:-)

Hi Charlie,
I already am truly enjoying this conversation as I’m already learning another example of how different people think with really different mentalities.
It’s unfortunate that you misunderstood my comments and my main point. My main point is that if we need to carry on this debate/conversation as objectively as possible, we have to eliminate assumptions and agree on common facts. When you talked previously about believing in God and religions, you said that you don’t believe in God/religion because they ARE “so unlikely”. This is the context in which you mentioned the word “unlikely”. When I replied and said God is unlikely only to you, you must have taken this literally when I meant it within the aforementioned context. My point was: when you say something is “so unlikely”, this is absolutely your own point of view. Yes it is the point of view for another 2.4% in the world, but the rest of the world obviously has a different point of view. So regardless of what your or my point of view is, to be able to carry on a debate, we have to build common facts and see where this would take us.

You never said it was written in the US law that people must believe in God. I totally agree with you. I never even claimed that you said that! The comment I was making in that regard was that if you don’t have high opinions of religious freedom in the US, I equally don’t have a high opinion about religious convictions in Sweden or Yugoslavia! Once again the “point” is: it doesn’t matter what your opinion is or what mine is as far as this conversation is concerned. What matters is what we can agree on (or disagree on) and how we can build upon our agreement points to prove to each other our view points and possibly change our views, or at least challenge them.
I really hope you don’t misunderstand my main point again. And I don’t really blame you since you might not be exposed to this way of thinking before, but hopefully you start seeing where we are not in synch.

When I said you are an atheist because you live in Sweden, I was NOT saying that as a necessarily “true fact” that you needed to nullify and tell me how that’s not true. It was not a presumption I had, but on the contrary I was saying: I can’t use such an argument even if that was what I believe in. In other words, I was making that comment to show you yet another example of how statements like: “you guys believe in God because you simply were taught that by your parents/environment”, would not help this conversation as they have no proof to them and are built on presumptions.
Read my words again carefully and you will clearly see that right after that comment I wrote:

!

As a matter of fact if you read each one of the points you demanded an apology for, you would find that at the end of each one of them, I keep repeating something like: “But all that does not matter because it does NOT proof anything”. Hopes this assures you that you took my words out of context.

Finally I honestly do not mean to disrespect you in any way shape or form. This is actually part of our own religion and convictions.

Let me also give you an advice regarding your last comment (feel free to reject it or possibly benefit from it as it’s clearly my own personal opinion and is not part of the debate):

My advice: revisit your intentions. Are you involved in this debate because you want to show people that you are “right”? People don’t matter, and don’t place this as hindrance to objectively trying to learn something out of this debate. People could greatly influence someone’s objectivity. I’m assuming you’re here to learn something because you did indicate that you joined this forum to see how we could believe in God and find out more about reasons of why we believe. I think being open-minded means that I would be willing to understand someone else’s view points and possibly change some of my own views vs. coming in with a predetermined mentality and not even thinking of the possibility that I could be wrong. So think about that for a second. Also let me know if it would help to carry on this conversation privately.

I swear every time I try to make my messages short, it just gets’s longer. We should probably have a maximum of like 30 lines per post 

We truly want you to enjoy your stay here, so really nothing personal and absolutely no disrespect and ill feelings.

Let me know if we can continue now and start a fruitful debate, if so refer to my previous post and check out the rules for the debate game and let me know
stranger.

Hi Charlie,
How is it going today, hope all is fine.
Sure, I’d love to have an open-minded debate and thanks for the warm welcome.
And let me start off saying, please do excuse me if sometimes I take a long time to reply since I’m very busy these days preparing to defend my PhD thesis.

So Charlie I’ll be very honest and straightforward. You obviously have many assumptions like we all do and everyone is biased towards what he is convinced of. We try to be as objective as we can, but to do that, we have to challenge our very basic assumptions!

I’m obviously not asking you to agree with everything I claim. I’m trying to build a common base so we can carry on a debate. So I wrote a couple of rules and I want to see if we can mutually agree on them, or possibly modify them first before we can proceed.

Let me try to simplify things. Think of the debate as a game. We’re right now at the phase of setting the rules of the game before we play it . We can NOT change the rules of the game, but we CAN add to them as we play.

So to summarize the rules:
1- No assumptions can be made unless you can prove them to be ABSOLUTE FACTS (of course to a certain extent). I’m not talking about 1+1=2; I’m talking about statements like: “we believe because our parents taught us so” or a statement like: “you refuse to believe because you don’t want to accept religious restrictions on your life”…etc. These are assumptions/explanations and we can’t build on them before we prove them. Another assumption would be: God is not likely to me. We say: well God is likely to us. We are already convinced of that just like you’re convinced of the contrary. I can’t build my conversation on the assumption that God exists (although I personally totally believe in him), nor can you build your conversation on the assumption that he does not (although you are convinced so). Remember what might be a FACT for you, might not be for me and vice versa.

