If mankind had Danny's driving intellectual curiosity we'd still be living in caves.

(December 9, 2015 at 9:48 am)Evie Wrote:

(December 9, 2015 at 9:37 am)Aractus Wrote: You can't just use catch-all claims like that. What you can say though is that they ignore other evidence that has firm academic support (such as Egypt was not as depicted in the Old Testament, and neither were Canaan cities).

I'm not the one making the claim. Do you understand the burden of proof? When Christians claim that God exists, the burden of proof is on them. Proving a negative isn't necessary, Christianity isn't even worthy of refutation, and the same goes for other forms of theism.

I do understand the burden of proof, Evie. And you're right...Christians do have the burden of proof when they claim that God exists. But that's only one side of the coin.

Atheists have the burden of proof when they claim that God does not exist. Atheism is NOT merely a lack of a belief in God; it is a belief (ranging in strength from uncertainty to certainty) that there is no god. If that is your position, then you should be able to give me good reasons for it (just as a believer ought to be able to give me reasons for faith). It is a logical leap to go from "I'm not convinced by the evidence" to "Christianity/Judaism/Islam/whatever is not true." It simply means you don't have enough compelling evidence to know with certainty.

For example, is the total number of grains of sand on the beach an even or odd number? If you don't believe the number is even, shouldn't you have proof that the number is odd? If you're going to state something more than a guess, an opinion or a preference, you ought to start counting. Or admit that you don't know with certainty and remain agnostic about the number.

Further, the common cry that "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is an example of confirmation bias. Since the skeptic is not inclined to believe the claims of believers, the bar is raised. On the other hand, when a Mythicist author makes claims that are not supported by real scholarship, the bar is lowered and the claims (though unsupported) are likely to be accepted by the average skeptical reader because the author is confirming the bias of the reader.  So, the end result of this confirmation bias is that something which may be quite strong evidentially is dismissed as "not extraordinary" because the threshold for what IS considered extraordinary is raised impossibly high in the mind of the non-believer. 

This is true in reverse, of course, for religious authors and their readers, pastors and their flocks. Believers can tend to be overly gullible in this regard. As Aractus pointed out, everyone is biased, so it's important for authors and readers to be aware of this bias and consider the source when evaluating claims of one sort or another.

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(December 9, 2015 at 12:08 pm)Minimalist Wrote:

Quote:So do me a favour guys, stop making stupid arguments. If you're not going to at least get your facts on religion from scholars, then you can't expect anyone else to get their facts on other things from scholars either.

Fuck off, Danny.  YOU don't get to decide which scholars are real and which are not.   You keep your tiny little mind confined in a tiny little box and anything which challenges your predetermined notions is something which simply CAN NEVER BE REAL.

You're pathetic.

Aren't there universities and accreditation boards for this sort of thing?

Seems to me we ought to be able to figure out who has legitimate credentials and who is a self-published crackpot with a blog...

I partially agree with the initial premises and conclusion - I've witnessed atheists present simplified, overly repeated arguments that offer no logical or rational discussion.

(December 9, 2015 at 3:24 pm)Dystopia Wrote: I partially agree with the initial premises and conclusion - I've witnessed atheists present simplified, overly repeated arguments that offer no logical or rational discussion.

For sure, being an Atheist doesn't automatically grant anyone logic, rationality or the ability to coherently back up their arguments on an internet forum. If that's Aractus' complaint then you can only say: No shit.

The second part is if you are going to complain about something like this, you better be careful yourself. For example it's probably bad to then go into a bunch of personal theories that have scanty evidence, if any.

Edit: By you I don't mean you as in Dystopia, but refering to Aractus.

Point is though an atheist can be completely illogical and give bad arguments. They can lose a debate to a Christian. But after all that is over: It still remains that the Christian has no evidence for their God.

(December 9, 2015 at 3:40 pm)Evie Wrote: Point is though an atheist can be completely illogical and give bad arguments. They can lose a debate to a Christian. But after all that is over: It still remains that the Christian has no evidence for their God.

This is true, however it only applies when the topic at hand is "is there evidence for god?". If the topic is something else, it really depends on who sounds more convincing.

(December 9, 2015 at 4:33 pm)Dystopia Wrote:

(December 9, 2015 at 3:40 pm)Evie Wrote: Point is though an atheist can be completely illogical and give bad arguments. They can lose a debate to a Christian. But after all that is over: It still remains that the Christian has no evidence for their God.

This is true, however it only applies when the topic at hand is "is there evidence for god?". If the topic is something else, it really depends on who sounds more convincing.

The OP seems to make it clear we're talking about atheists debating Christians. My point is that it's pointless to waste time focusing on refuting specific details of Christianity if the whole of Christianity has failed to meet the burden of proof.

(December 9, 2015 at 10:52 am)Judi Lynn Wrote:

(December 9, 2015 at 9:37 am)Aractus Wrote: They have no evidence for what Evie? They have abundance of evidence for some things, including that religious people tend to be happier and healthier.

