We have nothing more to talk about (paradise, debate, salvation)

[mommabear2]

Originally Posted by Ilene Wright

Those are both very good videos Seeker, I need to file them away for possible future use as I am unable to articulate things in this way.....I'm still "in the closet" about my non-belief but I feel sure that someday it will become known and I need to have that closet filled with ammunition. This is a good start, thanks.

I know what you mean Ilene. I come to the CD Atheist subform to learn more from fellow atheist - for when the time comes that I'm "out"... like you stated, I need ammunition against my relatives and friends. I don't articulate my beliefs as well as others here on this issue either.

[tigetmax24]

Originally Posted by LargeKingCat

Let us start with the most obvious
Science has shown our planet to be over 4 Billion years old. Homo sapiens have been on the planet for around 200,000 years and the earliest cave paintings have been dated at 32,000 years indicating an organization of some level of society which produced this.

According to the Bible, the earth is 6000 years old and a written lineage in the Old Testament attempts to clarify genealogy, indicating that Man has been on the planet for only those 6000 years.
Clearly THE BIBLE IS WRONG. Some apologists will try to say "Oh well that may have a different translation or a different meaning from what we think of as time"
NO The Bible is in error. Plain and simple The Bible is wrong.
And this Bible is believed by many to have been authored by God, so "God" Got it wrong. God is wrong, mistaken, incorrect, not perfect, etc. Plain and simple.
OR there is a God, and God did not write the Bible and the Bible is still wrong.

I'm willing to hear you out.

As far as I'm aware, there is controversy over the supposed accuracy of the genealogies. As well, there is controversy over whether or not the days of creation represent literal 24 hour days.

Bottom line - gaps. Gaps which could logically allow for billions of years.

...but I'll bow to you. You say the Bible places the age of the earth at 6000 years. I'm all ears.

Originally Posted by LargeKingCat

SO let us show God as evil without needing to use the Bible. We will go first to the works of Freud and look at the component of personalilty called the Ego. The ego is a component the I which seperates our self from the masses, that aspect which also is a component of self esteem and self value. THis aspect also comes into play in a disorder listed in DSM-IV(axisII) called the Narcissistic personality disorder. It is a disorder which involves the ego and results in an individual being obssessed with power, prestige and recognition, and it goes along with a very "egotistical" personality. Such persons, like Hitler, will be preoccupied not only with aquiring power, but keeping it and wanting everyone to obey and worship them as loyal subjects.

It seems to me that we all have some sort of an ego to one degree or another. There's really nothing to separate any particular ego from the "masses."

Is it possible to test personality disorders in the lab? It all seems to involve a good deal of subjective speculation IMO.

Originally Posted by LargeKingCat

Now I ask, do Christians say that on Sundays they "Worship" God? And does it not follow then that god must have quite the ego, to want to be the "one God" and above all other gods?

No, it doesn't necessarily follow. It seems quite probable that we, as creatures, are not truly fulfilled unless we worship our creator. Could it be that God wants us to worship because God actually wants what is best for his creatures? In other words, the possibility that it's actually all for our own good?

Originally Posted by LargeKingCat

Now going back to the Bible, using that as the only source, we may see that the lawgiver, God, is above the law,...

How do you logically conclude that God is above the law? Is it possible that the law is merely a reflection of who God is?

Originally Posted by LargeKingCat

... but if we look at the scientific coures, in this case psychology, we see that god is only a superhuman with a personality problem. We have a different picture altogether of this lawgiver and it is not a pretty picture. It shares a diagnosis in common with Hitler. How Good is that?

How good is that? With regard to your assessment, not good.

Originally Posted by LargeKingCat

You want me to go on? Or have I made enough of a point as to Good/evil in the Abrahamic God? I can say yes there is evil and the human definition of the Abrahamic god certainly embodies that which is flawed, and therefore perhaps evil to some degree. I need only a psych fdiagnostic manual and a person who is accepted as real and evil (Hitler) and I can put the Abrahamic God along side and be unsuprised at the comparison.

Logically, morality is either objective (God exists) or relative (no God exists). Without God, how does one logically arrive at any objective view of morality?

[BigCityDreamer]

Originally Posted by tigetmax24

Without God, how does one logically arrive at any objective view of morality?

That's pretty easy: have society "create" an objective view of morality by stating it so.

[hiker45]

Even though I am an Atheist, I like talking with Theists about their religious beliefs.

When I used to work, I found the most boring lunch companions were the ones that I agreed with. It was more fun to talk with liberals or really right-wing people. I mean, we aren't going to learn much from people who always agree with us, are we?

I would even enjoy talking with one of those snake-handler guys, but not one of those voodoo cannibals that seem to be in the news these days. There is a limit to my intellectual curiosity.

