Correct. It makes magnets much, much less extraordinary. Magnets are directly observable, and given the evidence it’s easy to accept their existence. You might even say they are ordinary. Gods aren’t. If the only support for the existence of magnets was millennia-old books and people testifying that magnets spoke to them in their minds and did impossible things, then it would make just as much sense to be suspicious about claims that magnets exist.
Smiley Bastard said: *Would you want to be convicted of murder because someone said their god told them you committed the murder?
Do you want drug trials to be based on one or two people who claimed to be cured by the drug in question?*
You are mischaracterizing my position. I never said that claiming to be a prophet is good, reliable, infallible, compelling evidence. I merely said that it is small, tiny evidence. It has to be. So, yes, if two people claimed to be cured by drug, that would INCREASE, at least in my mind, the odds that the drug works. I would want MORE evidence, but I would still agree that the two people’s claim about the drug are evidential.
Definition of EXTRAORDINARY
1 a : going beyond what is usual, regular, or customary <extraordinary powers>
b : exceptional to a very marked extent <extraordinary beauty>
c of a financial transaction : nonrecurring
2: employed for or sent on a special function or service <an ambassador extraordinary>
I am saying that I see magnets every day. I have yet to see any gods or any clear effects of them.
For example if you say yesterday you had eggs for breakfast. I will generally be willing to accept that because it is not extraordinary. People do it all the time. I have done it.
Now if you say that yesterday you rode I will want some evidence. It is far less ordinary. I believe it does happen, but is is very uncommon.
If you claim you walked on mars yesterday I would not believe you without pretty extraordinary evidence. I am not aware that this has ever been done. Now I believe this can and some day will be done, because we can see how it could be doe given what we know.
Finally if you claim to have had lunch with Thor yesterday, well that is another notch up. I have seen not evidence that Thor exists as a real entity and I can’t even see how it would be possible being I don’t think he exists. For this I would need some serious extraordinary evidence.
I hope that clears it up for you.
abele,
This is god speaking. Go put a chicken mask on your head and run around the outside of your house three times squawking loudly and flapping your arms. Post the video on youtube, and then send me $20 in a sealed envelope. If you do this I will grant you eternal happiness.
Are you 100% certain that I am not god? Isn’t the small chance that I am worth the risk.
Also while you’re at it you could address my (god’s) point that even though the reward is infinite it still may not be worth the cost if the probability is too low.
Voyager: Because the Book of Judges was written for a specific purpose; to inform us about the lives of the Judges (which is exactly why many of the other books of the Bible don’t refer to the Torah; e.g, Esther.)
Also, please see Judges 1:20, where it refers to Moses’ command [which is recorded in the Torah] that Caleb should get Hebron.
Judges also refers to the Exodus miracles “that our fathers told us.”
It also refers to “Sinai,” in Deborah’s Song.
I don’t have my bible in front of me, so I am using an online version, and my weak memory of the verses.
He didn’t understand my point at all. My rabbi’s words were only useful in showing what the belief of our part of Judaism was.
In classes I got fed history written as if the post-Abram part of the Bible was 100% correct. That part isn’t worth much.
Sabbath is here. I will respond 2moroww night. C ya.
(BTW, if you love King David, then read what he told Solomon on his deathbed: “Observe the laws and commemorations of the Torah that Moses wrote…”
Esther is fiction also.
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I’m certainly not claiming that in these stories they have no idea of the supposed history. I’d have to look it up, but I’d suspect they mention the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob somewhere. What is missing is the sense of the Torah as a book, and the sense of following the laws and commandments therein. Judges is set not long after Joshua - how did the Torah to get lost to be suspiciously rediscovered during the time of the second Temple?
The equivalent in the US would be for someone to discover ten new amendments to the Constitution which got lost around 1800. Not likely, is it?
Again, Voyager, the book of Judges does refer to a command of the Torah, that Caleb gets Hebron.
