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Author Topic:   Conversations with God
dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 84 of 530 (884464)
02-20-2021 8:09 PM
Reply to: Message 83 by Phat
02-20-2021 3:57 PM


Re: Charismatic Chaos Revisited
Sorry, but FUCK YOUR BALD LINK!!!!
Give us a summary! IN YOUR OWN WORDS!!!
You serve as an Admin and yet you post a FUCKING BALD LINK!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!
What better way to signal that you have absolutely nothing of any worth to mention than to post a FUCKING BALD LINK?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 83 by Phat, posted 02-20-2021 3:57 PM Phat has replied

Replies to this message:
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 85 of 530 (884465)
02-20-2021 11:38 PM
Reply to: Message 84 by dwise1
02-20-2021 8:09 PM


Re: Charismatic Chaos Revisited
What, five hours later and still no summary IN YOUR OWN WORDS?
If you refuse to maintain your own standards, then you maintain NO standards.
That is all we need to know about your religion.

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 Message 84 by dwise1, posted 02-20-2021 8:09 PM dwise1 has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 91 of 530 (884481)
02-21-2021 3:46 PM
Reply to: Message 86 by Phat
02-21-2021 1:47 AM


Re: Charismatic Chaos Revisited
Seriously, if you recommend a video but refuse to summarize what it says or even identify which part of it warrants your recommendation so that we can pay particular attention to that part of it, then you're basically informing us of your intent to deceive us. And why should we waste our time on something that you won't even represent with any degree of honesty?
Which does still inform us of all we need to know about your religion.
And besides, no bare naked links! Isn't that the policy on this forum? Plus bare links just plain violates standards of common decency. You have so much disregard for us, so how should you expect us to regard you?

This message is a reply to:
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 95 of 530 (884492)
02-22-2021 12:08 PM
Reply to: Message 92 by PaulK
02-21-2021 3:55 PM


Re: Charismatic Chaos Revisited
Phat, whenever I look at the videos you link to, I find problems and you refuse to discuss them.
That matches my experience with creationists, one in particular with whom I had an extended email correspondence.
In the experience, he would throw claims and "unanswerable question" challenges for me (basically, demanding that I provide him the entire chain of descent from "bacteria to blue whales" all while standing on one foot). However, in all that time he completely avoided my attempts to discuss his claims with him. Instead he would always change the subject, often by throwing yet another "unanswerable question" at me but also he would just simply run away.
Obviously, he didn't understand his own claims, which is why he was unable to even begin to discuss his own claims. He would hear a new claim which superficially seemed convincing so he would snatch it up and use it without any understanding. Then when anyone would try to discuss that "convincing sounding" claim with him, he was completely unable to do so.
That is a very common trait among creationists and believers in general. Another creationist on another forum I was on (until all the moderators had left except for one single creationist moderator who immediately became a tin-plated dictator) gave me an epiphany about that. After demonstrating to him what was wrong with his "ocean sodium" claim, I asked him why creationists continually use such unconvincing claims. He replied, "The only reason you find them unconvincing is because you are not yet convinced." Wow! So all they want is something that sounds convincing to them because it appears to support what they are already convinced about. Pure confirmation bias.
I used that to present a comparison between science and "creation science" and had since started to develop it into a page which is not yet completed: http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/cs_vs_sci.html .
So, obviously Phat chooses his videos because they superficially appear to support what he's already convinced of, even though he obviously does not understand them. So the reason why Phat refuses to discuss any of his videos is because he is incapable, because he doesn't understand them. That is obviously also why he refuses to tell us anything of what they say, because he does not understand it himself.
Which is truly sad for him, since discussion a subject is an ideal way to learn more about that subject and to give it much deeper thought. And like his golden opportunities to understand what atheists actually think, he's just pissing away this golden opportunity too.

