RE: Exposing the Intellectual Bankruptcy of Atheists Criticizing Religion
December 25, 2015 at 12:53 am
(This post was last modified: December 25, 2015 at 1:24 am by Crossless2.0.)
(December 19, 2015 at 1:36 pm)Reflex Wrote: “Where's the evidence?” means “What empirical empirical evidence do you have?” If atheists knew just how silly a question that is, they'd hide their faces in shame. Asking for physical evidence of a universal principle or Spirit is illogical and plainly the result of that category error. Whether it's an attempt at parody like the FSM or something relatively more intelligent like comparing God to a microscopic leprechaun, it's the same thing. People who pose those kinds of arguments are really just putting their ignorance on display. And they do so proudly because they imagine it to be clever and more intelligent than theism.
Look, if you want to believe in a "universal principle or Spirit", my dear anachronistic Hegelian, that's your business. I couldn't care less. But when I ask for evidence -- yes, empirical evidence -- I do so in the context of discussing the beliefs of Abrahamic followers, who purportedly believe in a god who intervened numerous times in history and who therefore might have left some kind of evidence, some trace of his existence, that can be recovered and examined.
And what do we get from the Abrahamic crowd? Appeals to a book of stories (their laughable idea of "evidence"); attempts by Christians to bury the last "real" intervention by their god in the dim history of Roman-era Palestine (or later in Arabia, in the case of the Muslims); private unverifiable experiences; spurious accounts of "miracles"; and attempts to refine the main character of their book of stories into precisely the kind of "universal principle or Spirit" that Plato or Hegel might recognize but bears hardly any resemblance to the Biblical god -- that strange literary creation laden with superlatives and an all-too-human range of emotional responses to things great and petty. Plato's Forms, after all, didn't enjoy the occasional nosh or concern themselves with foreskins and menstrual blood.
It's not our fault that you god believers feel the need to refine your own object of worship right out of existence. Of course, if I couldn't provide the goods, I'd do the same. It's as human an impulse as is creating gods to worship in the first place.
