The Problem with Christians

[God of Mr. Hanky]

No, it's not even on the level of ignorance, it's simply bigoted. Straight on the my god has the biggest dick line. Primitive on the side, but that usually goes hand in hand with bigotry.

Ignorant barges in with a vengeance, when you actually take an ambivalent phrase and turn it into a meaning of your liking. Thereby not only ignoring the history of the bible, such as when it actually was compiled.

Lastly, ignorance is also in play when you actually take the mark of the beast to be a real thiing. But I think, we established that already.

The Bible correctly predicts the rise of an end-times antichrist system. Why would a ragtag bunch of Jews 2000 years ago have the audacity to predict that the entire world would end up engulfed in a battle between what they believed as Christians and the forces denying their beliefs. It's an outrageously unlikely prediction and yet here we are watching it unfold. Fundamental Islam is slaughtering people all over the world for simply refusing to submit to its totalitarian demands. How is my observation of the actions of Islam bigotry or ignorance?

If you despise the Christian faith, how on earth could you not feel the same way about Islam?

The only thing your bible correctly predicts is that humans will act according to their nature. Nature! It's something that really doesn't give a fuck about Jesus, Mohammad, Jehova, Brahma, Buddha, Zeus, Zoroaster, Ishtar, nor Thor.

[God of Mr. Hanky]

AJW333

If it makes good sense to associate Islam with a worldwide and supernatural dictator, then it makes equal or better sense to associate evangelical Christianity with the same. If it's they who expect this, then it's they who will do their best to bring it.

AJW333 Wrote:

Are you saying that Christians wish to bring the antichrist?

Are you really ignorant enough to doubt that?

Christian deadbeats live far beyond their means on credit, betting that Jesus will return and set them free of their debt before it comes time to pay up.

Mega-church evangelical pastors are raking in billions of dollars while lobbying Congress to support Israel, which exists with our support specifically because American Christians, who are a bit more numerous than our US 1% Jewish population, want them to aggravate Muslim cultures into a conflict which will result in the next world war, which they presume will bring that final "Battle of Armageddon" which was "prophesied" in their bible. Idiots are raking in millions from writing fantasy books about the "Tribulation" which they say will come after the expected "Rapture" happens. It never will happen, but that won't deter people from engaging in an alluring and self-satisfying fantasy!

[Cyberman]

The Bible correctly predicts the rise of an end-times antichrist system.

Quick question: how can you have a correct prediction of something that hasn't happened? It's like me talking about that lovely, satisfying shit I'm going to have next Thursday.

[God of Mr. Hanky]

[God of Mr. Hanky]

[Esquilax]

The way I look at it, there is no such thing as a random code. Entropy takes care of that. Given that all life depends on very sophisticated code, I see that you have a problem with life getting off the ground in the first place.

Random activity = no code. No code = no life.

DNA is not a code. DNA is a series of chemical processes acting within a limited framework of actions and reactions. It is a code only in a post-hoc sense, as living minds long after the fact are able to predict the expressions of those chemical reactions due to their reliability and corresponding observations of the genomes of extant organisms. At the time that DNA forms- the relevant time for your argument- it is not a code, but merely chemicals pairing in ways that best assure their propagation as described in the theory of natural selection.

This argument from analogy isn't new to us, and it's no more fallacious the hundredth time we hear it than it was on the first. The only difference here is that you've front-loaded it with a bald assertion as to the impossibility of a random code with nothing to justify it. So you've taken a fallacy and then managed to make it worse.

Be that as it may, you have to assemble those building blocks in a meaningful sequence to make intelligent code and therefor life. This doesn't happen through random activity.

And equally, you never answered my question: if I had no answer to give you, do that mean that your god wins by default?

The problem here, that I suspect you might be aware of, given your earlier dodge, is that you're attempting to get to positive evidence only by subtracting. You're never going to demonstrate that your god was involved at all just by poking holes in the arguments of your detractors, but in the end, reducing the positions of others is all you have to make your own seem better. The purpose of my question was to show that, even if you were able to reduce our positions to zero, your own position isn't somehow the default we must return to: if you get us to the point that what we believe is wrong, the answer becomes "I don't know," not "god must have done it."

So, do you have any positive evidence for intelligent design, or does all of your support rest on one variation of "we can't explain this, therefore designer," or another?

Well that's an interesting argument but looking at a barren earth 4.5 billion years ago turning into a place that is literally teeming with incredibly complex life forms, it still represents a massive reversal of local entropy, especially considering that the contributions from outside the local system of the earth appear to be somewhat limited.

And I ask you: what seems more entropic to you: a barren, lifeless rock, or a world teeming with organisms that expend energy and change it and alter that rock in ever more chaotic ways?

Also, "somewhat limited" contributions from outside Earth? When we receive endless solar radiation from the sun, meteors and other space debris in our atmosphere, and a continual dose of radiation from space that's only really blocked out by that same atmosphere? Not to mention all the emissions from other stellar bodies that we continue to receive on Earth after traveling so many lightyears to get here. This is not limited, it's a bombardment from every side. It's just not all immediately detectable by any old guy with a keyboard.

[Kitan Etos]

The Bible correctly predicts

I know for a fact that the work of fiction known as the bible does not accurately predict anything, the same as it never accurately described anything about the earth or how anything works.

Ignorant people wrote about that which they knew nothing, pure and simple. Adding a super magical sky daddy to the equation does not make it believable. It merely makes the believers gullible.

[Huggy Bear]

[Cyberman]

I just want to say thank you to the theist participants in this thread for quite comprehensively demonstrating the rationale set out in the OP. Well done!

[robvalue]

Lol, we're not really needed, are we?

I'd love to hear how "faith based" approaches work in other situations.

"Maybe the door isn't where it looks like it is, and where it's always been. Maybe the door is now in what looks like a brick wall. You can't prove it isn't. I'm going to walk through the brick wall."