Oh my goodness this is genius. You're so right! Here are people, who base their lives on this evidence. But who knows if it's the truest experience?? No one! I'm not saying that one is better than the other. But since we can't know which is the 'truest experience of reality,' why don't we just hold faith and evidence equally?? You've really got me riled up here.
"Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer." From a material perspective, yes. But there is not a single human being in all existence who concerns themselves purely with using their hands for work. And I think that illustrates the precise degree of value that can be associated with our material aims.
I think a lot of people have a misconstrued view of the purpose of prayer/meditation. The purpose is to get oneself in the right mindset to achieve a certain goal. Say I pray to be more kind toward a certain person. God isn't going to instill kindness in me with a spiritual syringe. Rather, I've realized the nature of my actions much change and so I take time to meditate on that.
Prayer is (seems to me) for the one praying, not for the deity. I don't know why more Christians don't see this. If you pray for God to do something he wasn't going to do, surely that's futile.
If you pray for God to do something he was already going to do, surely that's useless. Therefore, if prayer is useful at all, then it is useful for the pray-er, not the pray-ee.
Is there really evidence? Or is it just blind faith in what your elementary school teacher once told you? ;) What about the whole concept of relativity and frame of reference? Should your driver's license be revoked if the police officer can provide evidence that your car was traveling 108,000 km/h above the speed limit? Because that's the speed it was traveling relative to the sun. Sure, if you're approximating planetary orbits, this is much easier to work with than this. But neither it technically wrong. Can you disprove that the sun "rises" each morning? No, because it's just a matter for frame of reference.I can have all the faith in the world that the sun revolves around the earth however the evidence would prove me wrong.
You've compared a heliocentric orbital diagram and a geocentric orbital diagram and proclaimed neither of them to be "technically wrong". This is absurd, the geocentric view of the solar system is absolutely wrong and is not even a useful approximation. It was, at one time, a useful and somewhat convincing approximation but the real answer is much simpler, far more accurate, and easier to work with. There is overwhelming evidence that this is the case. If we were having this discussion before the launch of the first interplanetary exploration missions there would STILL be overwhelming and conclusive evidence but in the age of space exploration it is incontrovertible. There's no blind faith required here, there is real evidence.
I wasn't really clear. I am not talking about orbits or the model of the solar system. I'm talking purely about changing the frame of reference. If you want to plot the movement of planets, you set the frame of reference at the sun. That way, the orbits are nice and elliptical. If you plot the movement of the moon, it will look something like this, though. To get a nice ellipse, you have to set the frame of reference at the earth. So now you have the earth at point (0,0,0) and you have the moon revolving around it in an elliptical orbit. What happens if you plot the sun? Normally, people consider the ground not to move, and use it as a frame of reference. So if you're just standing, you're not moving. If you're driving 30 miles per hour, you're moving at that rate relative to the earth's surface, right? So, if the ground is not moving but the sun moves from one side to the other, then at this frame of reference the sun is moving around the earth. So to be clear: I'm not making an argument against the model where the earth orbits around the sun - everything behaves the same. The only thing that changes is the frame of reference.
There's tons of evidence, no blind faith requires, your argument had no grounds and no blind faith required, unlike belief in god ;). Also, we use speed as a reference, true its really much faster relative to the sun but that i not the scale I, nor any rational human being uses. I cant disprove anything, it's impossible, can you disprove that you're a serial killing rapist, no.
I'm just playing devil's advocate here now, but how do you know that in a spiritual sense of our universe in which the sun and earth revolve around something entirely different? I know I'm being ridiculous. But the point of what I'm trying to say is that we shouldn't ever discredit the possibility for anything, even if there's no evidence for it.
But there's faith in facts! Faith that those facts will never change. Who knows that they won't?
Don't discredit the possibility that the earth and sun revolve around something else, because they do. Our solar system orbits the super massive black hole in the center of our galaxy. There's just nothing spiritual going on there. ;)
Haha, I knew that! It was the first thing I could think of off the top of my head!