has far-reaching consequences. I don't feel like it is a waste of my life, to investigate how indoctrinated minds work. I have no delusions of grandeur. I will probably never change any minds, but I enjoy learning. To each his/her own. What I find interesting, you might call a waste of life.

It's never me coming to them, it's them coming to me "to see the light" and when they engage me I feel obligated to invest a few minutes trying to get them "to see the light" of their own self-inflicted deception. I've never had a theist admit publically that they get my point, but I have had a few call me the devil, which to me means they understood, but they're too scared of the consequences of that revelation.

Christians know they have a soul in the same way they know God is real, faith. Unfortunately, faith is a useless tool for knowledge.
Biology only makes sense in the light of evolution and that's why our bodies fail us so easily. If a God created our bodies then he's unbelievably incompetent.

@paul1967 You're preaching to the choir on that last comment on my comment on your post!