Friend deleted me after 2 years because i'm atheist

[Aractus]

Overall generally positive for populations? You just pulled that out of your ass, Aractus.  You have no standard, objective metric by which to measure its positive and negative benefits.

For the health of populations, I did not pull it out of my ass - I gave a link to Williams & Sternthal (2007) and there are plenty of other peer-review journal articles that you can look up.

You can stomp your feet all you want, but you aren't entitled to your own facts FNM.

Are you just set on being an asshole for the sake of being an asshole? I clearly didn't put much time into this thread. Just because i was not 100% accurate on everything doesn't mean i'm wrong.

It doesn't mean you're always wrong, but I can see just from your response - labelling me an asshole - that you're quick to leap to conclusions, and that you may feel as if you are personally attacked when someone disagrees with something you assert.

If you took time to understand the situation you would see that you are giving him way too much credit, as he would literally just respond with curse words and go offline on steam/skype whenever he felt defeated in an argument. You also should realize that I would REPEATEDLY tell him "I will not be mad if you prove me wrong, but at least have a civil argument with me bro", and he would ignore it. I was not 100% on if I was right or not, nor does it matter, I always gave him the benefit of the doubt. I offered to have logical arguments with him many times. He did no such sort. Oh yeah and logic meaning fucking anything that makes any type of sense instead of just cursing me out and saying "im right because im right", stop analyzing my every word and finding every little detail to prove me wrong, the truth is I could be wrong on any of the arguments I had with him, but that's not the point of the story.

I never disagreed with anything you said about your friend. I have no way of knowing. But I'll point out to you that you just said that you explained to him that you wouldn't get mad if you were proved wrong - I proved to you there are long-term effects of marijuana, and you seemed to get pretty hot-headed about it. What's interesting, for me, is that this is a topic that can be divisive between different people that "just know" they're right. You can't talk sense to people who take drugs - believe me I know. I have had friends who have used every drug imaginable, and I've family members who have suffered negative long-term effects of marijuana use.

I have friends, and I know other people who have had other addiction issues with alcohol and gambling, and I know several people personally who have been the victim of domestic violence. I had one friend who was the victim of domestic violence - who wouldn't leave her partner - that wouldn't talk to any of her other friends because they kept labelling her partner a horrible monster that she should leave as soon as possible. You can't just "tell" people in these situations how to behave. It's not respectful, and it shows a lack of your own understanding if you do. You might have good intentions, but they won't follow-through to positive outcomes if you approach these situations in ways which cause people to push back, put up barriers, or feel threatened/misunderstood.

It appears that you feel that logic is the foundation of facts or truth. That's not at all unusual especially at the stage in which you're at in life. I remember back when I myself thought logic was the fundamental building block of fact - I was around your age at the time. But it isn't. As I've grown older I've understood this. Logic-arguments are just divisive arguments where one person pits their logic and reasoning against the logic and reasoning of other person. Each person's argument makes perfect sense to them, but they can't make it make sense to the other.

Like what are you even saying man? Do you think i'm a professor, and an expert on philosophy? I'm not making statements on this thread, like really why the fuck do you care? I'm 15 and this isn't meant to be a debate about what the meaning of logical is. Sorry I wasn't 2000% clearer in my words, and ironically you are criticizing someone that might describe a tree as a scientific description, yet you expect me to have a scientific description for everything I said or else you don't understand it apparently.

"Well perhaps don't tell people they're wrong then"
Like what? What are you even saying? Huh???

Even though this is a completely stupid statement, even then I still would clarify it to my friend and say "If you can't provide any evidence, you saying you are right doesn't make you right, so you can refute my points, or else you're wrong by default"

See there's your problem. What makes you the one to decide who's right by default?

My point about fractals, by the way, is that most people don't look at nature and say "look at all these fractals". Most people don't see it, because it's not intuitive and it doesn't follow logic. Einstein's theory of relativity, and the theory of quantum mechanics are also both counter-intuitive and counter-logical. You don't need to understand them to recognise that they're not logical - it is in fact in not understanding them that you do understand that they aren't logical. They also aren't facts either... they're just theories to describe interesting things about the world. Einstein himself stomped his feet and labelled quantum mechanics as ridiculous nonsense, which was not exactly his smartest move.

Have a look above - Faith No More has chipped in and asserted that "I" am wrong about religion and public health (even though I've repeatedly pointed out in the past that it isn't my assertion at all and I'm just parroting what I read from the experts), but he didn't provide any evidence and I did. This is quite a normal thing here actually, which is why that Journal article is in my signature. You think that'd make him wrong by default - in fact he is wrong, because he hasn't read the evidence like I have, but you try telling him that. He'll just keep saying "nuh-uh, nuh-uh, nuh-uh" like a little child. It'd be nice if he'd actually read some Journal articles on it and then say "oh yeah, there is evidence that people live longer and more of their lives free from the burden of disease when participating in religion, that's interesting". But he won't - he knows he's right after all, no need to look at evidence. He'll use his logic and anecdotal experiences instead.

Ignaz Semmelweis thought that women in the maternity ward were being poisoned by what he called "cadaverous particles" - invisible particles carried by medical students from the morgue to the maternity ward that were causing new-born mothers to come down with a fever and then die! So he said, in his own words, that "soap and water is not enough" to clean the skin of the "cadaverous particles" and that instead medical students needed to wash their hands in a chlorinated lime solution. Although Semmelweis was technically right that the chronicled lime solution did clean better than soap, he couldn't really explain why, the medical students hated it because the solution stung their hands every time they used it, they fought back and ultimately Semmelweis was kicked out of the hospital.

In the absence of empirical evidence, this is what logic leads to. Semmelweis says "you have to clean your hands in chlorinated lime" and his students say "no we're going to use soap and water, it's what people have been doing for centuries, that's what you use to clean your hands". And even today people disagree about how to categorise him. I think he was a heretic, quite frankly, and he was just lucky to have been on the right path. But that's often how scientific advances are made - through luck. Other people think he was an early pioneer and visionary, and misunderstood by his peers.