Christians often bear bad fruit.
My vote: not a miracle.
Intelligence, planning, forethought, calculation, preparation, testing, learning from previous crashes, engineering, training, having an emergency plan. Understanding metallurgy, physics, gravity, buoyancy, aerodynamics. And also, though I doubt Bill will admit this, but a portion of this event can be attributed to federally-enforced safety regulations and aircraft safety standards. Yes, government helped.
But if he wants to throw out all of the above and rely solely upon God to save him, he can be my guest.
One of my coworkers was saying how everyone prayed on the airplane and that’s how they were saved. I’m sure someone, somewhere on the 9/11 planes prayed and that didn’t help them. Of course, the terrorists were also praying to their god for a successful mission, so I guess that was a “miracle” for the terrorists and their followers. Oh, but wait, I can just see the counter-arguments now: “Prayer (miracles) work when they do and they don’t work when they don’t–it all comes out according to God’s plan.”
And I don’t consider myself an “atheist” but a skeptic. Skeptics believe what the evidence points to. If it points to a “God,” great, if it points to something else then that’s what gets my vote.
Super fans from Chicago would like to have a word with you…
Well, you mean effective, right? Because they are not “good,” they are agents of evil. Dividing people into opposing camps and setting them against each other – implicit in his statement – for profit (he DOES get paid), is willingly endangering others for money. Not unlike robbing them at gunpoint.
You aren’t usually such a blatant troll. What’s up today? 
This is of course untrue, or science would not be possible. But you know all this. What’s with all the adulation of woolly thinking?
Well, somebody’s got to pick up Bush’s slack, now that he’s leaving office!
That definition is wrong. Period. The major fallacy in your argument is that you’re trying to argue about self-definition. Yoiu’re actually studid enough to think that because you found a faulty definition on the internet (which, I assure you, is NOT the formal, academic definition), you can therefore conclude that anyone who self-identifies as an atheist “denies the existence of God.” That’s bullshit. Most of them don’t, and your inaccurate internet definition doesn’t prove otherwise.
Which is exactly how I defined it, virtually word for word.
That second definition is wrong.
Nope, you’re just flauntring your ignorance, as is your wont. Take an introductory philosophy class sometime. you’re just making yourself look like an idiot.
I can’t be assed to read them, but if they all define atheism as a spositive assertion that gods do not exist then they’re all wrong.
The translation is that you know you’d get your ass handed to you.
You are not led to your refrigerator by “faith,” moron, you go there because you have already acquired past empirical data that tells you the fridge has food in it. You were not born with that knowledge, and God did not give it to you. You acquired your knowledge that your fridge has food in it by guess what…scientific method.
Scientific method is not about “solving problems” anyway. It’s a method for discovering information.
In most workplaces facing a crisis, the higher-ups would have insisted on having a committee meeting to decide the best course of action. Meanwhile, if the person in the position to act, took action, he would have been reprimanded by a supervisor. In this case, however, the pilot saw what needed to be done, did it, and did not get blocked by a dimwit suprvisor. That, my friends, is the miracle.
What the fuck does evolution have to do with anything? Scientific method is an indirect result of evolution, and it’s one that helps perpetuate a species, but it’s not a cause of evolution, except maybe in the very fundamental ways that any species is able to learn and remember anything from past experience. For instance, some predators can learn that brightly colored frogs taste really bad and avoid trying to eat them. They’re using scientific method. Humans just figured out how to refine it.
In any case, getting back to the post that started this whole stupid tangent, your impression that there is any such thing as a “secular” method for discovering information exists entirely in your own head. One is either following scientific method or one is not. Theistic beliefs do not play into it.
I know. We’ve been through this before. I produce cites and evidence and definitions from a wide variety of sources supporting the definition and usage, and your response is that it’s “wrong. Period.” Your justification is to claim some sort of right of self-definition. As if you decided that you no longer identified yourself as “human” and instead called yourself a “chimp,” I am somehow obligated to accept your innane stupidity.
The rest of the fucking world uses these words the way I use them. Grow up.
People are feeding him, and he thinks he’s being clever. That’s what’s up with Scylla.
Seriously. His arguments are so damned stupid that they aren’t even worth the time to respond.
I’ll second this. There was a lot of work done to insure this little miracle, and there were a lot of humans doing the work. Must’ve missed where any deities were involved.
No, he means ‘good’. Clothahump, as far as I can tell, believes most or all of the bullshit all the rightwing blowhards on TV and the radio spew.
I don’t want to get into the middle of this argument, Scylla, but suppose you ran across a definition that said one of the following:
a person who denies the existence of anthropogenic global warming
a person who denies the existence of oxygen
a person who denies the existence of UFOs
a person who denies the existence of the Illuminati
Would you be inclined to believe that AGW, oxygen, UFOs, or the Illuminati exist, based on that wording of the definition? To me, “denies the existence of” suggests a delusion. It seems a poor definition to my ears, because it appears to presuppose the iron-clad existence of God, and define “atheist” as someone who refuses to admit it.
you have no idea what you’re talking about. You shouldn’t venture into topics about which you know nothing. If you look into any cites at all beyond the Google results page, you’ll see that trying to define atheism categorically as a positive belief that gods don’t exist is overnarrow and wrong and is really a definition only of a subset of atheism. Moreover, you’re basically saying that the majority of people who self-define as atheists are hard atheists even when they tell you they aren’t.
I just wanted to juxtapose those two quotes. Carry on.
If all the pilots were dead, all the plane’s systems including the backup and emergency ones were out of order, the engines dropped off, the crew and passengers panicked and ran amuck, but the plane dove at just the right angle and speed to make a perfect landing and everyone survived without a scratch, now that would be a coincidence. But it still wouldn’t be a miracle unless you can show me that it couldn’t have happened without a supernatural influence.
If the plane had been higher when it lost power, they would have had more options about where to land; maybe could have made Teterboro or back to LaGuardia. Airliners have lost power and landed at airports.
In any case, you touch down at about the same speed. If anything, landing would be slower later in the flight after it had burned off some of the fuel it was carrying.
And O’Reilly is an idiot.