[hiker45]

Originally Posted by tigetmax24

Without God, how does one logically arrive at any objective view of morality?

Common sense works for me. You got a better idea?

[Asheville Native]

Originally Posted by tigetmax24

Logically, morality is either objective (God exists) or relative (no God exists). Without God, how does one logically arrive at any objective view of morality?

Using your logic, you believe you would be a barbarian that would raping, pillaging and murdering and you're held in check only by the morals you believe exist only with your imaginary friend? Morals learned simply to keep you from being sent to hell by your imaginary friend to burn for all eternity, because he loves you. Yea that makes sense.

Speaks volumes about you as a person.

[LargeKingCat]

Originally Posted by tigetmax24

I'm willing to hear you out.



Logically, morality is either objective (God exists) or relative (no God exists). Without God, how does one logically arrive at any objective view of morality?

That is a good question Tigetmax I should be thanking you for making me think some more here at Midnight!

I think a part of that is What if God is flawed to begin with, is our morality thus flawed? and the answer is yes.
BUT you deserve more than to have me come on here and answer your question with a question.

think first, morality IS relative. I think the proof of this would be in the ideas I posted of how the Abrahamic God is flawed, by our human scientific standards, and how from MY point of view, the diety is niether perfect or omnipotent and cannot be because of his flaws exhibited scientifically as a personality disorder.
HOWEVER you are quite likely to meet others who will maintain that God is omnipotent and perfect, and that I am out of line and out of place using science (psychology) to dispute this.

I would first say that we need to agree on a definition of god, I was using the Abrhamic God as an example.. I know that some people refer to a more conceptual idea of God , God as an idea and a concept, that is personal yet universal.
I would suggest first, that to arrive logically at objective morality without God, we must first agree on what God is, and I wonder IF we as humans can do that? IF not, then Objective Morality has to be considered in dynamic terms, as in the objective morality of the year 100 in Rome is not going to be absolute in The USA in the year 2012. The reason for this is because the definition of God may have changed over the years.

I think the reason that it changes is simply because God has the characteristics which humans project onto him. And culture and society, values and morees change. The absolute objective morality is not God, it is MAN. Which is projected back onto the concept of god, and this is not going to be something just Christians Jews and Mulims do to the Abrahamic God but to anyone who professes a belief in God

You brought up some great questions and points and I want to respond to them and I also want to hear your opinion and reasoning as well.
I will try to respond to some of the other comments tomorrow as well but I am very very tired and I am done for the night THANKS

[SeekerSA]

Originally Posted by tigetmax24

Nothing new...the same tired old straw man characterizations of the Bible and Christianity.

A strawman is something you invent to suggest that is what a poster is saying then proceed to attack the strawman. There are no strawmen in this video as it deals directly with observable and documented claims from christians. That is called attacking the idea or concept. You really should learn the difference.

I've been around this forum for a number of years now and have tried repeatedly to get some of you to engage in a civil discussion where you would have every opportunity to explain in detail how science demonstrates the Bible and Christianity to be "fairy tales." Due to the apparent lack of available defenders, what else can be concluded other than that atheism is indefensible?

Atheism is defensible. How can the disbelief in god(s) be indefensible? You have made the classic theist error of false equivalence.

Many newer or younger or perhaps older new atheists are scientifically illiterate as they had no proper scientific education thanks to the weird US concepts of creationism which some US folk were lucky to avoid and folk like me were never exposed to despite being raised christian.

Science does not have a mandate to prove religions false but it does do so by mere extensive knowledge and discovery. I talk more on this in my next post.

You can't REASONABLY have it both ways with respect to the argument presented in the video. One cannot REASONABLY paint the Bible, God and Christianity as evil without acknowledging the existence of evil. One cannot logically acknowledge the existence of evil unless they are also willing to acknowledge the existence of good. How do we differentiate between good and evil without a Law Giver?

Talk about creating another strawman? The concepts of good and evil are not god dependent except in your mind and according to your indoctrinated standards. That said, your concept of good and evil probably stems more from societal norms rather than your religious beliefs which you wrongly attribute to a god concept.

But let us examine these morals that the bible allegedly teaches. I'll take one from the video regarding the victims of rapists in the bible having to marry the rapist or the rapist being required too pay a certain sum to her father and marry the victim.

Why don't you explain how this "absolute" morality is still not practiced in your country or mine (or many other countries) and why in fact at one time in my country it carried the death penalty?

Please do not use the tired and waste of time "that was another time" argument or excuse. You are claiming absolute morality comes from god/bible thus you should defend the god of the bible.

[SeekerSA]

You stated that science does not disprove god or christianity.

I said I will explain how it does. I have posted many threads here disputing christian claims even when I was still modestly theist. I have the benefit of not only being well versed in science bit also very well versed in biblical scholarship. I in fact do not need science to disprove the bible or god, I simply have to use the bible and refute the claims.

