Why would “wink wink nudge nudge, you should support embryonic stem cell research” be a great endorsement for the non-wink wink nudge nudge status of churches?
“Proper perspective” meaning “wink wink nudge nudge.”
And I know a 90 year old lady who smoked eight packs of cigarettes a day and yet still does a hundred pushups every morning.
I.e. I’m not talking about one or two people. Sure one guy might be religious and satisfied with his life and another guy be an atheist and evil, but what does that have to do with direct correlation of religion and entire populations being hungry, stupid, unhealthy, and unsatsified?
People who are poor and miserable in general commit more crime and live less morally, so I mean it’s an all-round cluster fuck.
If that’s what the Christian god wants, it’s not good evidence that he’s the good guy. Again, you’d only be following his word for the sake of getting into heaven, if it exists. But in the meanwhile you’re helping to make Earth a nice little slice of Hell. Sure, heaven lasts a lot longer, but that’s after making great giant leap of faith that has real-life impact on tons of people. If you want to believe it for youself, that’s one thing, but I sure wouldn’t defend that belief in public.
True, but as a percentage of population within their income bracket they commit fewer crimes. The scale of the crime might be larger but that’s unavoidable so long as mankind has hierarchies. And I suspect that you would prefer a guy padding his pockets inside a large company than crews of people going around raping women and taking everything you have except the bare minimum to survive.
White collar crime certainly isn’t friendly, but its impact is overstated compared to the misbehavior in countries that haven’t modernized. Even if the economy goes into a depression, practically speaking all that means is that I sit around eating twinkies for a year and stressing about finding a new job.
At this point you’re simply being totally incoherent. Let’s repeat this. You made a statement about my church’s position on stem cells that was factually 100 percent false. I posted a link to my church’s policy position on the issue, which proves that your statement was 100 percent false. Yet apparently you’re not at all concerned about the fact that your statement has been proven false. You seem to think that repeating the words “wink” and “nudge” 456,724,307,276,891 times will somehow make your untrue statement become true.
So once again, you made a statement about where the Methodist Church stands on stem cell research. I have linked to their actual position. You have not provided any evidence to back up your claims, despite multiple requests. Do you have any evidence that justifies what you said? If the answer is yes, please tell specifically what that evidence is. If the answer is no, please explain why you made that statement. If your answer is to repeat the phrase “wink wink nudge nudge” again, I will assume that you have no evidence, and that you said something which is untrue.
I’ll be interested in seeing what evidence you provide to back up this claim.
There is no such correlation.
Cite?
Please name the specific actions that I am taking which “make Earth a nice little slice of Hell.” If you are unable to do so, then please apologize for this insult.
Again, please provide the specifics for what I’m doing that negatively impacts “tons of people”, or withdraw the claim.
Ultimately I have a feeling that this thread is dead-ending. I am asking you to provide some evidence that the claims you’re making are true. Whenever I ask you to do so, you merely repeat the claims. I do not believe that proof by endless repetition is a valid proof technique. If the best that you can do is to repeat them, that suggests to me that the claims are false.
Cite? I’m not talking about what would happen without law, but what happens now. Violent crime, yes, but I suspect there is more tax evasion in higher brackets. Poor people may commit more home burglaries, but I think Bernie Madoff stole more than all burglars put together.
Dylan, quoting Woody Guthrie, I suspect “some people can rob you with a fountain pen.”
So, we realize that all those things are imperfect and can be improved. Someone who thinks religion comes directly for god must think it perfect, or at least parts of it are perfect.
I cannot give totals for all of human history, but in my personal experience the answers to all those questions are zero.
If there has never been any questioning of God’s word, then what is in the writings of Thomas Merton, Donald Miller, Anne Lamott, Peter Standford, Larry Kearney, and many others. I would have thought that all of those authors question the word of God. You, on the other hand, apparently know that there has never been any questioning of the word of God, so you must have some reason to believe that those authors have never done so. Please provide this explanation, and be as specific and thorough as possible.
I’ve had many conversations with Christians about their religion and all of them have provided evidence that proves the exact opposite of your claim.
I’d be happy to discuss that in another thread, but let’s keep on subject here. We were not discussing anything to do with science. I asserted that materialists do not generally question their beliefs or explore intellectually. I find, much more frequently, that they simply make stuff up and pretend that the stuff they made up is true. A good half dozen examples can be found in this very thread. If you don’t think that a message board is a good place to take representative samples, then several recent best-selling books by prominent atheists will provide examples in equal abundance.
Are you asserting that religious types are less likely to assert ex nihilo?
(I am too lazy to dig up quotes from prominent creationists where they are pulling stuff out of their butts.)
You’ve shattered your credibility when you claim that you’ve heard zero instances of religious people crediting God’s word as the reason for their beliefs or actions, but if you claim that religious people aren’t as good at making stuff up as anybody else, you will be trying to top yourself.
