The March of Tyranny

http://garrisongraphics.blogspot.com/2010/08/march-of-tyranny.html

In response to FOX & Friends' Brian Kilmeade's comments on Muslims as terrorists.

I hate to comment on anything FOX says, as they're so persistently dishonest (admittedly some parts much more so than others) that I could spend all day, every day, screaming into the void about it and be wasting my time. But... this particular news item struck a cord with me because it seemed illustrate a twist on a familiar maxim.

(I'd made a comment about this on Facebook, but felt that it was worth not being overlooked, so I'm reposting it here.)

What prompted all this was an article on ThinkProgress titled "Fox Host Brian Kilmeade Says ‘All Terrorists Are Muslim’ In Defense Of O’Reilly’s ‘Muslims Killed Us’ Remark".

Commenters on the social media sites were quick to make plays on his wording with such quips as "Brian Kilmeade of Fox News stated this morning that "not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslim." - proving once and for all that not all idiots are anchors on Fox News, but all anchors on Fox News are idiots."

This brings to mind the familiar maxim of Hanlon's razor... "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

However, while this might usually be the case, this is importantly not the case with FOX News. These people know what the facts actually are... and some of them are very well educated people who merely pretend to be complete airheads on air in order to allow their target audience to better identify with them... pretending to not know what common words mean, drawing painfully obvious false parallels in feigned ignorance of the facts etc... it's done by well informed, intelligent people to intentionally manipulate their target audience, and in this case we see a further example of it in that even after having the facts pointed out to Kilmeade, he goes on to reiterate his false statement because it is the "party line" of FOX/Republicans, a group that is largely becoming synonymous these days.

To illustrate this point... let's look at Gretchen Carlson, one of FOX's iconic blonde "pretty lady" hosts.

"Carlson ... graduated from Anoka-Hennepin School District 11's Anoka High School, in 1984, as valedictorian."

"Carlson is also a former pageant winner. She won the title "Miss Minnesota" in 1989 and became the third woman from Minnesota to win the "Miss America" title. For the talent competition, Carlson played Zigeunerweisen, the violin composition of Sarasate."

She not only graduated valedictorian from high school, and went on to win a couple pageants, including Miss America, including classical violin performances etc... but here comes the punch-line:

"Carlson was graduated with Honors from Stanford University, in 1990, with a specialized degree in the field of Sociology (organizational behavior). While enrolled at Stanford University, she studied abroad as part of her Stanford program at Oxford University."

Graduated with honors from Standford with a specialized degree in the "organizational behavior" area of Sociology, including studying abroad at Oxford University in England.

And yet she routinely plays up the image of the "dumb blonde bimbo" on FOX in order to promote misinformation, to take jabs at the opposition through pretending to ignorantly misrepresent things using the same methodology as Push Polling, in that it's not so much about the inherent validity of what's being said, as that can be disproven fairly easily... it's about the constant repetition of the misinformation to create an underlying narrative that the audience subscribes to, assisted by their perceived rapport with the the hosts facilitated by the faux "down to earth common man" charade.

Saying that all terrorists are Muslim fits what Americans would like to believe, and promotes that idea in the face of clear evidence to the contrary because the audience does not want to think about the fact that there are many Christian terrorists today (as listed in the ThinkProgress article, and many others)... as well as other religions, and even non-religious terrorists, of which Timothy McVeigh could be counted as one... people who are merely exceptionally ideologically driven by the ideas of patriotism, liberty, the Constitution, etc... all of which reflect in one way or another on the "Tea Party" red blooded American self image of the core FOX demographic.

So it doesn't really matter that it's not true, and that it's easily proven as not true... it's that the hosts pander to what the audience wants to hear, and repeats the lies often enough to maintain the narrative and keep the audience believing it enough to act on it... to vote for the people FOX wants them to vote for, to buy the books they're selling, the products they're advertising, and so forth.

Which brings us back to the key point. While Hanlon'z Razor posits "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.", in this case, when dealing with FOX, it should be more accurately stated "When dealing with FOX, Never attribute to stupidity that which is more accurately explained by Machiavellianism."

(I could go on further to discuss the relationship of the word "malice" in Hanlon'z Razor to the actions of FOX and their ilk, and the actual effect their manipulation of the general public has on the well being and even the safety and very lives of many human beings... but I think that's enough for today.

Some other related points I'd like to cover in relation to this story include some comments Bill Maher made on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno about the Mosque at Ground Zero, as well as some further information about why Islam is in fact the most dangerous religion today and is far from the "religion of peace" its adherents largely try to make it out to be, and cover specifically why that is, and why they are in fact commanded by their religion to say that and to lie to non-believers and people of other religions about what their religion actually is and says in order to further the agendas of Islam... namely implementing Sharia etc.

But that's for another article...)

Response to Dave Stroebe's letter about C3Exhange

I was recently pointed in the direction of a letter on MLive.com ("Letters: Church has lost its core beliefs" by Dave Stroebe) via The Muskegon Chronicle regarding a "church" that some friends of mine attend. I'd written the following response to the author of that letter where it appeared on MLive.com, but I'm guessing that either due to the size of the comment, or the links therein, that it was held for moderation. So in the meantime I'm going to post it here and try to create a "non-link" to it in a comment there so that it can be read in the meantime.

Well let's address for a moment the issue underlying Dave's letter... the validity of Christianity in the first place.

We know for a fact, based on a vast wealth of objective evidence that we can actually verify through empirical observation and testing etc, we know that essentially every single claim made in the Judeo-Christian Creation story is provably false.

Since we know these things... that for instance the Earth is not flat, nor 5,700 years old, nor is the sky overhead a physical dome holding back a second ocean above just like the one here on the ground, in which the bible claims that God opened floodgates to allow it to pour in to flood the Earth for Noah's flood, etc... but most importantly that we know for a fact that human beings did not originate in Mesopotamia 5,700 years ago. Not by several orders of magnitude and not even on the same continent.

Because we know that such claims as made in the bible are demonstrably, provably false, based on the wealth of real world objective evidence we actually have, we know that Adam and Eve were never in the mythical Garden of Eden as claimed. They weren't there to be tempted by a talking serpent to commit the Original Sin. And since they weren't there to commit it, it never happened. And since it never happened, the very act which Jesus claims to be dying to gain our salvation from never happened in the first place, thus rendering moot the argument that we should be worshiping him for that supposed deed. The best that can be argued is that he died for a noble, but misguided gesture. And remember, we actually have the vast wealth of evidence to back that position up, which is profoundly more valid than the mythological claims of middle eastern bronze age tribesmen from a culture that was one of the most scientifically illiterate and primitive in the region, essentially the known world, at that time.

The burden of proof should one try to refute all that actual modern day objective evidence we have lies soundly on their shoulders. But we can prove that the very core claims of the Judeo-Christian bible that were meant to establish the power and authority of that God provably never happened and that what actually did happen involved different processes, different differentiation between the things created, vastly different spans of time, forms of life not even listed because the authors were ignorant of them, different orders of events, different locations, and on and on. Every single aspect of creation was profoundly different, and provably so, than the authors of the bible literally claim, and upon which literal claims the authority and power of God is derived, and from which the tale of Original Sin comes, which is later relied upon as a literal truth for the subsequent literal claims of truth of Jesus himself about being the son of God... and in Romans explicitly linking the requisite literal truth of the Original Sin of Adam and Eve to Salvation through Jesus Christ.

Romans 5:12-21 (NIV):

Death Through Adam, Life Through Christ

12 Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned— 13 for before the law was given, sin was in the world. But sin is not taken into account when there is no law. 14 Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come.

15 But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God's grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many! 16 Again, the gift of God is not like the result of the one man's sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification. 17 For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God's abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.

18 Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men. 19 For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.

20 The law was added so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, 21 so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

And of course we know these things thanks to the overwhelming extent and accuracy of the knowledge we have accrued and refined over the convening centuries through the greatest method of establishing objective truths and gaining knowledge based thereupon ever derived by man; The Scientific Method.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

"Scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning. A scientific method consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses."

Which has led us to such things as, to only barely touch the tip of the vast iceberg of knowledge we now have...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_human_evolution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_evolution_fossils

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_evolution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_fossils

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_evolutionary_synthesis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life_(science)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_as_theory_and_fact

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mitochondrial_DNA_haplogroup ... which leads into terms like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam, which the Christian mindset of cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias instantly tries to mold into their mythology of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden... but these figurative individuals share their name no more than naming the planets after the Roman gods made those gods literally real.

I think you can understand why they chose the names. ;) Not to mention that both of these individuals lived far down in Africa, and many thousands of years separated from each other... and were not the first humans either, but merely the earliest common ancestor genetically we can find due to the way Y chromosomes and Mitochondrial DNA are passed down through generations etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MatrilinealAncestor.PNG

That image shows simply how that early ancestor, while not the only person around, ends up passing her particular mitochondrial DNA on to everyone else...

As a matter of fact, just read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve#Common_fallacies to clarify these points.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formation_and_evolution_of_the_Solar_System

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_time_scale

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Earth

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiometric_dating

And further...

http://myxo.css.msu.edu/ecoli/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment

"The unequivocal consensus in the scientific community is that intelligent design is not science."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design

http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/what_you_can_do/why-intelligent-design-is-not.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School_District

And I could go ON and ON....

Evolution is an objective, empirically observed fact. The only thing really up for honest debate these days are the mechanisms involved... eg; sexual selection, epigenetics, punctuated equilibrium, horizontal gene transfer, and so forth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer

But that it happens is none the less a fact, and one that many Christians seem to have such a profound problem with only because it contradicts their provably false ancient mythological explanation for things that we do actually have a fundamentally vastly superior understanding of today.

You could say it's much like the law of gravity versus the theory of gravity. That gravity exists is a fact, one that we can observe and study. Why gravity exists and how exactly it works is still an area of intense scientific study.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_as_theory_and_fact#Evolution_compared_with_gravity

People inventing those Judeo-Christian creation myths in one of the most scientifically illiterate cultures even of their time, thousands of years ago, at least had a good excuse for their beliefs... they had no way of knowing any better. Christians today do not share that luxury.

And we can only assume that those who would promote those claims as "truth" and "fact" etc, in spite of the wealth of evidence to the contrary, are so profoundly ignorant of the actual scientific facts because they must focus on sites like "The Institute for Creation Research", "Answers In Genesis", "Discovery Institute", and so forth if they even bother to consider the matter at all, which most intentionally don't... (most Christians never really consider the conflict between their modern scientific understanding of the world around them and the profoundly different standards by which they judge (or rather don't judge) the mythological claims of their religion. This is a form of psychological compartmentalization as a means of avoiding the forementioned cognitive dissonance etc... but we'll leave that for later as this is getting much too long as it is.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Creation_Research

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answers_in_Genesis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Institute

These are sites that persist in peddling false information in spite of it being shown to be profoundly wrong over and over again because they are more concerned with how effectively they can fool the scientifically illiterate faithful into believing them, not in actually proving any of their points honestly based on real evidence etc.

One might want to read the following: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_strategy

To understand the motivations of the people they seem to be so eagerly taking as honest and truthful promoters of "Truth" with a capital T etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School_District#Allegations_of_perjury

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-404729062613200911#

And so forth.

This is not a message of religious intolerance, it is a lesson in well supported facts and the sound reasoning based thereupon.

When we have established all these facts, the nature of what C3Exhange is doing becomes rather moot, because in reality they are hardly any less valid than Christianity itself, both having been provably invented based on the wishful thinking of human beings, and neither offering any objective evidence to support themselves, and both relying solely on subjective emotional appeals and a willful denial of evidence and reasoning to the contrary of either.

So don't get me wrong, I'm not a real fan of way C3Exchange promotes unsupported happy feelings as somehow establishing some sort of "truth" about the objective nature of the universe we live in, in spite of the actual real world facts and logic to the contrary... but it's a little beside the point in the context of this opinion piece since the author has no more of a sound footing to be standing on himself to be preaching such intolerance at Ian and his congregation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishful_thinking

"Wishful thinking is the formation of beliefs and making decisions according to what might be pleasing to imagine instead of by appealing to evidence, rationality or reality."

Now I can certainly expand upon this discussion vastly, go into greater detail if need be, and lay out more specifically the logical fallacies etc involved in arguments by those such as Dave Stroebe (the author of the opinion piece above) as well as Ian Lawton and many of his "faithful" etc. While I find both to be invalid, I at least have a little more forgiving attitude toward Ian for being more progressive about the whole thing.

Some of the most common issues that arise in these discussions are the following;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophic_burden_of_proof

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophic_burden_of_proof#Asymmetry_in_the_burden_of_proof

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_emotion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_pleading

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_tradition

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignoratio_elenchi#Red_herring

Slightly more subtle, but fundamentally important points...

http://www.differencebetween.net/language/difference-between-objective-and-subjective/

Objective – is a statement that is completely unbiased. It is not touched by the speaker’s previous experiences or tastes. It is verifiable by looking up facts or performing mathematical calculations.

Subjective – is a statement that has been colored by the character of the speaker or writer. It often has a basis in reality, but reflects the perspective through with the speaker views reality. It cannot be verified using concrete facts and figures.

And even more sublte ones such as;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_analogy

And so on...

That should be more than enough for now to establish the foundation of sound reason and evidence behind my assertions. Sorry for the length, I figured I would just get a lot of the heavy lifting out of the way right off the bat to hopefully save myself the trouble of having to type it later.

Color me foolishly optimistic. ;)

If you've made it this far and actually read and thought about all of that, I sincerely thank you.

The idiocy continues...

This began as a discussion on Facebook with a younger man that ended up being handed off to his father (a pastor) part way through.

It was after I had posted the original discussion here, in the post entitled "Your par for course debate with Christians on Facebook.", which he commented upon that I noticed that he had his own blog, where he'd been blogging his take on what the debate had amounted to. I wrote a few comments on there (and here and here etc) to clarify a few things and to present a link to the original discussion so that people could read the debate for themselves and make an honest, informed opinion based on the actual argument, and not solely on the tail end of one of the final comments of a 46 page, almost 23,000 word debate... where after 3 days of debating with him only sliding further and further into absurdity I finally snapped and dealt him some well deserved insults. (As he had copy pasted just the last bit of one of my final comments, and not even the whole comment, to try to cast me in a bad light.)

After a bit of commenting there, I decided to write him again on facebook and try to approach the issue from a more human standpoint, to give a little background as to who I was and what my personal experiences with religion were etc.

Unfortunately this too only quickly devolved into the most frustratingly absurd back and forth with Don's impenetrable delusion... where not even the most simplified explanations seemed to have any effect. Where not even clearly pointing out the fallacies for the Nth time, the clear contradictions, contrary statements, invalid arguments, flat out dishonest ones, utter lack of evidence on his part in the face of absolutely overwhelming evidence to the contrary... nothing gets through to him. (which led me back to his blog to leave the angry third comment on the first "here" comment link above.)

At this point I don't see how I can continue with it... it's gotten me so angry at this point that I just quickly stoop to angry insults peppering my rebuttal of his mindlessly repeated invalid excuse making... impervious to even the most basic standards of reason, logic, evidence, honesty, etc... he mindlessly chants his mantra of "it's all just made up opinion! the atheist agenda to rewrite history! only the bible is an accurate account of history and everything else is just a conspiracy to try to rewrite history! science is just an atheist agenda that has no facts whatsoever... and is wholly invalid... and is worthless in contrast with the truth of the bible, the ONLY REAL truth!" etc. (of course that's a paraphrase, but you get the idea.)

Another method that he has increasingly relied on is the Straw Man argument... where he repeatedly misstates what science is, what science's methods and intentions are, what my intentions are, specifically and intentionally misstates things I've already clearly stated to the contrary in the very same discussion etc...

A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position. To "attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by substituting a superficially similar yet weaker proposition (the "straw man"), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.

... and then tries to invalidate those misstatements using further arguments that are in themselves fallacious and invalid on top of the misstatement. They're not even really properly formed Straw Men... they're more like another fallacious method of argument he's been increasingly relying on... Red Herring distractions from the main facts and argument where he brings up the BP oil spill, the date of Christmas, belief in Unicorns, Hillary Clinton's claims about a right wing conspiracy etc... all to try to distract us from the valid facts, sound reasoning etc...

Similar in category, but with darker implications than ignoratio elenchi, a "red herring" is an answer, given in reply to a questioner, that goes beyond an innocent logical irrelevance. A "red herring" is a deliberate attempt to divert a process of enquiry by changing the subject.

... by using distracting statements that aren't even relevant to the matter at hand, are not even accurate statements in themselves most of the time, and completely ignore previously established facts about the differences between objective facts and subjective claims etc. Again, just layer upon layer of demonstrably invalid, erroneous, dishonest, and thoroughly fallacious arguments drowning in clearly evident cognitive biases (and that's putting it mildly).

A cognitive bias is the human tendency to draw incorrect conclusions in certain circumstances based on cognitive factors rather than evidence. Such biases are thought to be a form of "cognitive shortcut", often based upon rules of thumb, and include errors in statistical judgment, social attribution, and memory. Cognitive biases are a common outcome of human thought, and often drastically skew the reliability of anecdotal and legal evidence. It is a phenomenon studied in cognitive science and social psychology.

And I suppose I should include it here for the sake of completeness, that insulting someone while providing evidence and reason to back up that insult.. is not a fallacious argument. Saying "you're an idiot because you refuse to admit that there is any possibility you could ever be wrong, while simultaneously admitting that you don't really understand the issue and don't have any proof that you're right... and yet still insist that all the actual real world evidence is wrong, and your belief is absolute and cannot be argued" etc. THAT makes one an idiot. Now on the other hand, saying "you're wrong because you're an atheist" or "science is wrong because it's just an atheist agenda of opinions trying to rewrite history"... well, those ARE fallacious ad hominem type arguments that fail to address the validity of the actual facts and instead solely seek to try discrediting the messenger so to speak.

