In most of these conversations, God is a fish bicycle, isn't that obvious? There is a possible conversation about what "God chose," but the theologies that make sense to me essentially zero out the God contribution, beyond creating some expectation that it all makes, in the end, some kind of sense, and that we can search for that. God is, I'll just say, outside of time and so placing God's choice in the past, again, makes no sense. What is "God," anyway?

Since you don't accept the idea of God, whatever reasoning you create about God is made up, fantasy about fantasy.

Was there any choice at all involved in the creation of your "contradictory preferences"? What are you talking about? What is "choice"?

Okay, the core: you assume that contradictory preferences mean that something is wrong. Otherwise you would not conclude from them that God is crazy or incompetent. I'll just make up something not-wrong. You have differing preferences because they give you different points of view, and when you can see from more than one point of view, you get depth perception, right? Is depth perception valuable?

My own answer, by the way, about the three possibilities is All of the Above. Those are simply three stories we can tell about responsibility. Each one produces, if held in mind, consequences. Each has a value, but generally the most empowering is the second: you are responsible for your identity, which includes what you describe as your preferences.

Isn't that obvious? Okay, maybe it's not. We don't ordinarily think of ourselves as something that we created, we tend to "blame" it on our parents, society, or circumstances. But our identity was formed out of how we reacted to those factors. Did we chose these reactions or were they just automatic and predetermined? I'll leave the question there for now.

It's a bad argument against atheism. Atheists don't just disbelieve in any particular God, they disbelieve in all of them. Of course, if you redefine God to mean "potato", then atheists will believe in God. But that's a bad use of language, and the default assumption is to use the word in its normal context.

You persist in this, Chaosmosis, in assuming "against." What I presented was not an argument "against" atheism, per se, it was a question as to the nature of atheism. If "atheism" is disbelief in "God," then there must be some definition of "God," or it's totally meaningless.

I don't define God to be a thing. I equate God with Reality. What is that? I do not assume that I understand God. I did not invent this understanding, I found it. It's actually pretty standard Islam. God has many names, and one of them is al-Haqq. The Truth or the Reality. Because this is a reference to a singleness, I capitalize it, this is not a reference to the ordinary individual realities, the body of facts, all of which are conditional and relative.

I don't "believe" in this, I "trust" it, which is a better translation of the word in the Qur'an which is ordinarily translated as "believe." That is, there is an operating hypothesis here, on which I lean. It has effects. But it happens to be one which does not constrain my reasoning, that encourages it. But it is arbitrary, it's a choice.

I am responsible for it.

And you have your own choices to make.

In any case, "belief" is about an assumption of truth. "Trust" is only about a mind-state, in fact, or what I more routinely call a "condition of the heart."

What God do you believe in? Your point only makes sense if your understanding of God differs from the conventional one(s) in some important respect, which it probably doesn't.

I pointed to the Mu'tazila in another post to connect my position with an old tradition, one which is frequently thought to be heretical. The real story is that the Rationalists were very successful, early on, which might say something about the compatibility with the "proof-texts" of Islam, i.e, the Qur'an and the stories of the Prophet, but they asserted their power to attempt to crush contrary opinion. No surprise, they then lost power, and were in turn crushed.

To be fair, it was not the rationalist theologians who did this, it was their powerful supporters, who made the reserved and rational interpretations into a state-enforced dogma. Perhaps we could say that they did not adequately restrain their supporters.

Many "Muslims" would consider my comments heretical, I've run into this. I was considered to be too accommodating to "non-Muslims," who, they believed, were doomed to Hell if they did not "accept Islam." This got to the point that when I recited and translated a section of the Qur'an to a group of visiting Christian seminary students, the imam of the mosque was waving frantically at me to try to get me to stop. His religious affiliation trumped any concept that our responsibility might be to convey what was actually in the Qur'an. He was mostly ignorant of it. Small mosque, in a small town, a big fish in a small pond.

Definition of believe: "to accept as true or real". I don't believe with certainty in anything. (Technically, my intuitions are certain about certain things. Other parts of my brain disagree with their confidence though.) I slightly believe in everything, in that anything is possible because I'm fallible. But for everyday purposes, I believe that I am a human, that the sky looks blue sometimes, that rain is wet, and about ten million billion other things.

Great. Could we say that you believe in your experience? I would put it a little differently. You trust your experience. But for what?

In any case, can we distinguish between experience and what is concluded or expected from it?