Every person that rejects them has a different story, a different reason. Why did you reject them? Perhaps you grew up in a house that was non-religious and free-thinking to begin with?

(December 29, 2013 at 7:55 am)BadWriterSparty Wrote: Every person that rejects them has a different story, a different reason. Why did you reject them? Perhaps you grew up in a house that was non-religious and free-thinking to begin with?

My father was non religious but not Atheist. He was just not bothered in the slightest. Never went into a church apart from Hatch/Match/Despatch.

My Mother is into woo and always has been as far as I can remember and she got it from her grandmother.

I went to a Catholic School because it was the good school in the area. I was utterly non impressed and realised I was an Athiest at age 10. I went through a spell <da dish> of wiccan sympathising but it was probably more about the idea of naked girls dancing.

I became an Atheist Buddhist in my twenties. Atheist Buddhism rejects all supernatural aspects of buddhist culture but embraces Buddhist ethics. The idea of karma is replaced with the understanding that we are all connected and that actions have consequences, often unintended one.

Meditation is very important to us.

I am not sure what enlightenment actually is but I think interesting things come a a deep practice of meditation.

(December 28, 2013 at 3:14 pm)The_Thinking_Theist Wrote:

(December 11, 2013 at 1:25 pm)BadWriterSparty Wrote: I've lately seen a rash of theists here, old and new alike, that when confronted with the question, "Do you have evidence for the existence of your god?" that proceed to quote biblical scripture as the source of their conviction. This is not a strange thing, as these particular theists called Christians more often than not perceive this text to be full of accounts that were directly-inspired by divine means, or tell the tale of historical events relating to their particular religious history. Taking such a stance is, in actuality, a non-answer to the question posed above.

The Bible is a book of divine claims, telling of a god (or gods, in some interpretations) that has yet to be proven to exist. Since evidence must be demonstrated to be true before it can be taken as fact, the Bible falls short in satisfying any demands of proof, as it can in no way be proven that the men who wrote were actually under any divine influence.

I know my request to theists to stop appealing to the Bible as evidence of a god (or gods) will fall on many deaf ears, but I feel this phenomenon has gotten a little out of hand as of late and really needed to be addressed. Thank you for taking a moment to read this, especially if you are a Christian member of this forum.

The real reply to the objective evidence question for anyone's religious views, including mine, is "There is no objective evidence, that's why it's called faith."

To let self deception go by a different name does not make it honorable to deceive oneself.

Excellent observations BWS

(December 29, 2013 at 12:12 pm)là bạn điên Wrote:

(December 29, 2013 at 7:55 am)BadWriterSparty Wrote: Every person that rejects them has a different story, a different reason. Why did you reject them? Perhaps you grew up in a house that was non-religious and free-thinking to begin with?

My father was non religious but not Atheist. He was just not bothered in the slightest. Never went into a church apart from Hatch/Match/Despatch.

My Mother is into woo and always has been as far as I can remember and she got it from her grandmother.

I went to a Catholic School because it was the good school in the area. I was utterly non impressed and realised I was an Athiest at age 10. I went through a spell <da dish> of wiccan sympathising but it was probably more about the idea of naked girls dancing.

I became an Atheist Buddhist in my twenties. Atheist Buddhism rejects all supernatural aspects of buddhist culture but embraces Buddhist ethics. The idea of karma is replaced with the understanding that we are all connected and that actions have consequences, often unintended one.

Meditation is very important to us.

I am not sure what enlightenment actually is but I think interesting things come a a deep practice of meditation.

My parents are Unitarians. My mother was into woo for a while, but she doesn't believe that stuff anymore. My mother's mother was an apatheist -- she did not claim to know anything about the supernatural and she did not give a shit about it.

I have many friends who are atheist Buddhists. I'm just an atheist atheist. I do not meditate -- I know atheists who do and feel that it helps them, I just can't seem to do it -- or do it right -- or whatever.

Enlightenment for me is purely intellectual -- I do not have spiritual enlightenments.

