[QUOTE=FinnAgain]
Well, in as much as a faith-based-belief-system does not pretend to be based on facts, logic, or reason, then sure. Honest religious folks will tell you that they have faith and that’s enough for them. Dishonest folks, like many of the "creationists"will try to substitute their faith for facts.
But, that’s beside the point here. Lobohan was rather obviously poking fun at the common anti-rational assertion that evolution is “just a theory”, as if scientific theories were imagined up after a night of hard drinking.
Faith, as such, cannot be logically debunked because faith is the belief in something without any factual support. Talking about debunking faith is a bit like dancing about architecture.
Faith and science can coexist quite easily as long as those in both camps don’t try to apply their particular metric, be it faith or evidence, to the other side. On that much we are agreed.
With my above comment still standing, certain matters of faith are soundly debunked by reason. A seven day creation, the gods sitting atop Olympus, etc…
To the degree that religious beliefs contradict facts, they are perforce wrong. To the extent that they touch on matters outside the scope of rational inquiry, they are best approached as aesthetic conceits, and not much can be said about them. Evolution does debunk certain religious beliefs, like biblical literalism, for example. That it why some bible beaters are profoundly hostile to learning anything about it.
No, no, no, and yet again no.
That’s the fallacy of false dichotomy and its specific use here has been used to sucker more than a few folks over the ages.
There are numerous possibilities if there is a God (or gods) ranging from them not caring an unlit fart as to whether or not you believe in them, to them having predestined you for damnation anyways, to you believing in the wrong God. Maybe Ahura Mazda is angry at you for being a Christian, yes?
Does that hold any weight with you? If not, why would an a-theist worry about the Christian God being upset with him any more than he’d worry about Odin being perturbed that he wasn’t out spilling blood on the battlefield in His name?
Not any more than it’s a loss for Christians if Odin is pissed off at them for all that ‘turning the other cheek’ crap.
Or as one of the earliest martyred rationalists said, before she was torn to pieces by an angry mob “To rule by fettering the mind through fear of punishment in another world is just as base as to use force.”
Or if God is actually omnibenevolent and doesn’t care if you know of Him, believe in Him, or worship Him. Or if the only choices aren’t “no God” and “the Christian God”. Etc.
Yog Sothoth will eat your soul for that, you know? Isn’t it safer to believe in Him and offer him blood sacrifices, as He demands, than to believe in Jesus? After all, if Yahweh exists, at least after he had his personality makeover in the first few centuries of the first millennium, then he’s a nice guy, and wouldn’t consign His children to an eternity of torment for simply not having faith. Only a real bastard of a father would ever do that.
So it’s a push, right?
Yog Sothoth, on the other hand, is an evil motherfucker and will do stuff to you that can’t even be described in polite society. Surely it’s safer to bet on him, right? Right?
So it’s a push one way, and eternal unspeakable torment at the hands of the Old Gods on the other hand. Only a Vegas gambling fool wouldn’t offer obeisance to Yog Sothoth.
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Are you available to be on retainer to rebut message board posts for me? Because your post pretty much sums up intelligently what I was about to try to get across with venom. Thanks. 