"An ad hominem, also known as argumentum ad hominem (Latin: "to the man"), is an attempt to persuade which links the validity of a premise to a characteristic or belief of the person advocating the premise."

And from Common misconceptions about ad hominem;

Gratuitous verbal abuse or "name-calling" itself is not an argumentum ad hominem or a logical fallacy. The fallacy only occurs if personal attacks are employed instead of an argument to devalue an argument by attacking the speaker, not personal insults in the middle of an otherwise sound argument or insults that stand alone. "X's argument is invalid because X's analogy is false, there are differences between a republic and a democracy. But then again, X is idiotically ignorant." is gratuitously abusive but is not a fallacy because X's argument is actually addressed directly in the opening statement. "X is idiotically ignorant" is not a fallacy of itself. It is an argument that X doesn't know the difference between a republic and a democracy.

I've explained this to him numerous times now, even clearly defined a logical fallacy for him and so on... but yet his entire argument rests on these kinds of willfully repeated fallacious arguments and stubborn denial of the facts etc.

Now I can't help but think that his behavior when dealing with the presentation of all these facts and valid reasoning etc... that the more overwhelming they get, the more blatantly he flat out denies their existence or validity and starts quoting atheist conspiracy theories etc... that Don (and many other Christians) descend into textbook pathological denial, which is defined as follows:

Level 1 - Pathological

The mechanisms on this level, when predominating, almost always are severely pathological. These four defenses, in conjunction, permit one to effectively rearrange external experiences to eliminate the need to cope with reality. The pathological users of these mechanisms frequently appear crazy or insane to others. These are the "psychotic" defenses, common in overt psychosis. However, they are found in dreams and throughout childhood as well.

They include:

• Delusional Projection: Grossly frank delusions about external reality, usually of a persecutory nature.


• Denial: Refusal to accept external reality because it is too threatening; arguing against an anxiety-provoking stimulus by stating it doesn't exist; resolution of emotional conflict and reduction of anxiety by refusing to perceive or consciously acknowledge the more unpleasant aspects of external reality.


• Distortion: A gross reshaping of external reality to meet internal needs.


• Splitting: A primitive defence. Negative and positive impulses are split off and unintegrated. Fundamental example: An individual views other people as either innately good or innately evil, rather than a whole continuous being.


• Extreme projection: The blatant denial of a moral or psychological deficiency, which is perceived as a deficiency in another individual or group.

And while I certainly don't think that Don is pathologically neurotic, with some fundamental physical malformation in his brain or something... I do most certainly think that he is incredibly irrational and displays at least some extent of every one of these symptoms as a result of his brainwashing by his own religious beliefs... beliefs he is now so invested in that he is utterly unwilling to, and incapable of, considering to be in error... regardless of the overwhelming level of evidence and sound reasoning to the contrary.

Anyway... read for yourselves and see what I mean.

On a somewhat friendly side note. :)
Myself June 17 at 3:51pm

It seems a bit unfortunate that your son and I got off on the wrong foot on such a divisive issue, as we have other things in common.

The reason I have so much time to spend on these discussions is because I am self employed as graphic design and web development guy who also does general IT work etc (and have been for over 15 years now, including working for GM and Ford world headquarters in Detroit, the tribal government up north as variously network admin, webmaster, and even interim IT manager for a bit...)

The relevant point being that for the past 2 years my main job has been as the head admin running a Japanese language learning website. http://thejapanesepage.com/

Interestingly enough, my boss is actually #religion removed for privacy#. ;) He and I have debated religion a few times, but generally we avoid it because we really enjoy our friendship and working relationship outside of that.

My interest in Japanese is actually what brought Jack and I together here on Facebook as friends, as he taught a number of my friends at ########## and is a friend of one of our longtime family friends Rod ######, and knows my father etc. When I found out that he lived in Japan now we started talking and became friends here on FB... and this was only a few months ago.

I just happen to be very unapologetic when it comes to religion because of my many years as a Christian, involvement in DecoTEC etc... and the kind of irrational hate I faced when I eventually began questioning my beliefs and after many years of in depth research and critical assessment eventually became the atheist I am today (at 36 years old).

As a result, my own father has unfriended me here on facebook, half of my relatives... my uncle called me a threat to his family as real as a murderer or rapist... my own mother said that because I was an atheist I'd be happy to put out a hit on her and my father and have them killed because they were Christians... something SO insane that my father actually defended me for the only time EVER... coming out of the bedroom to say to my mother, and I quote; "Melody, have you lost your fucking mind!?"

(Or for instance when she said she didn't care if EVERY Nobel laureate scientist on Earth agreed on a particular fact and had all the evidence in the world to prove it... if it contradicted what the bible said, they were completely wrong and the BIBLE 100% right. In spite of, for instance, being an insulin dependent diabetic who relies on medical science instead of prayer to keep herself alive...)

I've seen the harm first hand that religious irrationality can do to a family when a provably false religion, imaginary friends, and so forth are put ahead of your own children and your relationship with them... you know, like Jesus says to do in Matthew 10:34-39 (NIV) that I referenced in our other discussion...

34"Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35 For I have come to turn " 'a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law - 36 a man's enemies will be the members of his own household.'
37 "Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; 38 and anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 39 Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

I have had my own mother threaten to disown me for talking to my own sister about religion, and recently reiterate that she was perfectly right in that threat... I was accused of being possessed by demons, rather than simply well educated and making well informed and well reasoned statements based on that education. I was considered the black sheep of the family, a failure on my parents part to raise me right in spite of not only being the only child (out of my living brother and sister and I) to actually graduate high school, but to go on to college... to work out in silicon valley during the dot com boom, and some of the other aforementioned jobs etc... and in spite of being a generally good person with a very loving and kind girlfriend who while also being an atheist, works in adult foster care taking care of mentally handicapped older men, visits her family almost every day and talks to them every day etc.

I have lived for years now with the kind of irrational hatred that Christians have for atheists purely because Christians are absolutely unwilling to even CONSIDER that they might be mistaken, or to acknowledge the illogical clash between admitting that you have no proof of something, and yet simultaneously claiming that you will not argue that issue, and state that nothing could ever change your mind about it... and atheists thus exist as a threat to that unfounded and irrational belief system because we present the facts, the sound reasoning etc... we pose a threat to a cherished belief that Christians have built lives around.

For instance you have gone to school to learn your religion, made a life for yourself as a religious man...

To admit at this point that you might be mistaken would be to admit that you might have wasted years of your life invested in something untrue. That could be embarrassing... and not only that, but it could threaten the relationships with the friends you've built relationships with... or even threaten your relationship with your family, as it did mine... it would remove the unfounded surety that you'll get to live in a magic castle in the sky when you die... that someone is always loving you and looking out for you.... and easy black and white answers to problems without having to think too hard or do too much research etc...

These are all valid reasons to be resistant to admitting the possibility of a mistake, and I understand that. I have lived through them myself.

So while I'm sure you're a very nice guy, and we probably do have things in common... and the same with your son etc... having been a Christian myself, having lived through both sides of the equation... and having seen the negative effects of religion on myself, my friends, and countless other people throughout the world who are deprived of rights, oppressed, and even hurt and killed by the irrationality inherent in religion, it is the one thing I can't abide. I simply expect more of people who claim to be rational, intelligent, mature adults... and to be clear, people who otherwise ARE good people, with the best intentions etc.

My argument against 1 particular belief a person holds is not an attack on their character as a whole, or a statement that they are completely stupid (unless they actually are)... because even my father, who I consider a smart man... is an idiot when it comes to religion and I've told him so. But luckily he isn't as REMOTELY as insane as my mother. But I digress...

The point was that I am a human being. I have had my own experiences and have a life outside of arguing religion. I am defined only as an atheist so much as religion exists to be a non-believer of, and so long as it persists as a cancer on human progress, to stand up and speak out against.

I would be a much happier man if it simply didn't exist, and quite frankly even your life would really be no different if you stopped believing. You just might have to think a little more and re-evaluate some of your friendships and what they're based upon.

It can take a strong person to admit that nobody knows what happens when you die and that you'll probably just turn back into dirt... or to admit that you don't have an imaginary friend always loving you and looking out for you and your best interests and to instead rely on your friends and family. But it really isn't so different from your every day life... the vast majority of which you do without ever thinking about Jesus or religion.

If anything I see the world much more clearly since leaving the faith... as the cognitive dissonance melted away... it was like a breath of fresh air to not have to compartmentalize my beliefs... to feel that discomfort of knowing that the real world around me didn't match up with what religion claimed as fact...

For instance, if a man walked up to you and said he saw a man walking across the water of the Pere Marquette Channel, you would say he was lying... you'd ask for evidence... you'd try to think of a rational explanation for how he managed it... a bridge just under the surface of the water or something... and this same type of critical thinking and rational assessment of fact applies to essentially every other aspect of your daily life.

And yet when a book written thousands of years ago by primitive and ignorant bronze age tribesmen claims that a man walked out on the sea and told another man that if he believed hard enough he could do it too... you believe it without question. You don't apply the same rational assessment to those ancient mythological claims as you do everything else in your daily life.

That is the compartmentalization... that is where the cognitive dissonance comes in when someone points out that disparity in your beliefs... the disparity in your application of critical assessment.

"Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, or by justifying or rationalizing them. It is one of the most influential and extensively studied theories in social psychology."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

And since you have already decided that you ABSOLUTELY believe in your chosen faith, confirmation bias then comes in to subconsciously influence you to reject information contrary to your preconceptions and focus solely on that which might reaffirm your existing beliefs.

"Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias or myside bias) is a tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses, independently of whether they are true. This results in people selectively collecting new evidence, interpreting evidence in a biased way, or selectively recalling information from memory."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

This bias is inherent in ALL of us, and so powerful and subconscious that science has had to develop methods of working around it because human beings essentially cannot be unbiased even if they try.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_experiment#Double-blind_trials

etc...

But as I'm digressing a bit far afield, and I only originally meant to write the first part about how I know Jack and what we have in common with your son etc, I'll just leave it at this.

I hope you'll read an consider what I've written. :)

Thanks.



Don Sr. June 17 at 4:17pm
You didn't get off on the wrong foot with me or him either. My daughter #######(friend of your sister) explain to me how you were raised. Don and I call these people"Chrispy Christians". According to them, I will be sitting next to you in hell. LOL



Don Sr. June 17 at 4:32pm
First to address your statement
And yet when a book written thousands of years ago by primitive and ignorant bronze age tribesmen claims that a man walked out on the sea and told another man that if he believed hard enough he could do it too... you believe it without question. You don't apply the same rational assessment to those ancient mythological claims as you do everything else in your daily life.
Yes, yes,yes yes.................... that is my point exactly. It's like putting a new car togather with a book about antique car assembly
It need to be relevent to today.
In the beginning God created the internet? I don't think so. That is why I want to get past the redeculous(sp)
My belief is not like the "Crispy Christians', and I think I'm a nice guy. MY BELIEF says that I can't judge you and I won't. I am way to sinfull for that. I am ordained by a non denominational branch and am not ti



Don Sr. June 17 at 4:37pm Report
I am not tied by my ordination to any denomination. There is no watch dog making sure that I don't offend the faith. You may call me a rogue preacher, but as I tried to explain before.....My faith is between God and Me. Yes, I am biased, but not stupid in the face of logic and common sense. I really hate conversing this way as it is very impersonal. Its just words typed on a screen.



Myself June 17 at 5:08pm
The point you're not getting is that your concept of God, along with your assertion that Jesus Christ specifically died for your sins etc... those things CAN be addressed, as I did.

Put simply, you have derived your faith from the bible and Judeo-Christian religion, presuming their validity and authority, and are now trying to remove that foundation while still expecting the house built upon it, upon which it necessarily relies, to remain standing... which it doesn't.

This is why I referenced wishful thinking, negative proof, burden of proof, judicial impartiality, logical consistency, special pleading, etc... because all these things are fundamentally related to your assertions about your religious beliefs.

You cannot just make up your own religion, without any evidence to support it, and then use that unsupported belief that you've invented (and in reality based soundly upon Christianity) to justify flat out denying the validity of beliefs which DO have a wealth of evidence to support them.

That is where your overwhelming (logically fallacious) bias comes in where you allow your own unsupported beliefs to stand without evidence (any at all), while flat out denying in every way you can modern scientific knowledge that IS based on an absolute wealth of convergent and mutually conformational information from numerous disparate fields of science... fact based, tested, independently confirmed as OBJECTIVELY true... not subjectively opined etc...

The reason I keep trying to get you to pay attention to the logical fallacies and cognitive biases you're falling victim to is because until you actually understand what constitutes sound reasoning, valid logic, etc... you're just going to keep making these mental blunders in your reasoning.

And I don't mean that to try to insult you, it's just a statement of fact. If you read some of those links I provided you (a number of times now), maybe you'll see from their examples how and why those rules exist and why they are right.

You know, like the difference between fact and opinion... that difference itself is a FACT. It's like saying a stone and a blue-jay are two different things. That is a statement of FACT. It is not an opinion. It is an objective observation about a physical object in the natural world. It is not just an opinion any more than saying blue is not red, or up is not down, or I am not you etc... those are just statements of fact.

Opinions are things like "I don't like cheese", or "Mary is mean" etc... they are SUBJECTIVE opinions about things based on your own feelings, thoughts, emotions etc...

Objective facts can be independently verified because they have nothing to do with the observer.

Subjective opinions can and do differ between people because they deal with the observers feelings, emotions, etc... and those are different from person to person.

When you claim that numerous objective facts are nothing more than opinions, you are making an error in your assertion, whether intentional or not.

The reason I have been trying so hard to get you to actually read and think about what I'm saying is so that you'll stop making all these little fundamental errors in your reasoning... so that you can more accurately deal with the actual facts.

And you might want to ask Kaylee about the fact that I have an IQ in the 98th percentile, skipped the sixth grade because I was too smart for my own good, etc... I'm not just making shit up... this is all WELL established fact and so forth, and I have done a great deal of studying over the years to educate myself.

And before you YET AGAIN try dismissing the collective knowledge of science and academia as "opinion", go back and re-read what I just wrote to you... and don't let your confirmation bias trick you into just letting it all go in one ear and right out the other to preserve your preconceptions, or to ignore the point I clarified about standards of evidence that goes in tandem with that difference between objective facts and subjective opinions etc.

"Objective – is a statement that is completely unbiased. It is not touched by the speaker’s previous experiences or tastes. It is verifiable by looking up facts or performing mathematical calculations.

Subjective – is a statement that has been colored by the character of the speaker or writer. It often has a basis in reality, but reflects the perspective through with the speaker views reality. It cannot be verified using concrete facts and figures."

http://www.differencebetween.net/language/difference-between-objective-and-subjective/

And science inherently is based upon objective facts. Things that you can independently verify, test, etc.

Your belief in God is a purely subjective opinion, and one that even goes so far as to be contrary to the objective facts we do have... of which we have an absolutely overwhelming amount.

And again, I have to stress that you just DENYING all that information because it doesn't agree with you is not valid nor honest.

And again, that's not to offend you... it's just a statement of fact. :(



Myself June 17 at 5:11pm
And just to be clear, I would like you to read that entire message carefully and think about it before you respond. If you don't, there is no point in us discussing this any further because you're not learning anything and not addressing the information presented as I am doing with you. (And I am clearly investing a LOT of my time and emotional energy into this, to the detriment of my JOB as I should have been working for these past almost 4 days now... and when you consider that I make $## an hour, I think you can understand that my investment in this discussion with you is not only an emotional one.)

Thank you for your consideration.



Don Sr. June 17 at 5:29pm Report
First of all ....no offense taken. Again I most likely can't measure up to your IQ. To me, the world is not black and white. I can't prove or disprove that Jesus walked on the water. I've seen magicians and illutionist do that. I wasn't there when this happened. Maybe I need to symplify this for my sake as well as yours. If tonight I am beamed aboard the Star Ship Enterprise and am shown that Jesus was actually Mr. Spock being held up by a tractor beam, I might have a change of heart. I don't see that happening. If you think this is rediculus, remember that space travel to the moon was laughable back in the biblical times. My faith is nothing new or inventive, I just choose not to be identified by my denomination or anything else. I am smart enough to know that the bible is old, and we can argue if the flood covered the whole earth or the whole Known world. Our faith grows because it is



Don Sr. June 17 at 5:38pm Report
Living. Yes faith is believing without seeing. i believe a person can think for themselves and my faith is not formed by DR. James Dobson.
The fact that I can, makes it reality. If I'm wrong and end up worm bait for enternity, you are more then welcome to laugh. That I believe that life is alot more then the few years we have on this planet gives me hope in living and sharing my life with others. Is that the difference between optamism and pesamism(sp) ? Science, I love it, embrase it and know that it is falable. After all it is not perfect and it continues to grow, just like relegion.



Myself June 17 at 5:56pm
So why aren't you a Muslim? A religion with just as many people claiming that miracles happened in the name of their God, in a religion that denies the divinity of Christ, and a more recent revelation of the Abrahamic faith, as Christianity was to Judaism? Why are those 1.2 to 1.5 BILLION people wrong, and their eye witness accounts in their scriptures?

Or why aren't you a Jew, who were there before Christianity, with Jesus actually being one... and upon the authority of which Christianity was founded and Jesus himself staked his claims?

What makes those religions false, but yours true?

How about Hinduism? It predates Christianity by well over a thousand years, and has almost a billion followers? And also has eye witness accounts.

Again, you're failing to see that you're not following the logic through... you're not applying the same standard of critical assessment to your own religious beliefs as you're applying to others. You're not acknowledging that by the same standards that you assert the validity of your own beliefs, the others must be true as well... and they cannot all be true, as there are numerous mutually exclusive claims between them, contrary goals, etc.

