Catholics make up 78% of free state population.👍👍👍

[omaghjoe]

J70
If you say your not choosing to believe or disbelieve anything, then your saying you don't have freewill is that correct? Besides if your an atheist by definition you dont believe in God but what your are saying contradicts that.

And....


Esm/J70

If you are forming an opinion using evidence you are choosing to believe that the evidence you have is correct.
So I will ask... how do you know you have all the evidence? And more pertinently how do you know that any of the evidence you have is correct? These questions i have asked dozens of times on here and usually I receive no answer, ad hominen (tho not from your good selfs), or on occasions I'll a completely inadequate one.
If you were using logic you would have questioned the validity of the evidence and you could only conclude there is no possible way to know if it is correct and complete and most likely it does not give us a true or accurate picture.

So therefore without belief in something (in your case your "evidence") you could not believe anything is correct.

[omaghjoe]

People are more educated and have access to more information than peasants in the 7th century did. It is not surprising that faith is under pressure.
Catholicism has very little to offer modern women.

This is codswallop Seafoid in my experience women usually easily outnumber men at mass.

Why would faith be under pressure from education? The only thing that's its under pressure from is the cultural rise of self-importance, but long term thats likely to be only a blip as it will be checked by society.

But if you keep repeating mantra eventually you'll convince yourself.

[BennyCake]

On a side note, I find it strange when people in sport use lines like "please God we'll get through to the final". What's God got to do with it? If they didn't win, was it Gods fault or the teams?

[seafoid]

People are more educated and have access to more information than peasants in the 7th century did. It is not surprising that faith is under pressure.
Catholicism has very little to offer modern women.

This is codswallop Seafoid in my experience women usually easily outnumber men at mass.

Why would faith be under pressure from education? The only thing that's its under pressure from is the cultural rise of self-importance, but long term thats likely to be only a blip as it will be checked by society.

But if you keep repeating mantra eventually you'll convince yourself.

I saw a list of all the developments opposed by the Church in the South.
Childrens allowance, tampons (FFS), contraception, divorce .. it was quite a long list.

[Lar Naparka]

People are more educated and have access to more information than peasants in the 7th century did. It is not surprising that faith is under pressure.
Catholicism has very little to offer modern women.

This is codswallop Seafoid in my experience women usually easily outnumber men at mass.

Why would faith be under pressure from education? The only thing that's its under pressure from is the cultural rise of self-importance, but long term thats likely to be only a blip as it will be checked by society.

But if you keep repeating mantra eventually you'll convince yourself.

Joe. I don'rt intend to join the barney going on here so I won't be hanging around but I can't let some of your comments pass without question. Firstly, in my experience women do definitely outnumber men at mass so I have no problem with that. I can only go by what I see.
However, it is also my experience that faith, the Christian dogma anyway, is under tremendous from education. Numbers that are active Christians are falling in Ireland, England, and all others we regard as first world societies eg,those who who are literate, numerate as well as articulate .

Numbers are increasing in Eastern Europe and third world countries such as the Philippines who are none of the above.  The common themes here is poverty and lack of education. Cultural self-importance is a by-product of education, pure and simple.
When Paddys and Biddys emigrated in their thousands, they carried a simple faith with them and stuck with it in the face of all difficulties they had to contend with. Nowadays, the numbers of practicing Christians are dwindling rapidly and the only major reason is the difference of the standard of education back then and now.
I'm not taking any side in the present dispute when I say that there is no evidence of any sort to suggest that the decline of Catholicism will be checked by society. if it's not being checked at present, there is little hope that it will be in some future time.

[manfromdelmonte]

On a side note, I find it strange when people in sport use lines like "please God we'll get through to the final". What's God got to do with it? If they didn't win, was it Gods fault or the teams?

some of the feckers on the squad didn't go to mass

[Imposerous]

People are more educated and have access to more information than peasants in the 7th century did. It is not surprising that faith is under pressure.
Catholicism has very little to offer modern women.

This is codswallop Seafoid in my experience women usually easily outnumber men at mass.

Why would faith be under pressure from education? The only thing that's its under pressure from is the cultural rise of self-importance, but long term thats likely to be only a blip as it will be checked by society.