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 200 of 530 (884912)
03-12-2021 5:39 PM
Reply to: Message 199 by jar
03-12-2021 4:15 PM


Re: Why You People Think The Way You Do
Phat writes:
It is possible that out of many religions only one is correct.
While it is highly unlikely it is possible that one or more religions MIGHT be correct.
Well, that depends entirely on how you score a religion on correctness, doesn't it?
Correctness would of course depend on getting things right, so being false would be the opposite, namely getting things wrong. I would think that we can all agree to that.
But are we requiring (or trying to claim) that a religion get absolutely everything right in order to qualify as "correct"? Or can it get some things right and also some things wrong and still qualify as "correct"?
By the same token, are we requiring (or trying to claim) that a religion get absolutely everything wrong in order to qualify as "false"? Or can it get some things wrong but still get some things right (however few) and still qualify as "false"?
Until we can agree on some kind of standards to proper rate religions, then Phat's claim (or hypothetical scenario) of "out of many religions only one is correct" is so meaningless as to not even come within sight of becoming an assertion.
 
If we go by the standard that a religion must get absolutely everything right and get absolutely nothing wrong in order to qualify as being correct, that would mean that the presence of even one single error would disqualify the entire religion. Given that every single religion has been created, operated, maintained, and taught by Man, who has a distinct talent to make mistakes (which is even part of Christian doctrine, especially fundamentalist doctrine), then it would be impossible for such a perfect religion to exist.
Ergo (∴), there does not exist any religion which is correct.
Applying similarly strict qualifications for a "false" religion, namely that it must get absolutely nothing right, would similarly yield an extreme paucity of candidates -- it might be possible to find one, but still very difficult and one would be very rare.
The most likely and obvious situation is that all religions are both correct and false in various degrees (ie, some are less false than others).
So trying to argue for only one religion being correct is just simply nonsense by any definition of "correct religion".

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(2)
Message 214 of 530 (884952)
03-16-2021 3:29 PM
Reply to: Message 206 by Phat
03-15-2021 3:16 PM


Re: Why You People Think The Way You Do
Jebus H! You still don't understand?
(borrowing from The Simpsons and to understand the middle initial read the results of my research into it at "Jesus H. Christ": Why "H"? which even (and especially) believers would find interesting since it seems to stem from Christograms -- BTW, my research was triggered by a visit to a chapel in Cadíz, Spain, which had the initials "JHC" painted on the walls)
You claim to believe in and follow your "Jesus", though you seem to have a unique "Jesus" different from others' and certainly different from what's in the Bible (which you choose to ignore when it gets inconvenient) and whom you created for your own personal use (while claiming that he actually exists, unlike all the other Jesuses). And yet you adamantly refuse to follow his teachings.
Stop making up excuses and address the question. We already know and agree with you that actually doing what you claim to believe would be inconvenient for you and would impact your life style. We already know that! But that is not the issue nor the question. Rather, the issue is your flagrant hypocrisy in which you claim to believe Jesus' teachings and try to follow them while at the same time rejecting and refusing to follow his teachings.
Try actually discussing instead of constantly deflecting.
... and throw myself on the altar of socialism.
You're in a union! Where do you think that unions come from and how they were formed? You already worship at "the altar of socialism" and serve it.
Plus, it would help if you were to try to learn something about "the S-word" that you throw about so easily. I don't think it means what you think it means.
Edited by dwise1, : BTW in Cadíz

This message is a reply to:
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(2)
Message 218 of 530 (884957)
03-16-2021 7:58 PM
Reply to: Message 216 by AnswersInGenitals
03-16-2021 6:44 PM