We do know that magicians and illusionists make it look like they walk on water... but today people know that magic isn't real, and we can see how they did the tricks etc. That really doesn't relate to the claims of a book from thousands of years ago... which is better address by what I just wrote a moment ago.

This is the reason why, given the problem I laid out, why we base our decisions on sound reason, actual evidence, etc... because that is the best way we as human beings have to establish the nature of the reality in which we live... what is true and false... what is objective fact verses opinion or fallacious claim etc.

Also, like I said, atheists don't claim that there isn't anything in the universe beyond our understanding. We only claim to know what is true or false based on what we DO know... and based on that, we DO know that Christianity itself is nothing more than one of many absurd ancient mythologies, and wasn't even the most popular in its day... and really only took off because of the ideas about redemption, salvation, eternal life, etc.

The problem is that while you're trying to imply that you only believe in some vague concept of an impersonal deistic God, a concept less difficult to defend than that Abrahamic God and Jesus specifically... the God you specifically cite, both in the manner you describe your belief, and even explicitly in your words, is the Christian God and your faith in Jesus Christ as your savior etc.

The point is that you're claiming your absolutely objectively unsupported claims of FACT are MORE valid and somehow deserve more merit than the actual wealth of ACTUAL OBJECTIVE FACT that we have that proves your beliefs WRONG.

That's not an opinion Don. It's a fact that we know based on all that objective evidence and verified and validated understanding of it. All things which your beliefs are utterly lacking.

You cannot claim to be RIGHT about something you yourself admit you cannot possibly know. You can't claim it as true, and you can't deny actual REAL FACTS because they contradict that claim for which you cannot possibly know.

And as for science, as I explained to you already, science inherently acknowledges its fallibility. The entire scientific method is built on the understanding that human knowledge is limited, and seeks to expand itself through studying the objective facts, testing its hypotheses, trying to intentionally disprove them so that it can correct its own errors.

It is nothing like religion, again as I already explained... so please don't start irritating me by repeating things that you've already misstated and I've already corrected more than once.



Myself June 17 at 6:02pm
Now answer me honestly, are you actually reading what I'm writing? You seem to not have read or understand at all the information about the difference between and objective fact and subjective opinions or beliefs, in spite of me having repeated it at least 3 different times now and even gave a link to an article further explaining it...

It just seems like you skim a little of what I say, having already decided you're not going to really think about what I'm saying... and you just go on and continue denying what I'm saying and asserting the validity of your own position.

For instance we CAN prove that by EVERY SINGLE THING we know as OBJECTIVE FACT about the world we live in.... there is NO WAY Jesus could have walked on water in the miraculous sense clearly meant in the bible (considering that Peter sunk when he began to doubt, so we know he wasn't just standing on a sandbar, aside from the fact that that would completely negate the intended miracle of it).

So because we know that there is no way, based on all the objective, factual evidence that he walked on water as written, that leaves us to consider how accurate and authoritative the biblical account itself is, and how its claims stack up against other religious claims both contemporary to and preceding and proceeding it.

And that is where you have to face the fact that if you believe these things as true solely because the book itself claims them to be true... then the very same kind of claims, by the very same standard of evidence, of other religions, must also be true... and because we know they can't all be true... then we MUST rely on what we DO know to be true... the objective facts rather than the unsupported ancient mythological claims that contradict those established objective facts.

So you need to answer the question about why it is that you claim the validity of your particular religion and deny the validity of the others?

The answer seems fairly clear to me... but I want you to try to answer that question for me, based on everything I've just explained to you.

And please don't just tell me I'm wrong and insist why you think you're right. I want you to answer my questions and work through that problem in your head and deal with it rather than trying to skirt around it.

Tackle that cognitive dissonance head on and TRY to answer me rationally.

Thanks.



Don Sr. June 17 at 6:44pm Report
Ok let me explain this another way. The bible is the only historical book of that age. Am I missing another book written at the beginning of time. I don't think so. Athiest now want to invent there own history. Everyone wishes they could write their own history but they can't Facts are facts. I hope I havn't waste this time in trying to explain something so simple. lack of evidence is what bothers athiest. History, eyewitness of people who lived during the time vs. guesses from athiest with an agenda. Sorry to get rought with you but that is history.



Myself June 17 at 7:08pm
Yes, in fact you are missing things from earlier religions... like Hinduism etc... and Egyptian etc... who also have their own distinctly different gods, origins, miraculous claims etc...

And for instance at the very time Judaism claims the world was being created, civilizations such as the Egyptians and Sumerians etc were already well in swing and didn't seem to notice or mention this creation, nor especially a giant flood was wiping out all life on Earth at the time claimed, etc.

I think you're missing the concept of Historical Fiction, something I thought I'd mentioned already.

Just because your favorite book says it, doesn't mean it's true... AGAIN, the reason we contrast with contemporaneous religions, earlier religions, later religions, and especially objective facts as we know them today, archaeological evidence, geological evidence, and everything we know scientifically about the actual age and formation of the Earth, solar system, and on and on and on.

We know for a fact that the Old Testament cannot be considered as an infallible source of accurate information about early events. And you know it too. So when we are trying to establish what is factually true, again we use the methods as listed.

We're not INVENTING HISTORY Don. We're actually establishing what is OBJECTIVELY REAL AND TRUE based on the ACTUAL EVIDENCE.

Hinduism claims that the world rests on the back of a giant turtle, held up by 4 elephants standing on its back.

Now why don't we believe this? Because we've obviously traveled all around the world now and even out into space USING F'ING SCIENCE for that latter bit no less... and we've looked at the entire planet, as a sphere floating in the void of space... bound by the principles of physics as we know them, validating science that had clarified this contrary to the ancient biblical claims of a flat Earth... and we traveled to the moon, that the ancients believed was a lesser sun, with the sun and moon being two of the same kind of bodies, and the stars being entirely different... more things we have learned better than since then.

So you trying to claim that we're just INVENTING these things is the polar opposite of what is actually happening.

YOU RELIGIOUS PEOPLE invented all this crap based on feelings and imagination etc... and science is now ACTUALLY REALLY ANSWERING those original questions.... undoing the long standing mythologies that religion put in place and told us not to question.

You know... to have FAITH in.

Also, get it through your head that we actually have evidence that proves Christianity wrong. So it's not a lack of evidence Don, it's the fact that you stubbornly insist that your "NO evidence" is better than our "LOTS OF evidence".

Got that yet?

And I'm sorry, but for as many times as I've explained that point and you still don't get it... *sigh*

WE'RE NOT FUCKING GUESSING DON. THESE ARE PROVEN, VERIFIED, OBJECTIVE FUCKING FACTS. FACTS THAT YOU CAN EVEN VERIFY FOR YOURSELF BECAUSE THEY FUCKING EXIST FOR REAL.

There is no "atheist agenda". Science isn't pro-atheist... it's simply about finding the objective truth about how things work based on the actual real world evidence etc.

You're not getting rough with me... you're just getting stubbornly stupid and it's starting to tick me off again because I tire of fucking repeating myself like I'm hand holding a child because you just can't wrap your head around these very simple explanations.

So when treating you like an intelligent adult doesn't work, what the hell else am I supposed to do?

"History, eyewitness of people who lived during the time"

That particularly is a stupid statement considering that I just pointed out that other religions are based on their own eye witness accounts of creation etc... by the claims of their scriptures, both before and after your religion... and they claim DIFFERENT things.

Thus the whole damn explanation I already gave you that, just as I feared, went in one ear and out the other.

Allow me to leave you with a quote that illustrates the fundamental simple point here that you just can't seem comprehend because it isn't what you want it to be.

"You don't use science to show you're right, you use science to become right." --xkcd

Got that?

Science isn't about serving any agenda. It's entire methodology is created to avoid that specifically, using things like the double blind testing methods etc that I already linked you to earlier. It's a method of acquiring knowledge about objective facts and truths, correctly previous information, and using that to make accurate predictions of further information etc.

You use that methodology to understand objective facts that exist irrespective of us and our wishes.

So you use that methodology to BECOME right by learning what the facts ACTUALLY ARE.

NOT by deciding what they are before hand, as you have done, and then trying to find ways to confirm your preconceptions.

Can I possibly make that any more clear? I don't think so. And if you can't grasp that Don, I'm sorry but you're an idiot beyond my help because I've run out of patience.



Don Sr. June 17 at 9:07pm Report
I read and I just don't understand . Just because you don't like history you cant write your own. One question, what other history book is there. Fact Fact Fact Thae fact that science and athiesm can't disapprove . Please wake up or move on. You are avoiding the truth, there is nothing else matter how you try to change history, you can't. Don't insult people with saying that you know more then the people who were there and wrote about it. Please, it is insulting to everyone.



Myself June 17 at 9:34pm
No Don, YOU don't understand. There is nothing that makes your bible inherently any more accurate than all the other histories written by other cultures before and after the bible was written that contradict what it says and make their own same claims of eye witness accounts etc.

So we're not INVENTING a history, as YOUR religion did (and the others as well), we're establishing what we DO know of history based on ALL of the ACTUAL EVIDENCE that we have. Corroborating contemporary evidence between cultures that lines up with the archaeological evidence, geological evidence, etc.

You have a fucking book. That's it.

The Hebrew Calender and Judeo-Christian religions etc state the Universe as having been created in 3760 BC.

But we know FOR A FACT that that is wrong by literally a factor of almost a MILLION TIMES. And that fact has been verified through numerous different independent methods by independent researchers around the world for years now.

We have all the evidence that proves your book wrong.

You are a deluded idiot who cannot accept that you have NOTHING to stack up against all the real world evidence that WE ACTUALLY DO have. Just your obviously deep seated need to cling to a provably false ancient myth because you've invested your life in a demonstrable lie.

We have TONS and TONS and TONS of actual REAL EVIDENCE Don. YOU HAVE A BOOK. A PROVABLY WRONG BOOK. That's it.

You're clinging to a fucking ancient middle eastern tribal myth because it makes you feel better.

A small child could understand this... I honestly cannot fathom how you can be so willfully self deluded and dishonest. It's this kind of abject fucking stupidity that makes me hate religion so much... because it takes a grown man like you makes him too fucking stupid to realize that the FACT BASED, EVIDENCE BASED, SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE we have that built the fucking computer sitting in front of him... technology beyond his comprehension (but not mine), was discovered, refined, and built into the machine in front of him using that scientific method... the same damn method that shows, based on all we know now, after 2,000 years of continued advancement, new discoveries, enlightenment etc... THAT WE DON'T LIVE ON THE BACK OF A GIANT FUCKING TURTLE JUST BECAUSE A BOOK WRITTEN BY FUCKING IGNORANT DESERT SHEEP HERDERS THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO SAYS SO.

YOU IDIOT.

(And that last part was meant as sarcasm, which you'd probably also miss if I didn't point it out... YOUR book says we live on a flat disk with a mechanical dome overhead that holds up a second water ocean, within which are suspended 2 giant twin lights for lighting the day and night, and other tiny lights to navigate by, with the earth as the immovable center of of this system. Only slightly less retarded than the turtle, but just as WRONG.)

I'm sorry Don... I give up. You're beyond help. I'm just pissed at this point that I wasted so much time on this... I seriously just don't get how people can be so fucking stubbornly self deluded that they LIE about shit like this.

YOU HAVE A FUCKING BOOK AND YOUR WISHFUL THINKING.

THAT'S IT.

You haven't done a fucking thing aside from deny even that book, that is the ONLY "evidence" you even have... while claiming that it alone somehow invalidates 2,000 years of human progress, enlightenment, discovery, knowledge, understanding, and immeasurable amounts of actual REAL WORLD OBJECTIVE FACTS... convergence and mutually confirmation evidence from countless fields of study.

Fuck it... I don't know why I'm wasting my time. Enjoy wallowing in your deluded willfully self imposed ignorance... I have work and study to do.

DON'T write me back or I'll block you. You've wasted enough of my time. Try rereading all the information presented and maybe eventually you'll get it. If you want to talk then remotely on my level, then you may contact me. Anything short of that and I'll block you permanently.

I hope I've made myself clear.

Good luck.

Your par for course debate with Christians on Facebook.

The following is a debate I got into on a friend's profile on Facebook earlier this week. It started out with a man arguing with me, and eventually shifted to his father taking over.

My initial point was about the inherent irrationality of religion, and Christianity in particular, and made the point that the more fundamentalist a religious person was, the more irrational they were because irrationality itself is a fundamental requisite for religious belief.

These 2 tried every fallacious, dishonest, irrational method of excuse making, distraction, emotional pleas and so forth that they could think of to try to avoid having to accept that reality. They attacked me, they attacked the validity of science itself...

So I just wanted to share this as a reference for others who might want to see what happens when you try getting Christians to acknowledge the known facts of modern science that cut the foundation out from under the house of cards that is their religion.

(Please pardon the all-caps "shouting" in some parts... facebook comments don't allow bold, italic, etc... so capitalization is the easiest available way to stress particular points. I'd rather leave the discussion as originally made than go back through and reformat it now to change that.)

Jack
A thought provoking piece for reasonable people who are unhappy with the direction our country is heading. Hopefully, they'll look past the title and read the whole article. Many Americans fear extreme Islam and well they should. Unfortunately, they don't see that extreme Christianity is just as much a threat to our way of life.

Hedges: The Christian Fascists Are Growing Stronger | News & Politics
Tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, are aiming for a theocracy.
Monday at 6:33am
You and 3 others like this.


Camille Woods
So true Jack...."extremes" in any religion have historically proven to be bad for society.( i.e Salem witch trials) We are already driven to be a "better" religion (Christian America) than any other,certainly thats bad enough...but I do see an internal ( within the states) trend of hating or rejecting people of different religions. I am formerlly a Jehovah Witness and dealt with huge amounts of hatred and rejection! Where is our "land of the free"? I have left the religious world at this point mainly due to the many one sided extremes I have found in every church/hall I went
to. I havent turned my back on Godm,who I believe exists (and am fine with those who don't) but I have turned my back on religion. I don't want to be associated with the hypocrisy. Sorry for my soap box...simply the title of your article got my mind spinnin..
Monday at 7:17am


Donald Jr.
As both a long-standing Christian, as well as an active foreign missionary, I can't say that I disagree with some of the concerns raised in that article. Persecuting, or waging war, in the name of Jesus is akin to digging a hole in the ground in the name of N.A.S.A.; you're going the wrong way! I worry though, much as many Muslims do these days, that people might see the actions of these fanatics, and see them as descriptive of all of our faith, when they are in truth the actions of an admittedly vocal minority. The mindset of extremism, be it Christian, Islamic, Scientific or Atheist, is what I feel is the great enemy of man in the modern world...
Monday at 12:04pm


Myself
Donald, I seem to have to point out from time to time that there is a fundamental (pardon the pun) difference between religious and atheist fundamentalism.

Allow me to quote something I wrote 8 months ago in response to a comment on another website where I was in fact chastising an atheist...

Hopefully my point is clear enough by the end to illustrate the error in your logic.

I think there is an underlying issue here that isn't being addressed.

The problem even most religious people have with "religious fundamentalists" is that they take what the bible (or other holy book) says too seriously. They have too much faith. They're too religious. They actually believe in their scriptures etc.

What seems to make people good Christians these days is to actually be more secular and take the religion less seriously, and it seems that the closer to secular and humanist, the better.

The problem that you, and seemingly many atheists here seem to have with the general atheist "fundamentalists" is that you have people who, as others have pointed out, haven't really done their homework, and don't really understand the scientific reasoning behind the belief etc.. and essentially proudly proclaim their atheism as some angsty badge of "look how edgy and different I am!".

What seems to be a common thread in both is that both sides are considered to be better when they actually act more like well educated, reasonable, rational, secular humanists. The more you take religion seriously, the worse you are. The more you tout your atheism without actually understanding the underlying reasoning behind it, the worse you are.

In short, the problem with Christian fundamentalists is the religion itself. The more they believe it, the worse they are.

This doesn't actually parallel "atheist fundamentalists" because it implies that the more you believe in atheist philosophy, the worse you are, which isn't at all true. The actual problem is with people being ignorant and stubborn to defend a philosophy they either don't fully understand... let me put this another way;

You can be a through and through, full blooded, 100% atheist and still be entirely in the right, well educated, can back up your beliefs rationally and calmly etc because atheism itself is not the problem. Human irrationality is... and atheism itself doesn't promote that, quite the opposite. However, Christianity and other religions actually promote as a core tenet irrationality and belief in things not only without evidence, but in spite of evidence to the contrary. Thus the more strongly you follow such tenets, the worse off you are.

I see an awful lot of this claim of some kind of equality between Christian and atheist "fundamentalists", but none seem to address that fundamentally important (pardon the pun) distinction. :)

Monday at 12:33pm ·


Donald Jr.
Unfortunately, I still find your point fundamentally flawed. Firstly, as I may have mentioned before, faith is not the issue with Christian extremists. They are not practicing an excess of faith, since the practices they are employing are in direct contravention to the Bible itself. They are, in fact, taking action that is diametrically opposed to the teachings and beliefs of both the Christian faith, and the established doctrines of all Christian churches. Rather, the problem is what I called the "mindset of extremism" which can be, for the purposes of discussion, defined as self-justification of the pursuit and persecution of those who are different.

The same mindset is often utilized by what I would define as "Atheist extremists" as well. As with other religious extremists, these people argue the case for no God, often without any regard to notable facts of any kind. These are people who pursue and attack people of faith simply for having faith. The issue here is not argument, it is action. It is, to my mind, just as wrong to attack a person, verbally or physically, for not being Christian, as it is to do the same to someone for being Christian, and there are examples of both in the world today. Again, the problem is not Atheism nor Faith, but that "mindset of extremism".