But if you keep repeating mantra eventually you'll convince yourself.

Hmmm.

[imtommygunn]

http://indo.ie/8WKg30bucVn

Stephen fry reportedto guards for blasphemous comments on rte show. Kind of related to the thread...

[BennyCake]

On a side note, I find it strange when people in sport use lines like "please God we'll get through to the final". What's God got to do with it? If they didn't win, was it Gods fault or the teams?

some of the feckers on the squad didn't go to mass

That would explain it.

[J70]

J70
If you say your not choosing to believe or disbelieve anything, then your saying you don't have freewill is that correct? Besides if your an atheist by definition you dont believe in God but what your are saying contradicts that.

Once again, I'm not getting the connection between free will and weighing evidence and coming to an honest conclusion.

And....


Esm/J70

If you are forming an opinion using evidence you are choosing to believe that the evidence you have is correct.
So I will ask... how do you know you have all the evidence? And more pertinently how do you know that any of the evidence you have is correct? These questions i have asked dozens of times on here and usually I receive no answer, ad hominen (tho not from your good selfs), or on occasions I'll a completely inadequate one.

How can one EVER know they have all the evidence? That is obviously an impossibility. So one goes on what one has. For millennia, evidence of any kind was so limited and inadequate, that deities (whether single or multiple) were the default cause and origin of everything. There was so much we could not explain, that that was the starting point for what caused A-Z. We can't explain X by what we see every day, therefore there must be such and such a magical unseen being behind it. Then, especially in the past 200 years, we've been chiseling away at the causes of A-Z, and the movement from column A to B has been one way.

But even if we accept that we don't know (or ever will know) everything, we still have to come to an intellectually honest conclusion, one way or the other, based on what we do know. That conclusion is not a choice. Either you find one explanation convincing or you find the other convincing. One can cherry pick when presenting an argument, but you can't fool yourself (or, if he/she/it/they exist(s) as an omniscient, omnipotent being(s) with some kind of interest in whether you believe in them or not, gods).

I mean, what's the alternative? That you DON'T form an opinion because you can't determine if anything is valid or approaching some level of completeness allowing a judgment to be formed? Assuming that is even possible, where does that leave on when faced with the supposed judgment day?

And sorry if you consider my response inadequate. I'm obviously no philosopher.

If you were using logic you would have questioned the validity of the evidence and you could only conclude there is no possible way to know if it is correct and complete and most likely it does not give us a true or accurate picture.

So therefore without belief in something (in your case your "evidence") you could not believe anything is correct.

As above, that still doesn't make one's conclusion a choice. And if the god Tony believes in is real and is the one who equipped us with our senses and intellect and perception, how can he hold us accountable for honestly coming to the wrong conclusion using the very tools he granted? Are we supposed to use our "free will" to reject, a priori, anything that leads us to the wrong conclusion? Is it a case of I'll let you do what you want, but you better arrive at this pre-determined end point or that shit is going down? Do we judge what's valid and what is not, after the fact, based on the outcome?

And once again, is the person who simply accepts the indoctrination and slides through, not challenging themselves and lucking out on the right side, in better shape than the honest, curious person who ended up being wrong? If any of us had lived 300 years ago, we'd almost to a man be unquestioning, young earth creationists. Would we be on the fast track to heaven, with no intellectual obstacles in our way?

I think I've said this before, but if you live your day to day life to the standard you espouse here, where no assumptions or perceptions are necessarily valid, I don't know how you make it out of bed!

[T Fearon]

Surely in the light of Stephen Fry case, Garda should be prosecuting loads of constant blasphemers on this thread and Board. Over to the Mods.

[omaghjoe]

J70
If you say your not choosing to believe or disbelieve anything, then your saying you don't have freewill is that correct? Besides if your an atheist by definition you dont believe in God but what your are saying contradicts that.

Once again, I'm not getting the connection between free will and weighing evidence and coming to an honest conclusion.

J70 If you say you didnt choose your conclusion then there was no choice involved therefore no freewill? Similar to a computer running some logic? ..ie no freewill? I pretty sure tho that a computer would just say I don't know. Your in agreement tho that your arent actually an atheist since you dont believe you just conclude? Or are they the same thing?
Also didnt you choose to make the analysis yourself even if you cant admit that the conclusions you make are a choice?

