Better reasons to quit Christianity

[Tobie]

How does the new differ from the old?

Noone will have to teach another about "God"...

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If it's undetectable then it's completely irrelevant to everything. I really couldn't give a shit about something if it has no observable effect on anything.

Until you have your own experience...

[catfish]

Is that you deep in prayer?

[frankiej]

I feel dirty for giving you kudos, but that did make me laugh...

[Mister Agenda]

Let's put it this way: My wife is the most skeptical and logical person I know. She never talks about the paranormal. Yet, the day she watched a news program about the first teacher to take a ride in to space in the space shuttle, she turned to her mother and said, "Mom, I know she is going to die." That shuttle exploded on take off.

Too bad you and she did not take it serously then. if you had made an effort you might have saved the lives of seven people...or at least have it on record that you tried. Have you heard of the Jeane Dixon effect? It refers to Jeane Dixon's many failed predictions being ignored while her few correct ones made her the world's most famous psychic.

People sometimes get premonitions, a strong feeling about a future event. They are usually wrong, but some of them will occasionally be right. Based on a single incident, there's nothing mysterious about your wife's experience: she had a premonition that turned out to be correct. It's not like the odds of a rocket crashing are a million-to-one. And note that your wife didn't predict THAT. If the teacher had died in a car crash or had a stroke or was shot, you would still take the prediction as fulfilled. The less specific the prediction, the more likely it is to be fulfilled by chance.

If premonitions turned out to be true 25% of the time, I would take them seriously. It isn't nearly that close.

So what does this mean? Was she crazy? No, the proof was in the tragedy. Was she lying? She is actually the most honest person I know (I should know, because I've been married to her for many years). She has a type A personality, and would rather confront someone and die, than tell a lie. So how did she know? I don't know. I just know she did, and I cannot deny the evidence.

How does lying enter into it? You give the impression that you were there at the time, so you would be in a position to know firsthand what your wife said, and the only way she could be lying is if she believed the teacher wouldn't die and said she would anyway. Now if Christa McAuliffe were alive today, you would probably have forgotten the incident by now and certainly wouln't bring it up. No lying or craziness, just a very human tendency to count the hits and ignore the misses.

Does this prove there are ghosts? No. But it does prove to me that there are experiences others have that I have never had that cannot be denied as genuine.

Genuine in the sense that all involved were sincere, or genuine in that it was genuinely paranormal? I have had strange experiences myself, including two 'ghostly ones', but I tend to examine such things closely: one was an accidentally-formed illusion, the other fits the profile of a night terror.

So when someone talks about an experience he has had which seems remarkable to me, and I know that person to be sincere and sane, I hesitate to brush off what he says.

When my aunt tells me not to touch the stove because it's hot, I don't touch it. She is sincere and sane, and I hesitate to brush off what she says...and she is in a position to know if the stove is hot. But if she told me not to touch it because it contained a spirit which would destroy my soul, I would (perhaps cautiously, given her previous reliability) have to verify it for myself, starting by finding out why she believes that. Sincere and sane people can be fooled, misperceive, or have strange beliefs. One hallucination doesn't mean you're insane. People have been investigating these things scientifically--the only reliable tool we have to find out if a phenomena is real or not--for over a hundred years without being able to verify a single case that is what it appeared at first to be.

Next to hearsay, eyewitness testimony is the worst kind: a dozen people at a scene will give you a dozen versions of what happened. We miss things, we misinterpret things, we make mistakes; and we are more likely to do all three when frightened. We're wired to be more likely to attribute agency to events than to think they're random because even though people likely to dismiss a rustle in the grass as the breeze will be right more often than people who are more likely to think it's a dangerous predator, the person who is usually right is still more likely to get eaten, 'cause they only have to be wrong once.

Knowing that people have hallucinations, knowing that people sometimes think they're awake when they're still dreaming, knowing that our eyes can play tricks on us, knowing that other people can play tricks on us, knowing that many times it has been shown that something that at first seemed supernatural turned out to be mundane, knowing that everyone who has tried to prove the reality of paranormal phenomena has failed...is it really that reasonable to accept someone's account of an incident that would be at odds with what we already know about the natural world (like how we can know things) at face value?