Re: Why You People Think The Way You Do
Part of the issue is that almost nobody has any idea what "socialism" is. For most in the USA, it's just a word to use to vilify anyone you don't like and to scare the rest.
Rick Steves (yeah, that travel guy on PBS) did a one hour special on the rise of fascism in 1930's Europe. Worth watching. At one point he got to Hitler's best-seller book, Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"). Incoherent and almost completely unreadable, but everybody had a copy (kind of like the Bible if you stop to think about it, only far worse). Then Rick Steves showed us two small bookshelves next to each other, a Communist one and a Nazi one. The Communist bookshelf was filled with books that you needed to read and study. For example, Das Kapital by Marx is a very dense multi-volume work which was the result of years of research into the deaths and mutilating injuries of workers. The National-Socialist bookshelf contained only one book, Mein Kampf, which nobody read anyway.
Watching on USA Netflix "Genius of the Modern World", I was amazed at the insight of Karl Marx into the failings and flaws of capitalism, though I still do not see the alternative that he offered as being a viable solution. His thinking was so strongly influenced by Hegelian dialectics (in the 2016 Coen Bros film, "Hail, Caesar!", the moment one of the actor's captors mentioned "dialectic" I whispered to my friend that they were Communists).
From the simplified presentation of dialectics in the US Air Force Communications Command Leadership School (circa 1982), you have a thesis and its opposite, an antithesis, which then resolve into a synthesis. So from my military training in dialectics, I would view the thesis and antithesis as being capitalism and socialism (in its extreme sense; see below), so the synthesis would be some form of capitalism that still took care of the workers.
This video by a Swedish Marxist, AzureScapeGoat, seems to explain it well:
So basically, the salient thing that all the different things that are called "socialist" have in common is ... nothing. That "s-word" mostly gets thrown about so much as to render it meaningless.
What I like about that video is that it lays out rather clealy the difference between social democracy (SD) and democratic socialism (DS). The video sets up a kind of Venn Diagram dividing the universe into Capitalism (ie, private ownership of the means of production) and Socialism (ie, state ownership of the means of production). SD (used by many nations in Europe, hence the "European model" touted by American "socialists") is very firmly entrenched on the capitalist side of capitalism with support, a "social safety net", for workers. Unfortunately, while supporting such a system, US supporters of such a system falsely call themselves "democratic socialists", which is solidly on the side of state ownership of the means of production (Cuba being a prime example). Talk about lifting oneself upon one's own petard.
Military history. One function of military engineers is that of the sapper, the troops who breech the enemy's defenses. One such tactic a couple/few centuries ago was to take an A-frame and lean it against the fortification's gate with an explosive charge attached to it to blow the gate open. That was a petard. On occasion, a sapper would set up his petard but one of his harnesses would get caught up in that petard, which he had already set to explode, so he couldn't escape. That is what getting hoisted on your own petard means.
We clearly need a solution. Capitalism doesn't work, at least not for the vast majority of the population. Socialism/Communism also have proven to not work.
We need a viable synthesis.

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 230 of 530 (884989)
03-18-2021 12:41 PM
Reply to: Message 229 by nwr
03-18-2021 12:19 PM


Re: the classic compartmentalization of Biblical Christianity
He's just doing the Christian Time Warp again.
I encountered the same thing with Suds on CompuServe in the late 80's. I pointed out that when we compare Mosaic Law and the Hamurabic Code we find that they are virtually identical (except that in questions of such things as whether the child of a freeman and a slave should be free or slave, Hammurabi chose freedom while Moses chose slavery).
Hammurabi predated Moses by centuries, so it's obvious who borrowed from whom. However Suds insisted that Hammurabi predating Moses proved that he had borrowed his code from Moses.
Doing the Christian Time Warp again. Go figure.

This message is a reply to:
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(2)
Message 234 of 530 (884995)
03-18-2021 2:00 PM
Reply to: Message 231 by Phat
03-18-2021 12:51 PM


