Hello to everyone

[Mister Agenda]

Thank you for sharing your history with us. I would have to know if he was an Orthodox Christian for real or was just a christian that called himself orthodox, but not a member of the Church. Also I would need to know what logical fallacies did he commit and so on.

I never believed anything without questioning, I did not have the luck of growing up in a religious household, even if my parents were Orthodox, they did not practiced it too much. The road to the faith was a lonely road to me, I had "moral" support but no one really helped me, I had to taught myself, but under the firm guidance of God.

You're welcome. I don't want to turn this into a debate, which would be more appropriate to have in a separate thread in a different section of the forum; but he was actually a member of the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church in Columbia, SC. For some reason, in that period of my life, I ran into a number of Orthodox Christians, most of whom I considered friends, so I was in a position to know something about his authenticity. I'm a little surprised that it was the first thing you questioned. It's uncommon for Christians who aren't Orthodox to claim they are Orthodox here in the USA.

It was about 20 years ago, so I can't remember everything he said that struck me as fallacious at the time in detail; but his God detecting machine thought experiment stands out; and so does shifting the Burden of Proof (if others can't prove God does not exist, it is reasonable to believe that he does) and argument from ignorance (if you can't explain the origin of the universe and I can because I know God did it, that means my position is stronger).

This is not intended to put you down; but I have noticed that atheists who were never indoctrinated into religion when they were young are far more likely to become theists later in life than atheists who had to think their way out of their indoctrination. My whole journey to atheism can be summed up as learning to think critically about my own beliefs. Now that I have, at least to an extent somewhat exceeding the average; it's going to take evidence and sound reasoning to make me change my mind again. Or revelation, if there's a God; he, she, it, or they are welcome to revelate me.