Pull up a chair

[Rampant.A.I.]

How easily you “free” thinkers avoid challenges to your atheistic worldview by falling back on your irrelevant clichés. Let’s count those made since my last post, shall we?

How easily you "Christian" thinkers fall back on your irrelevant stereotyping of an atheistic worldview, when you're unable to support your own.

1) There is no evidence. For general revelation, the whole of reality is the evidence from which we deduce a basic understanding of the Divine.

Now there's a claim with no evidence! You are demanding we presuppose <God exists> to support <God exists> as self-evidence. This is circular reasoning.

For special revelation, the various artifacts, and accounts serve as the subjects for interpretation and dispute. Asserting that there is no evidence is simply wrong. The only questions are whether the evidence applies and how strong that evidence is.

This is simply rephrasing the first claim: <everything is evidence God exists because God exists, therefore everything is evidence>

2) You assume the conclusion in advanceEvery hypothesis is an advanced conclusion for which you test.

Untrue, see above. You assume your unsupported claims to be true, and are throwing a hissy fit because others don't.

Positing divine action in the beginning is no guarantee of the final interpretation.

It's also begging the question, and unsupportable, untestable, and an irrational claim you seem unable to provide evidence for.

Some miracles prove to be naturally occurring or fraudulent. That is not to say that some believers search for and cling to anything they feel supports their hope. This fault also applies to atheists that instantly dismiss any supernatural claim because it does not fit within a naturalistic paradigm.

Again, you are presupposing <miracles exist>, and then looking for events to substantiate your claim, usually in the form of an argument from ignorance. "We don't know: therefore Miracle."

3) The original Christians weren’t very bright, i.e “primitive goatherders”.Clearly some members of the early Christian community were highly literate and educated, a rarity for the times, since they produced written accounts. Anyone that argues that Saint Paul wasn’t very bright cannot be taken seriously.

They also had thirty or more years after the fact of the supposed events to build their stories. The average novelist takes 4-6 years to produce a novel, given 30 years anyone could produce a literarily compelling work.

4) The many ‘conflicting’ religious traditions proves they are all bullshit.There is some truth to this, but not much. For nearly all major religions and the late pagan ones, the results of general revelation are overall consistent.

This shows a dramatic lack of understanding of world religious traditions, and you seem to be claiming that because certain mythological archetypes are fulfilled, it adds to the veracity of the text. I don't know many Star Wars literalists, but the same could be applied.

Moreover, the mystical traditions within each religion tend to converge on key concepts, like Huxley’s “perennial philosophy”. With respect to special revelation my own denomination is very ecumenical, focusing on orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy.

Surely you realize this implies that Buddhism, which predates Christianity by hundreds of years, is not only equally divinely inspired, but bears greater veracity being closer to original divine inspiration?

What people do with their beliefs is much more important than the beliefs themselves. An atheist that rails against “In God We Trust” is being every bit as much of an asshole as a loudmouthed bible-thumper.

Why? Do you dislike the separation of church and state?

5) Religious believers resort to special pleading.It is not special pleading to approach something according to the nature of the thing under consideration. When it comes to God, He is not just another thing within a world of things, but is the One that serves as the very basis for and unity of the plurality.

There you go, back to unsupported presupposition, and advancing additional claims on top of presupposed validity. And you wonder why no one takes you seriously.

Please. Atheist twaddle is SO annoying.

It's annoying because people aren't willing to accept your assertions carte blanche, and ask you to provide support you're clearly unable to.

And that makes you uncomfortable, so you revert to tantrum throwing and rambling stereotypical diatribes, instead of paying attention and participating in the discussion.