Think about the implications. If your wife had stopped McAuliffe from boarding the shuttle: Her prediction would have been wrong (assuming you didn't get one of those twist endings where she falls into a wood chipper or something to fulfill the prophecy, since your wife didn't say how McAuliffe would die). However, there was nothing really your wife could have done, so the information was useless, except as a story to tell later, I suppose. But if her information really came from the future, you and she were affected by something that hadn't happened yet. You seem to think that something like God is needed as a terminus for an otherwise infinite chain of cause-and-effect, but you don't even believe that causes must precede effects because you believe in a case where the effect (the premonition) preceded the cause (the crash). If effects can precede causes, the chain of causality can start that way: an effect that preceded a cause, making an ultimate cause unnecessary.

I'm not going to go down those rabbit holes based on anecdotal evidence.

[Jackalope]

Let's put it this way: My wife is the most skeptical and logical person I know. She never talks about the paranormal. Yet, the day she watched a news program about the first teacher to take a ride in to space in the space shuttle, she turned to her mother and said, "Mom, I know she is going to die." That shuttle exploded on take off.

So what does this mean? Was she crazy? No, the proof was in the tragedy. Was she lying? She is actually the most honest person I know (I should know, because I've been married to her for many years). She has a type A personality, and would rather confront someone and die, than tell a lie. So how did she know? I don't know. I just know she did, and I cannot deny the evidence.

Does this prove there are ghosts? No. But it does prove to me that there are experiences others have that I have never had that cannot be denied as genuine. So when someone talks about an experience he has had which seems remarkable to me, and I know that person to be sincere and sane, I hesitate to brush off what he says.

Coincidence.

Let me tell YOU a little story. I'm an avid poker player. One time, I found myself in a hand heads up with a friend. The game was no-limit Texas hold'em and we were all-in on the flop with two cards to come.

(If you are not familiar with the game, we each had two hole cards, and there were three exposed community cards on the board. The combination of one's hole cards and the community cards make your hand. As we were all-in (all of the money was in the pot), no further betting would occur).

We turn over our hands, and I see that I am WAY ahead - the only way that my opponent can win is if the two cards to come are either the two remaining nines in the deck, or two spades.

I do not often do this, but this particular time, I called for the dealer to deal the worst possible card for my hand (i.e. the one card that would give my opponent the best chance of beating me, even though the odds would still be slim): the nine of spades. All in the interest of keeping things interesting.

The nine of spades came on the next card. So the sensible thing to do is to call for the least likely card that could beat me: the nine of hearts. Which, by the way, also came.

Improbable things happen, and absent any kind of corroborating evidence that there's something supernatural occuring, I see no reason to chalk such happenings up to anything other than coincidence.

[frankiej]

Yes, anyone who plays a lot of poker will know that things with the tiniest of probability can still happen... never seems to happen in my favour though...

[Mister Agenda]

You were a devout Pentecostal who read the King James Version of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, but you could not understand it.

Very uncharitable of you and arrogant, too. I hoped I did not understand it. Turns out I understood it fine. Not looking good.

So you tried reading a more modern version. You then became what you call an agnostic theist, but (for reasons not explained) could no longer believe the Bible was inspired. You were gullible and interested in all things fantastic--UFOs, Nessie, hauntings, Yettie and the like. Then you became more skeptical and open minded. A teacher of your made a fool of himself trying to defend his liberal, Orthodox Christian beliefs. So you decided a closed mind was more rational.

I hoped I was misunderstanding you, too, but again I was wrong. You are just a troll. Yawn. Really though, it's a compliment. It means I don't think you're really stupid enough to sincerely conclude that I decided a closed mind was more rational. You're just baiting me.

The proper application of the burden of proof that you learned in a class on logic was also helpful. The class taught you that you should believe nothing until it meets that burden of proof. You then made up your mind to not even provisionally consider God as a possibility.

I really didn't expect you to give up the game so early. On the off chance that you're really this dense, I still consider God as a possibility. If that's what you really think, so much for your reading comprehension.

The whole trip took you 20 years without the aid of the Internet.

Does that pretty much sum it up?