When Samson wants to marry a Philisine girl, his parent’s are appalled that he was to marry one of the “uncircumcised” philistines. So they observed the Torah. But the purpose of the book is not the Torah. It’s equivalent to why the Constitution doesn’t mention that Columbus discovered america. The purpose of the constitution is something else.
Again with the magnets!!! This guy really is a Juggalo.
Right. It is “small, tiny evidence”.
So far as I understand **Diogenes’ **point that in case, it is not that there is zero evidence for these religions. It is that there are no choices that do not carry that risk. If we choose atheism - we run the risk of losing out on eternal happiness from many gods. If we choose a faith - we run the risk of losing out on eternal happiness from all the gods we don’t pick.
There is no choice that allows us to avoid the possibility of squandering eternal happiness. We’re all in the same barrel on that one, because irregardless of our particular points of view, there are quite literally infinite possibilities of eternal happiness that we have not selected.
100%? You must have some absolutely ironclad evidence then, or certainly wouldn’t say something like that. So why haven’t you bothered to show us this evidence?
First, what if your life is all you have? You’ve just given it up for nothing. Until I see this amazing evidence of yours, I won’t really know what the odds might be.
And second, there are many afterlifes, not just one. If you’re wrong, not only have you thrown your life away, but now you get to spend eternity in suffering and pain, or boredom, or something else bad. So it isn’t just a small chance of eternal paradise, but a rather large chance of eternal suffering. But then, you do have 100% convincing evidence. I can’t wait to see it.
You haven’t, I presume, read this Staff Report?
No, we’re not. There’s no such animal.
Read Stephen Hawking’s “The Arrow of Time”, and get back to us.
Dear God,
I’ve been waiting a long time to say this directly to your face: GO FUCK YOURSE
That’s exactly my point. If I have “small, tiny evidence” for something which will provide me eternal, infinite happiness, I follow it.
I would recommend that you read Rabbi David Gottlieb’s Living Up to the Truth. He is the Orthodox “Richard Dawkins.”
If Pascal’s Wager tells us one thing, it is to take evidence as seriously as we can. The cite you provided is called taking evidence as flippantly as possible.
I will outline the main objections presented to Moses’ writing of the Torah in your citation:
- Why would Moses write the he is the most humble person? Because God told him to. God is the author of the Bible; Moses merely wrote it.
2) Why would Moses write the he died, and why would he describe his own burial? Because Moses was a prophet and God told him to write what will happen after his death, in the past-tense, so that the Book of the Torah would be thorough narrative (as the Talmud says, “Moses wrote the last verses with tears.”)
3) The fact that there are doublets. How does that prove that Moses didn’t write the Torah? (It just means that certain stories are repeated in order to stress various aspects of the story. So the first creation story is the worlds creation, and the next is a summary, which focuses more on man’s creation)
- Contradictions in the Torah The classic commentators answer all the contradictions. That some are too lazy to read them should not bother us.
Those are not the main objections. The primary objection is that there isn’t a shred of evidence in favor of it. The Torah does not even claim itself that it was written by Moses. The burden to prove Mosaic authorship rests on those who want to assign it. There is no burden to disprove it. Having said that, those who wish to claim Mosaic authorship have some pretty tough obstacles to get around. To name a few:
- Moses is a fictional character.
- The Torah was written at least 500 years after Moses was alleged to have lived.
- It’s written in a language that did not yet exist during the alleged time of Moses.
- It shows clear lingusitic evidence of multiple sources edited (not particularly well) into a single narrative.
Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch is not taken anything close to seriously by historians or critical Biblical scholars. It is a religious belief only, and a decidedly unsupportable one at that.
Richard Dawkins came up with a “New Ten Commandments.” One of the first is that we should be skeptical about trusting authority. You have violated that commandment.
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The Torah does claim that it was written by Moses, numerous times (See, e.g., Dueteronomy 31) and the numerous books of Joshua, I Kings, II Kings, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, Chronicles are all quite clear that Moses wrote the Torah.
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How do they know that the written language didn’t exist during the time of Moses? (Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence)
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Alice in Wonderland has a different style that “An elementary study in determinents,” and they both had the same author.