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I won't dignify that with an answer.
What did we say that was monstrous? You're the one who brought up the adultery argument and the rather creepy comment about the dirty blonde at your workplace. (This is all assuming she exists and is not a Rollo Tomassi).
I felt so offended by you making such remarks about my faith that I felt compelled to do my citizen's duty and report you to the police for religious hatred. So expect a knock on the door.
Or rather don't as the police only investigate when it's the religious who take offence about something.
I can’t believe it the proof for god is right there all along watch this video and this takes the flame out of Wiz’s arguments at least.
For there to be Evil there must be good
For there to be good there must be an objective moral law
For there to be an objective moral law here must be a law giver
So in Wiz’s own questions he is assuming God exists otherwise who is to say any action is good or evil?
You've not heard of the torts of libel and slander, then? There are plenty of other avenues available for the defamed in this country. It isn't just the reserve of the religious.
To be fair to you, you’re certainly not as fanatical as Tweedle-Dee.
ALLAH IS ONE! DEATH TO JUICE!
Which is hilarious as most of my atheist friends in real life don’t mind that I am a Christian and I don’t mind that they are atheists live and let live is my motto but you people seem to have taken Fleming a bit to literally
The guy tries to justify that pain and suffering is good because of one girl with a weird disease where she can feel no pain and without pain she doesn't know when something is wrong?
Yeah well done God - top design there. Why not, when I get kicked in the bollocks, just a little red light flashing in the corner of my vision saying 'Alert - bollocks have been kicked' rather than crippling agony that leaves me bent double and easy prey for any attacker?
Imagine a fire alarm that gave you a 50000 volt shock to wake you up rather than a loud noise? People would say that was mental but when God does something it's sheer genius.
As for the whole 'God must exist as otherwise how would you know what is good and what is evil?' 'argument' - I'm perfectly capable of knowing myself that killing someone, or shagging a dirty blonde behind my wifes back is wrong without the need for God. It's called a conscience.
It's certainly true that we cannot conclusively rule out a possible misreading of events taking place 200 or even 20 or even 2 years ago. Historical events are almost always recorded through a filter and details get lost over time. Even today, political leaders can influence what is printed and what isn't. Simply look at Russia, North-Korea, Turkey or China. The only difference is that the Internet has now facilitated leaks of sensitive documents, the publishing of uncomfortable photos (which be manipulated) and the streaming of live recorded audiovisual material. Plus, the Internet is littered with details which are here to stay. Furthermore, as a more sophisticated lot, indulging in certain freedoms and whatnot, we also tend to be more critical, sceptical even, and we demand hard proof rather than hearsay before tolerating a certain version of "the truth". That pleases me, even if "we" don't represent everyone. But going further back in time, the aforementioned sophistication and freedoms were absent. The sceptics came in shorter supplies and they had less access to tools which allow objective verification of "the truth".
It stands to reason, therefore, that events which were recorded in 1812, several centuries after printing had become the normal way of reproducing texts, carry at least some extra weight over events which were recorded nearly two thousand years earlier. Even if we still accept a large percentage of made-up stuff and other forms of manipulation, the closer to the "now", the easier it is for us to rewind time and spot inconsistencies and errors and possibly correct them.
Furthermore, war and other political events operate in a real and tangible framework, completely devoid of the supernatural. The nature of the subject is, therefore, such that it is far better understood than when the supernatural is involved. It is less open to interpretation, less relying on faith and "that feeling that I have". When discussing the details surrounding the subject, one mustn't first waste any time defining the subject, which itself, in case of the supernatural, seems an almost impossible task.
Debating the resurrection of Christ the way one might be debating the American Civil War, for example, would render one in danger of making an equivocation fallacy. In both cases, one would be tempted to fall back on "historical evidence", but while the latter can rely on, indeed, evidence, the former certainly can not. With very few to no independent "journalists" or "historians" writing about Christ's resurrection in his days, and with most texts on the subject written decades after the alleged events, based not on empirical evidence but, at best, on eyewitness testimonies which were, themselves, passed on amongst relatively uneducated people before making the gospels--gospels which also tend to contradict each other in several places and which were copied, manually, by monks, for centuries in fact--every bit of reliability is lost.
