Why be good?

[Thumpalumpacus]

---

"We"? Not everyone thinks like that.  Just because you reach for superstition when the shit hits the fan doesn't mean everyone does.

"We"! You got a mouse in your pocket, kid?




I wasn't pissed, myself, just irritated at a puerile approach coupled with a vapid comparison.




You think that.  But that carries little weight, because you're reporting hearsay of hearsay of hearsay. I don't care if that satisfies you; you've already demonstrated that you have a low evidentiary threshold, at least insofar as your pet beliefs are concerned.




That depends on what is being asserted, obviously. If I told you that I won $82 million in the Powerball last month, you may or may not be skeptical.  If I told you I'm the Son of God and that you need to pray to me for forgiveness, I'm pretty sure you'd be asking for evidence ... if you didn't simply wave away my claim.

This idea of yours that we automatically lend credence to any belief no matter the claim being made is silly.  It has been pointed out to you plenty of times already.  Quit tiptoeing through the horseshit, 'cause it's still sticking to your boots. You're not fooling anyone. You don't lend credence to every claim you hear.  No one does.



When you assert your faith prior to beginning your investigation, you have filters in place that are obvious to everyone ... except, apparently, yourself.

---

Your comments have been noted, Parkers. Thanks.

Without objection, apparently. Or is this just your way of brushing off difficult points?

If you cannot do me the courtesy of a reply, then I don't see the point of having a discussion with you. Ought I return to simply heckling your horseshit?

Holy shit -- you mean that in addition to bringing salvation, Jesus taught us about title pages? The things you learn online!

Seriously, the works had to be conveyed by a written copy. Why would an individual church change the title of a holy book?

Do you realize exactly how lame this argument is?

Um...

You're exactly right, Parkers. There is NO reason whatsoever to think that any individual Church, whether in Rome or some far-flung corner of the empire, ever changed the title of one of the Gospels.

Instead, they have been known universally and unanimously by all the congregations as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John from the moment the ink dried on the papyri, and we still know them by their original names to this very day.

Thanks for pointing that out to everyone.

[emphasis added -- Thump]

You seem to have forgotten that you were arguing that those names had to be true because everyone around the world agreed upon their use. To put this back into context, you argued:

AND THE NAMES ARE THE SAME WHEREVER YOU GO. 

It's not as if the Church in Thessalonica called the first gospel, the "Gospel According to Matthew" while a Church in Alexandria referred to it as the "Gospel of Andrew". The Church in Rome did not refer to the last gospel as the "Gospel of Phillip" while that same book was known as the "Beloved Disciple's Gospel" in Antioch.

So the honest thing to do would be to acknowledge conceding the point, which you've clearly done with your latest reply. The names being the same don't matter at all as for veracity, because as you yourself acknowledged, they were written and shared.

Yes, and in your Catholic mythos, with its Trinity, the first instance seems appropriate.

Jesus cannot have died if he was simultaneously God, if God has lived eternally.

Jesus is God.
Jesus died.
Therefore, God died, and we killed Him.

How is this possible?

Jesus is fully God and fully man, and He really and truly died; his heart stopped, His brain functions stopped, and He was not breathing.

However, when ANY of us dies physically, our spirit or soul lives on eternally.

Just so, Jesus' spirit lived on, and on the third day, His spirit re-animated his physical body.

Yeah, more unsupported assertions. I know the theological claims. I'm pointing out that they are incoherent, relying as they do on an invented mechanism ("the spirit") to rescue them from scornful dismissal ... which is the only reply they merit, even so.

[Jenny A]

---

Not really.  The point that many of us have said over and over and over in one way or another is that no written or oral eyewitness account alone is sufficient to prove the supernatural.  Full stop, no more is necessary.  

However, some of us for one reason or another have read a lot scripture, not to mention theology.  And it doesn't take much looking to find contradictions, anachronisms, and portions that contradict what we do know about the Biblical period.

---

Just out of curiosity, what proof of the supernatural WOULD be sufficient, and how would or could it be provided?

That's a complex question, and the answer would depend on the supernatural claim.  For example, if I claimed that there is a dragon in my living room proof ought to be pretty easy, come and see.  But if I then stipulated that it was invisible, untouchable, can't be heard, and can't be smelt, or x-rayed, or detected with any equipment, my dragon would appear to be both unfalsifiable and unprovable.   It wouldn't help you if I added that you have to be open to the dragon to see it and that knowing it was in my living room made me feel better.  Adding that my brother sees the dragon too, still wouldn't make the dragon provable.  You see unless there is something different about my living room with the dragon in it then without the dragon that can be independently verified by anyone with the proper senses or equipment, then the dragon is not provable.

Obviously a more simple claim like the ability to levitate objects is much more easily proven or dis-proven.  That is why charlatans always equivocate when making such claims.  Adding stipulations about feeling just right, and there being no unbelievers in the room etc.  What they are doing is making their claims unfalsifiable.
Many ghosts sighting, esp claims, claims concerning talking to the dead, and god, fit the general description of my dragon and are unfalsifiable.  Such things are not provable.

So step one in proving the supernatural would be to define it in a falsifiable way.  So, if I told you my dragon does communicate with me and he reads minds,  I could prove at a minimum the mind reading part, by simple replicable experiment.  The problem would be in showing that it was the dragon and not me that read minds.  If others could also read minds in the presence of the dragon, but not elsewhere, it would be helpful.