Re: the classic compartmentalization of Biblical Christianity
The "Isaiah" that I am talking about is the young man with the glasses in the video. Isaiah Saldivar.
Then you should have clearly identified which "Isaiah" you were talking about in Message 225. Since hardly anybody would bother to watch what promised to be yet another junk video, the description of the video that you should have provided would have identified that ambiguous "Isaiah". At the very least, when you made your ambiguous reference to "Isaiah", you should have included some kind of clarification in his identity; ie:
quote:
"Isaiah explains basic Christianity quite well."
should have been
"Isaiah Saldivar, the young man with the glasses in the video, is a deliverance minister from California who explains basic Christianity quite well."
Or even just mentioning that your "Isaiah" is a person in the video would have been enough to differentiate him from the Old Testament prophet Isaiah, which is to whom Christians refer virtually every single time they say "Isaiah" (ie, 999,999,999 times out of a billion).
So then clearly your "Isaiah explains basic Christianity quite well." must have meant that the Old Testament prophet Isaiah was being referred to. Which would be a temporal impossibility given that Isaiah predated Jesus, who in term predated Christianity.
Hence doing the Christian Time Warp again, in which the timelines get all tangled up.
I had no comment on Moses or Hammurabi, but I wouldnt even lump them together.
I never claimed that you had made any such comment. Rather it was a member of CompuServe (Religion Forum, Science & Religion section which is where creation/evolution was discussed) circa 1990 who went by the moniker, Suds. He said he had been a brilliant mathematician but had to retire after a couple strokes. He kept coming up with the craziest stuff.
The case in point is that, upon having unearthed and translated a pillar upon which the Code of Hammurabi was inscribed, it became obvious that Mosaic Law was mostly a copy of the Code.
Now, please try to keep the timelines straight here. Hammurabi ruled Babylon c. 1792 BCE to c. 1750 BCE. As for when Moses is supposed to have lived:
quote:
Rabbinical Judaism calculated a lifespan of Moses corresponding to 1391–1271 BCE; Jerome suggested 1592 BCE, and James Ussher suggested 1571 BCE as his birth year.
Those dates would mean that Hammurabi not only came before Moses, but predated him by two to four centuries. Therefore, as to the question of whether Hammurabi would have copied from Moses or Moses from Hammurabi, it is extremely and undeniably obvious because of how time works that Moses had copied from Hammurabi. Or rather, since Moses is a legendary figure and the Book of Exodus was initially written during the Babylonian Exile, laws that had been set down by Hammurabi became incorporated in the text -- a very common phenomenon in oral traditions is the incorporation of new information into the old.
However, Suds insisted that it was Hammurabi who had copied from Moses despite his existing two to four centuries before Moses even existed.
Doing the Christian Time Warp again.
Though Suds did come up with a jewel of wisdom. Mind you, he was a staunch Christian. He stated that it does not matter one bit whether Christianity is true or not, nor whether Jesus ever actually existed. None of that actually matters, but rather what does actually matter is that the people of Europe believed that Jesus existed and that Christianity was true. Because Western Europe, by acting as if Christianity were true (note use of the subjunctive there) the outcome has been the exact same as if Christianity were actually true.
So in summary, results come from what people believe rather than from whether what you believe is true or not.
Like Rick Perry (who earned for Dubya the title in Texas of "the smart one") said:
quote:
Even a broken clock is right once a day.

This message is a reply to:
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 256 of 530 (885032)
03-19-2021 3:26 PM
Reply to: Message 246 by Phat
03-19-2021 12:40 PM


Re: Why You People Think The Way You Do
They were killed for lying. Not withholding. The God I worship would not kill somebody who honestly withheld.
Spoken like a true victim of abuse.
You limit your understanding to the character in the book you read about.
You mean the Bible? The only primary source of information about your god? The book that your religion requires you to believe, but which you repeatedly and obstinately refuse to even consider?
I've actually communed with Him. And you cant say one thing against that since you cant crawl inside my head.
Spoken like a true abuse victim.
I tend to blame it on our kinship with bonobos who use sex to calm down any male who starts to get out of hand. You think that the way to calm down any abuser is to get him laid. Sorry, but that doesn't always work, especially not in the long run.

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 258 of 530 (885034)
03-19-2021 4:23 PM
Reply to: Message 252 by Phat
03-19-2021 1:05 PM