Quote:My parents are Unitarians. My mother was into woo for a while, but she doesn't believe that stuff anymore. My mother's mother was an apatheist -- she did not claim to know anything about the supernatural and she did not give a shit about it.

My Mothers mother was ap as well. I never remembered either of my mothers parents ever going to church , owning a bible or a crucifix. My mothers woo is all invasive.

Quote:I have many friends who are atheist Buddhists. I'm just an atheist atheist. I do not meditate -- I know atheists who do and feel that it helps them, I just can't seem to do it -- or do it right -- or whatever.

meditation is not easy. Good results though.

Quote:Enlightenment for me is purely intellectual -- I do not have spiritual enlightenments.

I am not sure what it is and I am experimenting to find out

(December 25, 2013 at 6:26 am)WesOlsen Wrote: Please elucidate. Last time I checked the authors of the new testament [sic] were writing things such as 'But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name', John 20:31. This tends to suggest that what we have is a piece of religious propaganda, written by men, referring to god as an agent other than themselves. Modern historians do not commit to their favourite supernatural deity and then declare that everything they write isn't for the purpose of giving a balanced overview of a period or nation, but rather to glorify a supernatural deity. The best historians keep things nice and objective. The bible isn't an objective piece of historical enquiry, it has a seriously heavy agenda. We could argue that all communication is political and informed by bias, but the degree to which the new testament [sic] is self-confessed propaganda is to the extreme side of this spectrum.

Last time you checked what? Asserting that something cannot be the word of God if it has an agenda is a logical non-sequitur. All of scripture is the inspired word of God and used as His direct revelation to us in order to fulfil His redemptive purposes.

“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness”- 2 Timothy 3:16 (ESV)

Quote:Because as mentioned already, it was penned by humans and compares to other scriptures from other religions, in that it contains nothing particularly unique, predicts nothing accurately and occupies itself with tedious, epoch relative desert dealings.

Well it actually does make accurate predictions; especially the messianic prophecies of the Old Testament. Secondly, its manuscript tradition is completely unique. You’re not representing the facts accurately at all.

Quote:It really doesn't

Yes it does. True bird fossils have been found that predate archaeopteryx by over 60 million years. Children cannot be older than their parents.

Quote:Yes i'm sure you went exploring your huge collection of scientific journals that you keep. I actually have a massive collection of 'the biomedical scientist' because I work in a scientific setting, with keratin.

Good, then I can hold you to a high standard.

Quote: The wikipedia article, which references the relevant scientific journal (btw I take it that you just used a search engine to find your journal right?), states that decay products of beta-keratin were detected, this suggests that keratin can be detected for millions of years.

No it doesn’t, it suggests those fossils are not millions of years old. There is no empirical evidence demonstrating such entities can survive for anything close to that amount of time.

Quote:The slowly accumulating collection of evidence for feathered dinosaurs, by all rights and accounts, outweighs the evidence for the divine origin of the bible.

Considering that you have not provided any evidence for feathered-dinosaurs this is an unmerited assertion.

Quote: The objective evidence shows that the bible was penned by men, with no clear way of establishing whether they were acting under the orders of a supernatural deity.

The Bible itself says men put the ink to paper. The words they wrote were inspired by God though.

Quote: To believe such a fantastic claim is faith, and faith alone. Your standards of evidence go far beyond inconsistent my friend. You decided what you wanted to believe, then cherry picked whatever you could find to fit that,

No, I have deductive reasons for believing what I believe. That is superior to anything inductive.

Quote: whereas most scientists would happily drop their certainties if we could find ourselves a human in the cambrian or a dinosaur in the iron-age.

This is blatantly false. When it first looked like we had found human and dinosaur footprints together in the Tumbler Ridge region of Canada there were evolutionists claiming that it would be evidence for time travel and not that humans and dinosaurs ever coexisted during the Earth’s history. You have provided another great example of how a person forces the evidence to fit the paradigm. Rather than believing dinosaur fossils are not millions of years old you’d rather believe that soft tissue and proteins can last for millions of years even though that directly contradicts what we observe to be the case.

