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Author | Topic: God says this, and God says that | |||||||||||||||||||||||
nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
[QUOTE]Yeah if you stimulate the right parts of the brain you can replicate spiritual experiences. Doesn't mean the same parts of the brain are not being stimulated by other things, even possibly supernatural influences. [/B][/QUOTE]
Ah, but it doesn't mean that they are, either. How does the supernatural activate the brain, and how do we tell the difference between a supernatural and a natural cause of activation?
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: I've done all of those things, Gene, but I still don't have faith.
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: Because you can train yourself to feel all sorts of things in all sorts of situations. Group or cultural pressure can play a big part, as well. Look at how people carry on at concerts and sporting events, and we can't forget the snake handlers in Southern churches. The missionaries probably talk in vague terms, and everyone's experience is entirely subjective, also. You essentially self-evaluate, which is always subject to bias.
[QUOTE]And, even if it is entirely biological, is there anything even slightly harmful about it, to justify atheism? [/B][/QUOTE] Well, religious extacy and the belief that one is "filled with the spirit" in and of itself is fine if one remains peaceful, but what if one decides to go on a tear?
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: quote: Holy Crapola, do you THINK you could be any more self-righteous? You are starting to sound like a wacko Fundie. With your definite war-monger tendencies, you would fit in quite nicely with some of the folks from the Michigan Militia.
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: I most definitely disagree. I think we are very much born with the capacity to believe in magic and the supernatural. Otherwise, we wouldn't swallow all of that bunk about the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Boogey Man. The belief in God is just much, much more socially reinforced.
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: Actually, evolutionary psychology is investigating these ideas...
[QUOTE]christians can explain these things.../QUOTE No, they can't, at least not by using faith or belief or whatever you are claiming. "Godidit" isn't an explanation. I could say that invisible pink unicorns gave us logic and reason. There. Understand now? ...see the problem?
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
[QUOTE]Originally posted by David unfamous:
[B] quote: quote: ROTFLMAO!!!
[QUOTE]Personally, the reason I feel awe at such wonders as mountains is because of their sheer size and scale. But, if they were cuboid, I'd be more inclined to think they were supernaturally created...[/B][/QUOTE] The funny thing is, mountains were widely considered quite ugly by many good Christian people: http://www.pitt.edu/~ulin/lit&env/Sublime.pdf "James Howell (1645) saw the Pyrenees as "uncouth huge monstrous excrescences of Nature", another writer called the Alps "the rubbish of the earth"
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: Technically, this is not true. Christians deny the existence of all transcendent entities except the Judeo/Christian concept of God. You all flatly reject the notion that any other gods or supernatural entities exist.
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: No. YOu said that athiests couldn't explain where logic and reason came from, and that Christians could. I pointed out that Evolutionary Psychology is investigating the origins of logic and reasoning ability.
quote: The problem is your use of the word "explain." "Explain" means something different to the materialist than it does to the mystic.
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: How many times have you (or others) prayed for pain to go away and it hadn't compared to the times you prayed and it has? Haven't been keeping records? Then you are likely subject to a fallacy called confirmation bias, where you remember the "hits" and forget or excuse the misses. What kind of pain? Pain caused by what illness? What did the doctors say about these miracle healings?
quote: How many times have you prayed for something specific and had it not come true compared to having it come true? Not keeping track like that, I'll bet. I'll bet if you were, you would find that the instances of specific prayers being anwered/not anwered would be no better than chance would predict. Of course, if you aren't being specific, and you just pray for general blessings or something, then you can always discount the bad things that happen and remember the good things, and then say after the fact that the reason the good things happen is because of answered prayers. This is called post hoc reasoning. These are exactly the kinds of very human tendencies for faulty reasoning that the scientific method is good at avoiding. Read more about them: confirmation bias - The Skeptic's Dictionary - Skepdic.com "Confirmation bias refers to a type of selective thinking whereby one tends to notice and to look for what confirms one's beliefs, and to ignore, not look for, or undervalue the relevance of what contradicts one's beliefs." post hoc fallacy - The Skeptic's Dictionary - Skepdic.com "The post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this therefore because of this) fallacy is based upon the mistaken notion that simply because one thing happens after another, the first event was a cause of the second event."
quote: BUt these aren't really pieces of evidence. They are just unsupported assertions that you have made.
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: But one of your churche's main activities is sending missionaries all over the world to try to convince people of other religions to convert to Mormonism!
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: Huh? Is my dismissal of giant pink invisible unicorns unreasonable because I hanven't had any direct sensory experience of them? If I HAD had direct sensory experience of said unicorns and STILL dismissed them, then THAT would be unreasonable.
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
[QUOTE]Originally posted by gene90:
[B] quote: quote: Bull. (Strawman) Besides, moral values prescribed by religions change with the wind. Slavery used to be morally OK. Owning women as chattel used to be morally OK. Burning people at the stake used to be morally OK. Having multiple wives used to be morally OK. Killing homosexuals used to be morally OK. Some of these things are still considered morally OK in certain parts of the world. It all depends upon what religion one follows. Religiously-based morality seems much more dangerous to me than humanistically-based morality because of this ability to dictate to large groups of people who will accept a moral code in it's entirety. Think "crusades." [This message has been edited by schrafinator, 12-16-2002]
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: Gene, you misrepresented what John wrote about in this article. His point is that the US Congress denounced the results of a scientific study. They had no business doing that just because the results of that study touched a nerve. Do you agree that this IS an inappropriate and bizzare thing for Congress to do, and do you agree that scientists should be able to study what they want to (within ethical limits) and that scientists should be free of censure by our government just because their results are unpopular?
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
[QUOTE]Originally posted by funkmasterfreaky:
[B] quote: quote: I don't believe you. Where is the JAMA paper that undoubtedly would have been front page news in every paper and news program in the world? Surely such an amazing thing would have been shouted from the rooftops, right? Could it be that the hip wasn't broken at all?
quote: Again, I don't believe you. Whaere are the doctor's records? What illness did they have? (food poisoning can act like that) How many people were ill for how long, and did they all REALLY get well at the same time, and were they all REALLY in "perfect" health? Who evaluated their healt to determine if it was "perfect? How many times have people prayed and people's health haven't improved that quickly, or at all?
quote: Um, maybe the gague was faulty. Maybe your dad or someone else got it filled and didn't tell anybody.
quote: Sorry, but none of these examples are convincing. They are all just personal anecdotes and are riddled with all kinds of bias. You wanted to believe God did these things so you found reasons to believe and ignored all the other possibilities.
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