Taking Sides: Atheism vs. Christianity

Many have! Please see that link I offered. You just choose to ignore them, because they'd force you to ask yourself some hard questions about the meaning of your experiences.

Does God tell you to argue dishonestly? You're trying to hang your hat on a semantic point here. You're trying to convince, all right, in the hopes that people will seek conversion. And you know very well that that's exactly what I meant. Honestly. Do you really think God approves of people ducking the crux of an argument in favor of the detrita? I don't.

x-post

BEST POST EVER

then you'd been in the invidious position of wanking in the face of god

take the look your mum would give you and x 1000

It is easy to think we are all born with a distaste for seeing, say, a woman and a dwarf man armed with blades and forced to fight to the death in the Coliseum for the audience's delight in their bloody suffering, but you would find only a few wet blankets -- men or women -- in Rome who saw anything slightly objectionable, and they would be Christians. This is worth reflecting on. The mind which objected to, e.g., the Coliseum, was born fairly suddenly and dramatically into the Western world, and it was the mind of Christ the Jew, in what we often dismissingly refer to as the "Judeo-Christian" tradition.

please cite exactly which "Roman records" you're referring to.

no seriously obviously as i said above there is faith required here as well, ie faith that they were not demented liars, that they believed what they were saying, and were willing to die for it.
i am not a christian. i also think that the actual message they carried to others has been so obscured by history/time/dirty dealings of the church that it's possible they could have said something different, with a crucial detail in there we're unaware of.
they could have been gnostics fercrissakes. but whatever it was, it was about joshua ben joseph/miriam. and they believed it passionately.

How many times have people pointed out the fact that it is philosophically idiotic to ask for a proof of non-existence? And yet you neither stop asking atheists to prove the non-existence of God, nor construct an argument against the position that it is idiotic to ask for a proof of non-existence.

And don't you see, also, that all of your arguments for the existence of God rely on a very limited reading of a TEXT? Imagine if the proof of existence of something relied entirely on textual evidence. In that case, Star Trek was real!! What you say about historians treating four testimonies as proof is pure fantasy. Historians will always want to corroborate textual evidence with other types of evidence before concluding anything from it. You are clearly desperate to close the case before making a proper and complete inquiry. Everyone can sense this and so they simply can't trust what you say.

By the way, why do you avoid the question about your age?

no problems there.

one writer may be bad and another good but they both write in english.

the apostles were human beings same as the gaters. they used similar tools to convert ppl. they didnt try to kill any-one no.
but they probably frothed at the mouth.

life doesnt make things easy to distinguish. which is why simpletons believe what they hear on fox news. but being a discriminating adult means you can that two things might appear the same but one is being transmitted in a spirit of love and trust and another out of ignorance and hatred. course sometimes one cant tell.

I think there has been some sort of collapse of the idea of proof as this thread has developed, so that now fiction seems the only available resource of meaning. When someone says that God is unprovable and that the burden of proof lies with those asserting (without any ground) that He exists, this is not equivalent to Eyeball saying "what if I told you I was 50 foot tall" because the claim about your height is provable one way or the other, by measuring the distance from your feet to the top of your head. That is not unprovable, its measuable. Can you see the difference?

So the atheist who says that God is unprovable is not obliged to say that everything in the universe is unprovable, only that some assertions - such as the existence of God and phlogiston - cannot be proved because we have no evidence of their existence. Agnosticism is not the rational response to unprovable assertions. Agnosticism makes the mistake of concluding that if something is unprovable then it is unknowable (that there must always be doubt about its existence). The unprovable and the unknowable are not the same thing.

The atheist is not simply subject to a rival fiction. The atheist behaves rationally given the lack of evidence, just as it would be rational to cross the road when there's no traffic even when you're child is telling you that a dinosaur is going to come round the corner at any minute.

The main flaw with the theist's argument is that it seems to believe it knows the truth without reason or reasonable proof or good reasons.

I've not really got anything to add, but Thomas Tallis, your posts have been very interesting.

sometimes, maybe that's true. What about the other times?

There was this bloke in my mum's book club who, whenever my mum or I tried to talk about the history of the church, not even anything particularly hardcore theological, would just throw up his hands and declare "Oh no, I don't want to know about theology. Faith for me is a heart thing, not a head thing!"

I kind of wrote him off as an illiterate loony fundie, but then, later on in the conversation, he mentioned that he was an accountant, and started talking about some fairly sophisticated things. I realised that this guy is not a dummy. But the accountant thing tipped me off.

Some people are *so* rational, they live so much in their heads - with figures, with mathematics and logic - that they like to assign anything that *isn't* totally logical and rational to this strange area of "FAITH" and "heart stuff" that they don't understand, and don't *want* to understand. There are people who compartmentalise love into the same place.

To me, the division between heart and head is irrational and arbitrary. I want to understand the things that I love, and I want to love the things that I understand. But some people seem to feel the need to do this.

Best thing said on ILX in at least ten minutes (that's a BIG compliment, btw).