Some of you may now try to corner me and assert that if going back further in time renders the validity of our findings less correct, science with all its Big Bang and Evolution nonsense is about as flawed as one can be. Let me stay ahead of you then. First of all, in the former paragraphs, I mentioned war and a belief in dead people walking. These are socio-political and cultural events for which science has little interest, let alone any theoretical model with which to test their factuality. The laws of nature have nothing to do with these things--at best (or at worst if you will) they are being abhorrently defied. These events are neither crucial nor even meaningful to our understanding of how the universe works or where we came from, both in a physical and biological sense. No laboratory experiment, probe or machine can reproduce, test or measure anything of interest in these debates. We can only provide the negative: dead people stay dead. Lastly, these are "historical" events and science doesn't really care about history all that much, except when studying man's impact on nature. What makes science so beautiful is that it studies the universe while factoring out man. Even biologists don't treat man any different than they treat other species. War and worshipped people are topics completely outside the realm of science. Since that is the case, science looks for answers in phenomena which are preferably not open to interpretation nor relying on historical recordings, such as the light from stars, the isotopes remaining in rocks, fossils, soil layers, plate tectonics, nucleic acids and the many conservation laws which apply to elementary particles. In almost all of these cases, we can safely ignore anything man has ever said, thought or done. Data carried by light waves in space or trapped in rocks has a preservation span in the region of millions and even billions of years. An eyewitness may not reliably recount what he saw 15 minutes ago, but the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe showed us the universe 300 000 years after the Big Bang, i.e. some 13.5 billion years ago. Science operates on a whole different level.
I want to end my post with one final note. If we are going to approach Jesus' life with the scrutiny of a historian, my religious friends might actually not like the outcome very much. Many scholars now believe that Jesus never called himself the Son of God; that he, in fact, wasn't the most god-loving of men around. He might rather be called a sort of anti-establishment, anti-oppression, anti-exploitation socialist. If he had been around in the 60s, you might have found him in Woodstock rather than in Church. If he had been around today and a member of this forum, he might even make @TheWizardOfIce blush when defecating all over some of the Jesus worshipping posts made in this thread. Then there is the intriguing mystery surrounding the disappeared gospels, the ones that were written much closer to Jesus' life, possibly more reliable, but which the Church made sure to destroy because they showed a much more human and vastly less "divine" Jesus. Then there are these rumours--and yes, I'm going out on a limb here--of Church leaders throughout the ages confessing to having manipulated and "corrected" the Bible in order to build them a stronger case, the equivalent of making cigarettes extra addictive by mixing the tobacco with certain additives. Another interesting thing is that the Church has long forbidden that the Bible be read by, let alone translated in the native language of, the common folk. If the Bible holds the absolute truth, one wonders why that was so. Even my grandmother (1926 - 2015) was, in her younger days, strictly forbidden to read or discuss (!) the Bible. A local priest, many years later, told her the reason for that--and those words, which she would repeat to me often, have stuck:
"If people could read the Bible, the Church could close its doors for good."
- quod erat demonstrandum -
The closest biography to Alexander the Great is 400 years after his life
The closest for Jesus is 3 years
I’m sorry what were you saying about Christianity coming up short?
I'm writing this with the best intentions.
One has to be blind not to see that you and I stand on opposite sides of the many debates in this thread. However, that shouldn't mean we cannot be good pals on the forum or even in this thread. The way I see it, debating is a necessary activity amongst people. We learn about and from each other when doing so. But, it has to be done right.
When saying you'll walk away from it, you're doing it wrong.
When you opened this thread, I warned you that it would get ugly, not as the mod threatening to lock it down but as a good pal making sure that you understood what you had started. People tend to get very upset when the pendulum swings the other way; hell, we have lost several members already who can't take that and in fact get dangerously emotional about it. Debating an issue can play out like a personal mission, plagued with feelings of being insulted, hated even, but above all of discovering a side of people you hadn't met before. Neither of these things is pleasant. One thing I, however, have learned, is that debates, no matter how heated, are neither fights nor wars, and that they needn't drive a wedge between folks. You and I have agreed on countless things in other threads and will no doubt continue to do so. It's just that in this one, we aren't seeing eye to eye and we most likely never will.
