13 Questions

[Angrboda]

Actually I was not rude to you at all, I simply said I was disappointed because you always expect people to give reasons for what they believe but when you are pressed as to what you believe you dodge the issue or just flat out ignore the questions as you did in the PM. Don’t misrepresent the facts please.

I'll let the hellhounds of damnation decide.

I only ask additional questions when I think the answers I am getting are not well thought out, are arbitrary, or are not based on rationality. I had hoped that you'd be a different kind of atheist, sadly I guess I will have to continue waiting for an atheist to sign up for this forum who can actually back their beliefs up.

I don't know about you, but I consider that an unwarranted insult. And an 'angry face' is at odds with your claim that you were just 'disappointed'.

But by all means, back up your implied claim that I cannot back up my claims. You cannot, because there is no such evidence, and even a fool like you knows better than to attempt to prove a negative. So you were just blowing smoke, insulting, uncharitable.

The only person misrepresenting facts here is you.

Even if everyone hated me on here (which they don’t, I have a positive rep and have several theists I get along with fine on here) it would not bother me in the least. I have been ten times more civil to others on here as they have been to me. I have been called a “F**ker”, “Moron”, “Sh**head”, “A**hole”, told to die, told to suck a fart out of someone’s a**, and a closet homosexual just to name a few of my favorites to date. If you can point to any example where I have used such brutality, be my guest.

There are worse things than harsh language, in my book, and prophets with lying spirits in their mouths are among them. There is a passage in the Tao Te Ching which analogizes the Tao's relationship to reality as like a king to his subjects -- they are ruthless, treating the subjects as dummies. I see some of this in you, yet you carry no crown. I am unfairly biased to value goodness and truth above all else, but my gambit on you is that you gleefully bend the corners of truth if you feel it serves a higher purpose. That's just my bias. (And when I said 'nobody', I was using hyperbole; I should be clearer where there is controversy.)

The fact is though; you give all these atheists a pass and bash the theist just because he does not compromise on his positions.

More lies. The fact of the matter is that I will attack sloppy thinking, bad morals or untruth wherever they may live. It matter not to me whether it live in the breast of a theist or atheist. I'm more than happy to listen to Fr0d0 as I trust him, and believe he is dealing straight from the top of the deck; for whatever reason, I don't get that impression from you (your apparent willingness to lie and criticize based on ad hominem doesn't help; as to the rest, many of your behaviors are straight out of the traditional sophistry and casuistry practiced by some religious positions (YEC) -- impossible to concretely demonstrate, so I give a pass on this. However, if others are as knowledgeable about prior examples of the use of such argument as I am, it is disrespectful to parade before them old paint and claim it a war horse).

As to why you are an atheist now, I do not know. I know it is one of two things, you are either one of the sheep and just in a period of doubt, or you never were one of the sheep. As to which you are, that is not up to me.

You are so wrapped up in your silly, private fantasies, if a shaft of daylight were ever to penetrate it would scare you to death. I can only presume that by "one of the sheep" you mean a believer in Christ. I was one at one time, though since you've given it a pass, I'll tell you that I don't even know why I stopped believing, but I'm confident it had nothing to do with doubt. You are correct that doubt continues to propel my disbelief, doubt that Theism can bring reasonably believable evidence to the table. There are many things I don't believe for lack of evidence. The banal idiocy of both common and gifted defenses of belief don't encourage me any, either. Oddly enough, not only are you displaying hypocrisy in asserting intelligence to re-converted theists and don't consider yourself owing of the same burden with respect to deconversions, since my "story" is posted publicly on this board, a resourceful person might have looked for it and used it to prosecute their case; but that resourceful person is not you.

You cannot tell me how people as intelligent as Carl Wieland and Alister McGrath can denounce their atheism and decide to carry the cross can you?

I can't definitively claim to know without examining some evidence in the matter, but since you can't do the same in the other direction, who cares? In general terms, my belief is that people are not essentially rational creatures, and are moved more by the dialectics of emotion, and social needs. Moreover, while I confess no absolute claim to belief in coherence theories of truth, I'm sure that figures into it. As such, beliefs are developed and maintained by "discourses" whose logic and rhythm is not ultimately guided by truth or evidence; thus, persons likely become theists -- after age of majority -- for the same types of reasons that people become atheists. [See -- I do NOT simply give atheists a pass. Your assertion has been tried and found wanting.]

ETA: I also note that you failed to answer my challenge to answer why we care about the fate of fictional characters in the way that we do? Why we agonize when our hero's fate is balancing on a knife edge, why writers killing off a favorite character can sadden us deeply, or why we want Huck Finn to come out all right? I don't expect you'll have an answer to this, but I'd be delighted to hear your speculations on the matter -- presuming you consider the human experience worth explaining; I've peeked in the good book, and am ignorant of any answers written there -- which is odd, given that the book involves the same themes, the narratives of great characters that move us to sadness, anger, joy, and experiences of the sublime. Given what we now know about the complexity and difficulty in correctly interpreting texts, don't you consider it strange that God wouldn't have included instructions on how his book is to be read? A hermeneutic to preface Genesis, an interpretive stance "woven" in the text like language savvy essays on the written word, or even so much as a "this book was meant to be read in the original Hebrew" to prevent Latin theologians from working in error? Where are the footnotes, the index, the table of contents? My God would certainly be capable of producing a more perspicacious document than this -- why not your God?