Norseman

? Flaming letters on the moon are flaming letters on the moon. The question is who put them there and why (and how, for that matter).

Sultanist

I'm as independent minded and as suspicious and skeptical of everything as a person can be.

However, I'm here to tell you when flaming letters which are hundreds or thousands or whatever it is miles across in size, which they would have to be for me to clearly see them, are seen on the moon; that without any reservations and without any qualification, I'm gonna believe whatever message they spell out. And I won't much be caring if God or Satan or space aliens or David Copperfield or whoever or whatever in the hell else put them there.

That is of course assuming that two other people with me are seeing exactly the same thing which was one of the stated criteria.

Sultanist

The Moon measures roughly 2200 miles across (you fancy foreigner types will have to convert that to kilometres yourself. Math is not my forte).

With the given hypothetical, I'm assuming that we're seeing this message with the naked eye (if it requires the aid of a telescope then all bets are off).
As I think about it, I'm not even sure you could fit the words "The God of the Bible Exists" into the circle of the Moon and those words still be clearly legible with the naked eye from a distance of 240,000 miles.
We might need to do a little scale model experimentation to determine the answer to that.

And of course the vision of the viewer would also be a factor. So I guess we're talking about 20/20 (uncorrected or corrected) vision.

Sultanist

If you and two of your Atheist friends saw the message "The God of the Bible Exists" written in flaming letters on the moon and spelled out in the stars for ten minutes

Hold on here. I didn't read that closely enough the first time. What the hell does that mean "flaming letters on the moon" followed by "spelled out in the stars"?

Is it within the circle of the Moon? Is it covering the whole damn sky? What exactly?
I may have to reassess my position here.

Biff the unclean

Oh, it’s concepts now. That’s not what you said before. People hold concepts, and I don’t know anyone who thinks Christianity doesn’t exist

That’s the nature of everything that doesn’t actually exist. It’s part and parcel with being a fake.

I studied sleight of hand when I was in grad school.
But my mind isn’t closed. As I said, if after investigation it were shown to be real magic I would change my opinion and believe in magic. Which would, of course, mean that all the rest of human knowledge was wrong…I’d have to stop believing in that too when I took up believing in magic.
As the facts stand now I would have to be a complete idiot to believe in magic. Should new facts ever come to light this might change.

Sultanist

Now looka here, Mr. Kahoona. There have been two pages worth of replies to your post from both atheists and your's truly. We've done our part.

Now it's time you do yours. I'm assuming that what I've quoted above indicates that your question to us was inspired by your being asked the converse version of the same question.
So I'll state the question my way and address it to you.

If you and two Christian friends looked up at the sky. And you all suddenly saw a message spelled out in flaming letters that were tens of thousands of miles across in size (and you would know this because you would see the Moon in front of the flaming letters), and that message was seen clearly legible with the naked eye, and that message said "The God Of The Bible Does Not Exist", would witnessing that cause you to abandon your Christianity?

quasi-sapien

For Christians, that might only provide definitive proof that the God of the Bible has a sense of humor. After all, if you adopt a fundamentalist interpretation of scripture, he surely does. The duck-billed platypus is an amusingly bizarre creature of creative whimsy. The fossil record is designed merely to obfuscate the true age of the Earth, and empirical dating methods only *appear* to be reasonably accurate, because the results are actually skewed by billions of years in some cases.

Joeman

:huh: Why do I need to?

show_no_mercy

Wow. You've just justified terrorism.

Let's go acquiesce to Osama's demands now.

TheBigKahoona

As I said before, I don't think I would respond to this new revelation in a rational way. I would claim the message was a strange conspiracy of some sort. I might blame it on Satan and grossly misinterpret a passage in the bible in order to justify my argument. Sadly, I do not think I would lose my Christianity. I find the fact that I would react in such an irrational way to such spectacular evidence frightening. That is why I decided to start this thread.

Your missing the point. It is the nature of magic and miracles to not be investigatable. If a man walked up to you, turned into a goose, and flew away never to be seen again, would you believe in magic or would you claim it was a trick or hoax?