Barriers to atheist - theist dialogue

[Anymouse]

Condoms are not 100% efficient at preventing STD transmission (or unwanted pregnancy), therefore, using condoms will always result in at least some level of STD transmission.

Does the Pope belong to the NRA? They make the same argument about gun crime. (Registration will not prevent all gun crime, so having it will always result in at least some gun crime, so we should have no registration. Though thirty years ago the NRA was plumping for universal registration. Like the religious, they interpret things to mean exactly what they say they mean, until they say they mean something else.)

If we cannot reduce all STDs to zero, reducing them by 10, 20, or 90% is a meaningless goal.

It is a good thing we didn't listen to that argument about drinking and driving laws, tobacco use, seat belts, food safety inspections, every advancement in medicine since it was invented, and we shouldn't listen to the Church about such things either.

And since contraceptives are in fact not a bulletproof solution to prevention of pregnancy, why does the church oppose vasectomies and tying tubes, which are? Oh right, it says right there in Matthew: And Jesus spake, saying, "Medical intervention to prevent pregnancy is evil; one shall be cast down into the Lake of Fire forever."

The one professor you cite in your argument (it is always amazing how the religious resort to trying to prove their positions with science, a) because their theology won't do it and b) they fail to realise that the second they can show something with evidence and reason then they no longer need faith and religion as the position becomes a matter of science) is called in science "an outlier."

One opinion which is in opposition to the collected body of science proves nothing. What your professor needs to do is trot out empirical evidence (studies, data, &c). Otherwise, scientists have another name for a shrill voice from the wilderness: a quack.

Yet you use a whole slew of instruments of entirely human ingenuity (physicians and dentists, medications and hospitals, computers, the Internet, electric power, petroleum extraction to produce plastic, radio electronics if you use wireless, &c) and fail to see that no god of any sort is required to create and produce any of those things. Or any thing we have ever created.

The Catholic Church instead advocates that sex should only be enjoyed inside committed, exclusive relationships. Ie a policy of monogamy and abistinence. This is 100% effective at preventing STD transmission.

So why is the Church opposed to committed gay and lesbian monogamous relationships, which also prevent STDs? Because it is written: it is better to be promiscuous with the opposite sex, than it is to be faithful to one person of the same sex.

It is good though that the Church (and its pope) has an apologist to stand up for it. Because all its actions for sixteen hundred years are anti-life, anti-liberty, and anti-human. No other organisation in the West has amassed greater wealth, caused greater suffering, and violated human rights than the Church.

By the way, you did not respond to the question of the Colorado lawsuit (to which I gave a link) that the church argued foetuses are not persons to avoid paying out in a wrongful death case. Nor the Indian woman in Ireland.

Avoiding answering tough questions by calling others "liars" does not answer the questions. It shows nothing more than a lack of understanding of the rules of debate.

Some religious people here use this site for quite a different purpose than you apparently are: to learn about atheism (after all, you cannot properly argue with an opponent unless you understand your opponent's position), to learn the weaknesses in their own religious arguments (to improve them), or simply to learn about their own religions (because you always get an unbiased account of any organisation by reading that organisation's own propaganda).

And yet you make such grand statements about the Church and its leaders, all the while an atheist about every other god or goddess ever proposed in the history of humankind. You picked one, presumably for some knowledge or feeling outside its holy book, and decided it was true.

Yet all you seem to be doing here is trotting out the same old tired apologetics for an organisation unwilling to admit its failings, open its finances to inspection, root out its corrupt officials.

When you've something constructive to say, or better yet, when you actually look at the information against the Church and the pope without a presupposition that it is false and its proponents liars, we might then have something to talk about. Until then, you are just behaving as one from Westboro Baptist Church, albeit with a rosary in hand.