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A physicist has more authority on saying "the same way I know the laws of the Universe I know God does not exist." Yes.
So the measureable fact that the vast majority of natural scientists are atheist means God doens't exist? It is their authority which you agree to.
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I would not take it as an infallible authority, but I might actually give some weight to a physicist who has really studied this issue.
But a comedian who has studied the issue isn't an authority?
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Comedians vary.
Physicists vary.
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Carlin and Sweeney I'll agree seem to have put some thought/study into what they say. Someone essentially just saying, "I know there's no God because I know stuff so I can say so" has to actually be smart to back that up. I didn't think Carolla was an example of that or at least I was unconvinced.
He makes a living prodding the absurdities of reality. Comedians are philosophers who know how to laugh.
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That you can't understand my thought processes does not mean I'm playing a game on you. That you think I should see the Bible as you see it makes you know better than some of these Fundamentalists.
You get a proper understanding of the Bible in part from the study/commentary of it over centuries by valid intellectual authority. As I often have to tell atheists, to the point I wish I could make it my signature line, I am not a literalist Protestant. I am not any kind of Protestant in fact.
You're still Christian, which means you still adhere to a core set of absurd beliefs not based in reason.
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What you think they are is your business.
[/i]J. Neil Schulman and John C. Wright, among others, might disagree.
I see I hit a nerve and you are now babbling in an even more childish manner.
I tire quickly of the ignorance that persists with religion.
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My Bible includes the deuterocanonical books and taken with what the Protestants have God clearly becomes a being beyond the Sky. Or the stars or any natural object. Catholic thinking also doesn't precisely say God is literally male either.
This doesn't invalidate that Yahweh comes directly from Abraham. Everything else is just speculation and addition to what Abraham started. You can include as many non-canonical books as you wish--but the entire Judeo-Christian concept draws its lineage to Abraham.
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That you can not think of another reason does not make it that there is no other reason. Pouting and swearing at me won't make it so either.
If it was all merely about comfort people would believe in whatever religion had no Hell. And yet we find many of the most "Hell focused" religions are also among the fastest growing ones.
I'm not going to argue religion has to be true, but you're understanding of this matter is glib, shallow, and juvenile.
Understanding religion isn't difficult to do. My extensive knowledge of history, psychology, and the sciences point to one very clear picture of religion. Religionists can't see the forest for the trees.
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You need to read more on the psychology of religion or comparative religion or just talk with actual religious people. A draw to religion is a sense of community and the desire for meaning and purpose. Also people's desire to be deemed "good" and a need for a system for self-improvement. And many other things.
None of which require religion's history of madness. Christianity does not provide a system for self-improvement. It breaks people down into servitude.
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That you believe science is really going to show that God doesn't answer prayers, or that it even cares, is absurd. Why does science need to care about proving whatever oddball philosophical proposition you want proved? Science is about testing natural phenomenon, it's not about proving whether your beliefs about God or mine are true.
God answers prayers.
Objective study of prayer shows prayer doesn't work
THEREFORE: God doesn't answer prayers.
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So no, you're not serious.
No, your post is insulting to you. In fact I started worried I was insulting you too much, but you've effectively insulted yourself better than I ever could. You display your ignorance and lack of a creative mind in ways I don't think I could've done. That you think you said anything interesting or valid to me here says something about yourself.
If God is capable of anything more than "Santa Clause for grown-ups," 3500 years of history have failed to show that.
So the measureable fact that the vast majority of natural scientists are atheist means God doens't exist? It is their authority which you agree to.
But a comedian who has studied the issue isn't an authority?
Physicists vary.
He makes a living prodding the absurdities of reality. Comedians are philosophers who know how to laugh.
You're still Christian, which means you still adhere to a core set of absurd beliefs not based in reason.
I tire quickly of the ignorance that persists with religion.
