Jobar

SOMMS:
I have no problem with athiesm but I will tell you this: I have never met an athiest who truly and unbiasedly applied their reasoning about God to other aspects of their life.

Mark it down! We now see the pot calling the refrigirator black.

Albert Cipriani

Dear Moderators D and Jobar,
I apologize for engaging in what you consider “name-calling.” I honestly thought I could get away with calling y’all “a bunch of hypocrites” cuz I’d followed up that bracing shot with the chaser of “no offense intended.”

For what it’s worth, I consider name-calling to be words that have no intellectual content, like "dumbass" or the late great Fiach’s “gobshite.” I’d like to think that the word “hypocrite” is not purely pejorative, that it has a legitimate use in articulating a rational judgment. But since you’ve called me on it, I will refrain from using that word again.

At this rate, you’re gonna wipe out my entire vocabulary. I’ll be reduced to saying things like: “You’re all a bunch of hyper-critters.” Or, “Your mother wears army footwear.” Seriously, instead of calling my opponents “hypocrites,” I will call their positions “inconsistent.” I Promise. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Calzaer

How's the leprechaun hunt going, AC?

SOMMS: When you can prove it, I'll believe it. Otherwise, you and the Greeks have the exact same amount of evidence for your beliefs.

You have two tasks:
(1) Prove any gods exist
and
(2) Prove YOUR god exists

You cannot prove (2) by assuming (1), and you cannot prove (1) while assuming (2).

Bill Snedden

Most convincing? I'd have to say the evidential POE. Against the God of evangelical Christianity, I believe that it's pretty dispositive.

However, I don't really find any arguments against God's existence ultimately convincing in the sense that they lead me to disbelief. I've merely yet to hear any convincing arguments for God's existence...

Regards,

Bill Snedden

Lobstrosity

It's nice when you get to play dumb and selectively ignore arguments you don't know how to answer, isn't it? No one is talking about man's relationship with God; we're talking about the nature of God himself and his relationship to the universe he allegedly created. There's no room for interpretation, here. Subjectivity doesn't enter the picture. Either God created the universe as given in Genesis and Christians are right, or he didn't and Christians are wrong. Pretty simple, isn't it? Either Zeus throws lightning bolts from Mount Olympus or he doesn't.

Look at it this way SOMMS: there are plenty of things you don't believe in. You don't believe in Leprechauns, Santa Claus, or unicorns. You probably also feel justified (e.g. that you're not a hypocrite) for holding these non-beliefs. Yet you still have no problem buying milk at the store? Simply astounding! Maybe you can use your ability to comprehend the existence of milk whilst simultaneously denying the existence of Leprechauns as a model for how atheists can be skeptical of the existence of God without being floored every time they see milk in the supermarket?

diana

I accept your apology. Thank you.

In my neck of the woods, people say things like, "She's so slow she's gotta speed up to stop...bless her heart." The "bless her heart" bit is the Southern equivalent of "no offense intended." Neither of them negates the offense. The fact that you find yourself saying, "no offense intended" means you know you just said something offensive.

FWIW, Albert, so do I, as well as the other mods here, the admins and the board of directors. This is why we don't allow name-calling. Well...one of the reasons. As you note, name-calling is both offensive and attacks the man, instead of the position.

As do all pejorative words I've ever heard. This is no excuse to use them.

As a rule of thumb, you can save us the trouble of jumping you every other post and yourself the trouble of apologies every week if you stop to consider, with each thing you write, if the language is loaded, and whether it attacks the person or the position. You already know how to do this, being a writer by trade. Please do not insult yourself or us with any more amnesia concerning your mother tongue and its varied connotations.

Mmhm. When pigs fly underground.

Thank you. I knew you had the hang of it.

d

Conchobar

God is not an observable phenomenon. God is not defined clearly in any so-called scripture. The idea of God would not even be a subject of discussion if not for a minority of people making the unsupported claim that there is a god. Humans buy into this because despite the total lack of evidence, they WANT to believe. They want to believe that a giant man in the sky watches over them. They want to know their origins, so in an absence of advanced science they invented a creator to give them a world view. Why am I here? Because god invented me.

The fact that god is hypothetical and invisible is of no matter to one who cannot understand the science of evolution or the astrophysics of the star and planet formation in the universe.

The second impelling reason is the fear of death. Once humans realised that death was death, they yearned for some alternative. They wished to live forever, immortality is wonderful. Here they had what appeared to the stone age tribesmen as evidence of a soul. We dream. In dreams, we travel outside of our bodies and meet dead loved ones, and then we wake up. It suggested that some ethereal thing with our consciousness left our bodies in space and time then returned. We felt that similar spirits moved rivers, make volcanoes belch, springs bubble up, and make our hands flex into fists, and make us solve problems.

How could we justify this soul? Some just say that every thing has a soul. But having a gigantic soul running the universe can more easily rationalise each human having one.

So we have a god (and we have many different gods according to the culture.) God answers questions of origins for the non-scientifically educated population. Simplistic explanations of Genesis need many years of science eduction to understand the real events.

The more important reason for God and the one that stays after science has debunked Magical Creation, is the desire for immortality.

There is an immense emotiional investment in immortality. Once one has the delusion, it is not easy to give up. The believer tends to hang on to the delusion of immortality with an emotional vigour unpresidented since the Middle Ages and Crusades.

This is the reason why fundamentalists are so aggressively creationist and anti-evolutionist. It is because it bypasses their already questionable god, so what. But it then takes out the underpinnings of immortality. By debunking Christian mythology we are threatening the very core of Fundamentalist world view. We threaten their immortality. That is equivalent to a death threat. That is why they get so angry at us.

Conchobar

Albert Cipriani

Dear Mad,
You confuse irony with the cold hard steel of truth when you say: You see, I am all for applying makeup (Tho the cost of it is delaying my transgender operation into Alice the Untraditional Female!) and watching sitcoms… as well as helping the poor. You, on the other hand, subscribe to the false dichotomy of doing only one or the other.

You define a life well spent as one squandered on the poor. But as Jesus said of those who reviled the lady who squandered $200 worth of perfume on Him, “The poor, you will always have with you.” Ergo, what sort of existential suicidal crisis will you face should He be proved wrong? If there were no more poor to feed, what reason would you have for living? Sitcoms and makeup seem a shallow substitute. (Tho I myself apply a THICK neutral base under my blush.)

You’re the one trying to achieve “the best possible use of time, money, and resources,” not I. It was a good use of money as was the prayer that went into it a good use of time as was the resources that went into some sitcoms. You have a deadly absolutist mentality that you must get a grip on to stay sane.

Will the money we squander on Cathedrals be seen as a waste compared to the money we squander on the poor 200 years hence? Hell no! The food the poor get literally turns into their waste -- not so with Cathedrals and any other wildly superfluous thing of beauty. Indeed, the only things that stand the test of time are the non-utilitarian, impractical, and excessive expressions of the human spirit such as music, art, and architecture, which are all embodied in that Cathedral you deride... while the sewers of Abidjan are already flush with the waste results of feeding the poor. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Calzaer

Right better 200 people die of starvation than a $280 million dollar building not get built.

Do you know how much bread $280 million would buy?
But no, prayer is more valuable than human life.

MadMez

"Indeed, the only things that stand the test of time are the non-utilitarian, impractical, and excessive expressions of the human spirit such as music, art, and architecture, which are all embodied in that Cathedral you deride... while the sewers of Abidjan are already flush with the waste results of feeding the poor."

I'd like to submit the above as the 3rd proof for the non existence of any God.

Dankeshoen, Albert.