Quote: You said it when you said that the bible is evidence for the existence of god, oh mercy like here for example:

(you know, the bit where you said god authored the scripture, that suggests to most people that you believe, with some unusual degree of certainty, that god sort of authored the scripture.)

Yes my statement accurately represents what I believe. However, how can you claim to know why I believe that?

Quote:That's right, the myth snowballing of the resurrection story, with each author adding details as they get further and further away from the events described. This constitutes contradictions, because each account of the resurrection is wildly different. The different writers do not complement each other, adding in the extra characters whom the other forgot to mention, rather they directly contradict each other,

I do not think “contradict” means what you think it means.

Person A: “I went to a party last night and Martha was there”
Person B: “I went to a party last night and Martha and Mary were there.”
Person C: “I went to a party last night and Tim was there.”

These accounts do not contradict one another, neither do the resurrection accounts.

Quote: with the latest account of the resurrection appearing in say that a giant cross rises from the tomb, shouts "i do" and flies off in to the sky.

What on Earth are you talking about?

Quote: We don't know whether the tomb was already open when the unknown number of witnesses arrived,

Yes we do and it was already open when they arrived. Rather than getting these off of atheist websites you’d be better off just reading the gospels for yourself.

Quote: we don't know if there was already someone sitting outside the tomb, or whether there was a guard there, or whether anything was seen to come flying out of it (cross or otherwise) or not.

I still have no idea why you keep bringing up a flying cross; that is not found in any of the four gospels. There is an angel sitting on the stone yes, and the guards were all unconscious.

Quote:You don't really have any place implying the arrogance of others here. You're a complete quack.

Call me all the names you like, it’s obviously all you’ve got.

Quote:I might use the Waldorf technique for asserting the certainty of my knowledge here > Yes it will.

How?

Quote:You can't demonstrate that god did anything under any conditions, so we're all good.

…so you are conceding that believing in RNA spontaneous generation is just as much of a faith position as believing in God? Well ok then.

Quote: I'm sure i've heard Muslims and hindus using this one before. You can't demonstrate that god made a revelation, so any assumption beyond that is null. Your standards of evidence, not mine.

Knowing that scripture is God’s word is something that is deductively known; deduction does not rely upon demonstration.

Quote:Has god ever been demonstrated to do anything in nature? I know what your answer will be, but the real answer is no, just in case you're struggling.

Again, you’re equating belief in abiogenesis with belief in God, I like this. Most atheists would not dare concede that they live by such religious faith.

Quote:Phew, for a minute I thought you were a christian who believed in the christian god. Glad we cleared that one up.

You were not talking about the Christian god.

Quote:No it's not, it's like saying that an author wrote a 100% perfect (let's say, divinely perfect) maths [sic] text book and a number of maths [sic] teachers can't agree on how to decipher it, each claiming that the text book is perfect and clear, but each claiming that the other's interpretation is wrong, suggesting that the text book isn't so clear, but rather is open to interpretation, and so may not be the perfect text book after all. The children in the classroom just sit around enduring the fallout from the squabbling, with their wellbeing suffering as a consequence. They're all literally covered in piss and shit. Quite a fitting reflection of the real world under religious insutrction [sic] in many ways.

That only proves your math teachers are fallible, just like people disagreeing on the Bible only proves that people are fallible. Nothing more. The Bible is infallible.

Quote: Demonstration needed.

Deduction does not require demonstration. Study up.

Quote: The real, tangible world.

That’s the fallacy of reification. This is kind of fun, you present the fallacy and I identify it for you.

Quote:Oh but we have, the burden is on you to explain how all processes take place because of god, and establish the mechanism of effect.

No, you made the claim now back it up with something. How are processes taking place without God? Explain.

Quote:So using senses to confirm other senses is a circular argument,

Hence the term circular.