Lastly, I take a certain issue with your claim that Christianity and other religions promote irrationality and belief without evidence as core values. To my knowledge, the core of Christianity, as well as that of other religions, is the providence of evidence and the support of it's rational assessment. Faith, what you might define as belief without evidence, is quite different. Faith is meant to act as the bridge between what we as a people don't know yet, and what we feel to be true. When we learn something new about the universe, the gap which faith must bridge gets smaller. Whether that gap will ever fully be gone however, is the province of far more complicated (and likely unnecessary) theological and philosophical discussion than would be necessary at this time. However, I truly and fully believe that both science and the Bible are two different ways of telling the exact same story.

Lastly, I find it the height of folly to decry something of which one has no knowledge. To attack a belief system, any belief system, without first learning what it is truly about is akin to trying to fight a tank with a catfish; both impossible and ridiculous.
Monday at 6:53pm


Myself
I was more referring to fundamentalist Christians more than the nutjob fascists mentioned in the article, although the departure from reason inherent in both is the same. Both require a denial of the facts and a promotion of irrationality, faith in spite of evidence to the contrary, compartmentalized thinking to avoid coping with cognitive dissonance, etc.

So while Christians claim that they know 100% that God is absolutely real, Atheists on the other hand say that honestly we don't know if there is something greater than us beyond our comprehension that might be responsible for the creation of the universe... but that all the evidence we DO have shows us that there is no personal God, no divine intervention... that the stories in the bible upon which the entire Christian faith's authority is founded... that of creation itself, original sin, etc... are easily proven as entirely false. That Noah's Ark is also not remotely true as written in the bible etc (again, something we have proof of).

And to be clear, "feeling" something to be true without evidence doesn't make it true. We only establish things to be true or not based on reason and evidence through methods such as the scientific method.

So for instance because we know FOR A FACT that the Earth is not a mere 6,000 or so years old... and that the order of creation is not what happened, nor were the first animals created the animals listed in the bible, nor did man originate 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, but hundreds of thousands of years earlier in Africa, etc... and based on all of these FACTS we know that the story of creation is nothing more than absurdly and entirely wrong myth... and because of that we know that Adam and Eve were never in the Garden of Eden as claimed, and thus could not have been tempted by a talking serpent to eat from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thus never committing original sin... and thus not setting up the entire house of cards upon which your claim of our obligation to worship Jesus for buying our pardon from a sin that provably never happened rests etc.

Whether or not Jesus BELIEVED that Original Sin actually happened, and that he was buying our pardon from it... is irrelevant. Because neither his belief, nor yours, alters the REALITY that the entire foundation upon which the Christian faith rests... both that of the establishment of Gods authority in the old testament, and Jesus' claims to divinity that rest upon that, all fall apart like a house of cards when we address the WEALTH of modern scientific understanding based on the actual real world facts etc.

Now see the thing here is that the only way you can persist in your faith at this point is by DENYING all of that actual real world evidence and sound reason etc... by trying to claim that the bible didn't mean what we know it actually meant (such as the stuff about the Earth being flat, the heavens being an actual mechanical dome overhead holding back a second ocean... a dome in which God supposedly opened actual mechanical floodgates to flood the Earth during the Noah's Ark tale... something I hopefully don't need to address for the provably false absurdity it also is... and we know from a wealth of contemporary evidence that the authors of those books of the bible ACTUALLY BELIEVED those things to be literally true... and it wasn't until many centuries later that the ideas of a spherical Earth first appeared, and a few more centuries before they became standard knowledge... and so on...)...

So your claim that the science and the bible are just telling the same story is not only totally false and wrong... but belies a strong lack of understanding of just what science does... as the bible clearly lists Gods explicit commands, the literally intended story of his creation to establish his might and authority etc... and as we've just covered, denying the literal story of the bible, as it was written as Gods word... goes right on down the line and invalidates Jesus' claims to fame as well (aside from some of his moral teachings... but those hardly deserve for him to be worshiped as our savior, the son of God, etc).

Also, you mention not to decry a belief system we don't understand... but for instance I decry Christianity as a man who was a Christian for around 25 years and even served as a youth minister for a bit in my late teens to early twenties... and then went through several years of questioning and researching and introspection to get to where I am today... but it would be a lie to try and claim that I do not know Christianity intimately from first hand experience as a Christian and from continued years of study.
Monday at 7:48pm ·


Myself
To back up my points...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_human_evolution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_evolution_fossils
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_evolution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_fossils
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_evolutionary_synthesis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life_%28science%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mitochondrial_DNA_haplogroup

(which leads into terms like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam , which the Christian mindset of cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias instantly tries to mold into their mythology of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden... but these figurative individuals share their name no more than naming the planets after the Roman gods made those gods literally real.

I think you can understand why they chose the names. ;) Not to mention that both of these individuals lived far down in Africa, and many thousands of years separated from each other... and were not the first humans either, but merely the earliest common ancestor genetically we can find due to the way Y chromosomes and Mitochondrial DNA are passed down through generations etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MatrilinealAncestor.PNG

That image shows simply how that early ancestor, while not the only person around, ends up passing her particular mitochondrial DNA on to everyone else...

As a matter of fact, just read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve#Common_fallacies to clarify these points.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formation_and_evolution_of_the_Solar_System
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_time_scale
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Earth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiometric_dating

And on... and on... and on.

Now people can go ahead and make shit up to try to explain things they don't understand... but they cannot claim them as absolute fact and deny reality and all the actual real world evidence that we do have. One also can't just stick their head in the sand so to speak and refuse to look at that evidence as though not acknowledging it, or the ignorance of it (whether willful or not), somehow will make their ignorant beliefs valid merely by not knowing the actual answers, or by denying or trying to avoid other people learning those actual answers.

This is just the tip of the iceberg as well, and each of those links has many citations and references to further information... scientific studies, journals, contextual articles, etc etc etc.

And to back up why that denial... why those invalid excuses etc are in fact invalid.. and why they don't change the facts...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_blind_spot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwagon_effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishful_thinking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostrich_effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_instinct
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignoratio_elenchi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_proof
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_pleading
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_emotion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_tradition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrational_escalation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophic_burden_of_proof
Monday at 7:49pm ·


Myself
I think another example of this is the claim that science... with things like Evolution, are not in conflict with matters of "faith", such as Creation... another point I also addressed with someone else recently...

Evolution is a product of the Scientific Method.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

Intelligent Design is a product of Wishful Thinking.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishful_thinking

"Scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning. A scientific method consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses."

"Wishful thinking is the formation of beliefs and making decisions according to what might be pleasing to imagine instead of by appealing to evidence, rationality or reality."

One is NECESSARILY derived FROM the evidence and must accurately account for the evidence and allow one to make accurate predictions of further evidence yet to be discovered etc.

The other NECESSARILY AVOIDS dealing with the evidence and instead relies on existing INDEPENDENT OF the evidence, constantly changing to squeeze into new gaps OUTSIDE of the evidence as old claims are disproven by new evidence and greater understanding provided by the Scientific Method.

Hopefully that clarifies the issue a little more.

Intelligent Design is wishful thinking.

Evolution is a scientific fact. (And read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_as_theory_and_fact before you complain about the usages of fact and theory, if that crossed your mind.)

So really the fact is that Atheists aren't just saying "we know 100% that there is no god". What we're saying is that Christianity is well and provably false. That the Judeo-Christian God is a childish absurdity created by ignorant ancient tribesmen thousands of years ago.

Trying to claim that admitting that we don't know certain things yet supports a belief in your particular God is a logical fallacy ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishful_thinking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_emotion etc ). A dishonest and invalid argument.

To try to claim that vague deism (a belief in a non-personal creator of some sort) supports your particular faith in Judeo-Christianity and the divinity of Christ as our savior etc is again a logical fallacy... a dishonest and invalid argument. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation in taking a reference to clearly different concepts of "god" and trying to pretend that they're the same, in spite of clearly being fundamentally different and even mutually exclusive etc )

So when you try to reference the "god in the gaps" as some sort of justification for belief in God, you're missing the point that you're not only ignoring and trying to dismiss the importance of your belief continually being proven wrong... such as on essentially every single claim made about the nature of the natural world in the bible... but you're also ignoring that continually trying to avoid acknowledging those countless examples of being proven WRONG and continually reassigning your God to smaller and smaller areas of human understanding... the gaps for which we don't YET know the actual REAL answers, and claiming "THAT is what God did!" doesn't actually tell us anything. It's just a claim of fact without any evidence to support it... wishful thinking...

But remember, the important point here is that Christians claim to be 100% correct... that they KNOW that their God is 100% real, no doubt about it. And thus as an extension, that they know that any claims to the contrary are 100% false.

Atheists are saying that we know for a fact that Christianity is wrong on countless claims, including the claims that establish the authority of the entire religion. But atheists don't claim to know things they don't yet, or can't possibly know. We only point out the FACTS as they are.

So yes... to promote your religion in spite of all the evidence we have to the contrary... in spite of committing countless logical fallacies because you cannot support your faith without them... to claim AS FACT things for which you have no evidence, and in spite of the evidence to the contrary, because you FEEL like they are true... all those things that form your faith are indeed just as I said they were.

And think carefully about how you address those facts... because I do know the bible well and I also know what excuses ignore what the bible actually says, what modern biblical scholars, archaeologists, textual critics etc know of history, biblical history, cultures etc and perhaps most importantly what constitutes invalid and fallacious arguments based thereupon.

And to bring us back full circle to the main point... it is religion's promotion of that denial of evidence, reason, etc... the compartmentalization, confirmation bias, fallacy riddled view of the world in black and white that fosters and perpetuates the kind of extremism we see... the kind of belief systems that are antithetical to the fact based, evidence supported, fundamentally rational system of belief inherent in atheism.

Thanks for reading.
Monday at 8:18pm ·


Donald Jr.
Again, I take offense to your claim that religion promotes the denial of evidence. Further, I severely question your lack of knowledge of the Christian faith, if it is your claim that we fly in the face of science. In point of fact, relegating faith to the province of wishful thinking is little more than crass insult guised in scientific dress. You show me evidence, and I will show you God in that evidence. In the meantime, either play nice, or quit the discussion.

Can you define faith as wishful thinking? Can you, with science, prove that there is no God? Can you tell me, using that touted scientific method, that God does not exist? There is, in my observance, absolutely no evidence that faith is wrong. Don't get me wrong, I find well-reasoned science to be a wonderful thing. I truly believe that science is a way of explaining in literal terms what faith tries to explain in figurative or philosophical terms.

It is the claim, which you have herein advanced, that not only are humans possessed of all possible knowledge, but that that knowledge prohibits the existence of God, which I find both ludicrously and grossly uninformed.

For the sake of space, I think I'll stay away from arguing your specific points, only to state that in all of your mentioned categories (Planetary age and Evolution being key examples) there is absolutely no biblical contradiction and, in many cases, the Bible tends to support the given scientific realities.

The simple, scientific truth of reality is thus: we don't know. We know absolutely nothing about the existence of God, aside from what religion has to say on the matter. Science has no proof to the contrary, nor has it proof positive either. As such, I would prefer to take the stance advocated by many a wiser man than myself over the years;

"I would rather live my life as if there is a God, and find none after death, than to live my life in denial of God, and have to explain to him after the fact."
Monday at 8:48pm


Myself
I addressed the excuses you're making already Donald.

Try reading what I wrote. I find your avoidance of almost everything I wrote a bit offensive as well.. as long as we're playing the "I'm offended" game.

But back to the facts. It looks like I'm going to have to walk you through this point by point...

"Again, I take offense to your claim that religion promotes the denial of evidence."

It doesn't matter if it offends you or not, it's a statement of fact, and one you're only reaffirming by avoiding almost everything I just wrote to you.

"Further, I severely question your lack of knowledge of the Christian faith, if it is your claim that we fly in the face of science. In point of fact, relegating faith to the province of wishful thinking is little more than crass insult guised in scientific dress."

I proved my point by providing the evidence that shows that you're wrong, and explained how you MUST deny and avoid that evidence, commit a number of the fallacies I listed, and instead promote your own unsupported wishful thinking as fact without evidence and in spite of the evidence. And you're just continuing to do exactly what I said you're doing and are now acting as those your indignance is going to somehow change the facts that you're trying very hard to ignore.

"Don't get me wrong, I find well-reasoned science to be a wonderful thing. I truly believe that science is a way of explaining in literal terms what faith tries to explain in figurative or philosophical terms."

And yet you just clearly ignored all the actual well reasoned science I just presented that proves the foundation of your Christian religion false. You then go on to assert an absurd claim that science is just explaining "in literal terms what faith tries to explain in figurative or philosophical terms" in spite of the fact that Christianity explicitly states that God specifically sets out his laws and LITERALLY makes claims about the nature of the world we live in, how society should be run, what commands we MUST obey, etc... and you just avoid or deny these things if they become inconvenient for your personal opinion of what you think your religion should be.

"It is the claim, which you have herein advanced, that not only are humans possessed of all possible knowledge, but that that knowledge prohibits the existence of God, which I find both ludicrously and grossly uninformed."

Don't LIE about what I said. I very clearly stated that we do NOT have all knowledge and that atheists actually admit that. I said that the fact that we don't know things yet doesn't make your baseless assertions true and listed the several fallacies you commit when you imply that they do etc. I covered it quite verbosely in fact to the very contrary of what you just claimed. Again, try actually reading what I wrote.

And please spare me your ignorant and erroneous attempts at ad hominems while you're at it Donald, I don't take kindly to them. I don't care if you're offended... it doesn't make me wrong, or justify you ignoring what I wrote and baselessly slinging insults at me.

"For the sake of space, I think I'll stay away from arguing your specific points, only to state that in all of your mentioned categories (Planetary age and Evolution being key examples) there is absolutely no biblical contradiction and, in many cases, the Bible tends to support the given scientific realities."

That is a flat out absurd lie. The bible EXPLICITLY lists as the very first man and woman, Adam and Eve, created as part of the God's creation of the heavens and Earth and all the life on it etc, and goes on to list in detail the lineage and ages of all the people between Adam and Jesus. It not only lists the amount of time creation took, and what it meant by the days of creation, but then goes on to list the number of years between that creation and the time of Jesus etc by listing the lineages between them and how long those people lived.

The bible further states multiple times the things I listed... a flat Earth... a sun that could stop in the sky... a mechanical dome overhead supporting a second ocean... and these things were meant to be literally true and were believed as such for many centuries until MUCH LATER science PROVED them WRONG.

I am appalled at how unashamedly you just LIED about what the bible itself actually says.

"The simple, scientific truth of reality is thus: we don't know. We know absolutely nothing about the existence of God, aside from what religion has to say on the matter. Science has no proof to the contrary, nor has it proof positive either."

And there you actually get a little closer to the truth. But again, I already addressed the fallacy of your excuse... WHICH YOU RUDELY (or out of cowardice, I'm not sure) flat out COMPLETELY IGNORED...

"The argument from ignorance, also known as argumentum ad ignorantiam ("appeal to ignorance"), or negative evidence, is a logical fallacy in which it is claimed that a premise is true only because it has not been proven false, or is false only because it has not been proven true."

"The logical fallacy of false dilemma (also called false dichotomy, the either-or fallacy) involves a situation in which only two alternatives are considered, when in fact there are other options. Closely related are failing to consider a range of options and the tendency to think in extremes, called black-and-white thinking."

"Wishful thinking is the formation of beliefs and making decisions according to what might be pleasing to imagine instead of by appealing to evidence, rationality or reality."

"Appeal to emotion is a potential fallacy which uses the manipulation of the recipient's emotions, rather than valid logic, to win an argument. Also this kind of thinking may be evident in one who lets emotions and/or other subjective considerations influence one's reasoning process." (you know, by asserting how offended you are... how indignant... and how stupid and clueless and grossly misinformed I must be... while doing nothing to actually prove that point, and ignoring everything I actually said and all the evidence I presented... as though people should shut up because you're offended, and not listen to me purely because you claim that I'm stupid, in direct opposition to everything I just said and the evidence and reason I gave to back it up.)

Maybe by typing some of them out for you you might actually pay attention this time and not force me to repeat myself a THIRD time.

And in closing... to address the cliche and fallacy riddled tired old Pascal's Wager you unsurprisingly try to foist on us...

"As such, I would prefer to take the stance advocated by many a wiser man than myself over the years;

"I would rather live my life as if there is a God, and find none after death, than to live my life in denial of God, and have to explain to him after the fact.""

We can for starters look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager#Criticisms

And note that, as I've already stated, you make a number of fundamental errors in your thinking...

You assume that the only possible God is YOUR God... a false dilemma on numerous counts... and you assume that you know what that God, if there is one, will reward... and it goes on from there.

Pascal's Wager is really not that great or wise... it's a rather ignorant and biased, fallacy riddled excuse for believing in fairy tales that really only sounds wide and profound to people who don't yet know better... of which you are clearly one... but I'm trying to correct that.

So again, I'm sorry if you're offended... but try actually reading what I wrote and addressing the facts presented and specifically how that invalidates the specific faith YOU claim to espouse, namely that of Christianity in particular, and the faith that you subsequently go try to preach and spread to others as the truth.
Monday at 9:21pm ·


Myself
(And if you lie through your teeth again and try claiming that the bible doesn't say the things it does, I will be more than happy to start providing quotations direct from the bible as references to prove my points and illustrate how shamelessly dishonest you're being in denying the very things that I think you know full well the bible actually says, and claiming that science in no way contradicts those biblical claims and in fact supports them... if anything, I find THAT level of breathtaking dishonesty (or delusion) to be offensive. There's nothing I hate more than liars... because without honesty we have no foundation from which to move forward in an honest rational discussion of the facts. Sorry if that sounds a little vitriolic... I think I am justifiably upset with your response, for much more substantial reasons than the demonstrably false claims of feigned indignation and assaults on my character and intellect you made in a vain attempt to preserve your own irrational beliefs.)

Attacking my character, my intelligence, my motivations etc... aren't going to make the facts go away.

