Theists: I am still alive: Valteron

Great Debates
101

I’m going to tell you a story.

I was at a football game last night. There was less than a minute to go. The other team was ahead, and had the ball. The game was over, and they were running out the clock. Now, my team had not played well all night. They made many, many mistakes, and had they not made them, they would have won. So needless to say, I was more than a little disappointed in them.

Another fan of my team walks by on the bleachers, stops and says, “WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! GO OUR TEAM!!!” He holds out his fist for the traditional fist bump. I ignore him. He just stands there.

After a bit, I look up at him. I get the feeling maybe he’s slightly mentally disabled, based on his actions, appearance and apparent balance problem. So I oblige him with the fist bump, hoping he’ll be on his way.

Instead, I get “WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! GO OUR TEAM!!!” again. And, “Come on buddy, say it! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! GO OUR TEAM!!!”

At this point, I realize he’s (probably) not mentally disabled, he’s drunk. A lot. And they don’t sell alcohol at the game. He’s stumbling around 150 feet up on rain-slick bleachers, slurring his words drunk, and has clearly pissed himself.

I continue to ignore him. He repeats the above about 10 or 15 times, interspersed with “I’m gunna stand here and make you look like a asshole until you say it.”

I continue to ignore him as a few other folks in the crowd turn around, chuckle at him, and point out the wet spots running from his crotch down to his legs. He eventually stumbles away, and as time expired and our team walked dejectedly off the field and the fans silently exited the bleachers, on into the night I faintly heard “WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! GO OUR TEAM!!!”

Not sure if it’s relevant or not, but for some reason I was reminded of it.

102

Even scarier is when these types, who ignore reality in favor of shouting their beliefs, are in the majority.

103

Sorry, I didn’t realise it was a joke thread.

104

Valteron, as a fellow atheist, I have to say that I’m tremendously underwhelmed by this argument. The spotty record of prayer to achieve good, I notice. Its failure to demise an unbeliever, not interesting.

105

This thread was worth it for the drunk pissing his pants and rooting for a team that had already lost.

106

As a latecomer to this issue, where is/was the closed thread, so I can know what the heck the OP is talking about?

107

It’s here:

And as I said earlier, he seems to have decided that the property of omnipotence includes the obligation to do whatever Valteron demands. Just slightly presumptuous, I’d say.

108

…is **that ** what you got out of it? I kinda equated **Valteron ** with the drunk guy who everyone ignored…

109

Oh, I’m sure that was the intent of the post. And, agog at the fine and glorious example of argument it was, the way it was so careful not to resort to things like insult and ad hominem, I decided to honor it by using it again, to point at a group that it applies as well or better to.

I mean, yes, Valeron’s little challenge suffers from the same small-sample-size problem that all the positive evidence-of-prayer’s-effectiveness arguments suffer from. Plus he got rather a bit hyperdramatic. But even so, if you’re going to sling insults at him in true GD fashion, you should make sure that they don’t apply equally well in their details to the side he’s opposing.

110

I have just reread this “God, if you exist, I dare you to kill me” thread that I started, from the recul of a few days, and I have finally realized why atheists really suffer from an image problem, and why atheism is such a slow-spreading thing.

You guys got no fucking sense of fun or humour!

Do you honestly think I thought I was going to convince anyone for or against atheism or theism? With a few exceptions (and I knoted who you are) most of my fellow atheists attacked me like the fate of the world hung in the balance.

Lighten up. :smiley: Sheesh! :rolleyes:

111

Joke threads? In my Great Debates? It’s more likely than you think.

112

No sense of fun?
Dude, we get to sleep in on Sunday morning- what’s not fun about that?

113

People always go about this all wrong.

The proper way to prove that God doesn’t exist is to announce your intentions, then proceed to jump off of a cliff and if God saves you, then God exists. If God does not save you, you’ve freed yourself of a world filled with those pesky believers who keep nagging you by thinking things different from you. Everybody wins.

114

Oh. So you were “posting a point of view which you do not in fact advocate, not in the interests of sparking debate but for the sake of eliciting a reaction for your own amusement”? We need a word for that, I think. :dubious:

115

If nothing else, this thread has been positive in that Valteron no longer believes I exist. I have that in writing.

116

I notice that I hear this claim, a lot, when people tell jokes and then hear everyone laughing at the teller, not the joke.

117

You hear this a lot because even though this is supposed to be great debates, it is always easier to attack the poster than to respond rationally to what the poster is saying. Personal, ad hominem attacks, saying I am laughable as you imply, Tomndeb, are just confirmations of the French adage that insults are the only weapon of he who has no arguments. Not only am I not offended by your comments but I wear them as a badge of honour.

What you fail to realize is that a joke does not have to be 100% humour. It can have a serious underside. When Johnathan Swift wrote “A Modest Proposal” he was not seriously proposing that Irish Children should be cooked and eaten. But neither was he engaging in pure bufoonery.

Guess what, Tom? Believe it or not, I am actually intelligent enough to know that if your alleged God did not kill me when I invited him to, it can have one of two meanings. It can mean he does not exist or that he exists and chose not to. Well, Duuuuuuh :rolleyes:

I was fully aware of that BEFORE I pulled my little parlor game, believe it or not. I just wanted to see what the theists would say. Not to mention the snotty, nose-in-the-air responses I anticipated from other atheists. God forbid (pardon the pun) that anyone should post something satirical and light-hearted like I did, rather than discussing some occult line of reasoning as dry as an old fart, on causes and existence and the ontological argument versus the Thomistic arguments of ultimate causes!

The whole thing is amusing, really.

Has it occurred to you that I might also be laughing at you?

118

[sub]WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! GO OUR TEAM!!![/sub]

119

Gee, Garfield, I wonder if I also could “score big” in this debate by implying unflattering comparisons between you and some piss-pants drunk or some mental deficient I recently had the misfortune to come across.

I could easily do so. … . . .But you know, on reflection, I think I will refrain from such tactics. Because that is not how mature, intelligent people discuss things.

120

Why start now?