(August 13, 2014 at 6:09 pm)Fidel_Castronaut Wrote: Yes, what is the point here? Please elucidate. Because currently the only conclusion that we can draw from, what, 21 pages, is that people don't fully know the mechanisms behind the efficacy of the placebo effect. You know, that conclusion that anyone even remotely aware of the placebo effect can draw.

The point was to get a gotcha! on Thumpy.

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(August 13, 2014 at 11:10 pm)jughead Wrote:

(August 1, 2014 at 5:41 pm)Rob_W75 Wrote: As an atheist I am willing to admit that I could be wrong. God may exist. Your Bible may be 100% accurate. All I need is evidence.

Is there anything that could convince you that the God of the Bible may not exist?

If a Christian believed this they would be an agnostic. You either believe or you don't. Believers operate on faith and wishful thinking. They do not do well with actual fact. They must turn a blind eye to fact.

When your in a religion you believe the dogma even if it is ridiculous. The only ones that can be objective are those outside the religion. It does not matter to the Christians that none of the writers of the bible ever met Jesus. They need the fantasy to get though life.

Yes, but they could be an agnostic Christian: admit that they don't know but they believe in Christianity anyway.

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(August 14, 2014 at 10:47 am)Huggy74 Wrote:

(August 14, 2014 at 1:11 am)Esquilax Wrote: However, one doesn't have faith in a medical placebo, as you have the evidence of, oh, I dunno, the entire history of modern medicine to demonstrate that doctors are quite adept at curing things.

You really are trying for the false equivocation double reacharound here, aren't you? First you attempt to equate faith healing in the religious sense with the placebo effect, and then in order to make that comparison at all functional you're attempting to equate reasonable expectations of success based on evidence, with blind religious faith.

Don't you ever feel bad, that the only way you can defend your belief in god is to devalue the meaning of other words? Isn't that a tacit admission that the terms of your religion can't stand on their own, without other terms being handicapped?

Of course one doesn't have faith in a placebo, the point is for them not to know it's a placebo, but are told it is a revolutionary procedure, That is what they have faith in.

As it was stated in the article I posted: a man is dying of cancer of the lymph nodes, has difficulty breathing, and is bedridden. He receives injections of a new anticancer drug called Krebiozen (a placebo). Within days the tumors shrink by half and he is eventually released from the hospital. After he finds out he was given a placebo, he dies days later.

Since you say faith has nothing to do with it, why don't you try explaining how this phenomena works?

It might be better to explain how equivocation works. When a word, such as faith, has multiple senses, it is important not to switch senses during the conversation because it can be misleading or cause inadvertent confusion: A balloon that contains enough hydrogen to float is light, therefore it cannot be dark.

Faith has multiple senses: religious faith through 'spiritual apprehension' and confident trust in something. It's inherently confusing to use the word in both senses in a discussion regarding religion, such as citing 'the need to have faith in God' in one post, and bringing up 'the faith it takes to believe your car will take you to your destination' in another. Better to stick to using the word 'faith' in the religious sense, and use 'belief' or 'trust' or 'confidence' regarding nondivine matters.

In ordinary use, when someone says 'faith healing' they don't mean 'placebo effect', they mean healing achieved by divine intervention, the faith involved being faith in God, not 'being misinformed that faith in God is effective in healing and therefore providing conditions conducive to the placebo effect'.

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(August 14, 2014 at 1:59 pm)Undeceived Wrote: The great thing about a relationship with Jesus, it's not based on fallible opinions. It's based on the Word of God and the Revelation of the Holy Spirit.

Romans 8:16
"The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children."

The Bible is the claim, not the evidence. Why is it that Jews and Hindus usually seem to get that quoting their scriptures before doing the legwork to convince people those scriptures are true in the first place is counter-productive, but Christians and Muslims so often don't?

(August 12, 2014 at 6:57 pm)Huggy74 Wrote: I was giving Thumpalumpacus time to provide a rebuttal, it's apparant that after almost a week he's got nothing.

Thumpalumpacus clearly asserted that faith healing doesn't exist. I posted an article from the Scientific American which would disagree.

By the way, this is false. Here's what I posted:

(August 4, 2014 at 8:36 am)Thumpalumpacus Wrote:

(August 3, 2014 at 10:43 am)Drich Wrote: If all you need is evidence, then simply A/S/K (Ask Seek Knock as outlined in Luke 11.) and God will provide it.

Been there, done that ... the silence was resounding.

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(August 3, 2014 at 3:44 pm)Huggy74 Wrote: There is a story in the Bible about Jesus meeting a Samaritan woman at a well and revealing to her the sin she was keeping secret (she had something like 5 husbands).

Earlier I posted an old video (recorded sometime in the 1950's) of a man doing exactly the same thing. In case you haven't seen it: When people would come up to the stage to be healed, he, having never met the person, could tell them what sickness they had, name, and address ect.

This isn't done to showoff, it's done because divine healing is operated by faith (scientific studies using placebos show this). And gift of discernment makes it easier for the person to believe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7BQKu0YP8Y

(August 14, 2014 at 2:38 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote: Yes, but they could be an agnostic Christian: admit that they don't know but they believe in Christianity anyway.