Quote: unless your Waldorf who knows that his senses are in tact [sic] because god made Walford (but not WesOlsen). You're like a cat on hot bricks mate, none of this makes any sense.

I did not appeal to my senses like you did. I appealed to an axiomatic truth within my conceptual scheme. You are not allowed to do this because your conceptual scheme does not allow for the existence of God.

Quote:What's the cutoff point for original scripture? Why can't we include the vedas or native american gods?

The content of the original 66 books.

Quote:To force an answer from an unlikely unnatural secenario [sic] demonstrates nothing, save your huge capacity for bullet dodging. But to answer, if there were no computers on this planet because we hadn't created them yet, but found one on the moon (or one came crashing through the sky) I would believe that it was likely extra-terrestrial in origin.

Well that’s not quite what I was asking but that’s all that I needed. Why would you believe this?

Quote:Once you've established the mechanism of effect and showed the process unfolding in spite of a scientific solution, then tested and re-tested the hypothesis, can we come back to this point. Demonstration needed.

What are you talking about? What mechanism and process?

Quote: It is true, because DNA does not follow a power law. DNA is also much less flexible than a true language, translations can't be made from English to DNA or back again quite so rigourously [sic].

There is nothing in the definition of a language requiring it to follow a power law; it merely has to be able to carry information. DNA is just as much of a language as any other programming language.

Quote: Until you demonstrate that cycpher [sic] must result from intelligence then we can't go any further here. Demonstration needed.

All known cyphers originated from intelligences, therefore it is completely reasonable to infer that DNA also arose from an intelligent source. That’s how induction works.

Quote: I did, I've got a friend who works for Microsfot. I've written my own basic scripts in visual basic, Java, html. Source code is quite easy to get hold of for a great many programming languages. To assume that Windows 8 was written by a supernatural deity just because you didn't witness the programming stage would be amusing, and I wouldn't put it past you.

No, I was going to assume it arose through purely natural processes over billions of years because I never witnessed its programming just like you do with DNA. Pretty absurd isn’t it?

Quote: LOL. So are rings in a tree cypher as well?

You’re conflating complexity with information. Rings in a tree do not hold information, but the DNA code within the tree cells does.

Quote: DNA isn't a language, it can't be fully translated in to C++ or back again, so in that respect, it's not as powerful as C++

Even if that were true it would not mean DNA was not a language, being able to be translated from language to language is not a necessary requirement of a language. A language merely needs to be able to hold information.

Quote: No i'm [sic] merely admitting that all written claims warrant a degree of scrutiny. The ongoing framework of scientific investigation, for me, has its own built in error-correction techniques, because scientists scruitinise each other all the time, that's what makes it work.

And theologians scrutinize one another all the time as well.

Quote: Jesus cheerleaders, who are well trained in the art of scrutiny, and who can scrutinise until the cows come home, rarely seem to reach consensus, and they certainly don't progress anything.

So in the very same paragraph you applaud scientists for disagreeing with one another you criticize Christians for disagreeing with one another? Unbelievable.

Quote: When we scruitinse bible claims and call upon other branches of historical study (Archeology, Geology, DNA studies etc) we quickly find that most of it doesn't survive the challenge.

Yes you try to argue against deductive truths by appealing to inductive reasoning. That’s totally backwards.

Quote: I was simply drawing a comparison between your standards of evidence in some circumstances with your standards of evidence in other circumstances, that is, you'll happily accept some pen on paper with little rational scrutiny so long as it fits your pre-determined world view, but as soon as pen on paper arises that challenges these claims you dismiss it outright.

Christianity was not my pre-determined worldview. Secondly, it is completely rational to value deduction over induction.

Quote: This is because you've already decided what you want to believe, and aren't interested in the ongoing search for truth at all.

No, it’s because I am philosophically sophisticated enough to realize that any such search for truth requires that what I believe to be true is actually true.

