In fact, you appear to be arguing that most people who have ever existed are insane. Is that correct?
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In fact, you appear to be arguing that most people who have ever existed are insane. Is that correct?
I do appear to be arguing that. Perhaps my choice of words could have been thought out better. The people who forcefully argue that God is real are definitely insane. I don't know if there's anything that can be said about people who don't forcefully argue it but continue to believe that isn't, at the least, insulting. Uninformed? Unconcerned with rational thinking? None of that sounds flattering. But when it comes down to it, they are content to believe something for which there is no evidence and they willfully admit is something they just feel to be correct.
I know God
that asshole owes me 20 dollars
I have no evidence for it but I'm pretty sure you said the exact same thing back in #teenchat on IRC.
Tell you what, if you go back and repost what you've said so that it says exactly what you want to convey, we can talk about your other points. You've made several and I'm not enamored of wasting time watching wriggling when the meaning should have been precise in the first place.Quote:
Originally Posted by Calliander
No, that would be an alien. Not ET/grey/whatever, but a life form that's not human, advanced beyond our current technological/cultural understanding. Being able to do a lot of stuff we can't just makes something smarter, not god-like.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yoshi
The idea of God isn't one that fits in with what we know to be true. Every discovery on how the universe works makes the idea of what a god would need to be to fit within its framework more and more ludicrous, until finally you get to the point where a being necessarily powerful enough to create the universe would have zero reason to attend to this particular chunk of moist rock. Yes, lightning is going to strike somewhere, but the universe can be proven to be about 13.8 billion years old, and Earth about 4.5 billion. Evolution has been proven to be a process that happens, working on both single-celled organisms as well as full-sized creatures. Mankind is a monkey that learned a few neat tricks with its brain. If you entertain one idea otherwise, such as a divine creator, why would any one of millions of other ideas requiring a suspension of disbelief be any less valid?
James
This exactly.Quote:
Originally Posted by bbobb
One of the biggest fallacies I see is the thought that the existence of God is a 50/50 proposition. There's an entire universe of difference between no god and the god from the Bible. Based solely on observation of our universe to the best of our current abilities, the odds of a being such as that particular god existing and having all the abilities assigned to him is pretty damn far from 50%. I'd say less than 1%.
That's easy to explain, actually. Suppose something happened that you didn't understand, so your friend told you that it was easy to explain: it was a miracle. When you ask them to explain what actually took place during the miracle, they then tell you that the nature of miracles cannot be understood by humans. In other words, "it was a miracle" is basically short for "I don't understand what happened."Quote:
Originally Posted by Yoshi
Would you believe "I don't understand what happened" explained... what happened? Is it an explanation at all? You have people who think it is, and they're defined as X's, and you have people who don't agree with them, and they are not X's.
Someone might say "a god created the universe" but then reveal that the god is incomprehensible to the human mind and its ways are mysterious. So "god created the universe" is just "the universe exists because things I can't comprehend did things that are a mystery to me."
Basically, "what are you talking about?" is one of the basic criticisms of theism because answers tend to be poor. It's not some strange position that makes the prospect of atheism confusing, it's pretty much what atheists were saying for years before the term agnosticism was even coined in the late 19th century:
Quote:
...theology obtained the point of persuading man he must believe that which he could not conceive; that he must receive with submission improbable systems; that he must adopt, with pious deference, conjectures contrary to his reason; that this reason itself was the most agreeable sacrifice he could make on the altars of his gods, who were unwilling he should use the gift they had bestowed upon him. In short, it had made mortals implicitly believe that they were not formed to comprehend the thing of all others the most important to themselves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baron_d'Holbach - apparently devoted an entire chapter to the lack of clarity in theology in "System of Nature" in 1770
He later said in Good Sense:
no denial of gods. No real knowledge of them at all.Quote:
All children are Atheists; they have no idea of God. Are they then criminal on account of their ignorance? At what age must they begin to believe in God? It is, you say, at the age of reason. But at what time should this age commence? Besides, if the profoundest theologians lose themselves in the divine nature, which they do not presume to comprehend, what ideas must the people of the world, women, artisans, in a word, those who compose the mass of mankind, have of him?
A Century before that, you had a theist criticizing the argument that "god" doesn't mean anything:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Cudworth - The True Intellectual System of the Universe, 1678Quote:
The second pretence of Atheists against the idea of God, and consequently his existence, is, because Theists themselves acknowledging God to be incomprehensible, it may be from thence inferred, that he is a nonentity. Which argumentation of the Atheists supposes these two things:first, that what is incomprehensible is altogether unconceivable; and then, that what is unconceivable is nothing
If you notice, these kind of topics regularly have people accusing atheists of being certain there is no god, while atheists actually making those arguments themselves are rarely ever present. Meanwhile, atheist points that have been around for centuries are seen as not being representative of atheism. A little more effort should be put into understanding why.
Atheism isn't believing the Christian God doesn't exist. It is the belief that no deity exists anywhere. So, again, that requires a specific definition of what a deity is, and it can't just be the Biblical one.Quote:
Originally Posted by James
Because the latter group is misusing the word. I see people butcher words like "penultimate" all the time. That doesn't change what it really means.Quote:
Originally Posted by rezo
If "atheist" really meant "a pompous and often biggoted douchebag who is unlikely to really understand the science he claims to worship," then it would be used correctly a lot more often. Atheism is a religion -- nothing more and nothing less.