I'm not sure it's possible to be an agnostic xtian. Agnostic theist, yes; but a xtian is deemed to have all that revelation crap, so they are meant to know in the true gnostic sense.

(August 14, 2014 at 3:49 pm)Stimbo Wrote:

(August 14, 2014 at 2:38 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote: Yes, but they could be an agnostic Christian: admit that they don't know but they believe in Christianity anyway.

I'm not sure it's possible to be an agnostic xtian. Agnostic theist, yes; but a xtian is deemed to have all that revelation crap, so they are meant to know in the true gnostic sense.

... Unless all that revelation, "knowing in your heart" nonsense is just a metaphor, according to the agnostic christian's personal interpretation.

Never underestimate a theist's ability to twist their inerrant holy book to precisely fit their own opinions.

(August 14, 2014 at 2:38 pm)JesusHChrist Wrote:

(August 14, 2014 at 1:59 pm)Undeceived Wrote: The great thing about a relationship with Jesus, it's not based on fallible opinions. It's based on the Word of God and the Revelation of the Holy Spirit.

Romans 8:16
"The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children."

The bible appears to be nothing more than the word of Man, not God. Can you show otherwise?

http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Miscellan...hecies.htm
http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-t003.html

(August 15, 2014 at 3:35 am)Undeceived Wrote:

(August 14, 2014 at 2:38 pm)JesusHChrist Wrote: The bible appears to be nothing more than the word of Man, not God. Can you show otherwise?

http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Miscellan...hecies.htm
http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-t003.html

So, just more bullshit? I think I stopped around the point I read the same nonsensical "Isaiah prophesied the earth was round!" claim. Since when is a circle the same shape as a sphere? Circles are flat!

Oh, not to mention the claim that no archaeological find has ever contradicted the biblical record. Evidently these websites have never had a look at, say, Egyptian history. Or all those civilizations that don't notice being wiped out by a flood at all. Or those agricultural, religious societies that are older than the earth is supposed to be, biblically.

It's crap, dude.

(August 15, 2014 at 3:48 am)Esquilax Wrote: Oh, not to mention the claim that no archaeological find has ever contradicted the biblical record. Evidently these websites have never had a look at, say, Egyptian history. Or all those civilizations that don't notice being wiped out by a flood at all. Or those agricultural, religious societies that are older than the earth is supposed to be, biblically.

A preliminary question: How is an absence of information considered the same as a contradiction?
Yet there are plenty of flood stories, from various civilizations, as you can easily find on wikipedia.
Did you know that the ancient Chinese symbol for 'boat' is composed of the characters “vessel” “eight” and “people”?

http://creation.com/cmi-misrepresents-an...e-language

(August 15, 2014 at 5:04 am)Undeceived Wrote: A preliminary question: How is an absence of information considered the same as a contradiction?

So you're just going to assume the bible to be true in the absence of any evidence for it?

Moreover, we're not just talking about the absence of evidence, we're talking about directly contradictory evidence.

Quote:Yet there are plenty of flood stories, from various civilizations, as you can easily find on wikipedia.

None of which wiped out every person within those civilizations, thereby making them contradictory to the biblical account just out of hand.

Quote:Did you know that the ancient Chinese symbol for 'boat' is composed of the characters “vessel” “eight” and “people”?

http://creation.com/cmi-misrepresents-an...e-language

Would that be the Chinese civilization that wasn't razed to the ground by a global flood, by any chance? The one that had a rudimentary agricultural system in place long before your creation claims are said to occur? That China?

(August 15, 2014 at 5:04 am)Undeceived Wrote:

(August 15, 2014 at 3:48 am)Esquilax Wrote: Oh, not to mention the claim that no archaeological find has ever contradicted the biblical record. Evidently these websites have never had a look at, say, Egyptian history. Or all those civilizations that don't notice being wiped out by a flood at all. Or those agricultural, religious societies that are older than the earth is supposed to be, biblically.

A preliminary question: How is an absence of information considered the same as a contradiction?

The contradiction is that the bible's flood story is just flat out wrong.

Not just wrong, demonstrably false. It's a load of tosh.

(August 15, 2014 at 3:35 am)Undeceived Wrote:

(August 14, 2014 at 2:38 pm)JesusHChrist Wrote: The bible appears to be nothing more than the word of Man, not God. Can you show otherwise?

http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Miscellan...hecies.htm
http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-t003.html

You have indeed been deceived, Mr. Gullible.

I see your apologetics websites and raise you three from the rational side:

rationalwiki.org/wiki/Failed_biblical_prophecies

skepticsannotatedbible.com/proph/long.html

faithskeptic.50megs.com/prophecies.htm

In addition to prophecies that obviously failed (eg., destruction of Tyre) and ones that are so vague that they can be twisted to mean whatever christians who are desparate to believe want to claim they mean, there are those which were manipulated into "fulfilled prophecies" by the writers of the gospels.