Christians. Could you be wrong?

[LastPoet]

[FatAndFaithless]

No, it's because of its observed gravitational effects.

so you've observed dark matter?

Blatantly dishonest representation of Chas' response. Have you ever seen gravity?

[Mister Agenda]

SO the only way to avoid getting tortured by God, is to worship him. You seriously don't see anything wrong with that?

Yea, I actually do see something wrong with that. By if God was being fair we would all be going to Hell. Instead God offers eternal lfe for nothing, so I praise and thank him everyday for it.

You know there are some possible alternatives to paradise or hell, right? What about painless extinguishment?

Here's the reason I think that's not an option for God: he's imaginary, and his iron-age followers imagined him to be similar to the Oriental potentates of the time who ruled harshly, and then Jesus came along to invent hell, the ultimate motivator to get shy followers to prosyletize aggressively (they'll burn forever if you don't save them!). I can admire it as a ruthless marketing tool.

But it's kind of silly to think the omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, sane creator of the universe values worship and belief without evidence, or thinks finite crimes deserve infinite punishment. Since the iron age, most of us have come to think that if God with a capital G were real, he isn't a petty despot at heart.

[Huggy Bear]

Huggy, you don't get to make assumptions of that nature either. I didn't respond to your question about dark matter because it had no relevance to the question at hand. That you're trying to sell it as though it does speaks volumes about your honesty. Thankfully, everything here is a matter of record so we can all evaluate it.

The fact that you can't see the relevance speaks volumes.

your question:

"do we accept the truth of the claim purely on the credentials of the claimant?"

the answer is yes when it comes down to matters of science and an expert in that particular scientific field.

so the relevance was that you having never observed dark matter, accept it's existence based upon the "credentials of the claimants"

[Mister Agenda]

Really you have to say sorry to God for the bad things you have done and the good things you haven't done. You hzve to then ask him into your life to help you live a good life according to God.

In other words when a sinner reaches up to God, God reaches down.

Great, I'm saved then, since I did that when I was a teenager. Unless there are MORE conditions?

[FatAndFaithless]

Huggy, you don't get to make assumptions of that nature either. I didn't respond to your question about dark matter because it had no relevance to the question at hand. That you're trying to sell it as though it does speaks volumes about your honesty. Thankfully, everything here is a matter of record so we can all evaluate it.

"do we accept the truth of the claim purely on the credentials of the claimant?"

the answer is yes when it comes down to matters of science and an expert in that particular scientific field.

That is the literal opposite of what science is. You have a disastrously wrong concept of science and what beign scientific means.

[Mister Agenda]

Those definitions were from dictionary.com.

It's very simple, if something cannot be explained by natural laws, then it falls under the definition of supernatural.

There's a big difference between cannot be explained by natural laws and has not been explained yet by natural laws, else your definition of supernatural amounts to ignorance of how something works.

[Huggy Bear]

"do we accept the truth of the claim purely on the credentials of the claimant?"

the answer is yes when it comes down to matters of science and an expert in that particular scientific field.

That is the literal opposite of what science is. You have a disastrously wrong concept of science and what beign scientific means.

once again it goes sailing way past your head, I'm talking about the layperson....

the average Joe (which you all are) isn't scientific, he accepts what hes told by the experts.

[Mister Agenda]

Do you understand what unconditional means? Saying that I have to do something in order to achieve salvation is conditional.

---

I don't care what the Torah calls a miracle and what it doesn't. I'm highlighting the fact that ancient societies from all stripes called just about anything unknown as a 'miracle'. Once science came to understand those phenomena, they stopped being miraculous. There's no reason to jump the shark and apply the miracle label to anything now, seeing how many times that's been proven foolish and inaccurate.

And don't bother trying to pull miracles from the Bible as if they have any merit at all in any way. They're all either demonstrably untrue or unable to be verified at best.

Oh and one last thing, the Torah is not older than ancient Greece. If anything, early ancient Greece is about 200 years older than the Torah. Get your shit straight.

My point was, the Bible makes a distinction between naturally occurring phenomena and miracles, contradicting your argument.

Also Moses is credited with the writing of the Torah, which puts it's age around 1400 bc, that's about 600 years before the Archaic period.

You know Moses dies at the end, right? Did he write that part, too?

[FatAndFaithless]

That is the literal opposite of what science is. You have a disastrously wrong concept of science and what beign scientific means.

once again it goes sailing way past your head, I'm talking about the layperson....

the average Joe (which you all are) isn't scientific, he accepts what hes told by the experts.

You're a fool and your way of thinking fits in perfectly with your theism. We don't accept things based on the credentials of the person saying it, we accept things based on their truth value, which is often demonstrated through experiment and study. The data attained is not more or less valuable based on whether or not the experimenter has a PhD or a Bachelor's or no degree at all.