Summations Only

But you always just shrug these problems off without - it seems to me - actually thinking about them. You protect yourself from these ideas by wrapping your protective cloak of belief around yourself. Like you just did. Why do preachers teach what is known to be false and what they don't believe themselves?Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

There's nothing special about you, empathy is a human emotion like love, hate, happiness, anger which - with the exception of psychopaths who are missing this emotion - is common to all. It's a measurable brain function which we're beginning to properly understand. There's absolutely no reason to ascribe it to a superstitious concept of 'Holy Spirits' when it can be seen in action using neuroimaging. Do you ascribe all our other emotions to various spirits?

I said measured not quantified, but to be clear, I meant that emotions being real, phyiscial things can be observed as brain activities. So yes, love is a physiological condition that can be examined objectively and explained scientifically.Remind me any time you like and also let me know when you find a mystical spirit causing the feeling.

Steady, a till receipt is objective evidence that goods were bought by someone (unless forged). Who bought it would need to be established. None of that is hearsay.

Hi Golffy, I've been reading your posts with interest.Some things you need to know about the people here. You'll see that most of your combatants have been here for many, many years. If you look back over the threads, you'll also find that every possible combinations of discussions about both religion and evolution has already been had. It's rare to find something to argue about that hasn't already been done to death here many times.Consequently what we have here are a bunch of die hards - often extraordinarily intelligent and often very knowledgeable people who are unfortunatley also contrary twats who simply like to argue for no other purpose other than to argue when nothing much else is happening. It gets extremely tiresome at times, especially if you're really trying to sort something out.So it's important to log fairly quickly when you're just being trolled and who most is likely to be doing it. Then back out of pointless discussions when it's obvious that there's nothing more useful likely to be found.'nuff said.

No he doesn't - he's never reached out to me.(See how easy that was to disprove?)

Of course, all of mankind has that. It's an emotion called morality which we can see in action in the pre-frontal cortex of the brain using fRMI. The reason 14-24 year olds are responsible for the vast majority of crime is because the pre-frontal cortex which is responsible for executive functioning - ie self-control - and the limbic system - which is responsible for governing risk taking - are still under-developed. This has been explained to you umpteen times. It's not a voice - it's an emotional state - just the same as anger or fear. That really is nonsense - what on earth has 'heart' got to do with it. You're just talking in metaphor. Neither is it doctrine, morality is a learnt emotional state. We get it from our parents and society - it makes it work.God has never, ever, reached out to me, but my parents and teachers and friends and relatives and neighbours and police and laws have. That's how it works, that's how civilisation was created - by hundreds of years of pacification and civilisation resulting from our creation of institutions, fair laws and non-arbitrary policing of them.

I do not. The cause IS the process.You can simply say that god built the process - well fine, bollocks but fine. Bollocks because the origin of the function of the pre-frontal cortex is no different than for the function of the elbow joint - it evolved.What never, ever happens is that I have a voice from god in my ear telling what's right and wrong - you always use that language but actually accept that what's occurring is a natural process requiring no external, real time intervention which you consistently imply.If you follow the biology instead of your preconceptions and preachy language, you must arrive at the same conclusion - god does not intervene in our feelings and actions, they are derived from perfectly natural processes.

How is that supposed to be persuasive? Every believer of every religious book says the same and then say totally different things to eachother. No one say "IMHO I believe I have a very inconsistent way of understanding the Scriptures." It's not even as though the book is really difficult to understand - it isn't it's simply written for simple peoples.You just believe your reading is correct the same way everyone else does. Your reading of it is different from those a few centuries ago, not because the words are different but because - and unlike Faith - you've allowed many of the ideas of the Enlightenment and the civilising effects our liberal democracy to colour it.In the end all the statement that you Phat and Faith make about belief can be countered by the statement "no it's not" or similar flat denial.That's only able to be the case because the original claim has nothing to support it other than your belief. Well 'no it's not'.

'Things have been learned since the so-called enlightenment' You think? Pretty much everything modern Western society and all the good things that have come from it owe it to the enlightenment. Without it, you'd be burnt for your blasphemous beliefs by people like Faith who wouldn't just be minority armchair evangelists, they'd be mainstream zealots.Their God was not good - it was the god of the Old Testament with all the nastiness that comes with him. Enjoy your freedom to believe just the bits that you prefer and to ignore the rest - it was brought to you by rational men who wanted to replace superstition with sanity and human progress.

No it isn't and no he didn't.

Normally we assess the evidence, then form a conclusion from it. Of course if you take the opposite approach and decide guilt or innocence before the trial, you're one of those people that we are all very frightened of when the are in control of anything more that the TV remote.So far it seems that we got lucky.