Re: Why You People Think The Way You Do
How could you possible know. You claim not to be infallible but you are certainly cocky and arrogant.
We all have noses, so we all are able to tell when something stinks to high heaven.
Have you caught COVID and lost your ability to smell?
BTW, I did come down with COVID starting in mid-January. Never did lose my sense of smell nor taste, though I did lose 10 pounds which I'm trying to keep off. Have been vaccinated since then, both doses (Pfizer, so I have no fear of Trump having had anything to do with that, thus eliminating the chance of him having screwed everything up as he always does).
You cant say that a whole belief system is wrong unless you make a better case.
Not having a complete replacement for a totally fucked up belief system is no excuse for denying that that belief system is totally fucked up. That kind of fucked up logic that you're applying is ... wait for it, wait for it ... totally fucked up.
Look at how science and scientific theories work. You can't prove most theories, nor is that how the game is played. Rather, you disprove a theory with further research and data. When you disprove a theory you are not required to replace it totally, but rather that is incentive for other researchers to construct a replacement. Just as the further questions raised by every scientific answer provide clues for researchers to follow.
And I don't think you have enough evidence.
Haven't we already been there before with pioneering forensic scientist Locard's
exchange principle
?
Everything that happens leaves behind it trace evidence. You (grammatically speaking, I am referring to you, Phat, in the most personal sense possible) keep denying the role of evidence in any investigation, so now you are trying to invoke evidence? What kind of hypocrite are you? A F*CKING REPUBLICAN? (the worst kind of hypocrite, BTW)
In fact, you show that you don't by lumping all religions in the same category.
But aren't they all the same? Have you ever demonstrated that they are not all the same? How?
Newsflash: Many of them are WRONG.
Yes, as we have repeatedly told you.
I simply know and believe that there is a Right and Wrong and I claim to belong to the RIGHT group.
Spoken like a true right-wing authoritarian. What? You still haven't read that FREE book?
Show me how we would even test all of the various religions to see if a clear winner exists?
We have done so repeatedly, but you refuse to listen. Who's at fault there?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 252 by Phat, posted 03-19-2021 1:05 PM Phat has replied

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 274 of 530 (885753)
04-25-2021 2:55 PM
Reply to: Message 273 by robertleva
04-25-2021 10:46 AM


I immediately thought of that scene in "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum". Too much background info to catch you up (but I will if you ask), but the master of the house returns home to a new "maid" who informs him that while her body is his her heart belongs to someone else. That arrangement doesn't bother him in the least and he looks up to the gods and says "Thank you." and adds "Whichever one of you is responsible for this."
But more seriously, what you describe is what I feel that Christianity should be about, caring for and trying to help the least among us.
I am an atheist. On my last singles dance cruise on the Mexican Riviera I was bunked up with an "evangelical" ex-Mormon Christian. Not wanting to cause unnecessary tension with my bunkie, I stayed mum but my willingness to discuss religious matters led him to assume that I was of like mind to him (I actually saw the moment he made that decision). Everything I said to him was was truthful and meaningful. Believers must be truthful and honest. Believers must always think about what they believe, even question what they believe in order to root out error in their own thinking. But by thinking about and questioning what they believe, they are actively working through and actively thinking about their beliefs which is vital to spiritual growth.
Religion is meaningless unless you are actively engaged. Your statement says to me that you are actively engaged. That is a good thing. A very good thing.
Also, please do not assume the worst about atheists. We are among the few who actually think about religion.
Edited by dwise1, : added "singles" to the dance cruise

This message is a reply to:
 Message 273 by robertleva, posted 04-25-2021 10:46 AM robertleva has replied

Replies to this message:
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 280 of 530 (885782)
04-26-2021 2:40 PM
Reply to: Message 275 by robertleva
04-26-2021 10:04 AM


Do you leave room for the possibility that you could be wrong?
Always. That is how we learn.
For example, I couldn't believe it when I read Dawkins' description of how rapidly his WEASEL program converged onto a solution (by the end of lunch time, though using a slow BASIC interpreter instead of a compiled program) by using cumulative selection (which is based on how evolution actually works) instead of the typical creationist misconceived choice of single-step selection (which has nothing at all to do with how evolution works) which I've calculated would take many thousands of times longer than the estimated age of the universe.
Since Dawkins did not provide a program listing, I used his description of his thought experiment as my specification and wrote my own WEASEL program which I called MONKEY -- on a page which collected various WEASEL programs, mine was cited as being the best reconstruction of the original. Written in a compiled language, Pascal, it converged on its solution in less than a minute (usually in about 30 seconds, depending on population size), but that was when PCs were still slow; now it converges in less than a second, appearing to do so instantaneously.
Not even able to accept my own results, I analyzed the probabilities involved, resulting in my MONKEY Probabilties page. Once I understood why it worked so well I could finally accept my results.
So by leaving room for the possibility that something was wrong, I was free and motivated to question what I had read which in turn led to learning so much more.
 