Quote:Yeah perhaps you're right, I must be mistaken, I thought you'd declared a belief i..............................oh wait here it is:

Quote:God authored scripture by using physical human authors.

Yup, I never said anything about a magic man in the sky, you really were confused.

Quote:The supernatural deity that you don't believe exists, but definitely exists and that you believe in. Yours is a troubled world indeed.

When you intentionally misrepresent what I believe I call you on it, that’s all.

Quote:Not in light of all the letters that you shit out of your keyboard and crap all over this forum.

Spoken like a true intellectual.

Quote: Quack quack. Demonstration needed.

Demonstration is only required in induction, not deduction.

Quote: Demonstration needed....

Demonstration is only required in induction, not deduction.

Quote: Demonstration needed.................yawn

Demonstration is only required in induction, not deduction….yawn.

(December 28, 2013 at 2:32 pm)Lemonvariable72 Wrote: No stat the article I linked discusses the implication of a only found in birds previously.

Only found in birds that could fly you mean. Not all oviraptors had the structure either. It’s astonishing you’ll accept such a bold claim with so little evidence. If squid were the only other animals on earth with beaks other than birds it would not be evidence establishing that squid have feathers. You’re going to have to do better.

Quote: nice try, and archeopteryx has key dinosour features that birds lack. The key to transitional forms is spoting the features that lead to feature we see now.

The majority view is that archaeopteryx was a bird. Secondly, a transitional form cannot postdate the alleged transition point by 60 million years. Archaeopteryx proves nothing; I thought you were supposed to be a skeptic.

Quote: Actually I'll let darwin explain it, as he explains the transitional forms of the eye

Now you are appealing to science that is over 150 years old? Darwin was completely ignorant of the inner complexity of the cell and its genetic code, such ad hoc storytelling is only that I am afraid…fantastic stories.

(December 29, 2013 at 12:57 am)là bạn điên Wrote: What is the difference between faith and gullibility?

Why would you believe something in the total absence of evidence?

That’s not how the Bible uses the term faith. Any argument that uses this definition is guilty of equivocation.

(December 29, 2013 at 2:07 am)Lemonvariable72 Wrote: Because the church has been in the business of manipulating people since its inception. They are very good at brainwashing

Darwinists are even better at it; you are a prime example, you’ll believe dinosaurs had feathers simply because the Darwinists tell you they did.

(December 29, 2013 at 2:52 am)BadWriterSparty Wrote: Children believe their parents in all things as they grow up; after all, our brains are wired that way for survival purposes. With the exception of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, the kid grows up with accepting these notions and afterwards passes them on to his or her children.

Over 2 billion adults do not believe in Santa Claus so that is a fallacious analogy.

(December 29, 2013 at 7:55 am)BadWriterSparty Wrote: Every person that rejects them has a different story, a different reason. Why did you reject them? Perhaps you grew up in a house that was non-religious and free-thinking to begin with?

If atheists are such free-thinkers then why do they all believe exactly the same things? You’ll find much more freedom of thought and descent in a group of Christians than you will in a group of atheists.

(December 29, 2013 at 12:35 pm)Chuck Wrote: To let self deception go by a different name does not make it honorable to deceive oneself.

How do you know it is not you who is deceiving yourself?

Oh, look. Waldork is spouting out scripture!

Well, bullshitters should bullshit. It's all he's good for.

Fallacious analogy? Read it again, you asshat. "With the exception of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy..." And you wonder why people don't respond to half the bullshit that you spout. You're more than allowed to find some common ground with us; you don't have to refute everything for refutation's sake, nor because a bunch of us here are atheists while you are not. Do you interact with your real life peers in this manner?

EDIT: And it wasn't an analogy either. Your perception skills are quite dull. No wonder you cling to fairy tales and myths.

(January 3, 2014 at 9:17 pm)Minimalist Wrote: Oh, look. Waldork is spouting out scripture!

Well, bullshitters should bullshit. It's all he's good for.

Poor Min! Always whining, but too old to debate.