Happy Zombie Jesus Day.

octatonic

Rocker said:

snakemanStoo said:

For on the third day he rose

That, my friend, is the essence of Christianity.  Jesus, the Son of God, came down to earth, was crucified, died and rose from the dead on the third day.

Simple statements of fact.

* Believers cannot prove the existence of God.
* Non believers cannot prove that God does not exist.

Everyone must make up their own mind on the existence or not of God.  Your belief in God is your own choice, one you make yourself.  My stance is that I believe in God, in Jesus and in the existence of Heaven.  A very well put together paper called 'Pascal's Wager' exists questioning this very issue.  It makes for some interesting reading.  Whether you believe in God or not.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager/

Pascal uses logic to weigh up the pros and cons.  'Logic' and 'religious belief' are words that are not usually used together.  
Worth a read.

Voltaire characterised Pascal's Wager as "indecent and childish" when describing "the interest I have to believe a thing is no proof that such a thing exists".

TheBlueWolf

I'm not familiar with Pascals Wager but I'm going to have a read, even if it is nonsense. 

fretmeister

TheBlueWolf said:

I'm not familiar with Pascals Wager but I'm going to have a read, even if it is nonsense. 

It basically says that just because there is a minuscule (to the point of being able to validly and reasonably ignore it) chance of a shark landing on your head while you cross the road, you should always live your entire life as if that shark is always there.

Grunfeld

TheBlueWolf said:

I'm not familiar with Pascals Wager but I'm going to have a read, even if it is nonsense. 

It's not nonsense.  On the face of it Pascal's idea can seem fair enough:
But once you've been through it and you get the idea of a false dichotomy then it doesn't seem so convincing.
The interesting part, for me anyway, is how pervasive the heuristic of either/ or is in our thinking -- it's a basic cognitive bias.

fretmeister

Yup. Almost every either / or decision is presented in a way that  suggests possible negative outcomes are equiprobable, and most of the time they are not.

VimFuego

fretmeister said:

TheBlueWolf said:

I'm not familiar with Pascals Wager but I'm going to have a read, even if it is nonsense. 

It basically says that just because there is a minuscule (to the point of being able to validly and reasonably ignore it) chance of a shark landing on your head while you cross the road, you should always live your entire life as if that shark is always there.

fck!!! there's a shark over my head?!?

Grunfeld

fretmeister said:

Yup. Almost every either / or decision is presented in a way that  suggests possible negative outcomes are equiprobable, and most of the time they are not.

For sure, and we generally have an utterly rubbish grasp of probability. 
Add to that the bias of risk aversion which most of us have and Pascal's wager seems worth a punt. 

Flink_Poyd

Rocker said:

snakemanStoo said:

For on the third day he rose

That, my friend, is the essence of Christianity.  Jesus, the Son of God, came down to earth, was crucified, died and rose from the dead on the third day.

Simple statements of fact.

* Believers cannot prove the existence of God.
* Non believers cannot prove that God does not exist.

Everyone must make up their own mind on the existence or not of God.  Your belief in God is your own choice, one you make yourself.  My stance is that I believe in God, in Jesus and in the existence of Heaven.  A very well put together paper called 'Pascal's Wager' exists questioning this very issue.  It makes for some interesting reading.  Whether you believe in God or not.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager/

Pascal uses logic to weigh up the pros and cons.  'Logic' and 'religious belief' are words that are not usually used together.  
Worth a read.

I really don't see the need to prove either way anymore. I'm  not particularly religious, if you believe in something and I don't I'm not going to get all worked up about it. There are millions of people who believe theyre going to win the lottery each week, theyre more deluded in my eyes

TheBlueWolf

I take back my "nonsense" comment as it was an interesting read. If I've read it right it presumes that you *should* believe in God and that the only loss is in not having believed in God in the first place, making it a biased wager.

I'll have a think about it overnight

quarky

It is nonsense, because the obvious question is "which god" should you believe in. There are thousands upon thousands, mostly mutually exclusive, so you can't "win" the wager anyway. And there is of course generally a loss in leading your life believing in an after-life.

PVO_Dave

https://pics.onsizzle.com/Facebook-070b71.png

57Deluxe

I can't wait for Ascension Sunday  - that's the best bit...