Remind us all, did you have to email an admin to get permission to post here? Are you relegated to a “lol christians!” forum?
No?
I must say I like this new style of argumenting.
You are improving, sir.
“Skeptic Tank”?
Really?!?
Yet we still don’t ban you because you represent a view that contradicts ours.
Right like when you dismissed a well regarded international conference on divine healing as just a bunch of quacks? Kind a bold statement since you refused to attend the conference and know ZIPPO ZILCH NADA about these doctor’s credentials or background.
Problem is you and pretty much most atheist scan not demonstrate that you have an open mind to seriously consider any evidence. The fact that you always respond in a negative condescending tone only supports my quite valid assertations.
If I ask questions, you respond negatively and say you don’t have to answer them.
Here’s a test:
Please provide proof with backing documentation that Christianity is a myth. Demonstrate how there is absolutely nothing different from the Christian myth vs the many other examples that you enjoy throwing in my face.
Please provide proof that there is no life after death.
Of course, you will refuse in typical fashion.
Or this:
:rolleyes:
There’s no such thing. It’s well regarded only by people who already believe in divine healing.
Why are we back to Christianity again? Islam and Mithraism are just as made up.
If there were a real difference, wouldn’t you have posted it by now?
Please provide proof that Vishnu is not more powerful than Yahweh.
You’ve never posted on Slick’s forum?
It’s a treat… In some sense of the word…I’m sure…
I don’t know what you mean by myth, but here is something I wrote up on why I don’t trust the NT. I’ve expanded it a bit since I posted it on that forum.
If you’d actually like to discuss it, I’m game.
“Well-regarded” here is extremely loaded/relative. Divine healing has been studied/shown to be no different from your plain old average placebo effect. That’s why people get called “quacks” who try to pretend otherwise. The data says one thing, but some people swear and say another – and yet they can’t show any proof that they’re right. If anything, it’s continually shown that they are wrong.
People have open minds to evidence on this board. The problem is that your “evidence” is problematic in itself and doesn’t hold up to scrutiny for reasons that are explicitly given to you.
If you want to have an open discussion then you need to at least be intellectually honest here and address the points as given. Are you going to reply to my faith-healing comments above, for instance?
What does it mean to “prove that something is a myth”? How can you prove that “there’s no life after death”? Can you prove to me that there’s no Zeus? Can you prove there’s no Thor? Can you prove there isn’t a Flying Spaghetti Monster? Can you prove that there isn’t an invisible, breathless, odorless, heatless, silent dragon living in your garage? Can you prove there’s not an alternate universe full of sentient peanut-butter jars with footballs for heads and pencils for arms?
There are an infinite number of things we could cook up and ask you to “prove the nonexistence” or “mythical status” of. Let’s assume they actually don’t exist. How would we ever know? We wouldn’t be able to. That being said, what good reason is there to believe in any one of them in the first place? Similarly, there isn’t – which is why we don’t even care about such things until evidence shows up and gives us reason to.
Now, some people will see something and claim it’s evidence OF (insert X here), where X may be the Christian God, for example. The problem is that we can also analyze the same evidence and come to a much more likely conclusion that is far more consistent with the body of knowledge and framework of understanding we’ve come to acquire about the universe.
Is there always “that small chance we’re wrong”? Absolutely. But you have to show why we’re wrong, first, with strong evidence that isn’t easily squashed by our current understanding of the natural world. And even if you bring up a phenomenon we don’t understand yet, that doesn’t mean you’re still more likely to be right, either. We don’t know what dark matter is yet but that doesn’t mean it’s “God’s influence” – this would be argument from ignorance, like how people see a UFO then suddenly claim “It must be aliens!”
Well regarded by whom ?
Be fair to us. We respond with a negative condescending tone to everybody. Including our own.
First you’d have to provide proof (or even just a hint of an inkling of a possibility) that there is.
Empirically: I see Jeff, then Jeff dies and I see Jeff’s body not moving. I can sit by Jeff’s body forever and he won’t move. Empirically, there’s no life after Jeff. If you want me to believe he’s gone to the Happy Jeffing Grounds, you’re going to have to work for it, not me who asserts that there’s no more Jeff on account of Jeff not being fucking there any more.
There’s much better reason to assume nothing happens when you die than to assume that something happens.
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We know what it’s like to feel nothingness. Ever had a dreamless sleep? How about what life was like before you were born? Ever been knocked unconscious? What about coma patients who have been asleep for years? How about going into surgery – you’re awake, then you sleep, and wake up without any idea how much time passed in between. No memory, no experience, no consciousness.
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We know that consciousness is a function of the brain. All the different parts of the brain come together to form your individualized experience. Why assume that form will “continue” in its function when you die and go to an afterlife?