I picked those two merely because I’ve been reading their works recently. Truth be told, I don’t agree with your description. When I read articles like this from Rev. King, I find them to be models of factual and logical reasoning. Yes, there is appeal to the emotions in there as well, but that doesn’t negate the argument. King wrote so that readers would be well-informed, and also to persuade them. Dennet writes for the same reasons. Even if we find that particular comparison to be useless, I see similar results everywhere. All the famous Christian authors I’ve read, including Chesterton, Lewis, Merton, and others, were quite capable of wrapping together many sources from many different places and times into a single argument. I see that much less from atheist authors. I’m sure there are some atheist authors out there who can do it, but I don’t see it as often.
If you are trying to argue that non-theists are less capable of citing sources hither and yon, just because scientific papers tend not to benefit much from quoting Poor Richard’s Almanac, then I fear you are setting yourself up for a losing battle. (For example, I personally think it’s an amazingly stupid conclusion that can only be reached via blind-eyed bias, bigotry, and hatred. And through no other route. I may be wrong about that last bit, but that doesn’t change the fact it’s a conclusion that you cannot successfully argue to me.)
For your own benefit, try dividing writings up by whether they are using rhetorical argument tactics or not, and only comparing like against like. You might see a difference - even if a rhethorical argument manages to be internally logical and consistent, it’s still not in any way the same sort of creature as a scientific argument.
Hmm, a bunch of Christian writers. I don’t see any books by the ordained priest Thomas Merton called ‘God is Wrong’, and I don’t see any books by Donald Miller called ‘I think this tenet of Christianity is wrong’, etc. I think I’m seeing this because everything I can find on these authors says that they’re all very pro-Christianity. So why would they question god’s word? You must be using a different definition of the word ‘question’, by which I quite obviously meant ‘disagree with’.
You mean all of them have absolutely factual answers to all your questions and none of them claimed belief or faith for anything? Wow, these must be some Christians. I wonder why I never meet any like that.
So you’re saying that materialists are completely independent from science? Interesting. And you claim that materialists make things up and say they’re true? So this is different from Christians who, as far as we know, made up god and say that his existence is true?
Are you reading the same article I am? Cuz I’m not getting factual or logical as the main point. Yes, he uses fact and logic, I’m not debating that. But he’s not just trying to get information across, he’s trying to persuade people, and so he’s not limiting himself to fact and logic. He’s using emotion, personal connections, etc to do this. Why would a philosophy writer put appeals to emotion in a paper?
I’ve read stuff by some of those names, and what I saw was religious authors quoting other religious authors. And those same authors using non-religious sources only infrequently. Of course religious authors would quote other religious authors, where else are they going to find material to back up their arguments? There’s no real evidence outside of religious literature, so they pretty much have to. At the same time, why would an atheist quote a religious author except when referencing religion? Dawkins last book I read was crammed full of religious references, because he was talking about religion. But that book on genetics only referenced religion in a few places, usually when rebutting arguments.
Trying to claim materialists shun religious sources is like criticizing a chef for not shopping for food at the hardware store.
You are correct, every thing we learn,are taught,think, or read is human,or from another human, so religions have no more validity. What we believe or taught was from a human so, there is nothing divine in any of our writings, teachings or thoughts, so there should be no dispute as any belief is just that, unless it can be proven, if it is proven it is no longer just belief but a fact, belief doesn’t require fact, just desire or hope. One can believe he won’t be hit by a train if he stands on the tracks but it can be proven that should he stand on the tracks when a train is coming he will be killed.
Can you prove God told John Newton to quit, or do you believe John Newton. It could be John Newton just wasn’t satisfied with his life and decided to change. There is no proof that God said ,or did anything and a person saying He did does not make it so. He believed it was God as that is what he wanted it to be. Other wise we would have to believe that God told Muhammad to kill all the people who were heratics. I could say I did something because God told me to do it but it would not be true. A woman killed her 5 children because she believed God told her to.
People do good things, some because they believe God wants them to do it, others do good things because they have the desire to help others, they can see that kindness helps not only the other person but themselves as well. To say one knows about God is not the truth, one can say they believe that God said ,did or inspired tbut that is not necessarily a fact. A fact can be proven.
I suppose that depends on how you count the crimes. How many people did the Enron folks rob or cheat. How many folks did Madoff rob? When company execs make decisions that result in a class action lawsuit by hundreds of people how many crimes do we count?
The more relevant question would be, is there any reason to doubt what John Newton said? He wrote about his conversion experience in great detail and with great consistency. For those who have read his writings, the theory that he just “decided to change” does not hold water. The change that he underwent between his early adult life and his life as a Christian is somewhat larger and more dramatic than that.
This is just logical nonsense. If we believe one person, we must believe another completely unrelated person? Ridiculous. It’s like saying that if we believe what Barack Obama says about his stimulus measure then we must believe what George W. Bush said about his stimulus measure. A far more logical approach was espoused by Chesterton.