An atheist picks the least charitable, least logical, and least persuasive ideas from a religion. Well, sure.

Maybe they shouldn't be there in the first place?

(August 8, 2020 at 10:12 am)Xaventis Wrote: What evidence would convince you that th bible is false?

What exactly do you require and on what area?

Are you trying to determine if it's true/false or right/wrong? Would you like to look at it Deontologicaly, Teleologicaly or Ontologicaly? You obvs have some serious straw men out there so could you please for simplicity's sake, state that you "believe the Bible to be _____ with regards to it's _________ based on ___________" and I will make a similar statement.

(August 10, 2020 at 11:32 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: An atheist picks the least charitable, least logical, and least persuasive ideas from a religion. Well, sure.

Maybe they shouldn't be there in the first place?

I'm not in the business of restricting thoughts and ideas. A major theme of the Protestant Reformation was the elimination of human dictatorship over beliefs. A person's religion is between them and God alone.

If a man believes water can cure his baldness, he is free to do so. My disagreement with him does not warrant exclusion of him. But any attempt to make his belief representative of everyone else's is dishonest.

(August 10, 2020 at 10:34 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: I think that the person that is unable to speak good of opposition, and represent their ideas in the most logical or persuasive form, does so out of fear of being persuaded.

So you've been on a religious forum when atheists(ism) is being discussed. Or read religious literature from prior to the internet when atheists(ism) is being portrayed. Christians taught me my abrasive behavior when interacting with them

I think I'll play the "they started it" card now.

(August 10, 2020 at 11:45 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: I'm not in the business of restricting thoughts and ideas. A major theme of the Protestant Reformation was the elimination of human dictatorship over beliefs. A person's religion is between them and God alone.

If a man believes water can cure his baldness, he is free to do so. My disagreement with him does not warrant exclusion of him. But any attempt to make his belief representative of everyone else's is dishonest.

That's probably good advice, and if christians were capable of following it, then atheists wouldn't have a list of uncharitable, illogical, and unpersuasive whatsits to choose from.  

I assume that all christians believe in christ, it seems fair.

Can't say I agree with you about disagreements not being cause for exclusion. I would exclude a christian for this or that for the same reasons a person might exclude a pyromaniac from being in the fire dept. We've been asking people who don't believe in justice to mete it out for some time, and the best they seem to be able to muster is spite and revenge, for example. So much so that we had to separate governance from religion. So much so that you'd want to remove a True Believer from the jury if your client ran afoul of their superstitions.

That's a pretty serious failure. Some disagreements, I'm sure, are cause for exclusion - and here again I can only suggest much the same as my last post. Maybe you should have been excluding these people. My noticing them, like noticing the uncharitable, illogical, and unpersuasive, is not the problem.

"If Christians ____, then atheists ____."

This isn't an ingroup vs outgroup issue. The issue is simply one of human cognition. The way in which people process information. To be even more specific, the issue I've been pointing out is bias. For example, my comment about nut-picking is just a variant of confirmation bias. And ironically, those saying that "we only do it because they started it" or "they do it more than us" illustrates in-group favoritism vs. out-group bias.

Bias. Avoid it.

How much in-group/out-group bias do you imagine it takes for me to assert that all christians believe in christ? On a scale of none to zero.

No clue how this relates to what I've said. But I understand that arguing is addicting.

Seems to me like you ought to have some idea how your comments relate. You offered them in response.

Again, if the problem is that an atheist picks uncharitable, illogical, and unpersuasive parts of a given belief - who's problem is that? The person who notices them, or the person who holds them? What kind of a problem is that? A problem with the belief, or a problem with bias?

Do you mean to invoke a bias toward charitable, logical, and persuasive beliefs? Yours or mine, because from where I sit, that's something we agree on, which might explain why you would exclude those others yourself, as you did when insisting that they could not be a valid criticism of the belief system.

The problem begins with bias and ends with a fallacy. Bias creates an inclination to look at the fringes of a normal distribution curve in an opposing population. If you then take the fringe as representative of the population, you run into a statistical issue known as the exception fallacy. Or if you take a belief lying at the center of the distribution and apply it towards other individuals in that population you've created an ecological fallacy.

The beliefs are not the problem; the problem is how your represent them.