"Ad hominem abusive usually involves insulting or belittling one's opponent, but can also involve pointing out factual but ostensible character flaws or actions which are irrelevant to the opponent's argument. This tactic is logically fallacious because insults and even true negative facts about the opponent's personal character have nothing to do with the logical merits of the opponent's arguments or assertions."

You may also want to read the following: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_dishonesty

"Intellectual dishonesty is dishonesty in performing intellectual activities like thought or communication. Examples are:

• the advocacy of a position which the advocate knows or believes to be false or misleading


• the conscious omission of aspects of the truth known or believed to be relevant in the particular context.

Rhetoric may be used to advance an agenda or to reinforce one's deeply held beliefs in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. If a person is aware of the evidence and agrees with the conclusion it portends, yet advocates a contradictory view, they commit intellectual dishonesty. If the person is unaware of the evidence, their position is ignorance, even if in agreement with the scientific conclusion. If the person is knowingly aware that there may be additional evidence but purposefully fails to check, and then acts as though the position is confirmed, this is also intellectual dishonesty."

And honestly at this point I think I'm so disgusted and pissed off about how dishonest you're being that I think I will go ahead and start quoting the bible verses that prove that you're lying about what the bible actually says, and the real relationship between those claims and those of modern science etc.

I want to make it perfectly clear how deceptive you're being in your statements in an attempt to discredit myself and the sound evidence and reason I presented.
Monday at 9:34pm ·


Vicki
Jack, Why do you get these things going?
Monday at 9:54pm


Don Sr.
I guess if you can quote bible texts, it makes you an expert. I can read a science book but it doesn't make me a scientist. Showing ones ingorance on line shows a lack of ones conviction in their own mental abilities. If you can't fathom what faith is, go ahead and rely on your scientific notions. I'll defend your right to an opinion, even if everyone else thinks it is wrong.
Monday at 10:11pm


Myself
Vicki: Because they need to be addressed. Because the kind of irrationality I've been pointing out is precisely what leads to the kind of problems listed in the article that Jack linked. Those are very real problems the world not only faces today, but has for centuries... and people are still being executed TODAY in a number of countries based on those irrational beliefs, and human rights in general are suppressed and violated in many more countries as a result of them as well. (such as the Catholic Church claiming that preserving its authority is more important than defending children from being raped, and thus stating, from the Pope on down, that children and their families are to be threatened with excommunication, which for Catholics means an eternity in Hell, if they speak about the crimes committed against them to anyone, especially law enforcement etc... claiming that the importance of preserving the Church and what it stands for is more important etc. Not to mention countless other examples I can list.)

When rational people see crimes being committed in the name of, by the supposed authority of, and by the direction of these irrational mythologies... we feel compelled as human beings to stand up against these delusions for the sake of all humanity that we might leave these dark ages behind us. We have enough problems to deal with as a result of basic human faults like greed etc that we don't need to greatly exacerbate the problem by promoting irrationality, delusion, and hostility toward fact, reason, logic, evidence, etc.

Don: Again, you avoid everything I said. I didn't claim to be an expert... merely to have studied these issues for years and to be presenting FACTS as such that you need to address as such instead of continuously trying to use ad hominems and other excuses as red herrings to try to distract everyone from them.

One doesn't have to be an expert to be well informed and present factual information to be addressed as such. Again, your argument is fallacious. You haven't in any way shown me to be ignorant, and even if I were, you still need to actually show where I was wrong instead of just insisting that I am without actually showing how those facts and reasoning are in error.

These statements aren't merely my OPINION as you disingenuously assert... they are statements of facts as the collective best of human minds have independently verified around the world... mutually reaffirming real world evidence and understanding upon which modern technology, medicine, space travel, etc are based upon because it is actually REAL and accurate and thusly able to be built upon to further expand our understanding and accurately predict future discoveries etc... such is the scientific method.

"Scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning. A scientific method consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses."

And just as I said originally, you are repeatedly denying what that evidence presents and the repercussions it has on the claims of your particular religion's claims of fact about the world we live in, and by extension the claims your religion holds about why we should worship your God/Jesus, etc.

So again... and to try to put it a little more clearly:

Science proves that the claims of the bible about the nature of creation, and of the origin of sin, are provably false. And as such, the ritual human sacrifice of Jesus to buy our pardon from that sin, which provably never happened in the first place, was a moot act as there was no "original sin" to buy our pardon from, aside from the primitive notion that ritual human (or animal) sacrifice absolves anyone of guilt for their crimes in the first place etc.

(See Romans 5:12-21 for a helpful clear explanation of the relation between the literal claim of Adam's original sin and the subsequent greatness of Jesus' death that is requisite on the literal act of Adam introducing sin to humanity as described in Genesis as the very foundation of its claim of our obligation to worship Jesus as our Lord and Savior etc.)

So you keep on avoiding dealing with that key premise of my argument and only repeatedly illustrating my point about the employment of numerous fallacious and invalid arguments, dishonesty with yourself and others, irrationality etc... in the pursuit of preserving your religious faith in a provably false doctrine.

Address the facts... and quit hollowly insisting that I'm wrong, or perhaps more importantly, avoiding addressing how the facts themselves and the logical consequences of those facts are in any way invalid, without giving any evidence to support your assertions.

How many times do I need to point out that you insisting that I'm wrong, or stupid, or whatever.. DOESN'T ADDRESS THE VALIDITY OF THE FACTS THEMSELVES OR HAVE ANY BEARING ON WHETHER OR NOT THEY THEMSELVES ARE TRUE OR FALSE.

And for someone that says that the bible is actually supported by the bible, and there is no disagreement at all between them etc... you don't seem to be taking me pointing out the contrary, WITH EVIDENCE TO BACK MY CLAIMS UP (unlike yours) very well.

Try again Don... because thus far you're only serving as a perfect example of my original point... and while I thank you for the validation.. my intent is to get you to admit to the facts, not to merely serve as another example of the kind of faults I outlined in faith and the harm it does to human reason, human rights, and human progress for ALL of us.
Monday at 10:31pm ·


Myself
Maybe I need to put this another way...

Don... are you asserting the factual, literal truth of the creation story, including Adam and Eve and the origin of sin?

Are you also asserting the validity of the claim that Jesus dying on the cross bought our pardon from that sin, as stated in the bible itself?

Are you claiming that the stories in Genesis of the nature of the creation, the order and nature of the creation and what was created are factually true and accurate? Noah's Ark, etc?

Are you asserting that all the modern day scientific evidence we have is wrong, given that it clearly proves that none of these events happened in any way as written? Denying all the other contemporary evidence we have from numerous other fields of study that reaffirms that these things were written as literally true beliefs when written, and maintained as such for centuries thereafter, the denial of which was punished by death for heresy?

Or are you going to admit that the bible is demonstrably and provably wrong in its claims. Claims that are contrary to what we know to be factually true and supported by a wealth of evidence from numerous disparate fields of study.

Or are you going to do exactly what I originally said Christians MUST do to maintain their faith, and deny what the bible says, what the biblical authors believed and meant when they wrote it (again, supported by a wealth of real world evidence), and what the modern day real world evidence, logic, reason etc says to the contrary of those ancient mythological claims?

Is that simple enough? I believe I've made my argument clearly enough and provided more than enough evidence and sound reasoning to support my position.

I expect you to address the facts as such and quit with your empty assertions that I'm ignorant, stupid, or whatever other baseless and invalid ad hominems you might be tempted to attempt to distract everyone (seemingly including yourself) from those uncomfortable facts.

(And on a side note, also quit with the equivocation... trying to slide back and forth from the specific Christian dogma to vague deistic "faith" as it suits you to try to avoid having to address the facts and their direct repercussions to Christian doctrine. In spite of my points still illustrating how and why you're in the wrong... I dislike you continuing to do something I've already explicitly addressed as a logically fallacious method of addressing the facts.)

Thanks.
Monday at 10:46pm ·


Myself
(Typo correction: "And for someone that says that the bible is actually supported by the bible, and there is no disagreement at all between them etc..." should be "And for someone that says that the bible is actually supported by science, and there is no disagreement at all between them etc...")
Monday at 10:50pm ·


Donald Jr.
I think I'm going to have to agree with my father on this point; you've a right to an opinion, even if it is based solely on anger and hostility. I can't imagine what must have happened to drive you to a position of such outright hatred, but you do have my sympathy.

The problem here is that you've taken an argument, which can be expressed in a myriad of shades of grey, and boiled it down to "Us vs. Them" bilateral perspectivism. You hold this thought that "If you don't believe "A" than you must believe "B". Furthermore, you're putting a number of words in my mouth, holding me to assertions that not only did I not make, but that are not even biblically supported. (for example, " the only possible God is YOUR God..", which is flatly contradicted numerous times in the Bible itself, and receives mention even in the 10 Commandments). Often, many of the claims you make can be directly disputed by simply reading the Bible. I would recommend reading the original Hebrew text of Genesis; the understanding of the Hebrew word we translate as "Day" may shed some light on this issue.

There is a technique for a civilized discussion my friend, and you are not even in the correct hemisphere. You claim facts not in evidence, and draw justifications for your own anger from literalist interpretations of the English translation of the Bible and excerpts from Wikipedia. This is not the behavior of someone seeking truth; this is more the province of a petulant, troubled soul.

When, or if, you are prepared to hold a legitimate, calm discussion on the issue without resorting to hostility and rage, I'll be glad to indulge. However, in the meantime, I'll wish you the best of luck, and withdraw from an obvious impasse. There will be no further replies from me.

*My apologies to Mr. Adams; it was not my intent to incite such strife on your facebook. I was merely looking for a good discussion. I am very sorry for my part in causing your facebook to be so crowded of late!*
Monday at 11:16pm


Don Sr.
Calm down Justin. The fact that you believe so strongly is admirable. The fact that you want to incorperate science, relegion, and everything else into one neat little package suggest a lack or creativity (in My humble opinion) To claim that science is perfect is wrong as the earliest scientist saying the earth is flat, or people who claimed aids could only be transmitted by homosexual contact. My faith is exactly that, between God and Me. If you wish to rely on the everchanging face of science, go ahead. By the way, you are discussing with two different Dons and you didn't even realize it.
Monday at 11:26pm


Don Sr.
by the way, what do we get for winning this argument?
Monday at 11:28pm


Don Sr.
Please say Hi to Kaylee for me. Glad to hear you are doing well.
Monday at 11:31pm


Jack
No problem Donald. I enjoy these debates. However, this wasn't really a debate. It was a one-sided, old fashioned butt whooping and you lost. Had I been online when this got started, I would have advised you not to get into it with Justin because he has done his homework on this topic and you, along with most other "believers" obviously have not. The only advice I would give you is to not expect everyone to respect your religion just because you believe in it. If you do, you should not engage in this kind of discussion.
Monday at 11:56pm


Donald Jr.
I'd grant that description fair enough; I planned for a discussion and wandered into a small war! What I would say though, is the same thing that I said at first, before the argument got so far afield.. The problem in the original article is not Christianity. The behaviors it argues against would be equally intolerable were they done by Muslims or Buddhists. My point was simply that the attitude of hateful, angry extremism; the aim to persecute and attack those who hold a differing belief, is the greater problem, whether that attitude comes from a Christian or, as we have seen, from an Atheist. Intolerance, regardless of it's motivation, is itself intolerable. That's all I was trying to say. As for the more advanced theology, I'll consult my reference library at home when I'm done teaching for the day, and perhaps I'll chime back in with something a little better researched!
Yesterday at 12:10am


Myself
Sorry for accidentally confusing you (Don) with Donald. ;) I noticed the difference in the email notifications just now and wondered why there was a "Don" and "Donald".

That said...

I never claimed science was perfect either. The fact that science isn't perfect is specifically acknowledged as part of the scientific method... the acknowledgment that we should always seek to improve it, to question it, to seek to disprove it if possible etc. No actual scientists, nor even anyone who actually understands it, would ever claim it was perfect... instead, that is generally the claim of religion; "The infallible and inspired word of God" etc. ;)

You also make a fallacious argument in claiming that because science was once wrong about a flat Earth... which is erroneous on several levels, as "scientists" weren't really the ones who thought the Earth was flat, and were (academics of the time) actually the ones responsible for correcting this error... that somehow a claim that has been known to be false for around 2,000 years now somehow draws into question the validity of scientific facts today. Something that should be clearly refuted by the explanation of what the scientific method actually is and how it works.

Also, while science moved on to correct the information about how AIDS is transmitted, along with having in the past accurately described the transmission of diseases in the first place... contrary to the religious claims of possession by demons etc... religious people are STILL today claiming that AIDS is a curse from God on gays etc. Just another odd example of you trying to disparage science by ignoring the implicit methodology of science and trying to credit religion with science's methods, discoveries, etc while mistakenly (seemingly intentionally) claiming that because science has, through the error checking fundamentally inherent in its process, corrected past errors that were exposed THROUGH THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD ITSELF, that somehow we should instead trust ignorance, superstitions, made up answers (that have since been proven false) etc...

I mean... your statement falls flat on its face in so many different ways that it's hard to really quantify just how wrong it is. (But obviously I try none the less.)

Also, your faith isn't just between you and your God, as I'm guessing you live your life according to the believe that your faith is real, your religion correct, and the teachings of it and commandments by God etc are valid and authoritative etc. Your decisions in life are thus based upon that flawed foundation, which subsequently taints every other decision or reasoning based thereupon etc.

A simple example is the very oft quoted justification for voting against equal rights for gays, citing God's feelings about it being an abomination that should be punished with execution. The list goes on and on, including things like voting for candidates for public office, including the Presidency etc, based on whether or not a person believes in God, or as is more specifically the case in the US, in Christianity and not just any generic God.

When the basis for such important decisions, which affect all of us in a country, state, city etc... is on provably false mythology contrary to reason, facts, evidence, logic etc... and goes further in many cases to fight against medical advances, equal rights, sound education in schools (such as trying to tear down evolution in favor of creationism)... those things affect all of us.

So it's not accurate or honest to act like your faith is purely a matter between you and your God. Nor would that negate the fact that the facts I presented which prove Christianity to be founded on provably false claims, fallacies etc. It doesn't matter if you believe it... it's still false and we're still right in saying so (and providing the actual evidence to prove it).

ALSO... You try to act as though science should be disregarded because it is "ever changing", in spite of that being the very source of its strength, and the reason for which you are able to sit at your computer and type your messages to me etc... also ignoring the fact that by any reasonable standard of verifiable fact, evidence, etc... your "faith" is religion LONG since refuted by any standard of evidence and accuracy etc before we reach any level at which science becomes questionable. So quite an absurd disparity of standards of evidence and so forth.

(Logical inconsistency, special pleading, impartiality, begging the question, etc etc... countless logical fallacies are evident in your line of reasoning... and I could go on explaining how they apply, but hopefully this is enough of a start to get my point across.)

And what we get for "winning this argument" is to actually better understand the world we live in, to be honest about what the facts are and how they relate to the real world... to free ourselves as best we can from irrationality, superstition, ancient mythology, etc... and to continue refining that knowledge and correcting our errors by the very same methods that have gotten us to where we are today (no longer fearing lightning as spears from God in retribution for our misdeeds etc, able to treat and cure most illnesses that in the past would have been deadly or life threatening, and for which the bible tells us that prayer and anointing with oils will cure us of.. ETC...)

I suppose I will close this comment with some words from one of the great scientific minds of modern history...

"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

"Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. They avoid rather than confront the world. But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries."

--Carl Sagan ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan )

With that said, I look forward to Donald, or even you Don, answering the questions I'd laid out previously in light of the facts as we know them today, in the clear context of the nature of fallacious arguments, invalid reasoning, erroneous claims, etc in which I presented them.

Thanks. (And thanks for the good word Jack.)
Yesterday at 12:21am ·


Myself
Donald: First off, I'm not quite sure what you mean by "I'd grant that description fair enough". Could you clarify a bit?

As you seem to also admit, the problem is with religion in general (Islam, Mormonism, Judaism, Buddhism, etc... all suffer from the same kinds of fallacies, irrationality, claims of fact without evidence and despite evidence to the contrary etc. The list of flaws in reasoning apply just as readily to them as well... such as Mormons claiming that the Native Americans are the lost tribe of Israel in spite modern DNA evidence proving that they're not... something they simply deny and try oddly enough using pseudo-science to try to refute... http://www.irr.org/mit/southerton-response.html ), and more specifically, with the mentality behind religion in general that I discussed at length, of believing in ancient mythologies, superstitions, etc... in spite of evidence to the contrary, rationality, logic, etc. And the "extremism" in religion is merely that fundamentally inherent irrationality taken to extremes.

I contrasted that with the fact that there really is no such flaw inherent in too much rationality, acknowledgment of the facts, evidence, etc. (In spite of Don's claim that somehow looking for evidence and being able to admit when we've been mistaken, and correcting those mistakes to increase the accuracy and validity of our knowledge is a BAD thing, and thus we should prefer baseless "revelations" and "feelings" etc... trying to dismiss evidence supported, testable, and verified FACTS as mere opinions of less merit that religious claims of infallible fact... man, I feel like I'm beating a dead horse having to clarify all these fundamental points so much, but it seems they just fall on deaf ears/blind eyes otherwise...)

And the examples we've seen in history of crimes that were committed by incidentally atheist people have been done by exploiting the very same kinds of subservience to authority without question, lack of critical assessment of claimed facts, etc. (Totalitarian regimes etc replace God with themselves as the object of the same kind of worship... and people like Hitler strongly espoused Christianity as vital to a healthy populace, held "God is with us" as a motto, banned any literature promoting science such as Darwin's theory of evolution and also banned any literature critical of Christianity, created strong ties with the Vatican to ensure the support of the people and promote the idea that their cause was just and performed by God's authority as righteous etc.)

