I am a theist. I keep covenant with the G-d of Abraham. I believe many things. Including that Lekatt just had a dream.
Aeschines Silly me, I thought you left because you kept making unsupported statements and getting trounced in debates. You just made some claims about psi. Prove them or retract.
What are we discussing?
So you hang out with other new agers, and 95% of the people you meet believe in spirits. Imagine that.
Atheism isn’t a cause any more than not giving a rats ass about the rain forest is a cause. And what does atheism have to do with psi?
Winner, Lack of Self-Awareness As Self-Parody Award.
Fine. Point to my “ideology” that demands that I reject evidence for God, psionic powers, or NDEs as mystical. The answer is, there is none; it’s just that all the evidence supports me. There’s no wiggle room in known physical laws for such things, and no evidence for them anyway.
And you are continuing, as pointed out by several posters above, to fail to provide any evidence for your side. You make implausible claims, refuse to provide evidence for them ( because you have none, of course ), and then you mock people for not believing them.
If you feel you must conrtribute nothing but insults to this thread, take your schtick to the Pit.
[ /Modding ]
I appreciate you post. I remember in the good old days you could have interesting philosophical discussions with different points of view sparring away and having fun.
Here it seems you are considered heretical if you don’t toe the party line. Yes, they do like to ‘rat pack’ in an attempted to stifle dissent and drive a wooden stake through the cold, black heart of Blasphemy.
I’m particularly fond of how they can pull the ‘fallacy card’ faster than Jesse Jackson can pull the ‘race card’. In particular, I like the ad hominem accusation when this thread is riddled with words like fools, woo woo, garbage, idiots, etc. Oh, well, what’s a guy to do?
Hey, I’ve got a good one for you:
An atheist walks into a bar with an angel on his shoulder and orders a beer.
Bartender says: what’s that?
Atheist says: what?
Bartender says: you’ve got an angel on your shoulder.
Atheist says: nonsense, angels don’t exist…but just to be on the safe side, order him a beer, too.
How about come up with some actual evidence for your claims ? Instead of playing Internet Martyr because people don’t swallow everything you say without question. No one is “stifling dissent”.
An unfunny joke attempting to push the tired old claim that atheists/skeptics/anyone not brain dead gullible is simply ignoring the “obvious evidence” for the Truth. Generally used by people have have no evidence for their beliefs but hate to admit it.
*You sound just like a fundamentalist preacher only with the polarity reversed.
*
The middle quote isn’t even me. And all your name calling of me, all your attempts to change the subject won’t change the fact that all the evidence says you are wrong.
And since when did a “fundamentalist preacher” go around demanding evidence ? Such people, like you, deny the need for evidence. The fact is that if there’s anyone who thinks like a fundamentalist here, it’s you. You’ve made it clear that you have nothing to support what you believe; you’ve just declared it to be true, and anyone who asks for evidence is closed minded or oppressing you.
What, you mean back before people expected you to back up your assertions with evidence?
Oh, the drama. :rolleyes: There must be nearly a couple of people telling you that making claims and not supporting them is not a good way to convince people of anything. Quick, cry ‘persecution’ louder, maybe someone will believe you.
Keep repeating the same fallacies and ad homs apparently.
I’ve got a better one:
An atheist walks into his apartment building with nothing on his shoulder that he can see.
“Oh, you’ve got an angel on your shoulder.”
“Um, what?”
“You do, I can see it. I believe in angels.”
“Excuse me? What are you talking about?”
“You have an angel on your shoulder. It’s obvious.”
/looks
“I do?”
"Yes you do. It’s right there.
“Um, ok…”
“Don’t look at me like that! I believe in angels! I’m not crazy! What the hell is wrong with you! You have an angel on your shoulder!”
/runs
This happened to me, pretty much word for word. It was oh so funny. Later anyway.
Here’s what you’re not getting. You keep saying, “…the fact that all the evidence says you’re wrong.” You forget to insert the words, “…all the evidence SO FAR says you’re wrong” That’s a huge distinction. The mistake you’re making is that you consider ‘all the evidence’ is all that you need to prove, once and for all, that something doesn’t exist or is impossible. You could use that same logic for string theory or quantum loop gravity if you wanted. The second mistake you make is that you assume all things are quantifiable and measurable by instruments.
The classic dodge. X exists! Prove me wrong.
The first mistake you made is thinking that we have to prove anything. We don’t, you do. You made the claims, you provide the evidence. You haven’t provided any, so we have no reason to think that anything you’ve claimed it true. The default assumption is that something with no evidence doesn’t exist, not that it needs to be proven to exist.
The second mistake you made is in thinking that just because evidence might be found for it in the future, something is true. If we have no evidence for a claim right now, then a rational person would not have a reason to think the claim was true. Saying ‘It might be true’ doesn’t make something true.
Look, you’ve spent all these pages arguing for this. Not once have you actually bothered to try and give any evidence. That’s all you have to do. Shut all of us up, make us all look stupid, give us something. You’ll win. We’ll be wrong and you’ll be right, and you’ll be able to prove it. So do it already.