In a way that demonstrates you're wasting both your time and mine, I suppose. Good to know. B'bye.

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As to ghosts, when I was a kid, I was walking through an old abandoned house, reputed as being haunted, a flash of light from a window scared the shit out of me. I truly believed at that time it was a ghost of somekind, yet, I wasn't satisfied. The next day I repeated my path, and saw the phenomena repeated itself. Hmmm. I gained entrance to the house and discovered a mirror that was in such an angle that reflected a street light at the distance (those times they were white) when I was passing by.

I used science, and it works bitches!

Similar account: When I was a kid, some other children were in a fret in front of what was locally reputed to be a haunted house. The front door was open and a vase was clearly visible floating in mid-air! I took a closer look and when I was within the house, I could see that there was an isolated shelf sticking out from a wall on the left. It was made of the same wood as the wall behind it from the door. You had to be pretty close to see the shelf since it was effectively camoflauged, so it looked like the vase on it was sitting on nothing.

Had I not demonstrated this, it wouldn't be surprising if one of those children, now grown up, was telling the story of the floating vase as evidence for the paranormal to this day.

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Improbable things happen, and absent any kind of corroborating evidence that there's something supernatural occuring, I see no reason to chalk such happenings up to anything other than coincidence.

The odds of getting any particular Bridge hand (13 cards) out of a well-shuffled deck are about 60 billion to one. We're surrounded by fabulously long odds all the time.

[Jackalope]

Yes, anyone who plays a lot of poker will know that things with the tiniest of probability can still happen... never seems to happen in my favour though...

I'm not the least bit superstitious, but man, I run bad.

AA vs AK all in preflop, yep, the flop is gonna be QJT. Set of kings vs 99 post flop, here come the running nines (the hand in my example).

I have a good laugh about it when it happens, because all you can do is put.your money in when you're ahead, and don't when you're not. It stings when it's a $500 pot, but I'll lose one of those for every 3 I win any day.

[LastPoet]

We should arrange a G+ poker session with members one of these days. I'm the unluckiest of everyone here.

[FallentoReason]

Yes, but if the newcomer is asking, rather than telling, would the same be true? If I ask you why someone believes there is no God, is it up to me to answer my own question?

I guess that's a good point, which reflects reality better. I guess from the word 'go' I would start wondering how many different versions of god I need to disprove before 'GOD' is disproved altogether. We can talk about why omnipotence, omni-benevolence and omniscience don't work together but then you can just bring up the next variation to that ad infinitum. This world is concerned with the things that exist and not non-existent things. So I would think that it's logical for you to show me why god is a possibility as opposed to me showing the endless list of possible gods to be non-existent.

I just wrote a thread about this actually: http://atheistforums.org/thread-14314.html

Strawman. I was vaguely talking about burden of proof.

I agree with your statement though. Unlucky for you though, you are telling me what truth has apparently always existed, which means this is the part where you bring forth the proof of your claim. May I see it?

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That's a fair point.

Thanks.

There's more to it than just third person with the Gospels though. Matthew seems to have used Mark ...

If Jesus' disciple Matthew penned his gospel after Mark, why is this evidence he did not write the gospel?

Because that gives rise to the possibility that he used Mark as the basis for his work, which it seems like he did. The Synoptics are best understood with a Markan priority type approach. That helps to explain why Mark is so short compared to the other two, why it misses out on important things like a birth narrative and witness accounts of a resurrected Christ, and why Matthew + Luke are more incredible sounding (because Mark toning down the miracles wouldn't really make much sense.. at least to me).

From what I understand, John was the youngest disciple who outlived the others. He spent his last days exiled on an island and had many visitors and even his own disciples. If I were a Christian at the time who visited John in exile, I'd ask him to tell me something Jesus said, or did that I did not already know from the previous gospels. It makes sense to me that John, near the end of his life, would write a gospel with people like these in mind.

Being younger than others that lived through the same events as you does not equate to gathering better sounding evidence for something. I'm not too sure what logic that is....

John and Matthew supposedly saw the same things but somehow John came out with a Gospel that exceeds the Synoptics in lots of ways. Age has nothing to do with this.