I should inform you that I have eyes to see and ears to hear, so I can see where you're trying to lead me. During my association with the Jesus Freak Movement at what's supposed to have been "Ground Zero" (ie, Chuck Smith's Calvary Chapel, "Costa Mesa" -- even though it has always been in Santa Ana to my knowledge -- around 1970), I read their proselytizing training materials and learned their techniques. Since then I've had half a century of experience with many proselytizers, so I've seen just about all the tricks. At least it has been quite a long time since I've seen anyone present a new one.
And if you are going to try dressing up Pascal's Wager with something like a car insurance analogy (which I have called After-Life Insurance, then you will need to review the problems with that argument which I present on that page. Basically, if you want to maneuver me to accept the possibility that a god could exist, then you must realize that there is no reason to assume that it's necessarily your god with your associated theology (because even choosing the right god but the wrong theology is just as literally damning as choosing the wrong god or no god as per Pascal's Wager -- BTW, since Pascal was a Catholic and you are most likely a heretic Protestant, you have lost the wager yourself).
BTW, yes, that is the same Pascal as the programming language was named after. Blaise Pascal's (1623-1662) contribution to computer science was inventing a mechanical calculator for his father, a tax collector.
My exposure to "creation science" was rather cursory at that time in 1970 and the major claim presented to me, that a NASA computer discovered Joshua's "Lost Day", was very clearly bogus so I wrote creationism off as bogus. When I encountered creationist claims again in 1981, I was surprised that it was still around. Assuming that meant that there might be something to it after all, I wanted to see what their "scientific evidence for creation" was. To see what their case is.
It did not take me long to discover that they didn't have anything. All they did was to misrepresent the science and what their "scientific sources" actually said. All they presented was lies and deception. The claim that you have led off with, trying to isolate natural selection as the only process of evolution, is just one example of that misrepresentation. The wide range of young-earth claims are others. In the four decades since I started studying "creation science", I do not recall ever encountering a valid creationist claim or argument. Four decades.
Rather, I did encounter a long procession of creationists ready and zealously willing to commit any dishonesty deemed necessary to support their theology and to serve their god.
 
And that only serves to prove their religion to be a false religion -- BTW, their religion is not necessarily the same as actual Christianity. And that's not just my own opinion, but rather the opinion of Jesus in the Matthew 7:20 Test: by their fruits you will know them.
So if you want to try to convert me, I already know that your tree is a wicked tree because it bears wicked fruit. In Jesus' opinion, it should be cut down and thrown into the fire.
Why would I ever want to become part of that?
 
Do you leave room for the possibility that you could be wrong?
Do you?
Have you ever tested and verified any of the creationist claims you have made? Or do you just blindly regurgitate what they have fed you?
Have you ever gone to the library and looked up a scientific source that one of your creationist sources "cites"? I put that in scare quotes, because most creationists simply borrow other creationists' claims whole, bibliography and all. As a result, creationists claim to use scientific sources when in truth they had never seen those sources themselves. They had never verified the claims themselves. And for each claim with "cites" a scientific source, how many generations has that claim gone through since that "cited" source had actually been read?
 
Case in point. When I saw leading creationist Dr. Henry Morris in a 1985 debate make the moon dust claim citing a "1976" NASA document, written "well into the space age" (required intonation for this creationist claim), I followed up by writing to the ICR for the source. Then while browsing through the document stacks at the university library, I found that "1976" NASA document, pulled it off the shelf, and looked at the cover. It was indeed the cited document, but it was a collection of papers from a 1965 conference which was printed in 1967.
You can read the entire story with all the gory details on my page, MOON DUST. Basically, Morris had gotten that claim from Harold Slusher (Slusher's letter making that claim linked to through that page) and Slusher in turn must have gotten it from yet another unmentioned creationist in hand-written form. That original creationist must have switched the digits changing "1967" to "1976". Slusher never bothered to look up that NASA document himself (he was teaching at a university at the time, so it should have been easily available) and just repeated that dyslexic error when he "cited" that source as his own. Dr. Morris in turn did the exact same thing, claiming Slusher's "source" as his own without ever bothering to look up that source himself. I know that, because just looking at the front cover exposes that error.
If you have a copy of Dr. Henry Morris' book, Scientific Creationism (2nd ed), he presented that claim in a footnote on page 152. In large part from my research and some astronomers' research into this claim, the ICR backed away almost completely from this claim, but since Morris has died there is no chance that his book, still being sold to new creationists, will ever be corrected.
Always verify. Especially when you're going to use creationist materials.
Edited by dwise1, : Forgot to turn the question around. Oversight corrected now.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 275 by robertleva, posted 04-26-2021 10:04 AM robertleva has replied

