Pope Francis: Free expression doesn't mean right to insult others' faith

The subjective experience. And if it has no bearing on any physical claims about the universe, then what is it? On what level is it reality?

God is brought into being in a similar way. It's hard to consciously reflect on whether you're in love or not, mainly because you have no properly measurable evidence about what love actually feels like, and even if you did, you'd still have no way to objectively judge the nature of your own feelings.

So if you decide you're in love, you're in love, and nobody can really say otherwise; if you decide God exists, he exists, and nobody can really say otherwise.

God of course does not really exist outside of people's minds, except insofar as people's individual concepts of what belief in God is supposed to consist of are shaped by shared religious traditions, which are an attempt at someone else's effusion of their own spiritual experiences. Same as love, which is shaped by shared fairy tales, music, and other scripture, which are attempts at someone else's effusion of their own romantic experiences.

If you're saying that god doesn't exist outside people's minds, then I don't think we have much to disagree on.

I think we do. Unless I'm pigeonholing you too much, you think that because we can't measure it, it's not real in any helpful sense. That's wrong. If we can't measure it, we simply can't prove it's real.

I think you've jumped the gun there. It would be bizarre to think that things can only exist by virtue of us being able to detect them.

In what way exactly is the opinion ridiculous? I'm a Christian but believe that the drawing of muhammed was taking it too far. Also how is religion outdated, the only place its declining is Europe. Outside of Europe religion is increasing.

That's the end of the road for some lines of debate, but for others you can assume it's real for the sake of argument and draw conclusions further down the line based on that assumption

A bit like how theoretical physicists postulate particles, fudge factors and cosmological constants to simplistically explain phenomena we see in the real world.

The problem is that many religious people take that man-made assumption and then expect the rest of us to treat it as if it is real.

In fact, many go further from that assumption to say that they know what this god they've assumed to exist wants us to do, who he prohibits us to sleep with, on what day this assumed god commands us to worship him, and so on.

That's just completely made up. Even if we're to accept the possible existence of a deistic god, the theist still has all his work ahead of him to substantiate even in the flimsiest way the supposed desires of this god

The distinction there is that physicists are hypothesising about explanations that tie together things we already know about the physical universe. And in many cases their hypotheses have proven correct when we later create the technology to confirm their theories. Other TSRians with greater scientific knowledge than I will be able to further outline the clear distinctions between things like the Theory of Relativity, and the assumption that Yahweh exists

Einstein's theory of relativity proved right - again!

The difference with theistic religion is that it's not based on any particular physical principle, it's purely man-made speculation with no physical substantiation of any sort.

The fact that the theistic god failed to insert any scientific facts into biblical texts that would later prove advanced knowledge (like if the Bible contained an expression of e=mc2, in an equivalent form with explanation... that would prove advanced knowledge and perhaps go some way to demonstrating that it wasn't just made up by humans at the time).

Instead, the evidence that we do have is entirely consistent with what we'd expect to see if there was no god and religion was completely man-made