But does that have to be a problem? I like to think of these debates as
1) a good opportunity to improve one's argumentation skills and rhetorical abilities;
2) a way to expand on our views by learning from those of others.
Even if the tone can get a little caustic from time to time, potentially very personal and dowsed in colourful terms and expressions, every next post is still capable of making the necessary tonal course correction and steer the debate back on track. I'm no expert myself, but I at least try to reason things out rather than duke things out. The way I'm seeing it, we're in one of the most productive threads on the forum right now, over a 100 pages strong in fact. The same people keep coming back too, which is never a bad thing in my opinion. And even if neither of us will ever formally win, the exercise itself is most interesting, educational and, quite frankly, a lot of fun.
So rather than pulling the old "I'm walking away from this thread", why not relax and do as I do? Keep playing the game, maintain your cool and help us to feed good debate. I bet we're all having a good time and we're all fairly passionate about it. But the one who walks away, even if he or she is convinced it is just a matter of "preserving one's dignity" is, by street rules, the one who accepts defeat. You're better than that, @Dragonpol. :)
I wrote all of this with, again, the very best of intentions.
What are you trying to say, @Risico007? I have studied Alexander. Many stories about him are incredibly hard to believe. We may try to backtrack his route into Asia and so forth, but I understand the lack of hard proof for the many details which can usually be found in biographies of him. Historians are also proud to admit that much. Phrases like "it is said" or "rumour has it" or "X or Y claimed" are always meant to indicate that a good pinch of salt is needed.
Please also explain to me how you reading the Bible daily lends it any or your case any additional credence? I read Star Wars comics almost daily but I'm not boasting about it in an attempt to make a case for Jedi-ism.
The closest for Jesus being 3 years? You're clinging on very weak slivers of information, while most elements typically used to build a case of Jesus are taken from gospels written decades after the man's passing.
"Wise guy"? Why? Pray tell. I'm feeding arguments and I'm being honest about going out on a limb when I know I have no proof. A "wise guy" is an arrogant ignoramus who only says what he thinks but doesn't quite know what he's talking about. All I'm trying to do is counter certain arguments with other arguments, logic and a few facts about how science works. Surely my honesty cannot be mistaken for arrogance?
@Risico007
You want to put me on a plane, sir? For we are living half a globe apart, you and I. :D
OK, thank you very much for that, @DarthDimi. There's much food for thought there and I will think it over. This is, for better or worse, my most successful thread ever, so that is probably why I find it so hard to stay away forever.
DO AS WE SAY AND NOT AS WE DO!
So my iPhone evolved without anyone interacting with it? Hmm perhaps I should keep my work and personal iPhone separate lest they have children
My whole point was that if you make use of an iPhone, you are counting on the technological fruits of the very science that is often deliberately ignored when asserting that man walked with dinosaurs and that the Earth isn't much older than 6000 years.
Non-sequitur fallacy.
Appeal to ridicule fallacy.
I just know I can talk and send pictures to people on the other side of the globe (assuming it is a globe not flat of course) as if by magic. Scientists just tell me the signal bounces off satellites but I’ve never seen these satellites so it’s equally possible that it’s God’s intervention that does it.
If you can’t prove to me that there are actually satellites then I’m going to assume it’s divine intervention.
Copy of Dawkins in hotel rooms? Big bell ringing out over villages reminding people that God does not exist? Not paying tax? Specific atheists in the House of Lords, etc etc,
Meanwhile , more bonkers....
https://www.secularism.org.uk/news/2018/04/nss-criticises-surrey-police-for-engaging-in-evangelism
https://metro.co.uk/2018/06/07/couple-lose-custody-of-child-after-using-toy-lion-they-thought-was-jesus-as-their-lawyer-7612419/
Depressing. Embarrassing when it comes to the police.