As I laid out at length, the very same irrationality that is illustrated in those "extremists" is fundamentally and inherently a REQUIREMENT of religious belief. Religion is the breeding ground for the minds that think in such black and white terms, who cannot see the contradictions, who ignore the evidence, etc. And as I also pointed out, if an atheist incidentally falls to the same kind of irrationality, they are also wrong... but science itself is the antithesis of that kind of "faith without evidence", irrationality, belief based on feelings rather than facts etc... and atheism is just an extension of that rational, fact based, critical assessment, and evidence supported view of the world we live in.

The quest to dispel those flawed methods of thinking... to get people to see when they are holding conflicting beliefs etc... that is the quest to cut the roots out from under such irrational and dangerous extremism... and religion is necessarily a part of that quest because it is both a cause and a symptom of that irrationality. It is not even merely collateral damage... but a valid direct target for being the foremost proponent of that kind of thinking, because it cannot exist without it.
Yesterday at 1:00am ·


Donald Jr.
Check your own anger, and see again if extremist irrationality is limited to the religious. You cite the actions of extremists as representative of the faith in its entirety, much as many do with those of the Muslim faith these days. It seems to me that you are driven far more strongly to attack my faith, than I am to move against your lack thereof. I admit that, amidst your anger, you raise a number of good points which I would much enjoy discussing, given time and cooler heads. For now though, I'll simply say good day.
Yesterday at 1:18am


Myself
Irritated and frustrated yes.. not so angry with this particular discussion. But that said, even if I were, there is nothing wrong with justified anger at certain things... like defending child rapists in the name of God etc. :)

Regardless, as I've said several times, MY (supposed) ANGER DOESN'T AFFECT THE VALIDITY OF THE FACTS. So please quit with the ad hominem attempts at avoiding the main point. Your religion is provably false.

Not to mention that contrary to your ridiculous claim, it would not even be "extremist irrationality", but rather extremist rationality. Something I've been clarifying to you repeatedly... something that is obviously necessary seeing as it's clearly not getting through to you.

I'm not irrational just because you don't like what I have to say. You can't just make things up to try to insult me and somehow think that your baseless claims counter to the evidence presented are somehow magically valid just because you say so (a habit you probably picked up as a part of your religion... but I digress...).

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/rational
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/irrational

Now you could actually justify calling me a rational extremist... but that wouldn't be much of an insult now would it. ;)

You're welcome to try to attack the validity of the facts I presented... in fact that is what I have been requesting that you do, and what you keep avoiding doing.

I, unlike you, welcome you to try to critically assess the information presented. THAT'S PRETTY MUCH THE WHOLE POINT.

(Also, as I touched on earlier (a recurring theme it seems), the only thing making religious people NOT as crazy or dangerous is in taking their own religions less seriously. Ignoring God's clear commands etc... thus it is perfectly valid to address the failures and invalidity of the religion itself as the root of the problem. Just because a Christian is ignorant of his own religion and essentially makes it up as they go and for the most part is a good person doesn't magically make them RIGHT in their religious beliefs, nor magically validate the provably false claims of that religion etc. Such as the fact that Islam mandates the punishment of DEATH for apostasy. And countless times calls for the death or subjugation of people of different faiths etc. Just because people don't actually follow their holy books as often any more doesn't magically change what those books say God himself, or his prophets, command etc. And it is only thanks to enlightenment and the advancement of society, often in spite of the best efforts of the religious to the contrary, that we have moved past things like slavery, oppression of women, laws against inter-racial marriages, segregation, laws against teaching sound science in schools (a fight we're still sadly fighting tooth and nail today) and on and on.

It is only because those people follow the modern day societal norms of morality, modern day understanding of the world we live in, etc that they RIGHTFULLY reject huge chunks of the bible that they RIGHTFULLY find as morally objectionable, barbaric, or even outright appallingly evil by today's standards. That is thanks to HUMAN REASON AND PROGRESS... IN SPITE OF RELIGION.)

Also, please don't even IMPLY that me pointing out, with the evidence and sound reasoning to back it up, that your religious beliefs are in error is in ANY WAY remotely in the same category as religious extremism.

I'm not threatening you with hell, or execution, or bodily harm, or any of the other things that are core tenets of the Abrahamic faiths.

(And I could go off on a long digression about how your God demands that you kill me, and to be the one to strike the first blow in doing so... and that Jesus himself subsequently goes on to clarify that he did NOT come to do away with those old laws of God, but to ensure they persist and are fulfilled until the end of time.. and goes on to clarify that while loving your neighbor may be one of the greatest commandments, the GREATEST is to OBEY and love God above all else... including his laws... and further goes on to restate the validity of punishment BY DEATH for violating those laws... referencing the punishment for failing to obey the law for honoring your father and mother... and goes on at length to promote the idea of trying to avoid committing a crime in the first place, or to make amends before you go before the court... as if you are convicted of your crime, you deserve the just punishments.. including death... for things such as being gay, not being a virgin on your wedding night, being an atheist, worshiping a different god, etc etc etc. And remember... that's just quoting your own bible. I'm not saying it's necessarily right or true... but it's the book YOU CLAIM IS. But enough of that for now...)

I'm just telling you you're wrong and trying to get you to act like a rational, intelligent, mature adult and address the facts as presented without resorting to attacking my personal character, motivations, etc in an attempt to distract everyone, seemingly including yourself, from what those facts have to say about your religion and associated beliefs.

I think I have every right to get angry when I get paralleled with such religious extremists. It's incredibly absurd and highly insulting (and yes, I've had Christians flat out say that I am more evil and more dangerous than any suicide bomber terrorist. And we have the absurd irrationality inherent in, and promoted by, religion... including your own provably false brand of it... to thank for that. Again, just another reason to try to promote rational thought, addressing the actual facts, evidence, etc.)

Hurting your feelings by proving that you are mistaken is a FAR cry from saying you deserve to die and be tortured for eternity, wouldn't you say?

(And on that note, it's bedtime for us as well... errands to run in the morning. Goodnight everyone.)
Yesterday at 1:53am ·


Don Sr.
I am impressed by your knowledge . Your arguments would be valid if all relegion were meshed together. The same thing happens if I were to mesh all the scientist together.Your "relegious" argument is all over the board as is mine about science. Both you and My son,Donald" have strayed from the center into what we call extremes. When you have two extremist in a room, you then have a true debate that will never be solved. As far as my faith being between God and It cannot be argued. If you believe in God, you know in that time when you come before God, what you did with your life is between God and you. You can't blame someone else. That is what I meant by your faith being between God and you. The most important part of the Bible is when they asked Jesus what was the most important comandment. In short he answers, Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandmnet all else hangs towards.
Yesterday at 11:12am


Myself
Don: I directly addressed the fallacies and errors in Christianity specifically verbatim. Please don't pretend I didn't. Address them as such.

You also erroneously presume that your God is the "one true God" etc just because your bible says so... thus leading you to believe that you know what God thinks, wants etc... a false dilemma on top of begging the question etc.

You may want to go back and read my response to your son's reference to what is better known as Pascal's Wager.

In short, you presuppose the validity of your bible based faith, without evidence, and in spite of the evidence to the contrary, and then use that unsupported and invalid "faith" to flat out ABSOLUTELY deny all the actual real world evidence, logic, reason etc to the contrary. (and in doing so expect a level of evidence from science and reason which can not only never be reached, as you flat out state that nothing can ever change your religious beliefs, but a level which would have long since been enough to dismiss your own groundless and fallacy ridden faith long LONG before ever even nearing the kind of level of evidence and fact that you'd demand of actual real world reason, science, fact, etc... if you weren't, by your own admission, an entirely closed minded religious zealot.)

I also, LAUGHABLY at this point, ADDRESS YOUR VERY COMMENT and stated it correctly before you just now tried pulling it out on me... which only goes to illustrate the point that you're not even reading what I actually wrote.

And I QUOTE: "and goes on to clarify that while loving your neighbor may be one of the greatest commandments, the GREATEST is to OBEY and love God above all else..."

And to prove that point...

Matthew 22:36-40 (NIV):
"36 "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" 37 Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

Mark 12:28-31 (NIV):
"28 One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, "Of all the commandments, which is the most important?"

29 "The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' 31 The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these."

Deuteronomy 6:13-17 (NIV):
"13 Fear the LORD your God, serve him only and take your oaths in his name. 14 Do not follow other gods, the gods of the peoples around you; 15 for the LORD your God, who is among you, is a jealous God and his anger will burn against you, and he will destroy you from the face of the land. 16 Do not test the LORD your God as you did at Massah. 17 Be sure to keep the commands of the LORD your God and the stipulations and decrees he has given you."

and of course Jesus himself...

Matthew 5:17-20 (NIV):
"17 "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. 19 Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven."

Don't try quoting the bible to me like I have no idea what it actually says, ESPECIALLY after you make it clear that you're not even bothering to read and pay attention to what I've said before you go ignorantly trying to assert how wrong I am.

I don't mind someone disagreeing with me.. but I have a real problem with people telling me I'm wrong when they clearly haven't bothered to actually read what I wrote, or THINK about it, or honestly address what I actually wrote etc. We can't have a valid discussion here if you won't address the actual facts presented or be honest about what I've said, what those facts and reasoning entail etc.

I also very clearly pointed out why it was both stupid and insulting to say the least to call me an extremist, as though my positions were identically extreme and equally wrong and irrational, and yet you went right ahead and did that as well.

Did you honestly read ANYTHING AT ALL that I wrote before you ignorantly and fallaciously tried attacking me in defense of your own ignorant and willful delusion?
Yesterday at 11:38am ·


Don Sr.
Ok, I,m just a simple country preacher and would not ever have a sermon that long to try to get to a point. Your bible text, though taken out of order, are impressive and shows that God is trying to work in your life. I made the point that everything improves on itself and the Bible is no different. To counter something said in the new testement with something said in the old testament is like me saying that science is wrong because of something said years ago. Justin, If I said you were wrong, I apologize. In my belief, there is only one judge, and It's not me. The reason I won't argue the Bible is because my faith has grown past it. Remember, FAITH is believing in something not seen, ergo I can't see gravity, but I have faith that it is there. I believe, in my humble opinion, that tearing apart the bible to win an argument is unproductive and I won't do it. It's not that I'm stubborn or unwilling to open my mind, but it's quite the contrary. I love when people question my faith and that gives me the chance to discuss, and maybe even learn something new. You want me to show you scientific proof that there is a God. I can't. Do you want me to give you proof that my relegion is the only right one? I can't. Can I say that your thinking is wrong? Nope, can't do that either. I can only share what I believe in thru faith. I have faith that Jesus died for my sins, and I have faith that God will come again to judge the nations. I would much enjoy talking person to person instead of this forum. Your sister knows where I live, and you are welcome to come and discuss these great revelations anytime. I don't have all the answers, hell, I don't know half the questions.
Yesterday at 12:44pm


Myself
I didn't counter something said in the New Testament with something said in the old testament. I corrected your WRONG statement about the "greatest commandment", something I had ALREADY correct earlier in this very discussion, but which you clearly hadn't read.

I then gave a verse from the Old Testament as a sort of context for what God himself said as a partner statement to Jesus himself in the New Testament specifically saying that he didn't come to change those old laws, including God's commandments such as the one I listed from the Old Testament etc.

Please don't so absurdly and incorrectly twist and misrepresent what I actually wrote.

That said, some things in life are simple and can't be chalked up in simplistic black and white little packages. That's the nature of reality and this is a complex issue. And as you are an adult, and we're discussing your own religion, I feel I shouldn't need to speak as though I'm talking to a child and make my explanations short and simple. I'm here to educate and expect people to actually THINK about what I've explained at length with links and references to further explain and support my claims and reasoning.

"Remember, FAITH is believing in something not seen, ergo I can't see gravity, but I have faith that it is there."

And here we have another fallacious argument. We can actually test for gravity. We can clearly see, understand, and accurately predict the nature of gravity... hence the law of gravity. We can thus use this clear understanding to accurately send probes into space to navigate our solar system, orbit distant planets and even travel millions of miles into interstellar space etc.

You CANNOT do these things for your utterly fabricated God. To try to pretend that your God is remotely the same as things like "air" or "gravity" etc is to intentionally avoid acknowledging the fact that we CAN prove that these other things exist through the scientific method etc. We can study the effect of air density, its composition through chemical interactions, etc.

You can do NONE of those things with your God because HE DOESN'T EXIST. Every test to try to find any influence of your deity whatsoever have failed to give any evidence of that existence and every excuse made consistently tries to relegate him to outside of our reality to the gaps in our knowledge thus far etc.

Perhaps you simply don't understand these very clear distinctions and the clear reasoning behind them... but that most certainly doesn't make you right or make your God magically real... or invalidate the actual sound science and understanding behind facts such as gravity, air composition, etc.

You then go on to say that you can't provide any evidence to support your position... nor can you provide any evidence or reasoning to prove that I am wrong, or that the evidence I DID present, unlike you, is in any way invalid.

And yet you go on to deny my evidence and reasoning and assert that you are POSITIVE of your "faith" and will never change that belief... and you specifically go on to state: "I have faith that Jesus died for my sins, and I have faith that God will come again to judge the nations." In spite of me DIRECTLY addressing the fact that Jesus DID NOT die for your sins in the manner in which the bible itself specifically states. And even if he believed he was, it doesn't make it true for the reasons I also already stated.

Your refusal to acknowledge and address those facts doesn't just magically make them go away... and your insistence on believing things that are demonstrably and provably false doesn't magically make them real.

There is no "personal reality" where you can make up your own FACTS. Facts are either true or not independent of you. (this is something I had to address with another religious idiot earlier this morning about his particular religion... and I might copy that comment here to illustrate the point about subjective and objective reality)

But to really clarify something... let's contrast two of your statements.

"I don't have all the answers, hell, I don't know half the questions."

"As far as my faith being between God and It cannot be argued."

So you admit that you have very little understanding of these issues, and in spite of it being rather clear that I have a much greater understanding of these issues in a much wider context than you do... you repeatedly clarify that your faith is unequivocally set and cannot be argued, changed, etc.

Doesn't it strike you as a little silly to first seemingly ignore most of what I wrote in this discussion... to then acknowledge that it seems that I have a greater understanding of these issues than you do... but to then insist that your position cannot be argued. Cannot be debated.

You say you won't debate the bible, in spite of the FACT that your religious beliefs inherently rely on the bible from which they spring. Sort of like insisting on the reality of chickens while denying the reality of eggs.

The only way to have such absurd beliefs is to be willfully ignorant, irrational, etc.

You cannot claim that you unequivocally believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior while willfully denying the evidence I presented to prove that Jesus didn't die to absolve us of the sin as explicitly stated in the bible because we can PROVE that that sin never existed AS THE BIBLE STATED.

You also cannot honestly claim that the bible didn't mean what it says, things that were meant literally when written and taken literally for centuries thereafter, and upon which belief many people lost there lives for heresy for daring to question.

Now if you want to just admit that you're an irrational and deluded ignorant country man who isn't interested in honestly facing the facts and figuring out what the actual truth is... who is, as you yourself stated, not willing to even entertain the possibility that he might be mistaken because he will never EVER change his belief in a provably false and absurd ancient mythology... well then we can't have a rational, intelligent, honest discussion now can we?

For that to happen you have to at least be willing to look at the evidence honestly. To admit that there is the capability of your mind to be changed by the overwhelming weight of fact, evidence, reason, etc.

It really is that simple. I can continue illustrating the established errors in your reasoning, the fallacious nature of your claims both about the bible, and my own claims etc... but until you start actually reading what I wrote and acknowledging those facts, we're not going to get anywhere.

It might behoove you to stop and consider for a moment the stubborn arrogance in admitting that you lack as deep an understanding of the issue as I do, but yet still refuse to even consider that maybe, just maybe, I actually know what I'm talking about... and that maybe, just maybe, while you BELIEVE that you're right... that greater understanding and honest assessment of the facts might enlighten you to the error of your beliefs.

A child may weep and cry at the notion of finding out that Santa isn't real... but that doesn't make him real, nor dispel the reality that he isn't and the evidence and reasoning we can provide to prove that point. And you would rightfully consider any grown person steadfastly claiming the contrary, no matter how much they believed it, and refusing to look at your evidence or honestly consider your reasoning, as irrational and even insane...

And you'd be right.

Maybe you might want to learn a little of the lessons of humility also taught by your faith and consider for a moment the possibility that you might be mistaken, as any honest adult interested in the TRUTH would do, and actually READ AND CONSIDER THE FACTS that I presented at length... and stop just ignoring anything I say that threatens your beliefs.
Yesterday at 1:18pm ·


Myself
And for the record, I'm getting a little tired of repeating myself because you're too inconsiderate to actually READ this discussion before commenting on it and asserting the inflexibility of your beliefs and by logical extension the invalidity of my arguments... you know, because you don't have to literally say "you're wrong" to tell me I'm wrong.

I read very carefully every comment you and your son and others give, and I respond to them almost point by point to make it perfectly clear what the problems are with each part of what you're saying.

Try having the courtesy of returning even a little of that respect.

"I'm right because I BELIEVE I'm right and nothing you can say can ever change that." isn't a valid, honest, or rational position in an argument.

*rolls eyes*

Again, something I've covered ad nauseum here... wishful thinking, appeal to emotion, burden of proof, appeal to tradition, logical inconsistency, and ON AND ON AND ON.

"Wishful thinking is the formation of beliefs and making decisions according to what might be pleasing to imagine instead of by appealing to evidence, rationality or reality."

You have simply decided that what you believe (based on the Judeo-Christian bible) is correct because you WANT it to be correct. You subsequently refuse to address the failures of the validity of that bible, from which your faith necessarily stems, and you refuse to address the actual evidence, rationality, and reality of the facts to the contrary because you insist that your faith CANNOT BE ARGUED.

