The Problem with Christians

[TheRocketSurgeon]

So you can see how the numbers of "fair-dinkum"  Christians in this country is actually very low. Certainly nothing like 61%

Did you just quote Robert Heinlein?

If so, my respect for you just notched up a point.

[vorlon13]

TANSTAAFL

[Esquilax]

Bill has also stated that the worlds population can be reduced by about a billion people thru using vaccines. Maybe he plans to put something special in them. It's been done before.

"Previous vaccination programs have been shown to have covertly been used to sterilize women.  In 1995, the Supreme Court of the Philippines found that vaccines used in a UNICEF anti-tetanus vaccination program contained B-hCG, which when given in a vaccine, permanently destroys women's ability to sustain a pregnancy."

The Hcg hormone was also added to tetanus vaccines in Kenya.

Here's an interesting article on the subject of tainted vaccines.

Oh, you are just deeply fun, dude.

So, I hope you're starting to realize now that, when you make these claims, I'm actually going to look them up, rather than just taking your quotes at face value. You're not going to be able to get away with lies or a lack of fact checking around me. In this case, I hit immediate paydirt when I discovered that your claim had already been addressed by Snopes, and found to be roundly false. In fact, it's little more than conspiracy theory rabble rousing initially instigated by a pro-life group, and then revived in Kenya by some deeply suspicious catholic bishops with no medical training and no access to the technology that would even allow them to test accurately for the compound they're claiming is in there. They literally have no way of knowing the thing they're claiming as definitely true.

See, these idiots used hospital pregnancy tests to "confirm" that this specific compound was in the vaccine, but that's little more than a way of producing false results. I mean, to begin with, pregnancy tests are made for urine samples, they aren't equipped to detect things in vaccines, but there's also a preservative in the tetanus vaccine that can lead to a false positive of a chemical resembling, but unable to be identified as hCG in the samples used on these inappropriate tests. As an added bonus though, the laboratories that did the testing that started this conspiracy theory noted in their reports that the results were insignificant, that the levels of hCG interaction were well below the pregnancy test's capability to accurately detect, and that the detection was most likely the result of an interaction between the aluminum salt within the vaccine and some component of the pregnancy test. So, the actual lab that did the testing said it wasn't an accurate result, yet the pro-life groups in the area jumped on it anyway, not caring about the truth in the least.

As it happens, actually testing the vaccines with technology able to, you know, test for the chemical you're looking for, shows that there is no hCG in the vaccine:

In fact, in a laboratory in Hungary, it was shown that the sterile water supply from the local hospital gave a higher false positive level of hCG than did the TT vaccine.

So you fucked up again, and badly this time. Do you think maybe it's time to start asking yourself why you keep getting taken in by citations that actually say the exact opposite of what you're claiming, or are demonstrably, wildly false? Do you think a little self reflection about your methods of discerning truth might be in order?

[robvalue]

I hope people are reading their own sources this time

Is that the Death Star I see on the horizon...

Tut tut, I tried to tell them!

[Esquilax]

Nope. I simply think that without the lobbying from a 3% minority group, the designation of homosexuality as disordered would have remained.

Except that this is another one of those cases where even a cursory amount of research into what you're talking about proves you wrong: the designation was changed because of empirical data stemming from the works of Kinsey and Evelyn Hooker, in addition to numerous studies across a wide variety of psychological tests that showed that homosexual individuals did not significantly deviate from heterosexual individuals in their ability to function. The designation was changed because of evidence and testing, not lobbying. You just pulled that out of your ass.

I never said that all violence is carried out by the irreligious. I would hold to the view that most violence is carried out by them because serious Christians know that they are not supposed to act in this way.

If all you've got is a No True Christian fallacy, then you do not have anything. I'm not going to sit here and play self serving definitional games with you, about people you cannot possibly know well enough to make informed decisions about.

Do you have any figures supporting your view that the Church is responsible for violence against the LGBT community? What research can you produce showing that the Church is conducting a "war" against such people? I did find an interesting article on violence against the transgendered but it made no mention of the Church. It looked at secular institutions and their role in sins of commission and omission.

So, you've got a Pope comparing trans people to nuclear weapons, you've got christian and conservative pundits left and right lining up to talk about "men in dresses" and the danger they pose, and you need more evidence?

Rhetorical flourishes aside, you're being overly simplistic and a tad misleading here, since it's my position that anti-trans sentiment stems largely from outmoded ideas of gender promulgated by your religion, not that the church is literally organizing violence against them. I know fleeing to this position is the only way to avoid accountability for you, but that's not what I'm saying: my position is one of memetics, not overt hectoring.

Incidentally, your study doesn't look at "secular" organizations, it looks at genres of organizations that people come into contact with regularly, like schools, hospitals and so on. Last I checked, religious schools and hospitals exist in Australia too.