And....


Esm/J70

If you are forming an opinion using evidence you are choosing to believe that the evidence you have is correct.
So I will ask... how do you know you have all the evidence? And more pertinently how do you know that any of the evidence you have is correct? These questions i have asked dozens of times on here and usually I receive no answer, ad hominen (tho not from your good selfs), or on occasions I'll a completely inadequate one.

How can one EVER know they have all the evidence? That is obviously an impossibility. So one goes on what one has. For millennia, evidence of any kind was so limited and inadequate, that deities (whether single or multiple) were the default cause and origin of everything. There was so much we could not explain, that that was the starting point for what caused A-Z. We can't explain X by what we see every day, therefore there must be such and such a magical unseen being behind it. Then, especially in the past 200 years, we've been chiseling away at the causes of A-Z, and the movement from column A to B has been one way.

But even if we accept that we don't know (or ever will know) everything, we still have to come to an intellectually honest conclusion, one way or the other, based on what we do know. That conclusion is not a choice. Either you find one explanation convincing or you find the other convincing. One can cherry pick when presenting an argument, but you can't fool yourself (or, if he/she/it/they exist(s) as an omniscient, omnipotent being(s) with some kind of interest in whether you believe in them or not, gods).

I mean, what's the alternative? That you DON'T form an opinion because you can't determine if anything is valid or approaching some level of completeness allowing a judgment to be formed? Assuming that is even possible, where does that leave on when faced with the supposed judgment day?

And sorry if you consider my response inadequate. I'm obviously no philosopher.

So your aware that you dont have all the evidence but are willing to make a call on it anyway? Sounds more like a prediction than anything. Like you would make about a match in the future where there is no way to possibly know but your gonna call it anyway. If you'll allow that analogy then you'd have to say that predicting football matches is exactly that, a prediction as you never really know..

You also didnt address my more pertinent point about how you know the evidence that you do have is correct?

Also what is this evidence by the way? I've havent seen any to suggest there is no non physical realm out there. In fact the order in the universe that we experience would suggest it is made by intelligent design (computer simulation is a front runner these days), and moreover the fact that we experience it at all when there is seemingly no reason for us to also suggests there is a deeper meaning to our lives. Rehashing the God of Gaps is simply a straw man which out of interest originated as a term for those of weak faith.

If you were using logic you would have questioned the validity of the evidence and you could only conclude there is no possible way to know if it is correct and complete and most likely it does not give us a true or accurate picture.

So therefore without belief in something (in your case your "evidence") you could not believe anything is correct.

As above, that still doesn't make one's conclusion a choice. And if the god Tony believes in is real and is the one who equipped us with our senses and intellect and perception, how can he hold us accountable for honestly coming to the wrong conclusion using the very tools he granted? Are we supposed to use our "free will" to reject, a priori, anything that leads us to the wrong conclusion? Is it a case of I'll let you do what you want, but you better arrive at this pre-determined end point or that shit is going down? Do we judge what's valid and what is not, after the fact, based on the outcome?

And once again, is the person who simply accepts the indoctrination and slides through, not challenging themselves and lucking out on the right side, in better shape than the honest, curious person who ended up being wrong? If any of us had lived 300 years ago, we'd almost to a man be unquestioning, young earth creationists. Would we be on the fast track to heaven, with no intellectual obstacles in our way?

I think I've said this before, but if you live your day to day life to the standard you espouse here, where no assumptions or perceptions are necessarily valid, I don't know how you make it out of bed!

They aren't my standards J70, they are yours, I dont live my life to them but you use them to conclude/believe/predict that the spiritual may/can/should not exist. I was wondering how rigorously you apply them to all aspects of your life? Obviously you don't as you say you wouldn't get out of bed, but if in the interests of fairness you did apply them to say a similar thing to spirituality like love... then the question would arise why get out of bed?

[omaghjoe]

People are more educated and have access to more information than peasants in the 7th century did. It is not surprising that faith is under pressure.
Catholicism has very little to offer modern women.

This is codswallop Seafoid in my experience women usually easily outnumber men at mass.

Why would faith be under pressure from education? The only thing that's its under pressure from is the cultural rise of self-importance, but long term thats likely to be only a blip as it will be checked by society.

