Descartes said that God exists because he had a sense within him that God exists. That is a fucking cop out. He may not have believed it himself.
I think this is actually a reasonable assertion , though I don't think it can be positively proven. There are very few human societies that do not worship some sort of God , indeed as if we were built for it. It is ubiquitous and this indicates it is a part of human nature as Descartes asserted. (BTW thanks for the spelling spellcheck was no help.)
Of course, Descartes knew that if he claimed that God did not exist, and the word got out that he has written this, he would have been seriously tortured by the Holy Office. As it was, he arranged for his Research on the Method to be published. AFTER his death. Read up on Descartes.
How did he know when he would die? This is a good point though , the first amendment is valuable to us not only to protect religious observance , it also prevents religious observance from being mandatory and therefore less than genuine.
Pascal was a mathematician and said that one should believe because if one was correct, one would be rewarded, whereas if one believed and God did not exist, then there would be no penalty.
Yep
Of course, Pascal postulated that if there was a God it was the one he had been indoctrinated with as a child, and that God punished nonbelievers with Hellfire and Damnation.
So Pascal actually is arguing more against Agnosticism than against Atheism or other religions?
Of course, if your entire belief structure is predicated on a lie, then the penalty is that you cannot be taken seriously.
He also assumes that believing is a conscious choice. To be a believer, all one has to do is to force oneself to believe and to reject all logical indications that point to disbelief. It does not work that way. One cannot force oneself to believe. At best one only gets a neurosis that way.
If belief is not a conscious choice , what is it? Do you choose to believe your favorite politician, or used car salesman?
No matter how hard I try, whiskey tastes just awful to me. Scotch, Bourbon, makes no difference. I can accept that others like the taste, but I cannot. In the same way, I cannot see Christian theism as anything but a poorly constructed hodgepodge. I cannot bring myself to believe that Pigs are capable of independent flight, either, and for the same reasons.
I don't think these are as tightly connected as you are positing. The people who love Gin don't look for that flavor in nonalcoholic drinks.
One thing is belief in a God, another is to believe that said God fits certain perimeters and has various attributes. Christian Theism has a whole bunch of illogical features: Original Sin, which states that Adam and Eve's snack has doomed every descendant forever. We no longer punish people for the sins of their fathers in civilized society. We would not execute John Wayne Gacey, Jr for his father's crimes. Svetlana Stalin came to the US and no one suggested that she be held accountable for what her father Josef did. We are smart enough to understand this. But we think God is not.
As a Son of the Confederacy , I am glad to see you have a good attitude about these things and do not think racism and unfairness to be congenital.
The Bible has God declaring, I thy God am a JEALOUS God, Jealous of what? Zeus? Baal? The Great Spirit? His Noodliness the FSM? How fucking omniscient is jealousy?
yes also any other thing that costs him his proper place in your life, Golf TV Facebook etc..
The entire doctrine of the Trinity is nonsensical, unless you see it for what it is: a fusion of Christianity with several popular mystery religions, done to win converts.
I don't want to defend the Trinity, I don't see it in the scriptures .