Dude, the “SO FAR” is implied. We know it’s there. It’s no secret. Evidence could, in theory, arrive tomorrow to demonstrate that, yes, all of reality is Odin’s puppet show.
But unless and until such evidence does arrive, we’d be fools not to make decisions based on the evidence we actually HAVE. When new evidence comes along, we’ll adapt. Which is why we ask you for your evidence. Which you don’t have, because you got nothin’. Except a foolish proclivity to build your beliefs based on wishful thinking instead of the available evidence, and a martyr complex because we don’t immidiately and reasonlessly accept that your wishful thinking is correct.
And science accepts human testimony too - that’s how we know people dream. We just don’t accept human testomony as evidence for things it doesn’t actually prove. For example, when I dream about smurfs, it doesn’t mean they objectively exist. It’s simple, really.
I’m going to say this one more time for you: no one has proof that god does or does not exist. The most you can say, assuming you’re objective and impartial. is that with our current state of the art technology which is finite in nature, we can’t disprove the concept and neither can we prove it. We can also say that so far there’s been absoutely no indication whatsoever. You can’t say that there is not god absolutely based on not being able to detect its presence right here, right now.
If you didn’t like my joke, come up with one that’s like having a true believer walks into a bar with an atheist on his shoulder…
But that applies to anything that can be imagined by the human mind. I can’t disprove unicorns, or the Boogeyman, or the Tooth Fairy. Do I also have to say it is possible they exist as well?
Which god? The one that created the earth before the sun? The one that flooded the planet? The one that made humans one day out of dirt?
And what does this have to do with NDEs? Other than the fact that there’s no reason to believe in them, and there’s evidence against them in the fact that they require humans to keep their consciousnesses in souls, and if that were the case then the soul would not lose consciousness when the body was klonked on the head?
So what?
You asked a question in GQ that got enough contrary answers to have it moved to GD, because no one has a factual answer at this point. You were asked on multiple occasions to provide your best guess/hypothesis/divine revelation regarding the cause of your experience and you chose to ignore those requests to post page after page of attacks on “pseudoskeptics,” replete with really bad analogies and utterly inaccurate claims regarding history.
There are only a few posters, here, who are actually absolutists regarding the material world, but you spent so much time attacking those two or three posters that you have persuaded everyone else that you really are pushing a woo woo agenda. It really is not that hard to ignore a small number of posters. Had you chosen to respond to the earlier requests for your explanations and then simply interacted only with those posters who were willing to discuss your ideas, this thread would have turned out much differently. Since you failed to present any ideas, you have handed the discussion over to those posters who do have a thesis: that all the world is only material.
I’m afraid that your decision to refrain from discussing your own original topic along with your multiple page hijack with straw man arguments against “pseudoskeptics” has given you exactly the thread that you have chosen.
And, speaking of straw men:
I actually tend to agree with Aeschines’s single point about not being able to have “fun” discussions, but he ruins it with his significant distortions: that it is “atheists” who have ruined it–as if atheists are the only ones who would like to see claims for odd things supported by evidence, (there are lots of theists and deists on that side of the argument, as well); and as if the proponents of the spiritualist and psi sides of the arguments had not engaged in every bit as much name calling, finger pointing, and foot stamping as the skeptics.
Sam Harris and Dawkins are the “prime movers” behind the new cultural phenomena that has been labeled “neoatheism” whether you like it or not.
Atheism has morphed from saying “in my opinion there is no god…to “there absolutely, for sure, never has been, never will be a god. You are stating it as a fact as though it were an immutable, unchanging, everlasting truth carved on a stone tablet. Well, guess what, if something is a fact it means it’s already been proven. Where’s your proof? If you state it as absolute fact then you can’t hide behind the fallacy ticket, play on a tilted playing field and move your goalposts close to you chest while pushing the other guy’s out as far as you can. Saying there is or isn’t a god are both extraordinary claims that require extraordinary evidence to prove them and so far there ain’t been squat on either side. I say opinion, and you say fact. Two very different things.
Where’s the punch line, by the way? It started out good but faded in the back stretch
Unicorns. Boogeyman. Tooth Fairy. Fact or opinion?
No, they aren’t. There’s no such “new cultural phenomena”.
Plenty of atheists have talked that way. You are trying to portray a conversational style as a movement.
The various physical laws God would have to break come to mind.
It’s something that came be stated as “everlasting truth” because there’s no evidence for your side, your claims are simply silly on the face of them, you can’t even agree with each other, your claims violate physical law, and because history teaches that religious claims are virtually always wrong.
“There is a God” is a religious claim, and judging from religion’s track record of accuracy it can be assumed to be false even if you know nothing other than the fact that it’s a religious claim. That’s what religion is largely for; a means of claiming blatant falsehoods to be true, and demanding respect for them. If something is actually true, it doesn’t get the religion label slapped on it.
Wrong. Claiming there is a God is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence, but has none. Claiming there is no God is the logical default, just as is claiming there are no invisible goblins or claiming that Sauron is fictional.