The Bible is the claim, not the evidence

[Bad Writer]

Is my claim that there are children that are raised religious and reject Santa but remain convinced of god wrong?

Not at all, it’s just irrelevant in regards to whether belief in God is rational or not.

Nice strawman...again. We were never on the topic of whether or not belief in a god is rational or not. I was making an observation, and that's all I was doing in this case. You just squirm a little when you hear people equate belief in something that's not real (i.e. the Tooth Fairy) to belief in something that's also probably not real even if you believe it is (i.e. Yahweh).

Whether conviction of these facts or rejection of them happens in childhood or adulthood is a red herring placed in this discussion by none other than you, Stat.

Are you just going to stay silent about how I called you out for misrepresenting the views of this forum's members?

What views are you referring to and how have I misrepresented them?

From just this last page:

Sweeping generalizations, is it? And what's it called that you're doing with atheists when you lump us all together into one box?

I can make these generalizations about religion because there is truth in my claim. You claim you know each atheist so well; you call us naturalists, materialists, and other such titles without even checking to see if that's true first. You are a class act asshole, and if your purpose is to sit back and misrepresent this forum's population by trying to tell us what we believe, then I'm pretty sure that's akin to flaming and trolling.

You completely ignored this, and we are left wondering why.

C'mon, aren't you going to tell me I'm wrong?

If you believe that belief in God is somehow like belief in the Tooth Fairy, then yes you are wrong. If you are merely saying that children believe in the Tooth Fairy and God as well as 2+2=4 then you are not wrong but simply pointing out the obvious. Either way, I see nothing profound in what you are saying.

At this point I was asking about if I was wrong about the post from the last page, not the thing about Santa and the Tooth Fairy, but since it's the only thing you seem capable of addressing, I feel compelled to rebut on this point.

Belief in god is exactly like belief in the Tooth Fairy. They're both beliefs in things that can't be evidenced as fact, fuck you very much. Missing the logic in this is akin to you missing the fact that 2+2=4 and 5x5=25 are both mathematical equations. I'm being intellectually honest here when I say I don't know if there's a god, but there's no evidence to indicate that there is; we can also say there's probably no Tooth Fairy because there's a generous lack of evidence there as well.

You, Stat, tell people that there is a god. Great. It's a bold claim, but maybe you have something there. We'll believe this great claim if you have great evidence to corroborate what you say. Now, this is the part where you might want to show us where you read about god...y'know, where you saw what people wrote about him 2000 years ago in a collaboration of books called the Bible. You don't see the problem with this? At all?

This thing called testimony (I mention this word because that's all there is throughout the Bible) can only be accepted in this case if there is acceptable evidence to back up the words of these long-dead men. In the same way that the claims of eastern/alternative medicine cannot be backed by consistent, reproducible results, truth claims about the existence of any kind of divinity fall flat in much the same way.

There is definitely a certain kind of profundity, for instance, if I pointed out the similarity between Mormons believing in the Angel Moroni visits to Joseph Smith Jr. and the claims made by so-called alien abductees.

Or are you silent because you realized you screwed up and were not honest in your dealings with your fellow man, and now you've gone off to a corner to kneel and pray for forgiveness?

No, I have a life outside of this forum.

My questioning was ill-timed here. I realize you out for surgery, but I wrote this before I found out. Truth be told, I was still a little irked that you had completely ignored the point I was making about you misrepresenting many views on this forum, and that's why I said what I did. I'm actually glad to see that everything went well on your end (at least I assume it did since you're here posting right now).