But if you keep repeating mantra eventually you'll convince yourself.

Joe. I don'rt intend to join the barney going on here so I won't be hanging around but I can't let some of your comments pass without question. Firstly, in my experience women do definitely outnumber men at mass so I have no problem with that. I can only go by what I see.
However, it is also my experience that faith, the Christian dogma anyway, is under tremendous from education. Numbers that are active Christians are falling in Ireland, England, and all others we regard as first world societies eg,those who who are literate, numerate as well as articulate .

Numbers are increasing in Eastern Europe and third world countries such as the Philippines who are none of the above.  The common themes here is poverty and lack of education. Cultural self-importance is a by-product of education, pure and simple.
When Paddys and Biddys emigrated in their thousands, they carried a simple faith with them and stuck with it in the face of all difficulties they had to contend with. Nowadays, the numbers of practicing Christians are dwindling rapidly and the only major reason is the difference of the standard of education back then and now.
I'm not taking any side in the present dispute when I say that there is no evidence of any sort to suggest that the decline of Catholicism will be checked by society. if it's not being checked at present, there is little hope that it will be in some future time.

Lar I was trying to say that the dip in religion is caused by the rise of individualism. The importance of the individual seems to supercede everything else these days. and that is not linked to education, well directly at least. I believe its linked to the pyraid scheme of capitalism which will either crash or be checked (likely the latter). There's a strong consensus among Anthropologists that society thrives with religion and that it isn't going anywhere.
Some of the greatest minds that ever lived were religious, they understood things a whole lot better than the modern educated masses who really just do what their peers are doing and for the most part only come up with rubbish (like many here do) anti-theist catch phrases, but there is gaping holes in their logic, if they were better educated they would likely recognise those gaps and be alot more aware that God/spiritual/dualist realm is indeed as possible as anything else.

[Eamonnca1]

Surely in the light of Stephen Fry case, Garda should be prosecuting loads of constant blasphemers on this thread and Board. Over to the Mods.

On a completely unrelated matter, what's the deal with Jesus hanging out with men all the time, washing their feet, telling them he loved them and never getting married? I think Jesus might have been gay. What do you think, Tony? Would it explain his failure to close the deal with Mary Magdalene and hook up with her?

[J70]

J70
If you say your not choosing to believe or disbelieve anything, then your saying you don't have freewill is that correct? Besides if your an atheist by definition you dont believe in God but what your are saying contradicts that.

Once again, I'm not getting the connection between free will and weighing evidence and coming to an honest conclusion.

J70 If you say you didnt choose your conclusion then there was no choice involved therefore no freewill? Similar to a computer running some logic? ..ie no freewill? I pretty sure tho that a computer would just say I don't know. Your in agreement tho that your arent actually an atheist since you dont believe you just conclude? Or are they the same thing?
Also didnt you choose to make the analysis yourself even if you cant admit that the conclusions you make are a choice?

You're just getting into ridiculous nitpicking now.

Yes, I guess one "chooses" the more convincing option when faced with a choice. If that it how weakly you interpret the concept of "choosing" to believe in the supernatural, then this god we are talking about is a petty, narcissistic, egomanaical arsehole for penalizing anyone who "chooses" wrongly.

And....


Esm/J70

If you are forming an opinion using evidence you are choosing to believe that the evidence you have is correct.
So I will ask... how do you know you have all the evidence? And more pertinently how do you know that any of the evidence you have is correct? These questions i have asked dozens of times on here and usually I receive no answer, ad hominen (tho not from your good selfs), or on occasions I'll a completely inadequate one.

How can one EVER know they have all the evidence? That is obviously an impossibility. So one goes on what one has. For millennia, evidence of any kind was so limited and inadequate, that deities (whether single or multiple) were the default cause and origin of everything. There was so much we could not explain, that that was the starting point for what caused A-Z. We can't explain X by what we see every day, therefore there must be such and such a magical unseen being behind it. Then, especially in the past 200 years, we've been chiseling away at the causes of A-Z, and the movement from column A to B has been one way.