2- Only once we establish something in common (add a rule), can we then build upon it and can not break it. We have to make clear decisions on what we agree upon. You can’t initially start saying: I agree on rule1 above for example and then break it during the debate. You can’t either say: ok I will temporarily accept rule1 above for now to see where this takes me. It might lead you to something you don’t like and in turn you can come back later and say: well I assumed I believe in these rules, but not really! In other words, any two parties in the debate can lie or not conform to intellectual integrity (for example be convinced by an argument but not admitting it!). We really usually assume such an intellectual integrity by default; however such rules can help a little in sustaining this integrity during the debate as well as organizing thoughts.

3- Once agreed upon, these rules can NOT be changed, but we can add to them.

4- The process of adding a rule is as follows:
I make a statement (or vice versa of course):
You either
A) Completely agree with the entire statement, and then the statement would be added to the rules.
Disagree with the statement. Can’t be added as a rule and we try to see why we disagree or completely drop it.
C) Don’t know for sure. Will deal with it later.
Note: if you partially agree with a statement that falls under either disagreeing or not knowing for Sure.

5- Pure logic is fair game (ex: two ABSOLUTELY contradicting statements can’t be both true). And math falls under this category (i.e. 1+1=2, or probability of flipping a coin and getting a head is 50%...etc)
6- Scientific laws are fair game.
7- Scientific theories are not a 100% proof, but we can build upon them since they’re very likely to be true. If something contradicts the theory (maybe another theory), then we can NOT build upon it any more.



I will show you the contradictions I saw in your way of thinking, but let’s keep this point aside for a second.

Are you serious man? I hope you’re kidding. You’re probably too confined to your experiences that are limited in Sweden. The last survey I’ve seen from the CIA’s world Fact book conducted in 2004 shows only 2.4% of the world’s population to be atheists. So yes God is only unlikely to you and the rest of the 2.4% in the world. God is likely to 97.6% of the world’s population! So NO! Most people in the world would NOT agree with you. And YES; there are still people in the 21st century that believe in God; they’re 97.6% of the world’s population.
You live in one of the most atheist countries in the world according to many studies my friend. According to one study in 1999 80% in Sweden don’t believe in God. A later study in 2005 shows 23% only with 53% believing in some kind of force, but not necessarily God. Hmm I guess we’re not the ones affected by our environment that teaches us about God and Islam. It seems to me like you’re the one affected by your environment that teaches you atheism.
See where such arguments take us? No where! That’s why I want to establish a common background (the game debate) because your assumptions that might be facts/true to you can be false to me, and vice versa!
Obviously we can start getting into arguments like: majority doesn’t matter because majority is not always correct as you stated…etc. I agree with that but at least it might have some kind of indication. Can I prove majority is correct: No. But when we start getting into: what I think is likely and what you think is likely, then majority and statistics do make a difference. Hope you now start seeing the importance of building mutual rules before we can proceed further with our own assumptions. I want to eliminate such assumptions.

Again, no I’m not talking other sciences (which you need to define anyways); I’m talking about biologists, physicists, chemists, cosmologists, astronomers, natural scientists… etc that believe in God and there are a lot of them.

See, you’re making an assumption here: you’re assuming that believing in God requires denying evolution, or that if you believe in evolution then you should deny God! (Obviously I disagree with this assumption) and you need to prove it, but that’s for a later point.

Once again you got it wrong my friend. You obviously don’t know much about the US or the US law, so I don’t know where you get you opinions from. It’s called freedom of speech and is in the first amendment of the US constitution. You CAN talk open against God in the US. There are other limitations, but talking open against God is not one of them.
But once again this is all irrelevant. It will not help us discuss and debate to reach to mutual agreements on points.

Well, legally they can be atheist; however population won’t probably elect them. Did you guess why? Because it’s LIKELY for most of the population to believe in God and would consider it very UNLIKELY for someone like the president no to believe in God!

Do you have a problem with people learning to obey since birth? And no I do not deny it. Actually I’m proud of it. I’m adding years of someone else’s experiences to mine.
Or do you want to say people don’t get affected by their environment? We all know they do. You live in Europe, and know the history of the Church and state. Church vs. Science…etc. my explanation is that your environment must have had a bad experience against religious ideas and churches since they opposed science and did terrible things for many great scientists. But whatever your environment or mine taught us will not help in the debate because once again, it does not prove anything. I keep emphasizing so hope you understand this point clearly.

Simply disagree. Hope you understand by now why.

Facts? Facts to you only. To me, your facts are simply not facts. I wouldn’t call them facts unless they’re proven and we both agree on them. So I would call them explanations or something like that but not facts.

Of course feel free to comment on any of my comments, however I’m waiting to see if you agree to the rules I mentioned above so we can proceed further. If not, please let me know which one and why. They sound logical and clear to me, but I have to make sure they’re logical and clear to you as well. Looking forward to “playing this game” with you with a sincere intention that we present to you our point of view and hopefully convince you of what you’ve been missing in your life. Will keep you personally in my prayers
Stranger,