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RE: What would you consider to be evidence for God?
April 17, 2016 at 11:17 am
Right. It doesn't have anything to do with any of them. It's an equivocation. No religious theists actually worships this bland version of God. Not that I've heard of anyway.
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RE: What would you consider to be evidence for God?
April 17, 2016 at 11:26 am
(April 17, 2016 at 11:17 am)robvalue Wrote: Right. It doesn't have anything to do with any of them. It's an equivocation. No religious theists actually worships this bland version of God. Not that I've heard of anyway.
I've never encountered anyone who hung their hat on such a bland god-concept either. I suppose the real utility of this argument for the believer is it gives them a philosophical Trojan horse they can sneak in before unleashing their arbitrary claim that it's really Yahweh, after all.
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RE: What would you consider to be evidence for God?
April 17, 2016 at 11:39 am
(This post was last modified: April 17, 2016 at 11:40 am by robvalue.)
Exactly. More dishonesty. And that's before you even get to trying to determine if it has anything to do with reality. It's still in the concept phase and they need to use underhand tactics.
The difference between Mr Bland-but-perfect and the utter buffoon with an identity crisis known as Yahweh is like the difference between a starship and a push bike.
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RE: What would you consider to be evidence for God?
April 17, 2016 at 12:26 pm
The real give-away when it comes to the bad intellectual conscience that seems to permeate modern apologetics is the shift, adopted by so many believers (but not really Chad, as far as I can tell), from trying to provide affirmative arguments for the existence of a god to a weird kind of zone-defense style of apologetics where the believer is really trying to affirm that belief is not unreasonable -- a la Alvin Plantinga. We've had several examples of this type of argument in recent months, and it always strikes me that such people (the unlamented late Delicate comes to mind) are simply desperate to avoid being thought of as irrational fantasists.
In the end, though, all that is gained from their arguments is the notion that it might be reasonable to provisionally believe in an unfalsifiable deist god. They have nothing more than appeals to personal revelation and other sleight-of-hand gambits to make the jump from that to their particular god. And of course that's where they founder.
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RE: What would you consider to be evidence for God?
April 17, 2016 at 1:23 pm
(April 17, 2016 at 11:01 am)robvalue Wrote: I define the ratsnatchet to be a thing that exists and which disproves the existence of the Christian God.
Actually, ratsnatchet is a verb, dating from the seventeenth century, meaning to gossip - or 'snitch', hence 'snatchet' - on the unsavoury activities of the clergy, colloquially referred to as rats.
True or bluff?
![[Image: robinson-bluff_1971637b.jpg]](https://i1.wp.com/i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01971/robinson-bluff_1971637b.jpg)
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
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RE: What would you consider to be evidence for God?
April 17, 2016 at 1:24 pm
Bluff.
You can fix ignorance, you can't fix stupid.
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RE: What would you consider to be evidence for God?
April 17, 2016 at 3:25 pm
True!
Crossless: I agree, totally. Watching the slow death of apologetics as it strangles itself is like some sort of weird horror porn.
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RE: What would you consider to be evidence for God?
April 17, 2016 at 3:28 pm
(April 17, 2016 at 1:24 pm)downbeatplumb Wrote: Bluff.
(April 17, 2016 at 3:25 pm)robvalue Wrote: True!
Probably.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
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RE: What would you consider to be evidence for God?
April 17, 2016 at 5:01 pm
(April 17, 2016 at 11:26 am)Crossless1 Wrote: (April 17, 2016 at 11:17 am)robvalue Wrote: Right. It doesn't have anything to do with any of them. It's an equivocation. No religious theists actually worships this bland version of God. Not that I've heard of anyway.
I've never encountered anyone who hung their hat on such a bland god-concept either. I suppose the real utility of this argument for the believer is it gives them a philosophical Trojan horse they can sneak in before unleashing their arbitrary claim that it's really Yahweh, after all.
Like ninety percent of classic theistic arguments are this way, the rest is biblical prophecy fluff. At this point I'm close to just calling it a form of divinity-themed Tourette's and leaving it at that, because I refuse to believe that people smart enough to string a sentence together can truly think that describing a vague, deistic sounding cause, and then blurting out that it also must be the christian god, counts as a cogent argument.
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RE: What would you consider to be evidence for God?
April 17, 2016 at 7:20 pm
(April 17, 2016 at 10:50 am)ChadWooters Wrote: (April 17, 2016 at 4:50 am)Constable Dorfl Wrote: Neither is yhwh, I can easily conceive more maximally great beings than kne with great power but the morals of a spoiled child. Hell, I can point to historical people who have better claims to being maximally great than your non-existent sky daddy. Sure you can conceive greater beings than a sky daddy. So can I which is why your taunt in ineffective. The question is what is the greatest possible thing you can conceive? Have you tried yet?
But if I can conceive of greater beings than your shit of a god, it doesn't matter a fuck what the greatest being I can conceive of is, because your shit of a god has failed your maximally great being criterion.
Fuck, Chad, I thought you'd actually know stuff in the area you profess expertise, not just show an ability to spout tangenital nonsense.
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