Hello atheistforum

[downbeatplumb]

I know atheists like to put on airs as if they have some sort of licence to logic and "critical thinking" but I don't have a low standard for truth or evidence. I am rigorously logical in my thought process and although it may seem I have come to fantastic conclusions based on little evidence, that is due to your preconceived notions. I have very good reasons for believing everything I do, based on experience, and meditating on these things, daily, hourly, for many years.

But not evidence. My wife meditates and has come to entirely different opinions than you (or me)

Atheism to me is a religion based on a lack of exposure to supernatural experience. Once you have a genuine experience of God, or something supernatural, you will no longer be an atheist. Some are still able to maintain their atheism in a schitzophrenic way even after having such experiences, but generally, the only reason anyone would ever be an atheist is because they have no spiritual experience at all. I used to believe material reality was all there is too, but the truth is that material reality is just a thin veil to a much grander reality.

There is no evidence for the spiritual or supernatural so I think your experiences my have been 'more of gravy than of grave' as Scrooge once said.

The mass marketed Christianity you see on television, where God is the ATM in the sky, is not Christianity. Scripture says to seek first the kingdom of God and its righteousness, and everything else will be added to you.

You dont get to decide what chrsitianity is.

You don't see agency behind anything, I am assuming. I'll give you another example. A dictator siezed power in Nigeria awhile back, and he was a very ruthless man. Christianity is very well established in Nigeria, and a pastor of a very large congregation received a vision of the Heavens opening and two giant angels with flaming swords descend, who told them that unless the dictator repented, he would be taken out of the way in three months. Three months go by and the pastor tells his congregation on a certain day that the yoke of the dictatorship would be broken and there would be dancing in the streets. 24 hours later the president has a heart attack and dies. Sure enough, there was dancing in the streets. Do you have a naturalistic explanation for this?

Well I could come up with many explanations given all the facts.
But I notice that you havent supplied any supporting evidence, so I guess I can just say its made up bullshit

Well, this is the essential paradigm. There isn't creationist evidence and secular evidence; we're looking at the same evidence. We are interpreting this evidence differently according to the presuppositions of our respective worldview. What I don't think many atheists realize is the philosophical nature of their presuppositions, or that they even have any in the first place.

The scientific evidence points to evolution over a long perod of time, people can always poke holes in any theory by saying 'well maybe' and presenting some bullshit argument, this was a prcosess perfected by the highly annoying statler, that the arguments put forward were universally not suported by the facts did not seem to put him off one jot, he'd just say 'well maybe' and put together another bullshit argument.
You seem to be going down the same route.
Stop it.

Maybe you're too skeptical about some things. That's what strikes me about my parents, how little evidence they need to believe their car was running on miracles and how much they need to believe the medical community isn't hiding an inexpensive cure for cancer.

These people opperate in a sort of all enveloping blanket of bullshit, where the 'holy spirit' meddles in everything they do.
It annoys the shit out of me.

I don't think so. I have nothing against evolution or deep time, if they're true. The Spirit of God has not left me for one moment since I was baptized; I am always experiencing His presence, so this isn't about trying to protect my beliefs from big bad science. I would still experience the presence of God whether they were true or not. My concern is for the truth, and that alone, and they simply don't pass the smell test.

I find the idea of god to not pass the smell test, it reeks of wrongness.

We all have Christ in common. As more persecution comes, I believe the lines will start to fade.

another christian with a persecution complex, you do know that it is the atheists who are persecuted dont you.

http://atheism.about.com/od/atheistbigot...urveys.htm

This was all going on when Paul was writing the epistles too, because Paul spoke out against some of those things. The teachings of scripture are clear, but Christians definitely have had different ideas about what it says, although I wouldn't call gnostics Christian by any stretch of the imagination. The simple fact is, whereever the truth is, there will be a million lies flanking it, trying to destroy it. The attacks always come in a flood.

If it is so hard to discern the truth have you ever considered that NONE of it might be true?

Actually, it was personally investigating claims of healings and paranormal events that led me toward skepticism. I found people believing in extraordinary things that always melted on close examination. I learned that many people are highly motivated to fool themselves and unable to evaluate their experiences critcally. An object levitating turned out to be an optical illusion. A kneecap growing back turned out never to have been more than a sprain according to the doctor. A person struck down with lameness was able to walk freely, only to be struck down again in a few weeks: just gout, which comes and goes. The worst cases were people who were clearly still ill but wanted to believe so badly in their cure that they were in denial. I wasn't able to find a natural explanation for all cases...only every single case where there was evidence available to examine. Even I wanted something that would prove there were miracles, but miracles have way more to do with how you process your experiences than what is actually happening outside your head.