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What about all the countless predecessors along the evolutionary chain? Did they go to the same heaven? Do other animals have an afterlife? Do cats have an afterlife? How about maggots? Single cells? Water? Atoms? Where is the distinction made? If I smash a computer to bits, does it have an afterlife, too? Does it even make sense to ask if something’s form “continues on” in some supernatural way once the natural form ceases to function? Sounds more like wishful thinking, than anything.
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Same goes for the soul. If the soul exists, then at what point in the evolutionary timeline did our physical forms become “infused” with a soul that apparently carries its internal functioning on elsewhere to another realm? Also consider that consciousness emerges over time as well via evolution.
So at the end of the day, why assume that when the brain stops working, something completely amazing happens? It makes far more sense to think of humans as elaborate biological computers, and computers are physically linked just like everything else.
It becomes much more likely that the “afterlife” is a wishful-thought. It’s born out of our innate fear of death, which we have in the first place because of evolutionary pressures. There’s no other reason to believe the afterlife exists and every reason to believe that “nothing happens” is the right answer.
… do you not understand what the word ‘honest’ means?
Do you really think I don’t actually hold the belief that they’re quacks, peddling woo, and not real scientists? Why on Earth would you actually think I’m lying about that? Seriously? Of course I’m being honest when I point out that a convocation of quacks whose work is not only quackery, but proven quackery by the fact that they do not, will not, and in fact can not publish in peer reviewed journal, is in fact a convocation of quacks.
Your claim that I know “zero” about the doctors’ backgrounds is, ironically enough in all your talk about veracity, incorrect. I know that they are believers in something that they claim is scientific, and yet they don’t publish for peer review. That alone allows me to determine that they’re quacks.
There are, of course, other explanations as for why your posts would merit condescension. You might also notice that the Straight Dope, the column which started this message board, is mildly snarky.
You still do not understand, it seems. Control F for “null hypothesis”.
It appears, at this point, that you are deliberately ignoring factual and logical refutations of your position and trying a Gish Gallop of bullshit rather than admitting that fact. I need not prove the null hypothesis, you must falsify it. Your nonsense ‘test’ and the fact that you’ve changed the subject yet again strongly implies that you know full well that you cannot falsify the null hypothesis.
Yet again, you simply do not understand.
The burden of proof is on you, the null hypothesis stands behind me, serene and undisturbed.
If you contend that Christianity is different from the Norse religion, prove it. If you allege that Christianity is the one and only divine truth and Islam is a fraud, prove it. And so on.
And again, the claim about ‘life after death’ is a classical unverifiable, unfalsifiable, meaningless bit of nonsense. It’s not science, it’s not even a true/false proposition, it’s just gibberish. And yet again, as you’ve repeatedly ignored and will most likely continue to ignore, even if there was an ‘afterlife’, that wouldn’t prove that Christianity was correct about it and not the Greeks.
Your negative rhetoric is so tiresome. Maybe one more response, or maybe you’ll just have to wait a month or longer with those sharpened claws. Practically every sentence in reference to me is “do not” Of course, I know what honesty is. An honest position is “well my opinion which I can’t base on facts is that they are quacks”. And the problem is you don’t have all the facts. There may be valid reasons why these instances don’t wind up in peer journals, and frankly unless you are part of the medical community, I don’t think you are qualified to make such a judgement. I presented a quite LOGICAL reason for the lack of documentation in that a doctor’s performance may be called into question or perhaps a misdiagnosis if he presented a patient case as a miracle. These doctors are actually quite brave for coming out in support of divine healling.
How about a friendly civilized debate for a change? The arrogance snarky responses sets a negative tone that is not appreciated.
Norse religion doesn’t contain fullfilled prophecies like the Bible. Score one for Christianity!
His position on divine healing is based on facts. Are you perhaps willing to admit that your views on religion or the supernatural or Biblical prophecy or history or generic or evolution or cosmology or geology are not based on facts?
If only the Bible had something to say about this kind of thing, perhaps using an example about having something in your eye.
And you set such a fine example in this thread.
You reap what you sow.
Maybe if you had started out in a friendly and civilised manner?
No, you do not know what honesty is. I have not only explained my reasoning, you are evidently attempting to claim that if I’m wrong in my reasoning, then I’m dishonest in my argument. That’s just babble. As it is, I have perfectly valid facts to base my conclusion on, which is that *they didn’t publish. * Evidently you don’t understand the importance of that fact, but to put it in a nutshell: we have people whose claims would earn them, at a minimum, Nobel prizes, global fame, and riches beyond their wildest dreams. Instead, they don’t publish. It’s because they have nothing to publish.
Look at your comments about atheists, then stop crying crocodile tears.
Further, if you can’t have the facts of your ignorance or logical errors pointed out to you, then fix your position rather than asking to be treated with kid gloves..
The Bible contains no such “prophecies”. You’ve already been corrected on that error, and you’re coming back to it.
It’s the “snicker” that does it. It is very difficult to take anyone seriously who tries to discuss epistemology while snickering.
(Talbot Mundy once said that it is impossible to be convincing while angry. The same is true for snickering.)