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 Message 283 by robertleva, posted 04-26-2021 3:00 PM dwise1 has replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


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Message 287 of 530 (885789)
04-26-2021 3:32 PM
Reply to: Message 283 by robertleva
04-26-2021 3:00 PM


So you do have faith you see. You have faith that there is no God, over what ever miniscule doubt that you harbor that you could in fact be wrong and that God does exist.
Wherever did you get that from? Besides that tired old false equivalency, you are displaying a dismaying lack of understanding what atheism is.
... , simply pointing out for all to see that atheism is faith based at it's very core. Naturalism is the euphemized term for it these days, but call it what ever you want atheism requires some amount of faith like every other "religion".
Where do you get your bizarre ideas from?
Atheism is far more a position of skepticism which is more a position that the a convincing case for the multitude of different gods and religions just has not been made yet. So it's not a case of believing "there is no God", but rather there's no reason to accept your particular version of "God", which is very different from the particular versions of "God" offered by other forms of Christian and from the various versions of the gods offered by other religions. We cannot see what is supposed to be so special about your god which is not also so special about the other versions.
For example, let's consider a shipmate from NYC who claims that he owns the Brooklyn Bridge and he offers to sell it to you for just $100. If you believe what he claims and want to take him up on his offer, then you are exhibiting faith in his word. If you are skeptical about his claims, then you are saying that you have faith in ... just exactly what? Your argument that being skeptical about somebody's sketchy claims is just as faith-based as accepting those sketchy claims just does not make any sense.
If you want to make definitive statements about atheism, then you should learn something about it first. Just as you should learn something about evolution before you make use of sketchy creationist claims and arguments.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 283 by robertleva, posted 04-26-2021 3:00 PM robertleva has replied

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 Message 294 by robertleva, posted 04-26-2021 5:06 PM dwise1 has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


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Message 301 of 530 (885804)
04-27-2021 2:12 AM
Reply to: Message 297 by ringo
04-26-2021 5:50 PM


I'm more peaceful (and loving) now than I was when I was a Christian.
Reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend at church (UU).
I mentioned how creationists' theology is constructed in such a way that if the world is found to be the way it actually is (eg, ancient with abundant evidence of it's being far older than 6,000 years (though creationists usually say "10,000 years" in order to better hide what they're doing), then they are taught that that would disprove God (eg, John Morris of the ICR saying, "If the world is older than 10,000 years, then Scripture has no meaning."). Because of that, creationists need to find any way they can to discount or completely ignore that contradictory evidence.
For several years Gary had been a fundamentalist Christian. In everyday life he would see things contrary to what his faith taught him did not exist and could not exist for Scripture to have any meaning, so he had to ignore them, turn a blind eye to them and not even notice what was right there in front of his own eyes. As each day went by, he would have to deploy even more defensive mechanisms to deny the existence of all that contradictory evidence.
Finally, that mental effort just proved to be too much for him. At that point, he decided to apply the Matthew 7:20 Test ("by their fruits, you will know them") on his own religion. Yes, there were some good things about it, but he also saw that there were wicked things as well (using the terminology of the Test). Since the Matthew 7:20 Test does not allow a "good true" to produce any wicked fruit, Gary's own Christianity failed the Test.
That is when and how he became an atheist. And he found that he is so very much more spiritually fulfilled as a "complete atheist and total humanist" than he had ever been as a Christian.
Since the real world wasn't how he was taught it needed to be

This message is a reply to:
 Message 297 by ringo, posted 04-26-2021 5:50 PM ringo has seen this message but not replied

  
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