I might also, if special sight were necessary to see the dragon, claim that all those who see the dragon will be able to describe it in the same way regardless of cultural background, or their knowledge of whether there was supposed to be a dragon in the room.  This second idea would require a great deal more effort, as demonstrating the neutrality of the witnesses would be difficult and a great number of witnesses would be necessary.  But if the people with this "extra" sight all walked into the room and said, ah hah, a red dragon of about ten feet in length who breaths steam but not fire and has eight toes on each front leg and six and each back leg, the consistency of such sighting would eventually constitute proof.   And perhaps they should be walked through living rooms with and without claimed dragons to observe the variation in reaction.But someone besides me had better be walking people through the living room and it would be better if that person also didn't know which rooms contained dragons, and I had better not be around to signal either of them in anyway. And finally, the experiment should work if a whole new group of testers designed and carried out a similar experiment from scratch.

So in short, to prove the supernatural you must describe it in a falsifiable way, and then prove it by replicable experiment.

[Esquilax]

Is it really so extreme as that?

Sure, we all have basic understandings of right and wrong (I say these are from God; some but not all atheists in this thread say they are from societal convention or agreement or evolution).

No, apparently you don't have that understanding; you've already asserted in this thread that what god wants determines what is moral, so if god inverted all previous moral laws tomorrow, you'd have to find things that are wrong to be right, and vice versa. You have no understanding at all of right and wrong; you've just got an understanding of what you think your god wants. I only hope you don't ever develop a mental illness that causes you to perceive voices that aren't there; you could easily hurt somebody, with beliefs like that.

However, there's no reason to believe that all Christians would become axe murderers if they "lost" their faith.

So... they might find some reason to be good that has nothing to do with the arbitrary fiat commands of a god?   What's the point of this thread then?

But conversely, I think the "Mad Max" analogy used much earlier might have some truth to it in the total absence of God.

Hey, or if your god arbitrarily decides to alter all the morals you follow. He could do that, after all. It's in his power.

Let me put it this way: you, as an atheist, benefit from the fact that you live in a society that is still largely influenced by Judeo-Christian morality. A look at ISIS will give you some indication of what your life would be like if Christianity were not still pulling us to the "right".

Bull. Our society abhors slavery, genocide... all the things that were at one time moral under your god's regime. The majority of the ten commandments figure nowhere in our laws; your religion has been in a desperate scrabble for centuries to demand fiat credit for all good things everywhere, but we see through that nonsense. If anything, we took the things that were good from your religion, and scrapped the bad, which is directly at odds with your claim that god's desires determine what is good.

And that's "if anything," because I don't for a second actually believe your religion has anything that is both meaningful and original in it; all the best moral precepts of christianity predate it by centuries.

Or would you look forward to living under Sharia law? And what would life be like if there were no authority at all?

My life already has no authority commanding it, and I manage to act morally regardless. That's because I'm able to think about my actions and their consequences. Your only response to that was "atheists can't do that," which means exactly jack shit.

Actually, that was just an example of the type of questions I might ask. But what you skipped over is the fact that I also asked myself similar questions for the first three claims.


1. Is Equislax even married? Is his wife out of town for the week? Are they separated or divorced? The questions may not ACTUALLY be asked...but our minds work such that in a flash, we know when something does or does not line up with all the other things we know to be true about you, your wife, and the circumstances which may or may not prevent or enable you to have lunch with her on any given day. "I had lunch with my wife." "Oh? I thought she had a new job across town...", etc, etc.

And by that token: "dragons don't exist." Oh, and also, just saying: "People cannot be resurrected from the dead."

You claim that it has been refuted.

You just fucking provided a series of additional, evidence based questions you would ask, beyond the two in your initial claim, in the quote above this one. If that's not a refutation, when you literally agree with the content of the counter-argument in your own post, I don't know what is.

That does not follow. The "truth value" is independent of whether many or few people believe it. However, over time, people generally find their way to the truth, so IF large numbers of people believe a thing, it might be true OR false, but either way, the numbers would at least suggest some investigation.

And if that investigation, as it has with christianity, shows no evidence at all of magic resurrections being possible? I mean, you still believe that claim anyway, despite the lack of evidence every investigation in the history of mankind has failed to find. One would think that would be a huge, huge factor in attributing belief to a claim, but you skip right by that when it comes to your pet religion.

[Whateverist]

---

---

Your comments have been noted, Parkers. Thanks.

Without objection, apparently.  Or is this just your way of brushing off difficult points?

If you cannot do me the courtesy of a reply, then I don't see the point of having a discussion with you.  Ought I return to simply heckling your horseshit?

I could certainly use the help.

[abaris]

Without objection, apparently.  Or is this just your way of brushing off difficult points?

He always cops out when it gets uncomfortable. He said it himself after all - he's only replying to the "best" comments. Best probably being posts that can be countered with the bible shield, without employing reason.

[Angrboda]

[The Grand Nudger]

Gotta be careful where you put that shit Jorm...a christer might see it in a moment of doubt.

[Thumpalumpacus]

And of course, Randy uses the same method all the time, I'm sure. I'll bet he disbelieves all sorts of extraordinary claims (alien abductions, bigfoot, crystal healing, loch ness, etc, etc) for the same reasons we do; lack of supporting evidence and reasoned argument. 

It goes back to the old saw: "When you understand why you don't believe in Zeus, you'll understand why I don't believe in God."

[Thumpalumpacus]

They don't WANT to be forgiven, so they cannot be.

No body cares what your secret nonexistent friend will or won't forgive.

Pardon me, I couldn't help myself.

[LastPoet]

Why are atheists, that religiotards so much claim as immoral, won't go bombing, killing, telling others how to live, like the religiotards do? If anything, the religious should sort their own morals before coming for the others. Glass ceilings and all that.