Let us take creation.

We have the concept of Adam and Eve and from there all mankind and all of creation was derived.

Using the bible, we are not told who the sons married and are left with the idea that they either copulated with their sisters OR god made other people too not recorded.

We use science in this regard as we know that incest is unfavourable esp. with siblings for healthy offspring. Laws exist to oppose this all over the world and this is based on mere observation of the offspring not surviving. Closed gene pool like the Amish and Mennonites show us high infant mortality rates. Here is a pic no creationist ever has a rebuttal for.



These are the Vadoma people of the Zambezi and I have seen them with my own eyes.

This is as a result of a shallow gene pool and genes that went wrong and was retained. These folk were only discovered in the 50's and they have assimilated now hence the clothes and not loin cloths or bare breasted.

This is mere observable evidence. We of course have DNA which affirms this problem of inbreeding.

When the creationist is presented with this, we are told, back then the genes were purer as if genetics had a purity factor to begin with.

The overwhelming evidence of evolution refutes creationism but creationists expect evolution to be explained in sound bytes. Science is not a discipline of sound bytes like godunnit is.

The whole of creation is supposed to have happened in 6 days yet when we examine the cosmos we see it to have originated from a singularity some 13.5 Bn years ago known as the big bang theory which BTW was a priest that posited the theory.

The 6000 years that you insist is not mentioned in the bible is correct but the creationists have locked onto the idea of a priest that calculated the time of creation to 4035 BCE, simple math does the rest. He did this by backtracking the begats and lineages and folk in the US have taken this as proof of creationism so much so that half the US population believes that the earth is 6,000-10,000 years old. We have dating of rocks even from the moon that shows the earth to be 4.5-4.7Bn years old.

I have presented many proofs like cave formations here in South Africa that are dated 1.5-3.5M years old, Antarctic ice cores 400-780 thousand years, lake varves, river deltas, canyons, gorges; all of which demonstrate a very old earth.

The ascent of man

Creationists think this is how evolution works. It is not an illustration to suggest we came from monkeys. Do you think a Grade 5 student has the mental capacity to understand the more complex charts of evolution? This is merely the ascent of man aka homo sapiens and is a fragment of the full picture/chart of evolution. However, even in this limited chart, we have fossils for all the stages and are not sucking it out of our thumbs.

Creationists cannot even come up with the bones of Adam and Eve as there really is no clarification as to where the garden of eden was.

The bible borrowed from earlier Sumerian myths and this is also provable.

Let us skip the fludd as we all know that never happened.

Moving onto the exodus event, I have also refuted that with mere math showing the logistics required to provide the minimum water to survive of two litres per day per person. There is zero archaeological evidence of this and one would think two MILLION+ people wandering the desert would have lost some pots and pans along the way and have grave sites scattered along the way. After all, the folk that left Egypt all died in the desert.

What did they find? NOTHING!

Then we have the clearest irrefutable proof that we are all asking for, where is the ark of the covenant holding the two tablets? NOWHERE to be found. The bible says it is back in heaven according to revelation - how convenient. Silly god, removing the only piece of evidence of his interaction with humans.

That said, evidence suggests that not even the commandments were original and again we do have archaeological evidence of older myths like the Egyptian book of the dead and others. The bible claims still sit with phat big ZERO evidence to their credit despite their silly attempts using the scientific method.

Virgin births are impossible for the era as they had no artificial insemination. A partial penetration and premature ejaculation perhaps to leave the hymen intact.

Dead people cannot be resuscitated days/weeks after they are embalmed and buried. Medical science has proved this to be impossible.

What the theist is left with is an appeal to magic and many what ifs. When the discussion enters that phase....

WE HAVE NOTHING LEFT TO DISCUSS.

Of course science does not directly disprove god or christianity. Studies of time relevant myths shows us that the man-god you revere is just one more in the pantheon of man-gods/demi gods that existed at the time. All the others were dismissed as folklore as the then Greco/Roman powers invented a catch all man-god to encapsulate all the older gods.

We all know Harry Potter is fiction, we use common sense to deduce that, why not apply the same standard to the bible? Because you were indoctrinated to believe this is true.

Only with proper exegesis and deep research will theists come to the conclusion that their god too is fiction.

Occam's razor is the tool we apply to all myths and hypothesis. This is called critical thinking and rational thought. Theists forego this tool as they have years even a lifetime vested in this crap.

It is hard to admit you were wrong and deluded.

[LargeKingCat]

Seeker, that was a great post and it would not let me rep you again so soon, Maybe tomorrow

I want to throw in this one, along the lines of the true conflict between science and Christianity. Notice that I did not say between science and religion, I could even say between science and conservative/evangelical Christainity, although there are a number of catholics who will be offended by what I am abotu to say.

