Can a valid, supportable reason be offered for deconversion

Yeah people diasagree with you for very good reasons in thier own minds and arguments, so there must be something wrong with them, correct?These types of tactics only make you appear as biased and prejudiced before you actually present an argument for deconversionNone of that post you just gave has anything to do with the actual topicDawn Bertot

Does not matter. If their own personal theologies were based on such misunderstandings of creation and what its primary arguments are, then that is the basis for their deconversion.Here's a stupid question: why are some theologies so harshly subject to deconversion while others are not? HINT: your own theology is very much subject to deconversion, as per the vast majority of the deconversion stories out there. Pon farr! I'm quite positive that I heard Hoshi use it in a rather heated conversation with T'Pol, but the network censors have cleaned that up in the meantime. You are not delusional, but you think you actually are? Well, then you very probably are delusional. We have been trying to tell you, but you stubbornly refuse to listen!Read the deconversion stories. It's almost never one single argument. It's a long and excruciating process, slowly sliding down that slippery slope. Refer back to my Message 437 and the Molasses Flood of 1919 analogy:

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Or another more colorful analogy would be a giant iron tank (50 ft tall, 2.3 million gallons capacity) filled with molasses. When it suddenly collapses with huge chunks of iron destroying entire buildings and releases a lethal flood of molasses, what was the cause? Was it the work of anarchists? Was it a single sudden catastrophic event that nobody could have forseen? Or were the signs of trouble there all along, with many cracks forming in the tank over an extended period of time? And what did the company do when it saw that molasses seeping out of all those cracks? They painted the tank that same color of brown, so that nobody would notice, just as your churches simply cover up the problems, such as the massive deconversion of their children, or blame it on "anarchists" and atheists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molasses_Flood

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You are fixating on that giant chunk of iron that crushed the fire station. But what about all those cracks in the tank that were seeping molasses long before the final collapse? Which the plant owners responded to by painting the tank molasses-brown so that the leaks would not show?It is no single argument, but rather the unravelling of the entire package.Are you ever going to get it?

i'm looking at isaiah. i'm not convinced that you are. since that sentence doesn't actually parse as english, i'll have to try and interpret what the heck you mean. you mean, why if the text quotes someone as saying they're inspired is inspiration still an assumption? simple. two reasons:

1. it assumes the accuracy of the that person being quoted, which remains to be demonstrated by comparing it against factual claims, and
2. it assumes that the accuracy of the text in reporting what that person said

we've been over this. i know you don't understand it, and i know that you won't understand it anytime soon. but your logic is circular. you assume your conclusion. the text is inspired because it says so. and we know what it says is true because it's inspired. keep chasing your tail. nope. i never once assumed the accuracy of isaiah. rather, i demonstrated a place where it was close enough to accurate, based on other sources. you'll notice that the fulfillment -- while a far better fit than jesus -- wasn't quite perfect. ahaz pays off assyria. oh, and the timing doesn't quite fit, but we're talking a year or two difference between the account in the book of kings and the account in isaiah. would you like to read a 300 page doctoral thesis that works out the discrepancy? i posted a link in the prophecy thread.in any case, what i was doing was strictly comparing texts. i do not know why this is hard to understand, or why you think we must assume accuracy in order to do so. i do not have to believe star trek to notice that the remake movie's portrayal of vulcans was a tad inconsistent with the original series. reason. you should try it.(warning, can be addictive)

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maybe because some one somewhere might be right, or is that not a possibility for you. That fact that you attack me personally because i hold to what I know to be true, because i have tried and tested it for nearly 45 years, simply aggrevates youYour blinded by your hatred.Try and stick with just the argumentsDawn Bertot

i liked mine better. but i suspect it went over his head. i'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume he just writes really poorly, and isn't a complete idiot. then again, we were discussing up above how a proposition and its opposite are generally mutually exclusive. also, how false prophets are false.