But even if we accept that we don't know (or ever will know) everything, we still have to come to an intellectually honest conclusion, one way or the other, based on what we do know. That conclusion is not a choice. Either you find one explanation convincing or you find the other convincing. One can cherry pick when presenting an argument, but you can't fool yourself (or, if he/she/it/they exist(s) as an omniscient, omnipotent being(s) with some kind of interest in whether you believe in them or not, gods).

I mean, what's the alternative? That you DON'T form an opinion because you can't determine if anything is valid or approaching some level of completeness allowing a judgment to be formed? Assuming that is even possible, where does that leave on when faced with the supposed judgment day?

And sorry if you consider my response inadequate. I'm obviously no philosopher.

So your aware that you dont have all the evidence but are willing to make a call on it anyway? Sounds more like a prediction than anything. Like you would make about a match in the future where there is no way to possibly know but your gonna call it anyway. If you'll allow that analogy then you'd have to say that predicting football matches is exactly that, a prediction as you never really know..

You also didnt address my more pertinent point about how you know the evidence that you do have is correct?

Also what is this evidence by the way? I've havent seen any to suggest there is no non physical realm out there. In fact the order in the universe that we experience would suggest it is made by intelligent design (computer simulation is a front runner these days), and moreover the fact that we experience it at all when there is seemingly no reason for us to also suggests there is a deeper meaning to our lives. Rehashing the God of Gaps is simply a straw man which out of interest originated as a term for those of weak faith.

You haven't seen evidence to suggest there is no non-physical realm??

Just what would evidence for OR against a non-physical realm look like?

And who is this intelligent designer with this supercomputer? And who designed him?? And who designed that designer??

And what have the intelligent design people been up to for the past 20+ years since they arrived on the scene announcing themselves and "irreducible complexity" as about to unleash a scientific revolution on a par with Newton?

As for "correctness of evidence", I have already addressed the concept. We are talking about humans forming an opinion of whether there are deities or supernatural beings or phenomena and whether there is a cost to the outcome of coming to that opinion.

In order to form the opinion, one obviously has to make assumptions that what one perceives and the evidence that accumulates and is repeatedly confirmed has some basis in reality. We do this all day, every day. And all day, every day those assumptions are either reinforced or reevaluated. (And this is what I was talking about in the "getting out of bed" bit, although I'm pretty sure you knew that).

But, as I've already said, the key is that these are the only tools we have. So why the f**k should person A be punished for coming to an honest opinion through the same process as person B who just lucked upon the "correct" conclusion?

If you were using logic you would have questioned the validity of the evidence and you could only conclude there is no possible way to know if it is correct and complete and most likely it does not give us a true or accurate picture.

So therefore without belief in something (in your case your "evidence") you could not believe anything is correct.

As above, that still doesn't make one's conclusion a choice. And if the god Tony believes in is real and is the one who equipped us with our senses and intellect and perception, how can he hold us accountable for honestly coming to the wrong conclusion using the very tools he granted? Are we supposed to use our "free will" to reject, a priori, anything that leads us to the wrong conclusion? Is it a case of I'll let you do what you want, but you better arrive at this pre-determined end point or that shit is going down? Do we judge what's valid and what is not, after the fact, based on the outcome?

And once again, is the person who simply accepts the indoctrination and slides through, not challenging themselves and lucking out on the right side, in better shape than the honest, curious person who ended up being wrong? If any of us had lived 300 years ago, we'd almost to a man be unquestioning, young earth creationists. Would we be on the fast track to heaven, with no intellectual obstacles in our way?

I think I've said this before, but if you live your day to day life to the standard you espouse here, where no assumptions or perceptions are necessarily valid, I don't know how you make it out of bed!

They aren't my standards J70, they are yours, I dont live my life to them but you use them to conclude/believe/predict that the spiritual may/can/should not exist. I was wondering how rigorously you apply them to all aspects of your life? Obviously you don't as you say you wouldn't get out of bed, but if in the interests of fairness you did apply them to say a similar thing to spirituality like love... then the question would arise why get out of bed?

Em, no, they're not my standards. Everyday, run of the mill life functions just fine going by our perceptions and assumptions. Extending that outwards to bigger questions presents no problems whatsoever for me. And I suspect that's the way for almost everyone, whatever "choice" they end up making vis a vis the needy gods.