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Comment by galaxyLogic | Hacker News Reader

Two things to ask anybody who claims to have some information, or even just some personal beliefs, about something they call "God" :

1. What are the statements about what you call "God" that you believe in?

2. Why do you believe just that set of statements and not some other set of statements?

I believe that the answer to 2., if they are honest, would most often be: They believe the set of statements they believe because they WANT to believe just those statements. And why do they want to believe just such a set of statements? Because believing what they believe makes them feel good.

They want to believe those statements, and here's the minor miracle: Just because they want to believe those statements, they also all of a sudden do believe them. At least they claim they do.

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Many, many people who've had near death experiences, e.g. Howard Storm, Dean Braxton, Randy Kay, Bryan Melvin, etc... do not believe simply because they want to believe: their entire operating system (heart, mind, soul) has been updated with the ineffable and there's no going back.

Do you realize that humanity has an enormous pool of people from multiple races and cultures, which have a near death experience on a regular basis? They are called soldiers. The representation of humans groups is near perfect in the army, excepts for women obviously.

There is no evidence that near death experience can change human thinking to the "belief" in any statistically significant numbers. The only people who claim to become "believers" after such experience are probably people already on the verge of believing due to their psyche or education or both.

No doubt. My question is simply what exactly do they believe in and why? They had some wonderful experience, maybe they heard a voice saying "I am God thou shall not have other gods but me". Ok you had that experience but what can and what do you infer from it? That every word in the Bible is true? How would you draw that conclusion, based on the heavenly experience you had?

I think the point that many people refuse to question their "faith" is a clue which tells us that they believe because they want to believe, regardless of any factual basis.

I'm not against faith I believe everybody has the right to believe whatever they choose to believe. And if they do then obviously there are good reasons why they do so, my guess is the reason is it makes them feel better.

1. we are "computationally" equivalent to a turing machine: a tape with symbols on it and a head that reads and writes symbols to the tape according to rules.

the natural generalization of a turing machine to infinity would be a hyper turing machine: an infinitely wide tape and infinitely many heads.

i think language of "god" is mostly expressed in terms of infinities. e.g. pi (most infinite numbers are inexpressible to us, since most infinite numbers are transcendental numbers)

2. The alphabet our math uses is pretty much all finite. What percent of the axioms and theorems that you know are infinitely long? Shouldn't the overwhelming majority of axioms and theorems be infinitely long (and in particular map onto an uncountable set?). It just seems natural given the circumstances.

No I don't believe any axioms and theorems should be infinitely long. If they were then there would not be enough time for us to understand them, or even read them through. Theorems which nobody can understand would not be useful for anything.

that's cuz we are computationally equivalent to a turing machine.

From your perspective a Christian has faith in God solely because they want to. This perspective is somewhat ironic because in many cases Christians believe that they have faith in God because God gifted them the faith; in other words, they have faith against their human/created/natural desire to be autonomous and suppress the knowledge of God.

> From your perspective a Christian has faith in God solely because they want to.

That is just my guess in most cases, but of course there can be many different reasons.

It is a bit ironic yes. I remember talking to Christians who told me it is basically a sin to NOT believe. So if you don't believe, it is not just that God didn't give you that gift of faith, but that you really have to force yourself to believe, or else you go to Hell. And you have to believe that it is not you who is forcing you to believe but it is God that makes you believe, if and when you do.

But my point was not really about whether to "believe" or not, but how does it come to be that you believe the very specific set of beliefs that you do, which I assume vary from person to person even within the same congregation.

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