The great scientific truth of earth and man's evolution onto it we are all familiar with it, Science has shown that Homo sapiens has been around over 100 000 years and probably in some form of well organized societal group since 20.000 years, although exactl dates vary between scholars slightly
Lets look at the creation Myth. This is where science undoes Christianity in it's entirety, or at least undoes fundamentalist/evangelical Christianity According to the Bible, which I am told is God's Word and Inerrant (although no one can tell me why) God created Adam and Eve, the first man and first woman, they were tempted by the talking snake (Who walked upright until that fateful day in Eden and was cursed to slither ever since as punishment for tempting Eve) Also they were cast out for this SIN of eating off the wrong tree, and they reproduced and had generations of huans to come (as Seeker pointed out above)
Well here are a few facts.
Go look up the lineage of that Biblical timeline, starting with the generation of Adam and going through until you get to Abraham, That takes 2008 YEARS. Then adding to where we are today (as that lineage Jacob, Issacc etc goes on we get that from the time of the first man, Adam to Now is only about 6000 YEARS. Epic fail for the myth, Science has already proven otherwise.
Lets look at that Talking snake as well. Snakes never had vocal chords, and snakes have been SLITHERING without LEGS for 450 Million years. Again scince proves this, and snakes did not suddenly devolve from lizards just 6000 years ago.
OF COurse the greaterst thing this negates is the concept of ORIGINAL SIN. Since there was no Adam from 6000 years ago to commit this SIN and no Tlaking Snake to make it happen and by all means no "Garden of Eden" which science would have found, then we can say that THERE IS NO NEED FOR MAN TO BE REDEEMED AND SAVED FROM THIS ORIGINAL SIN BY ANY FUTURE SAVIOTR OR MESSIAH.
That is because, according to science, the event never happened, according to myth they did, but myth in this case means NOT REAL. So there you have it The conflict between Science and Evangelical Christianity is set.

Now someone will say HOW DO YOU KNOW IT DID NOT HAPPEN? Well do the math, review the scientiic evidence and run a timeline of the geneology according to the creation myth. That does not even touch on the points made by Seeker which I will not repeat. THAT is how I KNOW that it DID NOT happen.

Now Everything I mentioned in yesterday's post has scientific reason behind it, and I am addressing the most basic aspect of Christianity.
We are asked again An interesting question, which is Without God can we have a truly objective morality? If we were to hold the concept of God as perfect we still may have nothing on the human scale more than relaitve morality, because God gets too embodied in man nmade relgiions of coure (I believe god to be a manmade concept anyway) I can and I was atempting to show that God as embodied in the Old Testament as an example was a fabrication of some super human, who had to have been based onaa an absolute tribal leader who had absolute unquestioned authority, like a pharoah for example. Or Hitler. The idea comes about that God must be kept appeased, kept happy, otherwise like Caeser he has the authority to order his legion to arrest and execute you, and nothing can change that order. I would say that since the concept of "God" as offered by evangelica/fundamentalist Christianity is flawed, I mean, he can't even get the facts right in his book, then any objective morality accompanied by it is likewise flawed. diety? I list worship as a flaw, because it is not neccesary for a benevolent ruler or one who even has ascended to a buddhist level of Bodhavista, as ego and jealousy have been left behind.
To require ego worship and a diety which required it would likewise be flawed.
IT would be flawed for a individual to attempt genocide, but we see it in Africa and The aforementioned German nutjob of WW2 was sick enough to try it, so why tolerate it from a diety? Does being "god" Place someone above the law? what about those commandments that God gave his tribes, I think there were originally 15 but according to Mel Brooks, Moses broke one set accidently and there ended up being only 10 or something? I seem to remember a Bible story about Mose breaking the commandments Ah well My attempt at humor
Any tribe, understanding a neccesity to survive would need rules on theft, murder, and honestly, even within the tribe. There exist thoughout the world and hitory tribes who all had some type of code to protect the numbers and breeding of the tribal unit, so Aborigines would have one and yet they would not be encouraged to murder each otehr, yet they had no ten commandments as the Biblical tribe did. SO my point is that as far aas a lawgiver, humans would have figured out those rules anyway and come to a moral code which preserved life and the tribal unit.
We in America know that no one is above the law, not even the president who leads the country, as Nixon so found out. So it is preposterous to say that God makes the laws but does not have to Obey them. Did Mussolini not try that as well ?
The thing is, in this year in the 21st CENTURY we can already do better than "gods lawws" Of the bronze age, because we have more technology and ability to preserve the sanctity of life and relieve suffering within our "tribe" More than the burnt offerings and scarifices of the year 4000 bce ever could. We can, and we are, doing better than we are told "god" did way back in the Bible times.