[Esquilax]

You claimed to dismiss the entire concept of inductive reasoning based on a tiny sample group. I never suggested that all people who assume God to be real would have the same experience. Some will conclude that there is nothing there, others like my son in law have had a profound change in their thinking and attitudes - much for the better.

So, in other words, spiritual fruits are not a way to determine god's effect on one's life, as both positive and negative results are to be expected. Why did you even bring it up at all?

Perhaps they believed amiss,

"Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand,  and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain." 1 Corinthians 15:2

I will not engage with the No True Christian fallacy. If that's all you have, then you have nothing.

It's hardly hypocritical to have a debate in which you disagree with someone. It isn't wrong to be annoyed with them either.

When you appeal to supernatural entities, and then dismiss someone's refutation of your claim on the basis that they aren't being scientific enough, then that is an act of hypocrisy.

[Esquilax]

OK, what do you make of this? A review of a hundred studies gives gender reassignment surgery the thumbs down,

"There is no conclusive evidence that sex change operations improve the lives of transsexuals, with many people remaining severely distressed and even suicidal after the operation, according to a medical review conducted exclusively for Guardian Weekend tomorrow.

The review of more than 100 international medical studies of post-operative transsexuals by the University of Birmingham's aggressive research intelligence facility (Arif) found no robust scientific evidence that gender reassignment surgery is clinically effective. " http://www.theguardian.com/society/2004/...ntalhealth

Motherfucker, if you're going to just keep listing citations to dodge the issue, the least you could do is to actually read them first.

I mean, just to start with: a meta-analyses commissioned from one research group by a newspaper to sell copies of a magazine issue filled with anecdotal experiences from a couple of trans people who regret transitioning is hardly the peak of scientific rigor. In fact, I think there's something wrong with every major word in that sentence.

But as it happens, you're also straight up lying about the results of that analyses, because in no sense does the review "give gender reassignment surgery the thumbs down," only that a large swathe of the studies analyzed show methodological problems that render the results potentially unhelpful, something that both sides of this issue tend to agree on in many cases. But hey, I can see how you missed that: it's the fifth paragraph (of an article where most paragraphs are three sentences at best) and clearly, you stopped reading at the second paragraph, which is where your quotation stopped. I guess you found something that confirmed what you already believed and then stopped.

What's particularly interesting is that, in the example they picked, the director of the research group leaps to assuming that those respondents who dropped out of the study "for unknown reasons," were all dead, instead of just... you know, dropped out of a five year study. He then intimates, based on no evidence (remember, they lost track of these people, they don't know what they're doing) that perhaps those deaths he just imagined out of thin air were suicides? Awfully suspicious leap of logic there.

Oh, and there's also the bit where they note that research from the US and Holland indicates that up to a fifth of study respondents report dissatisfaction with their transition... which by corollary suggests that four fifths do not. In what world is that sufficient to conclude that transitioning doesn't work?

The article ends- since I know you never read enough to get to the end of this stuff- by noting that any properly constructed study of this, with a control group, probably wouldn't make it past an ethics committee, as it would be unethical to deny patients medical care in order to establish a control group. So... you fucked up again: you presented a meta-analyses of dubious provenance that concludes that there are methodological issues with the research into transitioning thus far, which is an entirely uncontroversial statement among science-minded types (which you are not), and then asserted that this is tantamount to "giving gender reassignment surgery a thumbs down," which it is simply impossible to conclude from the actual content of the article.

So, did you not read the article, or were you lying about its contents? Because it has to be one of the two, and frankly, I'm getting very tired of having to correct every single citation you make at this extensive a level.

Oh, and also, are you willing to admit that you were wrong about the first trans study you cited? Because I don't want you to escape accountability on that issue: I know that's what you were trying to do by leaping to another study, but I'm not one to forget very easily.

[Esquilax]

Do you seriously think you're going to get away with that one?

According to the latest census, sixty one percent of Australians are christian, not fucking ten percent.

Pay attention class! I said practicing Christians.

And you determined that they weren't practicing... how, exactly?

The 61% Christian is one of those figures that bears no resemblance to the actual number of people who take their faith seriously and practice it daily. If a guy who was born Catholic, never goes to Church and doesn't believe in God, goes out and bashes a transsexual, is it reasonable to call that religious violence?

25% of Australia's population is Catholic. Of that, about 10-13% attend Mass each week. Of that number, a significant proportion would be bench-warmers. So you can see how the numbers of "fair-dinkum"  Christians in this country is actually very low. Certainly nothing like 61%

I'm not going to engage with the No True Christian fallacy. If that's all you have, then you haven't got anything.

[Esquilax]

I hope people are reading their own sources this time

Is that the Death Star I see on the horizon...

Tut tut, I tried to tell them!

Okay, I missed this before, but that is uncanny, Rob.

[robvalue]

You are so rocking that title. Not one little bit of bullshit escaped. Good job!