Statistics on that? Also, regarding religious people being happier and healthier, I could also say that since a comparison is being made there, that if you look at the majority of people in prison, most of them are religious. Here let me get some statistics on that: 

This link shows a nice article complete with statistics on every religion and on atheism and the percentage of prisoners in each category. 

See? This is a factual claim I am making. You are asserting that religious people tend to be happier and healthier. Where is your proof? Also, based on the facts above, religious people also tend to engage in more criminal activity than atheists do.

You can look it up easily in peer-review literature, as I said there's an abundance of evidence and it's easy to find. In fact it's so widely known and accepted (especially in the field of psychiatry) that academics often say it as if it's common-knowledge that doesn't need further explanation. But yes, there is clear peer-review evidence that shows people who participate in their religion see health benefits that are unexplained simply by the fact that it's a "social activity". See the link in my sig to Williams & Sternthal (2007).

Criminality is a different matter to health and happiness, so even if it's true that atheism reduces the likelihood of a person serving a custodial sentence (which isn't what your data shows anyway), it doesn't mean that it in any way obliterates the benefits associated with religious participation.

(December 9, 2015 at 11:08 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: You didn't notice that 'religious people tend to be happier and healthier' is a catch-all claim?

Not at all, it's supported by the majority of peer-review evidence, and I didn't make a catch-all claim I made an accurate summary of the evidence. A catch-all claim would be to say that in every instance religion improves people's health and happiness - and that isn't true. But it does tend to be true at the population level.

(December 9, 2015 at 10:56 am)Evie Wrote: The way I see it, regardless of whether it's true or not whether religious people are happier and healthier or not it's completely fucking irrelevant.

Why? What's your definition of "relevance"?

(December 9, 2015 at 12:27 pm)Clueless Morgan Wrote:

(December 9, 2015 at 9:37 am)Aractus Wrote: They have abundance of evidence for some things, including that religious people tend to be happier and healthier.

And there's significant evidence that that is not, in fact, the case:

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http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13674679908406340

Quote:The aim of the present work was to test for an association between religiosity and happiness... It was found that higher scores on the Francis Scale were associated with higher scores on the DHS, the OHI, the PIL, and the ISA, providing evidence for a positive association between religiosity and these facets of subjective well-being. However, partial correlations suggested that the association between religiosity and happiness is a function of purpose in life.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/713675504

Quote:A number of recent studies have consistently reported a positive association between religiosity and happiness, when happiness is operationalised in terms of the Oxford Happiness Inventory and religiosity is operationalised in terms of the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity. However, this general finding is not consistent across other measures of either construct. The present aim was to examine the generalisability of the link between religion and happiness using the Francis Scale and the Depression-Happiness Scale. Among two samples (Anglican priests and members of the Anglican Church), no significant associations were found between scores on the religiosity and happiness measures. Further research is now required to clarify the components of happiness that are associated with the Francis Scale.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...6997889106

Quote:The aim of the present work was to test for an association between religiosity and happiness... The present data provide no evidence that, among two samples of undergraduate students, religious people are happier.

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023...234#page-2

Quote:A sample of 331 students completed German editions of the Oxford Happiness Inventory and the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity...  These data provide no evidence for a relationship between religiosity and happiness among German students, contrary to the conclusions of the recent studies that have employed the same indices in the UK and in the USA.

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023...485#page-1

Quote:Robins and Francis (1996) note that the relationship between religiosity and happiness varies according to the precise measures used and the sample studies.  The further explore the association between religiosity and happiness, 154 North Irish undergraduate students completely the Depression-Happiness Scale and a measure of frequency of church attendances.  No significant association was found between a greater frequency of church attendance and happiness scores...

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So if you're talking about uninformed arguments annoying you, you just walked into one.

There are problems with the studies you've linked to. The biggest one is they're not representative of the populations where the people live: they're all done on university students, thus their generalisability is quite limited, and the studies themselves are very small. But the other problem is that it's not going to necessarily hold 100% true everywhere in the world, and the effect would reasonably be expected to be lower in some areas and higher in others. We see this with EVERYTHING. For example, the social gradient, for some reason, has a substantially lower effect on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health than it does on other Australian's health; but it is still there and measurable (see Shepherd, Li, & Zubrick, 2012). But even if it wasn't, that doesn't mean that Marmot is wrong: it's been well observed and documented in other places as a significant determinant of health.

But perhaps the biggest problem is that the weight of literature shows there is an effect, and cherry picking a few micro-studies that contradict the findings isn't going to change that.

(December 9, 2015 at 6:21 pm)Aractus Wrote:

(December 9, 2015 at 10:56 am)Evie Wrote: The way I see it, regardless of whether it's true or not whether religious people are happier and healthier or not it's completely fucking irrelevant.

Why? What's your definition of "relevance"?

Well if you didn't just cherrypick this one thing I said in response to you and ignore the rest, you might actually have understood the context of my comment.

Sigh. In a shitty mood right now can't be bothered with this shit. I've said enough times: The point is: Why complain about weak arguments against God when the burden of proof is on the one claiming God exists anyhow? Atheists could lose a debate to a Christian and at the end of it all there's still a complete lack of evidence for the God of Christianity.

But there's not a complete lack of evidence for the good of Christianity.