How many different ways can I state those facts before they start to sink in?
Yesterday at 1:26pm ·


Don Sr.
I'm sorry I only read about half your diatrible and found it lacking in facts. Let me make this simple. I believe that God created the world. You believe in the big bang theory. Can't prove either. You can assume from scientic data, but that is all.Most athiest are so afraid of the gospel truth that they will go on and on supstatuting(sp) assumptions with facts. By the way , Ican't see gravity and know that there is gravity by it's result. Can you honestly state that gravity will last forever? According to scientific assumption it is fair to say that gravity will be around for a while. Because I read the bible, doesnt make me a christian. You fail (in my opinion) to stay on track so I try to make it simple. God is the explanation for things science can only theorize. No one knows how time started, not you or I. If you wish to not believe in God that is your right.
One of the faiths, Jahovahs Witness, tries to tear the bible apart by their own enterpretation. My first question is to which translation they are refering to and what makes that enterpretaion correct. Many "Christians" pick an enterpretation that best suits their argument. Do we use the Greek, Roman, Hebrew, King James, Niv etc....... I have seen enterpretation that are miles apart, translated incorrectly from Hebrew to Greek etc....... As in politics, I can make anything come out the way I want it.
As a christian, I don't scour the bible to find a text to win an argument,maybe some do. Again we would have to find out what version and translation we are talking about. Then you would have to believe that man truely translated the exact word of God. I can't argue what I don't know. There are things in the bible that make me laugh and sometimes has my head shaking. Science does the same thing. Read some of the scientific America articles following the oil disaster of the Exxon Valdez. "A spill of this magnatude could never happen again." Look at the Gulf, and no, I don't believe it is God's curse for a sinfull world. Science and relegion are handling it. Prayers and science are about even if you are keeping score (LOL). Just remember the famous words of the singer John Lenon. "God is dead". How about "Lenon is dead", or "disco is dead" or athiesm is dead? Disco is the only one that derserved to die, the rest continue to grow. There always has to be a pro and a con. If we all thought the same........... boaring. I still offer a free cup of coffee or cola to exchange ideas. These have gotton way to long and confusing.
Yesterday at 2:03pm


Myself
You found my "diatribe" lacking facts?

Oh the height of irony. ;)

As I've repeated at length, the bible makes very specific and literal claims about the time span of creation, the nature of creation, what was created, when it was created, etc... up through the claims about the origin of sin, Noah's Ark, and so forth. Meant literally, BELIEVED literally by both the authors and centuries of "true believers" like yourself thereafter.

We CAN prove that THAT story of creation is FALSE.

It really has nothing to do with what came before the Big Bang, because as I've also already explained at length, it is a fallacious argument on your part to even imply that because we don't yet know what came before the Big Bang (which we DO know happened on the order of AT LEAST a MILLION times earlier in history than your bible claims), that YOUR PARTICULAR GOD is the actual answer. (go back and read my earlier explanations, I tire of repeating myself)

So in short, we CAN prove that YOUR RELIGION is wrong on this subject. You on the other hand, cannot in any way prove that your religion is right and ACTUAL FACTS (you know, the things you lack) are somehow in error simply because they contradict your baseless and irrational belief. (and again, I've covered equivocation as well and the intentional shifting between an ambiguous creator and the specific Judeo-Christian God, so please stop that dead in its tracks as well.)

"You can assume from scientic data, but that is all."

We don't simply ASSUME. We create testable and disprovable hypotheses based on the actual real world evidence, and we TEST them repeatedly to create accurate real world explanations that accurately predict other discoveries and properties of the natural world etc. Again, you dishonestly try to diminish the actual validity and methodology of science and the facts discovered by it.

"Most athiest are so afraid of the gospel truth that they will go on and on supstatuting(sp) assumptions with facts."

I'm not afraid of the "gospel truth" as you laughably call it. I am quite confident in the evidence I presented that you are now desperately trying to draw into question, in spite me clearly pointing out that the very standards of evidence you're trying to hold science and facts to FAR SOONER refute your own religious beliefs that utterly lack such supporting evidence etc. AGAIN, INVALID ARGUMENT ON YOUR PART.

Regarding "Can you honestly state that gravity will last forever?" and related comments... um, first off, yes, you can see it and test for it etc. That you either either not smart enough, or willfully choose not to do so is your problem. But the ABILITY TO SEE AND TEST IT EXISTS IN REALITY (and had subsequently been used to accomplish many of the types of things I referenced). I never claimed it would persist forever, so I fail to see why on Earth you would raise that point. Science doesn't claim to predict the future forever. It only makes accurate predictions based on the verifiable evidence we do have. *sigh* But I digress trying to address your absurdity yet again...

Reading the bible doesn't make you a Christian any more than it makes me a Christian. But believing that Jesus Christ died for your sins and believing in the God of the bible etc... well, that quite arguably does my friend.

"God is the explanation for things science can only theorize. No one knows how time started, not you or I."

I've also already covered the God of the Gaps, and why not knowing doesn't make YOUR unsupported claims true just because we don't know the answer yet. That is both a fallacious argument from ignorance, and a false dilemma, among other fallacies AS I ALREADY STATED!!! (how many times will I have to make THAT statement in this discussion?)

You also completely ignore the fact that your religion comes from your bible. And I have read several different translations of it, including the NIV, which is for instance one of the best and most accurate translations available, building on the oldest available manuscripts and the best modern paleo-linguistic knowledge etc. ( http://www.biblegateway.com/versions/New-International-Version-NIV-Bible/ ) It is FOR A FACT more accurate than other translations such as the King James etc. (And I have looked at some of those oldest available codexes such as the Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, etc... and could go on at length about the things NOT present in those oldest manuscripts that were introduced later... such as the last several chapters of Mark upon which several of the claims to fame of Pentecostal dogma are based such as snake handling, speaking in tongues, etc.. the story of the women taken in sin... and even things like the virgin birth, resurrection, etc.)

This is part of the reason I accurately cite WHICH version of the bible I am referring to when I quote scripture. Because I care about honesty and accuracy in my discussions.

"As a christian, I don't scour the bible to find a text to win an argument,maybe some do. Again we would have to find out what version and translation we are talking about. Then you would have to believe that man truely translated the exact word of God. I can't argue what I don't know."

And yet you clearly ARE arguing what you don't know... and telling someone who knows better than you do that they're wrong because they don't agree with what you just DECIDED was true IN IGNORANCE OF THE FACTS... and are now subsequently refusing to acknowledge the validity of the facts... (bringing us back to the fallacy of begging the question... AS I ALREADY COVERED.)

Then you go on to confuse OPINION with FACT... "A spill of this magnatude could never happen again.", which I addressed in another conversation this morning, referenced and explained here, but didn't copy that other comment here... which clearly I need to do as you still can't tell the difference, much less understand how such a random statement of opinion has essentially nothing to do with the validity of tested, verified, proven facts, based on evidence, upon which accurate predictions have been made and also verified etc.

And no... prayers and science are NOT even. Children die when stupid religious parents BELIEVE what the bible tells them in James 5:13-16 etc... and pray for their sick child instead of seeking medical attention. Believing that prayer is more effective than modern medicine makes you a dangerous idiot.

Not to mention all the testing that has been done showing that prayer is NOT any more effective than random chance.

And again at the end confusing laymen's opinion making with scientific facts... I shouldn't even need to address that.
Yesterday at 2:45pm ·


Myself
And here are the other comments I was referring to from this morning, in an argument with a believer of the Bahá'í Faith:

Afshin: Sorry, but when it comes to religion, yes, you are still a complete idiot just like the rest.

You have no evidence that there is any God, and yet you insist that you are right and we are wrong. You insist that NOTHING can change your mind about it.

That makes you an idiot.

You then quote your MADE UP religion, and attempt to make an appeal from authority, as though we should listen to your religion just because it says so.

Then you go on to say that you would follow your religion even if you knew it wasn't true... which begs the question of why you're so agitated and insisting that it is (and that nothing can change your mind about that)...

Then you make appeals to emotion... claiming that your religion has a good reputation... and using that to try to convince us that your religion is good...

BUT THAT DOESN'T MAKE IT TRUE. Buddhists generally have a great reputation as well... but there religion isn't true either. Just because you're peaceful and your religion promotes peace doesn't make it TRUE... it still claims a bunch of absolute BULLSHIT about the nature of God, God manifested in divine messengers, etc... and all the rest of its bullshit is just piled on to those utterly unfounded and MADE UP core tenets in the same way that Christianity for instance MAKES UP a bunch of provably false crap (through its Judaic heritage) which it uses to try to establish some authority by claiming to define the nature of God and creation etc.. and then necessarily has to base every other fabricated claim's authority on that original unsupported and made up bullshit (the fallacy of begging the question).

There is no evidence that any of those people were manifestations of God... there is in fact no evidence of God himself... and even simple logic breaks down the childish idea that there must be a God... a primitive and self important invented idea of man, based on his own lack of understanding and drive to understand... anthropomorphic and interested in human affairs. An invented idea that both violates logic and creates a more complex problem than the one it claims to solve.

Put simply, if the universe requires a creator because it is complex, then that more complex creator would necessarily, by the same logic, also require a creator. (and that creator another, more complex creator, and so on... ad infinitum.)

Now if you claim that the creator doesn't need a creator, then the universe itself would be MORE likely to just exist without needing a creator in the first place, being less complex and thus more likely to "just exist" by the very same special exception you're trying to make for your UTTERLY MADE UP idea of the creator.

Trying to violate that simple logic forces you to use several INVALID logically fallacious arguments.

Special Pleading, logical inconsistency, lack of impartiality, appeal to emotion, appeal to tradition, argument from ignorance, etc.

And perhaps I should clarify a bit what some of those are...

"Appeal to emotion is a potential fallacy which uses the manipulation of the recipient's emotions, rather than valid logic, to win an argument. Also this kind of thinking may be evident in one who lets emotions and/or other subjective considerations influence one's reasoning process. This kind of appeal to emotion is a type of red herring and encompasses several logical fallacies, including:

• Appeal to consequences


• Appeal to fear


• Appeal to flattery


• Appeal to pity


• Appeal to ridicule


• Appeal to spite


• Wishful thinking


• Appeal to ignorance

Fallacies introduce a failure to support a claim, and thus limit the possibility of an ideology to be recognized as credible. The appeal to emotion fallacy uses emotions as the basis of an argument's position. Therefore, factual evidence does not support the major ideas endorsed by the elicitor of the argument."

"Appeal to tradition, also known as proof from tradition, appeal to common practice, argumentum ad antiquitatem, false induction, or the "is/ought" fallacy, is a common logical fallacy in which a thesis is deemed correct on the basis that it correlates with some past or present tradition. The appeal takes the form of "this is right because we've always done it this way."

An appeal to tradition essentially makes two assumptions:

• The old way of thinking was proven correct when introduced. In actuality this may be false — the tradition might be entirely based on incorrect grounds.


• The past justifications for the tradition are still valid at present. In cases where circumstances have changed, this assumption may be false."

"Special pleading is a form of spurious argumentation where a position in a dispute introduces favorable details or excludes unfavorable details by alleging a need to apply additional considerations without proper criticism of these considerations themselves. Essentially, this involves someone attempting to cite something as an exemption to a generally accepted rule, principle, etc. without justifying the exemption."

"The argument from ignorance, also known as argumentum ad ignorantiam ("appeal to ignorance"), or negative evidence, is a logical fallacy in which it is claimed that a premise is true only because it has not been proven false, or is false only because it has not been proven true."

Now see, I can rightfully call you an idiot not simply because you're wrong... but because you strongly insist that you couldn't possibly be wrong and that NOTHING can change your mind. THAT kind of closed minded IDIOCY, which is fundamentally inherent in the minds of the religious, is what justifies us calling you stupid and an idiot etc. Because you're wrong and you REFUSE to even entertain the possibility that you might be mistaken... and thus close your mind to rationality, facts, evidence, reason, logic, etc in order to maintain your ill founded and fallacy riddled belief.

It is THAT promotion of and requisite need of irrationality, illogic, unreason, etc.. that is the core foundation of dangerous religious extremism. And just because you think your religion is nice and people doesn't make it TRUE, nor does it excuse how irrational and fallacious it is, and that it promotes such broken thinking as a virtue... thus perpetuating the cognitive failures that have plagued humanity throughout history.

Yesterday at 2:47pm ·


Myself
And the second part... that is more directly relevant to the confused error you keep making between opinions and facts (to understate the depth of the error in your reasoning).

And perhaps I should clarify that you seem to be confusing "opinions" with "provably false statements of fact". Yes, people are entitled to their opinions... but they are NOT entitled to go around claiming as 100% accurate absolute fact things for which they either cannot possibly know, or that are PROVABLY FALSE.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fact

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/opinion

And maybe you should take some quizzes to help you learn the difference between facts and opinions...

http://cuip.uchicago.edu/www4teach/97/jlyman/default/quiz/factopquiz.html

etc.

This is just one of countless fallacious methods of excuse making that religious people make... trying to diminish the veracity of FACTUAL REALITY by trying to trick people into thinking that facts are no different than opinions, when in FACT (pardon the pun) they are fundamentally different and inherently and necessarily valid.

It is the fundamental difference between SUBJECTIVE and OBJECTIVE.

Opinions are subjective... based on the emotions and beliefs of the person.

Facts are objective... based on the actual physical evidence, empirical observation of that evidence, etc... independent of our emotions or desires etc.

To continue to act like there is no distinction between the two on the part of the religious is openly disingenuous and just one more reason to hate how religion intentionally trains people to think incorrectly and dishonestly in order to promote itself.

Again, people are welcome to, and entitled to, their OPINIONS... they are NOT welcome to, nor entitled to, lie about the FACTS.

Yesterday at 2:48pm ·


Don Sr.
Let me dumb this down so you can understand. How long were each day of creation? You don't know?That is a fact. You are all over the board from christians scientist to who know what. Narrow down your subject matter. Here is another question.
Did God create Science to disprove his existence, or does science theorize to prove there is a God? I thank you for taking my side as how confused some athiest are.
You seem very smart, try narrowing down your subject matter.
You mention testing, which are made to prove or disprove theories of science, not relelgion. You are mixing up fact base science and theory based science. The two don't mix.
In short you are trying but everything into one little package be that relegious o r scientific . If I tried you way of argument, let try this one on.
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Since the mind of the first man could not comprehend the word heaven, and man felt that there was nothing outside of his line of sight, that God could not have created man in his own image since the knowledge of a "God and A Man would be so different.
thank you for bringing us James 5:13-16. Calling upon the Elders prayer. If you look up in the Jewish translations elders perform spiritual as well as medical issues given that knowledge by God. I does not say, Don't get medical help."
Once again you are reading in what you want it to say. Vs. 16 says to confess your sins in the NIV but it says to confess. or in the Greek, to share your faults.(King James ). Sins and faults are different. A version is the babalonian and Persian takes this verse out completely.
Is the 7th day Saturday or Sunday. Is Christmas tuely on December25. Science, astrology, biblical and other reference all very by many months
The bible never mentions dinasours, but it also doesn;'t mention unicorns. I agree that there may have been a creature with one horn on it head, but is it magical? Science has dug up dinasour which seems to prove that they existed even though they are not mentioned in the bible so logic dictates that there were dinasour roaming the earth.
The earths rotation has been scientificlly proven that the rotation of the earth has sped up over the millions of year thus proving that we don't know how long one day of creation was. Science want to prove itself using the "Theory" that a day back then was 24 hours which they have proved false. I can go on and on to prove descrepansies(sp) but whats the use. You can't prove there is not a God as well as I cannot prove there is a God.
One more thing. Science and the bible both agree that there was a great flood. The flood was said to have covered the earth. Since man's vision of the whole earth is now different does that mean the flood covered the whole earth or just the part where Noah was. Noahs earth is a lot different then Columbus. The next question would be, "Does it matter?.
Yesterday at 3:40pm


Don Sr.
If you want to continue, come on over to my wall.
Yesterday at 3:42pm


Myself
Actually the bible very clearly states how long each day of creation was. This is an absurd excuse. The whole point of the miracle of creation was that God spoke things into existence because he willed them so. Not that he was the impotent excuse of a God science has rightfully whittled him down to today... a god crouching in the gaps of the as yet unexplained.

"3 And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

6 And God said, "Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water." 7 So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. 8 God called the expanse "sky." And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day."

I mean they literally spell out that God created the lightness and called it day, the darkness and called it night, and then there were as a result the first evening (and the first night), and the first morning. The first day had passed. It continues on in this vein, going on to clarify the days and laughably having an omnipotent God that needs to rest from his labors on the 7th day, thus leading to the Sabbath (which even more absurdly you are to be killed for if you work on it, by God's command, a command defended later by Jesus etc).

(And this is also without going into the actual Hebrew word used for day, and the clear meaning of it etc... all of which show how laughably absurd your excuse is... something which essentially no biblical scholars seriously assert. And even those who don't actually believe that account to be accurate, are still honest about what it actually says and meant. There's that pesky HONESTY again... along with actually knowing what you're talking about.)

And don't try to patronize me by attempting to dumb things down Don. It is very clear here that you are the one lacking understanding and education in all of these subjects. If anyone here needs speaking down to, it is clearly you.

"Here is another question.
Did God create Science to disprove his existence, or does science theorize to prove there is a God?"

Neither. False dichotomy YET AGAIN.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

Shall I repeat my request that you actually go read what I wrote and try comprehending at least a little of the facts presented, and rules of logic, etc?

I'm also not mixing up fact based science and theory based science. In fact there is no such distinction as they are part of a whole. Facts exist independently and are verified by testing etc... for instance gravity existing is a fact. A proven, demonstrable fact. WHY and HOW gravity works are theories, with even the word theory carrying a meaning fundamentally different from that used in laymen's circles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_as_theory_and_fact

etc.

