Why Richard Dawkins should debate Christians

[pocaracas]

damn... this is why didn't follow this thread... too many points to follow

Am I the only one who notices a pattern?

No, you’re not the only one, there’s a definite method and pattern to my reasoning.

You base this god's existence of a book.

Well partially off of His direct revelation, but also by the things He has made. Scripture is the ultimate authority though.

"direct revelation", huh?
Why was I not included in that memo?

It's like (strawman time) claiming the harry potter exists, based on the 7 books written by J.K Rowlins, and all the remaining contributions about the subject, including the movies.

Yes, that’s a straw-man argument. Another alleged holy text would have been a better analogy.

Would yield the same result.
The gods of Olympus, the gods of Valhalla... you see them as fictional, just as I see yours... or am I mistaken in your portrayal of religions to which you don't subscribe?

This is exactly how an atheist views the "god of scripture". A fictional entity.

I do not care how atheists view scripture.

Then why are you here, on this forum?
To tell atheists how to read your precious scripture?

Without the book, you have nothing on the character.

Not quite, we could still learn of His attributes through the things He has made, but we have His direct revelation so that’s not a very relevant hypothetical to consider.

"his attributes", "the things he has made"? and which would those be?... and where did you come by that information?

The extraordinary proof some atheists require is something completely defying the known laws of Nature, like.... e.g. a constantly floating rock above a lake.... or an eternally burning bush... something extraordinary, something evidently extraordinary... that doesn't require drinking the kool aid, nor putting on the loony glasses.

First of all, millions of people claim to have such supernatural experiences and atheists simply write them off as mistaken perception, so why would it all of a sudden be a valid proof if those atheists experienced the same phenomena?

Because the experiences people claim to have can be simply mental concoctions... regardless of how genuinely those people believe that they have experienced something real... you know the saying: pics, or it didn't happen.
Unlike an eternally hovering stone or burning bush, which could be seen by everyone... and pics and vids could be all over the interwebz.

Secondly, you know as well as I do that atheists would simply postulate a naturalistic explanation for such events, or simply say there must be one that we do not understand yet. The proof for God’s existence is far more fundamental than that.

If the bugger would just stop hiding and tell everyone what's on his mind... instead, the guy just allows this eternal doubt to linger... While people argue and bicker about the guy's existence, about the guy's attributes... about the guy's name... This hiding of your god is one of the main causes of conflict on this planet.... go GOD!!

If you put the book aside and discount oral tradition as faulty, you have nothing, zero, didly squat, nada, niente.... well, you have the gaps

This assumes there is some neutral position a person can reason from in order to “put the Book aside” and then reason back to the Book being what it claims to be. There is no neutrality, you either have to assume that the Book is the word of God or you have to assume that it is not. You cannot say you are being any more rational by assuming it’s not the word of God than I am by assuming it is. The bigger question is; which view of reality is logically consistent and coherent and which one is not, and in that arena the Biblical view of reality trumps the anti-Biblical view in every which way, which means it must also be the true view of reality.

Aye, neutral position is the one you're born with... the same you see in all other animals: indifference, the desire to survive and breed.
I always come back to this question on the book.... 20 (or 30 or 40...) thousand years ago, there was no book. How did people get it? What happened?

Nowadays, there are millions of books, written by people.... some of those books are claimed, by some groups of people, to be divinely inspired, or the direct word of the deity they proclaim. Of these divinely inspired books, the divinity in one does not correspond to the divinity in another so one tends to exclude all the others.
Now, from a neutral position, what can I say about this myriad holy books? At most, one of them is correct. If it is correct, then that righteousness should be self evident... how else would the people who wrote them get the information?

Divine inspiration seems faulty... I mean, for example, the OT (sort of shared amongst jews, christians and muslims) claims that the deity talks directly to people... orders them to kill, to do this or that... what happened to the deity after the book was written? Did it loose that ability to interact with people? Or were those just voices in people's heads, just like what happens with some psychologically disturbed people we see nowadays? With this in mind, the OT is evidently based on stories from crazy people.


Also, the existence of large groups of people claiming their holy book is the correct one, shows that such self evident righteousness does not exist.... so the sensible conclusion is: all those holy books follow the pattern of all the other books we know of: man made.

If the book and its contents are man-made, then you follow a fictional tale of a fictional character, just like the Harry Potter stories (or any other story book). Straw man returns!