A miracle is an act of God. Some things are plainly impossible and would not happen if not for divine intervention. Because of the charismatic movement, these widespread faith healings have poisoned the well in regards to what God is really doing on planet Earth. You have every reason to be suspicious of these events; mostly because they are conducted in the wrong spirit, with the wrong spirit.

They dont actually happen.

http://thewordonthewordoffaithinfoblog.c...th-healer/

They were true believers because they had evidence. When Jesus died, they were huddled up in Jerusalem in fear of the authorities. They had no expectation of seeing Jesus ever again. They were in shock. Yet, after the resurrection they were in the streets proclaiming the gospel with boldness and winning thousands of converts. Yes, people are fallible; however, again, they're not so fallible as to imagine having lunch with Jesus, putting their hands on His wounds, etc. You have to be able to explain that amazing transformation from being miserable and fearful and thinking it was over to boldly proclaiming the gospel of the resurrected Christ without any fear, and willingly going to their deaths for that truth. Again, most historians believe the disciples honestly believed they saw the resurrected Christ. You're trying to make it sound like it's a bunch of he-said, she-said and no one knows what really happened.

In the old testament the jews apparently had ample evidence for god during the exodus, but as soon as moses went up a hill to do some stone masonry they decided to WORSHIP SOMETHING ELSE a golden calf i think.
Anyway even if they strongly belived it to be true does not make it true.

Visions do not appear to crowds, they appear to one person in a highly emotional state.

As good a description of a hallucination as any.

As far as the accounts being tall tales, many of the people who witnessed the ministry of Jesus were hostile witnesses. These beliefs were public and falsehoods would have been called out for what they were. There is simply no parallel in literature of a such a story developing in such a short amount of time in the presence of eye witnesses. These things take generations to develop, and by many accounts the epistles and the gospels were written within 20 years or so of the resurrection. Some account put an early apostles creed within 7 years.

'no parrallel in history apart from John frum, scientology, the mormons and all the others

What would convince you deep time is real? I can think of a number of things that could convince me it wasn't. I admit it's hard to imagine just how much scientific knowledge would have to be overturned to accommodate shallow time, it's easier to imagine evidence for Last Thursdayism (the universe was created as is last Thursday) than that science has gotten it so completely wrong. You're really in no position to chide me when you assume I thought the Apostles were morons when you think much worse of scientists, given the incentives to get their discoveries right and that you think they've been systematically wrong for generations. Maybe this will help you understand how I can think the ancients could be mistaken without being morons

What would convince me is hard evidence, and I haven't seen any. I showed you over 50 dating methods which prove a young earth, but you're not interested in looking at them. I'm not sure what would convince you if you're not interested in actual evidence. Scientists have more incentive for DT to be correct, than not. As you said, much of modern science is now rooted in this concept, which allows for virtually anything to happen in the past given enough time. They have thrown in their cards with this conventiional wisdom and change is going to be resisted to the upmost. Do you have any idea how much derison there is in the scientific community for the idea of a young earth? To argue for the possibility would assure you of being completely ostracized from the community at large.

The world is old the evidence is overwhelming, get over it.

Assumption 1: A closed system. That nothing has contaminated the parent or daughter product over millions or billions of years. Problem being, there are no closed systems in nature and contamination is inevitable.

Then why are they spending so much time and money trying to get to the closed systems of submerged lakes in the antarctic?

Assumption 2: That each system contained no daughter product, because if it did the reading would be false. Yet, how shall we confirm this? Answer, we can't, there is no way to know the initial conditions. Therefore, when you have your range of dates, just throw away the ones that don't match your assumptions.

Initial conditions can be deduced from the evidence, or am i missing something?

Assumption 3: Clock started at the beginning, no daughter products were present anywhere. Only elements at the top of the chain existed. That, for example, all of the U238 in the world had no lead 206 in it, nor did any lead 206 exist anywhere. Yet, after a flood or the moment of Creation, all of these daughter elements would be present and the clocks would start from there.

And the evidence for this is.......

You cannot get accurate dates using these assumptions, and when we test things we know the ages of, they give us inaccurate readings. Radiometric dating cannot be trusted.

Says you.

God is alive,

How so?

so life came from life. Life has never been demonstrated to come from non-life.

But there is a workable theory that explains how it could hapen without a divine spark or what ever bollocks you subscribe to'

Abiogenesis says life came from rocks

No it doesnt

The thing about abiogenesis is is that in the billions of years the universe has been around it only had to happen once and not necessarily on earth

[quote]yet curiously this never seems to happen.

It happened at least once.

A great deal of the safety measures we have taken for our food supply assumes that life doesn't spontaneously generate itself.