This doesn't invalidate that Yahweh comes directly from Abraham. Everything else is just speculation and addition to what Abraham started. You can include as many non-canonical books as you wish--but the entire Judeo-Christian concept draws its lineage to Abraham.
Understanding religion isn't difficult to do. My extensive knowledge of history, psychology, and the sciences point to one very clear picture of religion. Religionists can't see the forest for the trees.
None of which require religion's history of madness. Christianity does not provide a system for self-improvement. It breaks people down into servitude.
God answers prayers.
Objective study of prayer shows prayer doesn't work
THEREFORE: God doesn't answer prayers.
If God is capable of anything more than "Santa Clause for grown-ups," 3500 years of history have failed to show that.
More "Konration Theory"....how "nothing"...which is the essence of what you put your stock in. Like all Atheists. That should prove to be an investment with a great return for you...NOT!
God is great! Nothing is just that.
Believers are multiplied by God. Believers X God (All)= All Eternal Entities (same as anything else multiplied by "all")
Atheists are multiplied by Nothing. Atheists X Nothing (Zero)= Zero (same as anything else multiplied by "zero")
"God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent"
You left the most important word off of your list, an oversight no doubt-----mythological
Mythology can mean "the body of stories associated with a culture or institution or person." So I think C. S. Lewis, among other Christians I like better (I'm not a Lewis fan per-se), would agree with you that God is in some sense mythological. We know of him through culture and people. They would just not equate mythological to unreal or false.
I've honestly never heard of that before except from you -- I assume you made it up, my friend, but that is far beyond your closed plane of thinking, so far as I see.
But going on, you seem to think of it as fixing every single mess that appears so that nothing bad happens. Why would that be all-loving?
That would impinge on our free will. We couldn't clean up the mess on our own. How do we learn responsibility if God did everything for us?
After all, you could assume that any need or want could very likely cause a mess (looting, starving, etc.), so does that mean God would need to provide everything to us? If that was the case, why are we on Earth? Why aren't we all already in heaven, as wispy smoke figures that frolick around in the clouds with Jesus?
Not to mention if God was always fixing everything we messed up, don't you think we would never learn anything? Without Earth as our "proving ground," so to speak, wouldn't you say that we would never have the chance to earn any grace or salvation or anything because we can't learn anything because your definition of an "all-loving" God won't let us?
How is that all-loving? Life would become dull. We could never spice it up for fear of God "fixing" it for us. If we even had free thought in such a situation we would begin to resent God, and that's not good.
But that's not the case, not at all. Earth is our proving ground and here we can be happy just as we can be sad, but for some, they can take the bad with the good.
To prove my point (well, I can never prove it in your eyes, my friend, but I'll make an attempt), I remember a verse from a parable Jesus told. The rich man had a field. He got his servants to plant in the field, blah, blah, blah, the nice stuff grew.
But oh noes! Some weeds grew right along with it! The servants ask their master if they can pick out all those weeds. "No," he says, "for you might pick out the good seed with the bad. Rather, pick all of it when the harvest time comes, and you may sort them afterwards."
What does this story mean? Well, what I have interpreted as is that we have good and bad in our world, certainly so. But we have an option. We can remain good seed and deal with the bad till the harvest time, as a loving God would (because while we may suffer we can also have joy), so that the good can have eternal happiness (that makes even a thousand million billion gazillion years of suffering worth it, mind you) and the bad, those who fell to the weeds, will be in quite a different situation.
Well........appeals to logic would be a wasted effort.
Not to everyone. I'm Catholic, we were important in the rise of Medieval logic. The Oxford Calculators and the School of Salamanca had a fair importance in logic or at least reasonable philosophy. There are Neo-Thomists who aren't even theists. Anthony Kenny is a former Catholic and reportedly agnostic now. Philippa Foot is an atheist who reportedly has some Thomist leanings.
Besides there are other things besides logic and ridicule. I mean for those of us who aren't atheist there is anyway
Last edited by Thomas R.; 06-04-2010 at 02:17 AM..
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