Show me where the bible, or actual contemporary Hebrew scripture states to not just pray and be healed, as the bible clearly says, but to also be sure to seek actual medical help.

Then you go off into a bunch of unrelated bullshit... The Sabbath is on Saturday, not Sunday (in the Judeo-Christian religion at least), December 25 is NOT the birth of Jesus... and was actually intentionally stolen from the pre-existing Pagan festivals of Yule, Winter Solstice, Saturnalia, etc. The early church did not even celebrate Christmas until centuries later as they thought it absurd to celebrate the birthday of a God etc.

Honestly you're just throwing out red herrings now that have nothing to do with the fact that science DOES prove the bible WRONG in Genesis. Stop childishly avoiding that fact and trying any wholly fallacious desperate attempt you can think of to try to discredit science in order to preserve your provably false delusion.

"Science want to prove itself using the "Theory" that a day back then was 24 hours which they have proved false."

A day was, and has been since early in the life cycle of the planet, close to what a day is today. With NOTHING like the kind of discrepancy that would turn 24 hours into a thousand years.. and the implication that it did illustrates your failure to grasp the ramifications of the laughable excuses you're trying to make... not only because you don't seem capable of grasping the complexity and time spans in question, nor the supporting scientific evidence... but because you're trying to use science in the first place to supposedly try to support your absurd excuses, while ignoring the FACT that the very same science you're trying to invoke in a primitive cargo cult mindset appeal to authority ("if I say the word science, it means I'll be taken more seriously!"), also happens to OVERWHELMINGLY PROVE YOU WRONG.

Because the evidence does clarify the age of the Earth by multiple independent sources, and it is several orders of magnitude older than the bible claims. We're talking almost A MILLION TIMES older. So not only is a day meant to be the roughly 24 hour day we know today (given that it was the only span of a day that human beings knew at the time of the bible's authorship.. the same reason they listed the first animals of God's creation as those they saw around them and failed to list the dinosaurs and earlier life forms etc), but by your childish "logic" *chuckle* a day *hahaha* would have had to have been well over SIXTY FIVE THOUSAND YEARS long... and not just that... but here's the REAL kicker to show just how completely CLUELESS you are with this crap you're pulling out of your ass...

The days were actually SHORTER then.

Got it? The tidal forces exerted on the planet by the moon, as well as internal movement of convection in the planet's mantle etc... these all exert drag etc on the planet and actually SLOW its rotation by a millisecond every century or so... sometimes even a few milliseconds in a few years depending on the factors involved. These forces actually LENGTHEN the days... not shorten them.

"You can't prove there is not a God as well as I cannot prove there is a God."

Again you rudely (or dishonestly) ignore what I've already written multiple times. Burden of proof and the argument from ignorance... along with the fact that we CAN argue logically against the existence of the Christian God (or even a general creator). The lack of definitive proof DISproving God doesn't mean YOUR God actually exists. But we DO have a wealth of actual evidence, facts, logic, etc all saying that he doesn't... and you really have no valid evidence or facts to counter that (as the nature of your God is laid out in the bible, so that we can assess the validity of those claims.)

And I'll get to the retarded lie you just made about Noah's Ark and science agreeing with it in my next comment because it deserves a sound rebuttal for being so offensively dishonest (and stupid, as seems to be your new par for course given many of the claims you're trying to make without obviously having any idea what you're talking about) on your part.

So on to the Noah's Ark bashing! Weee!!

\(^_^)/
10 hours ago ·


Myself
(I'm simply going to copy/paste a part of an article I wrote 3 years ago to save myself the trouble of retyping it.)

Let's start by reading Genesis chapters 6 through 8 to get the whole story.
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+6-8%3B&version=31;

Now that we've done that, we notice as a side note the story of the "Nephilim" breeding with the daughters of man... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephilim... but we'll move past that for now. ;)

We see in chapter 6, verse 7: 7 So the LORD said, "I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth—men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air—for I am grieved that I have made them."

Here he states that he will kill every living creature on Earth, including all the birds, many species of which can survive just fine for months, even years, without landfall. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seabird

But I guess special "God Rain" can kill them too, right? ;)

Then we come to another important point where it explicitly lists Noah's sons: "10 Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham and Japheth.", this will come in handy in a bit.

Then we have the dimensions of the boat: "14 So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. 15 This is how you are to build it: The ark is to be 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high. 16 Make a roof for it and finish the ark to within 18 inches of the top. Put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle and upper decks."

Essentially Noah would have to have built an Ark using technology more advanced than that of the end of the main era of wooden ships, thousands of years later, would have had to fit literally millions of animals on it, provided food and water for every single one of them, enough to last almost a year, and make sure that not a single animal died of any of the "unclean" animals or that species would be wiped out, as all the non-livestock and non-avian animals only had 1 male and 1 female to represent them. As for the birds, as there are over 10,000 species of birds, this would equate to 70,000 birds alone being on the ark, as Noah was required to bring 7 of every kind of bird, over 100 different livestock animals, and so on...

But what have we here? In verse 20 it states: "20 Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive.", but then in Chapter 7, verse 3, it states: "3 and also seven of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth."

Where is he going to get the other 5 of every kind of bird if only 2 of each will actually come to him? Is he going to have to travel the world and capture the other 5 of every different kind? ;)

Moving along... we see the following: "6 Noah was six hundred years old when the floodwaters came on the earth. 7 And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons' wives entered the ark to escape the waters of the flood.", and as I was sure to point out earlier, we know there to be 3 sons. So we have 8 people in total entering the ark to repopulate the entire earth so that all the genetic diversity and geographical dispersal we see in the global human population happened within the past few thousand years. And by that I'm talking specifically around 4 or 5,000 years. Now we know through the fossil record etc, that this is simply not true. :) Much less the fact that even the genetic diversity as measured by the spread of Mitochondrial DNA and it's rate of mutation far exceeds this window.

Again, moving along...

I suppose I should touch on another interesting side note... in chapter 7, verse 11, it states: "11 In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened." With that said, it bears noting the the direct lineage from Adam up through David etc, were listed along with the ages of every person. Now given that these ages were generally all several hundred years, and that gives us the proverbial 6,000 span from creation to modern day... it would bear noting that even that span of time relies on improbably long lifespans for the individuals listed. If we were to say that perhaps they used a different measurement of time, that would actually lead to an even younger earth. Even more improbable. ;)

Again... moving on.

We come to the next interesting verses: "17 For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth. 18 The waters rose and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water. 19 They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. 20 The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet."

Allow me to reference a partial explanation of this. From http://en.allexperts.com/q/Physics-1358/Water-Volume-during-Great.htm we get:

The earth has a radius of approx. R=6374 km.

Its surface area is thus A= 4*Pi*R² = 5.1 *10^14 m².

Mr. Arafat (the late President of Palestine) was not very tall, but Mt. Ararat (the volcano mountain in Northeastern Turkey) is 5165 m high.

This makes the water volume necessary to flood it to its peak V= 2.6 * 10^18 m³. (Or 2.5 million million million cubic meters of water)

This water weighs 2.6 * 10^18 tons.

Spread out to 40 days the average rainfall would be 5165m / 40 d = 129 000 mm per day or 5375 mm per hour. Imagine standing under a waterfall.

Evaporated it would saturate the whole atmosphere plus the stratosphere with 105% humidity. In other words: Clouds would fill the atmosphere from the ground on upwards plus the stratosphere (where there are usually no clouds - "above the weather"). This would lead to the earth freezing under the clouds since no sunlight reaches the ground. The consequences would be harsher than the imagined "nuclear winter" after a global thermonuclear war.

Now mind you, that only relates to Mt. Ararat, which is only 5,165M. But the bible states that the water covered the highest point on Earth by 20 feet. That would increase that height to over 8,850M, which would only dramatically compound the effects listed above.

Are we seeing a theme yet? Not to mention that there simply isn't, and never has been, that much water on the entire planet. Not by an incredibly huge margin.

A few other things to note, as far as space on the boat etc... we would also have to account for at least 46 weeks worth of food for the 8 people and all the millions of animals on the boat. Or how about the fact that that much rainfall etc would effectively desalinate the Oceans, killing off further hundreds of thousands of species at the very least who rely on specific salinity levels and temperature ranges etc.

I think that's at least a satisfactory debunking of that fable... enough to illustrate that bickering over when the waters dried is a rather moot point given that the whole story is nothing more than an impossible myth to begin with. And even if you try to play apologist and reference the supposed flood of the Black Sea by the Mediterranean Sea after the receding glaciers raised the water tables, that would unfortunately not only still not lend any credence to almost any of the fantastical claims of the Noah Ark story, but it would also just happen to predate the date of the biblical creation story by well over a thousand years.

10 hours ago ·


Myself
I think that serves to illustrate just how breathtakingly far removed from reality your delusion actually is... and just how soundly those of us who actually have decent educations on these wide varieties of issues and are capable of actual sound logic, reasoning, critical assessment etc... can rightfully dismiss your delusions as exactly that... uninformed, irrational, illogical, and willfully so it seems, delusions for which you insist that you cannot be reasoned out of. That you will not argue them... they are not up for debate... they are just absolute.

Seriously Don... have the maturity to realize when you've gotten your ass handed to you and have the dignity to realize you're in over your head and could actually LEARN something from this discussion if you'd stop MAKING SHIT UP in a desperate attempt to excuse your provably false and irrational religious beliefs.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/delusion

Now odds are that what I will do is take this entire discussion, which I've been saving copies of, when it seems to have petered out here, or reached an impasse... and I will post the entire thing as a note on my own profile as an illustration of Christian reasoning (or lack thereof).

And I'd be delighted to add you as a friend so that you could continue the discussion there if you'd like... or I'd even format it and send you a copy so that you could do the same and we could CONTINUE this discussion honestly with the entire existing thread there for the proper honest context so that any new reader could see the morass we've already navigated thus far.

And now it's been a very long day and I had had no intention of typing anything before walking in my door and going straight to bed, and have now spent an hour and a half responding to your ... well, inanity. So I'm going to step outside and have a cold beer and be done with facebook for the night.

お休みなさい皆さん☆ミ
10 hours ago ·


Myself
(Well, let me say this in closing... I'm sure you're good people. I'm sure you don't intend to cause any harm, and I honestly doubt you even realize a fraction of the errors you make in your reasoning etc. And I doubt that me plowing through them like a tank through a field of sheep (pardon the expression, but that is what Christians refer to themselves as...) is really the most effective means of getting people to consider the facts as presented or be open to reassessing their own beliefs etc... but none the less, no matter how nice, or how innocently naive and uninformed one might be... with the best intentions.... those things don't change the facts. I'm not trying to say you're a bad person... you or Donald etc... I'm just saying you're provably wrong and have subsequently illustrated countless failures in your reasoning, your grasp of the facts, etc.

That said I honestly can't think enough to type anymore... I just want to point out that these aren't personal attacks on you. They're statements of fact about a particular belief system you have and the demonstrable failures in the related reasoning and the utter failure of the claims of fact in relation to the actual real world facts we actually have etc.)
10 hours ago ·


Don Sr.
Once again ,theory and unfounded fact. I guess I forgot the part in the bible when it said the days were 24 hours long. How can we discuss when you can't even read the bible. Your thinking is static, it doesn't grow. This is not an insult but something everyone has heard from athiesm since... forever This is why science seperates itself from athiesm. God is great and that bothers you, but that ok. I'm glad that you are reading the bible. If you need help, I will be glad to help you as I can see God tuely trying to work in your life. Let him in, you may lose a lot of anger.
52 minutes ago


Jack
I'm going to end this so called debate right here. I'm doing so because Don is obviously taking himself seriously here when in fact, in a war of words and ideas, he is totally defenseless against an intellect like Justin's.

You're out of your league Don. You should have had the sense to back out of this long ago just as your son did when he realized he was dealing with someone he couldn't bullshit. I see now that he comes by his gift for BS naturally.

Justin, your time would be better spent debating religion with someone who at least knows how to spell relegion. Any future posts on this thread will be deleted.

P.S. - Don, that squiggly red line under the word means you spelled it wrong.
20 minutes ago


Don Sr.
Jack, the word day in Hebrew read' An indeterminant amount of tiime." Your right, I am out of my league, that being fantasy. End of Story. I would love to hear something new instead of this old retoric. God Bless
11 minutes ago


Myself
Don: First off, no... it meant a specific day, and only meant indeterminate amount of time as a secondary meaning, and only in specific contexts. Again, you lie... but I'll address that in my other comment I was still writing. I just wanted to shoot this most recent flat out intentional lie on your part out of the water IMMEDIATELY. And laughably I know damn well that even fundamental Christian sources and scholars will have told you the exact same thing.

http://www.creationists.org/how-long-is-a-day-in-the-bible.html

Even a CREATIONIST website tells you that... and it's like the very first response on Google.

There is no way you didn't know that and didn't just intentionally avoid the truth to try to DECEIVE us into thinking you were right.
6 minutes ago ·


Myself
Don: You're sitting typing on a computer built by science. Your words are transmitted to me by that very real understanding of the natural world, electricity, transistors, etc... on an internet built by computer scientists using those same scientific principles...

Why don't you try praying as hard as you can and see if THAT sends your ignorant comments to me instead of these things built by science that you can't seem to wrap your head around how they got to be in front of you... maybe you believe that God just blinked them all into existence one day because someone prayed for it.

Or maybe you'll make the laughable (and as usual utterly unfounded) excuse that God INSPIRED these scientists to discover all these things... while ignoring the fact that you're still childishly trying as hard as you can to DISCREDIT science because the NUMEROUS FACTS show how incredibly clueless, irrational, deluded, and UTTERLY WRONG you are.

Am I getting close to the mark?

Don... you want to be a dishonest little man and LIE about things in order to try to insult me because lies and ad hominems and every other invalid and immature method of avoiding the truth is all you have left to cling to... you go right ahead. I've already stated IN THIS VERY DISCUSSION that you seem to have such a hard time wrapping your head around THAT I HAVE READ AT LEAST FOUR DIFFERENT TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE (KJV, NIV, NRS, NLT) AND STUDIED SEVERAL OTHERS (the aforementioned codices, etc). I have also studied theology, textual criticism ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textual_criticism ), biblical archaeology, anthropology, world religions including early religions specifically contemporary to, preceding and proceeding Christianity by thousands of years, as well as numerous fields of science since I was a small boy... archaeology, paleontology, entomology, cosmology, biology, chemistry, physics, geology, and on and on...

For you to simply deny all that and say that I can't even read the bible, as though I am illiterate or too stupid to understand what the authors meant, when I have PROVEN you WRONG about what the bible says, more than once in this discussion... a book that YOU YOURSELF admitted that you don't even really read or pay attention to because you've moved past it and are now just MAKING UP your own religion, that while obviously and necessarily built upon the Judeo-Christian faith as laid out in the bible, is somehow miraculous now TRUE INDEPENDENT of it's requisite foundation... for you deny all that and make the statements you do, that makes you a willful liar Don.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/lie

You have utterly failed to address the facts I presented at the beginning of this argument and so has your deluded moron of a son. All both of you small little people have done is sit and lie through your teeth, try to attack my character, motivation, intellect etc... and when that didn't work, you particularly took it upon yourself to try to act like you had a CLUE about science, or even the bible for that matter, and to try to use that feigned knowledge of science (which you clearly profoundly lack, as I illustrated) to try to discredit science because you are so desperate to preserve your delusion.

You have committed every logical fallacy I've listed... outright ignored it when pointed out to you... you have flat out lied and denied things that I had already stated in this very discussion, claimed that I said things in this discussion that I clearly did not, and at essentially every step have tried to draw into question mankind's arguably most valuable discovery ever... the use of the scientific method to understand the REAL world around them.

God is IMAGINARY you dolt. And you yourself admitted that you have NO evidence to the contrary, and I've explained to your thick skulled self numerous times now that the burden of proof is on YOU to demonstrate otherwise, and that arguing that your God is real because we CAN'T disprove it is an invalid argument... the argument from ignorance (or negative proof), and is no more valid than me claiming that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is the REAL God of the universe and your God is his bitch. Of course you can't prove that isn't true... and you don't have to because fantastic claims WITHOUT EVIDENCE can be DISMISSED WITHOUT EVIDENCE.

And more importantly my provincial friend, WE DO HAVE A TON OF EVIDENCE THAT SHOWS THAT YOUR BIBLE IS BULLSHIT. THAT YOUR RELIGION IS A FALLACIOUS HOUSE OF CARDS AND THAT YOUR FAITH IS FUNDAMENTALLY INHERENTLY ILLOGICAL, IRRATIONAL, UNREASONABLE AND OUTRIGHT HOSTILE TO FACTS, EVIDENCE, AND THE VERY THING THAT SETS HUMANITY APART FROM THE REST OF THE ANIMALS... REASON.

You are an embarrassment to the human race.

(There's a limit to my patience when dealing with deluded fools. I have presented more than enough evidence in this discussion to prove how WRONG you and your son are. That you cannot wrap your bumpkin head around that is your loss. I have invested enough energy in this discussion and am more than comfortable with leaving the evidence as it stands for those less lost to reality.)

I bid you good day.
6 minutes ago ·


Myself
And with that, I think I'm just going to suspend my account because I grow weary of dealing with this childish idiocy and stubborn refusal to admit even the possibility of error on your part.

You are a prime example of why I hate Christianity and would never.. COULD never EVER be a part of that shameful tradition and what it does to the human mind.

Thanks for entertaining this discussion Jack.
5 minutes ago ·


Don Sr.
Jack, you are a great musician and out of your league when it come to religon and academia. Facts are in your world is
you call B.S. It the same defense as Madlyln Murry O'hare said before her followers silenced her. If we were keeping tracl, you and Justin got smoked...
3 minutes ago


Myself
"Debating creationists on the topic of evolution is rather like trying to play chess with a pigeon; it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory." --Scott D. Weitzenhoffer
2 seconds ago ·