This is just fucking hilarious. You dont know the first thing about abiogenesis or the conditions that would be required.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/

Not necessarily just time. The wildly improbable can happen in a short time given enough simultaneously opportunities. Have a billion dealers deal at once and the chance that someone will get a straight flush is pretty good.

We're not just talking simultaneous opportunities, we are talking about consecutive miracles here. If you had a billion powerball lotteries running, you might win one. By no means does that mean you will five in a row..

There are 6 billion people alive at the moment each with slghly different dna that is six billion simultantious throws of the evolutionary hand.

Scientists with PHDs aren't convincing them, so I am not going to convince them. You're telling me that you are sure the Earth is old, but what you're really saying is that scientists, who know better than us, are sure, and that is good enough for you. Well, maybe that's good enough for you, but if you want to say if I am wrong about something, I think you should take the time to understand how it works and not just appeal to an authority.

Maybe you should take your own advice here because all you have been doing is regurgitating creationist nonsence

I've come to the conclusion that most atheists don't understand these things, because if they did they would understand how flimsy the actual evidence is and agree with me.

Thats because you are a brainwashed moron.

It's not poetic language to say things are designed; they *are* designed. The question is who, or what designed them.

They are not I repeat NOT designed they have evolved over vast perids of time.

You think it's plausible that a self-creating Universe appeared on the scene and designed them as the result of chance, natural processes. I think that is ridiculous.

They werent designed they EVOLVED now kindly learn what the fuck that means.

What do you mean, why am I so quick to jump on the bandwagon? It's positive evidence in favor of a young world. You're quick to jump on the bandwagon of whatever seems to indicate an old world, so what is the difference? And the muscle tissue had its original flexibility and transparency..it wasn't fossilized in any sense of the word. There is no reason we should find soft tissue in fossils, and t-rex isn't nearly the only one. They have found hadrosaur bone cells, 10 million year old soft frog tissue, santanaraptor muscle tissue, etc. There is no way soft tissue is surviving millions of years.

The dino soft tissue is dated to be 80milion years old.

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2009/04....over.time

The cell

"The cell is the most detailed and concentrated organizational structure known to humanity. It is a lively microcosmic city, with factories for making building supplies, packaging centers for transporting the supplies, trucks that move the materials along highways, communication devices, hospitals for repairing injuries, a massive library of information, power stations providing usable energy, garbage removal, walls for protection and city gates for allowing certain materials to come and go from the cell"

It was first suggested in the 1920s that simple organic molecules could form and spontaneously polymerize into macromolecules under the conditions thought to exist in primitive Earth's atmosphere. At the time life arose, the atmosphere of Earth is thought to have contained little or no free oxygen, instead consisting principally of CO2 and N2 in addition to smaller amounts of gases such as H2, H2S, and CO. Such an atmosphere provides reducing conditions in which organic molecules, given a source of energy such as sunlight or electrical discharge, can form spontaneously. The spontaneous formation of organic molecules was first demonstrated experimentally in the 1950s, when Stanley Miller (then a graduate student) showed that the discharge of electric sparks into a mixture of H2, CH4, and NH3, in the presence of water, led to the formation of a variety of organic molecules, including several amino acids (Figure 1.2). Although Miller's experiments did not precisely reproduce the conditions of primitive Earth, they clearly demonstrated the plausibility of the spontaneous synthesis of organic molecules, providing the basic materials from which the first living organisms arose.

This has always been a Christian nation,

tell that to the cherokee

Secularists have been ripping out the foundations of this country since the early sixities, but don't seem to realize that when you destroy the foundation the whole thing will crumble. This is evidenced in the shocking moral decline we have seen since that time.

Really that misgynistic, racist time that was so 'good and moral' you hark back to a non-exixtant time when everthing was rosy. It wasnt.

You can explain mechanisms all day long, which does not speak to agency. Since you don't know where the Universe came from, or how it got here, or why it is the way it is, you are left with an incomplete explanation. You simply cannot say the Universe does not require God to operate when you don't know why it operates. If you think you can then explain the uniformity in nature.

There is no reason that the universe would require a god to operate, indeed the idea of a god is a laughably stupid and infantlie one.

It is not an argument from ignorance.

Is too.

It is to say that you have no argument against Agency until you explain origins. Until then, it is incorrect to say you have ruled it out by explaining mechanisms. Uniformity in nature is the fundamental assumption that science must do to even make science possible. Why should there be any unformity in nature? Why is there a lawlike order in the Universe?

You are one of those people that assign abstract ideas personality. stop it.

It doesn't seem like atheists want to admit that they are sinners, but a guilty conscience cannot be denied.

Well arent we the high and mighty one eh, fuck you.