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When I transfered from JC to university (well, state college at the time, but it became a university a year or two later), I enrolled in a Rabbinic Literature course taught by a rabbi. One thing we learned is that the Law (ie, the Torah) is the Law, but if one must violate the Law in order to save a life, then save that life! Contrast that with a news story around that time in which a child died because his parents had withheld medical treatment due to their faith-healing beliefs and the parents, at their sentencing, testified that in the same circumstances they would have done the exact same thing. 'Nuff said?I have always had the utmost respect for Judaism, and myself fall just short of kissing my books. But the fundamentalist Christians keep talking about "absolute morality". Given the ease with which creationists will lie and will enable lying, I cannot help but wonder how such an attitude can be reconciled with "absolute morality".

the negation of "so harshly subject to deconversion" is "not so harshly subject to deconversion". not "immune"

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Oh, you believe that your man-made theology is absolutely true? As a fundamentalist fellow-traveller, I know that nothing man-made can possibly be absolutely true.OK, Dawn, explain that to me!Here's a hint -- consider it my casting yet another pearl before you -- : Every theology is wrong, because every theology gets something wrong, usually something in the details. At the same time, most every theology is also right, because most of them do get something right.But to expect any one theology to be absolutely right is a recipe for disaster. And I suspect that most fundamentalists believe that their own theology is absolutely right.

Really. Arch, this is what I have been arguing the whole time. I assumed we were speaking strickly from a biblical perspective. When I saw what you actually believed i manuvered it to the challenging you as to what you believed actually My reasoning is not circular if the argument is based against another argument Biblically based. I thought we were discussing the two passages from the two books, with inspiration as a clear part of the text.If inspiration is questionalbe then so is everything else and who cares, right?That is where I thought we were at. if it is not then we start the discussion somewhere elseDawn BertotEdited by Dawn Bertot, : No reason given.Edited by Dawn Bertot, : No reason given.

yes, they generally seem to at least try to progress in their religion in a somewhat logical way, and their views can often be quite a breath of fresh air when coming from the standard christian fundamentalist nonsense. ironic, that.well, some of them, anyways. not the sort that stone women on buses, or write sympathetically to iran about the destruction of israel. not those guys. everybody's got their fundies, i guess. note dawns answer to my moral dilemma, above. lying would not be okay -- he claims he'd do it, but it would be morally wrong to do so.Edited by arachnophilia, : No reason given.

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sure. the problem is that you think that "biblical perspective" means that everything in the bible must be true. i know a great many biblical scholars who would have a bone to pick with you about that. the problem is, as i keep stating, comparing two texts is not a matter of belief. it's a matter of comparing two texts. my beliefs are not relevant to my critical analysis: rather, they are formed by my critical analysis. you are putting the cart before the horse.no argument can ever convince you, because any argument against your faith does not also assume your faith. my brain is getting tired of trying to decipher your nonsense, dawn. would you care to try that one again, in english? fair enough. i'll start it where i started it the first time. on what basis do you assume the accuracy and inspiration of the bible, compared to other similar texts?

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Oh, and you completely ignored what the message was saying.Typical! So sadly typical!

Wait a minute here. Okrand be thanked, there is a canonical Klingon language. But then in the production of Enterprise, they made a decision to use gibberish instead of creating any actual languages. Outside of the first Star Trek movie (where Vulcan had an Old English sound to me), the most screen Vulcan has been on Enterprise, but that was mainly gibberish, not an actual language.There was a Vulcan language site, but it was not canonical. May I ask what your source is? Messaging is permissible.

to be fair, this is partly my fault.i directed him to the prophecy thread in Message 129, Message 134, Message 162, Message 204, Message 233, Message 236, Message 237, Message 259, Message 272, Message 294, Message 295, and Message 350. (and sort of in Message 397)in Message 259, i specifically stated:

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the problem is, it will utterly derail this thread. which is why there is a separate thread for it. i can promise that it will utterly derail this thread -- we've had previous prophecy threads that derailed themselves on the account of one single prophecy that happens to be rather highly valued by christianity.

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in Message 385, i finally gave up and posted the sure-fire thread derailment device. i figured that a derailed thread was perhaps better than his constant blathering about how we had presented any examples -- simply because he refused to participate in the thread where those examples were actually the topic. i know for a fact that this particular prophecy is sure to derail threads, as i've seen it derail threads devoted to prophecy in the past, notably this one.i think in the long run his antics are better here, messing up his own thread, rather than ruining a thread for intelligent conversation.Edited by arachnophilia, : typo

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i think that contributes to the humor, don't you?of course, i suspect that's because, after nimoy was no longer a regular, there weren't any good jewish boys around to teach them mystical hebrew stuff. memory alpha. now that i look more, i kind of wish i'd have used "tviokh" instead.

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