And yet oddly most people look at the facts and come to one conclusion. You look at the same facts and come to the opposite conclusion.
But I am sure you are so much more clever than everyone else. So clever your posts serve as your cites.
No I do not have to prove the existence of God. I admit I have no such proof. Further if nominated to devise such a proof, i would not run, if elected I would not serve.
But they don’t “come to one conclusion”. They come to thousands, perhaps millions of contradictory ones. Most of which due to being contradictory must be wrong, and all of which have the same utter lack of evidence. Why believe any of them?
It doesn’t take cleverness to be an atheist; the foolishness and baselessness of religion are blatant. That’s why I roll my eyes at those atheists who call themselves “Brights” by the way; not only is it pretentious, but it gives religion too much credit to claim you need to be bright to see through it. And my post doesn’t serve as my cite; again, my position is the logical default.
You do if you want to qualify that belief as anything other than a silly, baseless fantasy.
Deism is a thousand different things? (Or perhaps in your grammar, “Deisms are a thousand different things?”) Humm, soon we will be arguing over the word “is.”
No I don’t. We were talking about the Bible. How you got off on this tangent is beyond me.
No, read what he said again: “my position that there are no gods is by default correct”. He is talking about the default position, without any additional data. It would be equally true to say that by default, the position that there were no dinosaurs is correct. The difference is that we found enough evidence of dinosaurs to overcome that burden of proof and move away from that default assumption.
Exactly. If I say there’s no such things as goblins, and you produce Gri’tysh the Goblin for examination and testing, then guess what? You’ve come up with some excellent evidence for the position that goblins exist. But if you simply insist over and over that you believe in goblins, producing no evidence at all for your position, then my position that there’s no such thing as goblins is the rational one.
Well you two have me in the jaws of your logic like a terrier with snaucage. I can only pray (I can still do that, right?) you do not clamp down further.
In any case, I have replied to the OP. There is no proof of the sacredness of the Bible. (Why are you arguing with that?) And yet, I still believe.
I certainly never said my position was rational. I simply said it was mine.
Humans say it is inspired by God and humans are not necessarly right. Our belief in God is just a human idea. No one can say in truth (just belief in the person or persons who state it is inspired by God), that can be proven.
The Bible is not evidence, it is the writings of stories told by humans. The belief is in the humans who wrote the stories. There is no more evidence for the Bible than the Koran, or Aesops Fables.
The Bible is based on faith in the authors…not fact!
How do you know the authors were not eye witnesses?
Once again, you put forth the false assumption that most people believe in the same diety you do, and you add the unwarranted assumption that most people make the same interpretations you do.
How do you know John Milton wasn’t an eye witness to the fall of Satan?
If with “interpret them one way” you mean differently than you and “most people”, and if with “differently” you specifically mean scientifically, logically, critically, empirically, rationally… then yes.
That would indeed be quite different from looking at things superficially, non-critically, irrationally and from a position of ignorance and immaturity. Yes, I absolutely agree with you here 100%.
Yes you did. Occam’s razor and all that.
But not only don’t we know that the Bible is God’s word, we know that large chunks of it isn’t - unless God is a liar. Given that, do you have faith in the whole thing or in the parts of it that you happen to like? And what kind of faith is that?
Doesn’t it disturb you that you can make no better defense than this? if a loved one wanted to give all her money to scientology, would you be satisfied with an explanation like yours? Is your position any stronger than that of someone who believes in astrology or palm reading or some other religion?
If we say we like chocolate ice cream because we like it, that’s fine. But the accuracy of the Bible and the existence of God are things describing the world. Where E = mc**2 is not a matter of faith - why should something as important (based on the amount of money spent on it) as the existence of God be?
The authors were humans, some humans can claim something, for an example Kanicbird believes his thoughts are the Holy Spirit telling him things. Believers in any thing written,or taught, is faith in the author’s ideas, and so called visions not fact. There are no original writings to go by and through the years many different translations and translations of the translations. Who witnessed The garden Of Eden? The story was written many centuries ago and some of the written things have been proven to not have happened in that way as written.nor could some of the things happened in that way.
I hope I have not offered any defense. I am simply explaining reality to you. Most people are Deists of one flavor or another. Arguing people out of a position they were not argued into is a foolish waste of time.
If a loved one wanted to spend all their money foolishly, I would have enough sense to realize free people are allowed to do foolish things. That is what freedom means.
Actually, no you are wrong.
The areas where science and religion clash are way off in the corner of human affairs. Does it matter if I believe the universe sits atop a pile of turtles all the way down? Does it matter if you think light is a wave except when it is a particle? This is pretty darn esoteric stuff here. As a practical matter it hardly matters at all.
It is certainly not worth your getting upset about.
That’s simply not true. When religion claims that being gay is a choice, when it opposes acknowledging evolution in such matters as pesticide and antibiotic resistance, when it opposes stem cell research, when it pushes the idea that prayer can cure AIDS, when it lies about the effectiveness of condoms; in these and many other areas its opposition to science harms ordinary people. And then there’s the constant attempts by the beleivers to neuter science education, and to impose their own lies in the classroom. Science has had to engage in a running war against religion as long as science has existed; by its nature, religion is hostile to it, because by its nature science is a threat to religion.
You’re making an over sweeping generalization about all religion, based on a few handpicked examples.
More like the first examples that came to mind. Religion has a long, long history of hostility to religion. It either opposes science, or tries to twist science to its purposes create a pseudoscience. Science, in turn by its nature has hacked and slashed away at religion; pushing it back and back until religion has been reduced to a shadow of itself. The greater science grows in knowledge, the more powerful and important it becomes in a society, the more religion is marginalized because religion is so relentlessly wrong; it cannot win an honest confrontation. Until by now, it is largely constrained to making claims carefully designed so that big, bad science won’t come along and prove it wrong yet again.
Religion and science by nature are enemies because religion is not true, and the goal of science is to discover the truth about the world. This is why so many people are in denial about science and religion being in opposition; they don’t want to admit why science has so relentlessly pushed religion back. We are supposed to pretend that religion doesn’t have a history of always being wrong; we are supposed to pretend that a reasonable person can look at religion and take it seriously.