Anti-theist

Into a herd of swine. Remember "Legion, for we are many" in Mark and Matthew?

Perfectly understandable that you wouldn't have remembered. It is the "true Christians" who are so obsessed with demons and other nonsense.I got my fundamentalist Christian training circa 1970 in the Jesus Freak movement -- from what I keep hearing, that was at Ground Zero of the movement as it was happening, Chuck Smith's Calvary Chapel in Santa Ana, Orange County, California (they keep calling it "of Costa Mesa", but every single location I know of for them was always on the Santa Ana side of the Santa Ana/Costa Mesa city limits).Besides everything in the Bible being absolutely and literally true, etc, they were completely obsessed with End Times and demons. They saw demons literally involved with everything around them. Even when there was a well-known explanation for what just happened, it was done by demons every single time.For example, I got this personal story from two independent fundamentalist sources: my high school friend's mother and my ex-wife's electrical engineer brother. They both describe trying to wake up from a quick nap (she had nodded off in an easy chair) and they were aware of everybody around them and could hear them, but they couldn't move. It is simple sleep paralysis that we have known about for centuries and that has been studied and understood, but these two (and all other fundamentalists too, I have no doubt) were absolutely convinced that it was a demon holding them down.BTW, I was a "fellow traveler" though my friend's family. Neither I nor he ever converted, but rather everything that we were learning about their beliefs and theology only served to confirm and increase our skepticism. I had left Christianity half a decade earlier because I started reading the Bible and realized that what it said was just too crazy and unbelievable for me to be able to believe. Then the fundamentalist stuff was far more crazy and unbelievable, so I really couldn't believe that stuff! Ironically, my initial decision to leave Christian (by reading the Bible) was based on a naïve assumption of biblical literalism, which was required by the Jesus Freaks.

But it's guaranteed employment! And job security that never ends!Demon work is extremely labor-intensive. You need demons on hand to cause every individual infection and illness. You need demons to stand by every single individual human 24/7 ever alert to that person sneezing so that they can snatch up that bit of the person's soul that gets expelled from his body by that sneeze (unless the demon is thwarted by an observer saying, "Bless you."). Every single accident requires the actions of at least one demon. Every single bullet fired requires a demon to ride it and direct it to its target. Plus every single wrong thought requires a demon.Being a demon is guaranteed employment for eternity. Think about it, when have you ever seen unemployment rates for demons greater than 0%?

More than a decade ago I stumbled upon a British atheist site which had a rather good allegory. Needless to say, I have no idea how to find it again.So from memory, the story is of a traveling Christian missionary happening upon two men on the road who had never before heard of religion at all, let alone Christianity. So he started his proselytizing spiel on them, the same one that we have all heard far too many times. The two men listened eagerly and intently to what the missionary was telling them, since it was all brand new to them and he had said that it was very important. However, none of it made any sense to them, so they asked him many questions seeking clarification. The actual dialogue, which I cannot remember completely, showed the problems they were having (eg, the need for salvation from being punished for eternity by a God who's doing it out of love, why this "loving" God committed such atrocities, etc).The missionary was trying his best, but he was unable to answer their questions. Despite that, he agreed to accompany them to their village nearby to deliver his message to their neighbors who had also never heard about such things before. The entire village crowded around the missionary and listened to him even more eagerly and intently than the two on the road. And what he was telling them made even less sense to them so they had many more questions for him.Finally the missionary ran out of and away from that village as fast as he could despite the people's pleas that he remain and explain his teachings to them.Obviously, I could not do that story justice.

Not to mention Phat's predilection for hiding in dark alleys in order to prey on young children in order to force his beliefs on them. Message 90: Oh and BTW, those kids would not be able to give him that permission. Only the parents or guardians could do that. He had better hope that the police arrest him for molesting those kids before their parents can get their hands on him.

Yep, the typical way that theists (especially YECs) do "research": Google for a keyword, then copy-and-paste without ever having to read what you're copying let alone making any effort at all to try to understand any of it.I have two shining (assuming you could polish a turd) examples:1. An aggressively activist creationist with whom I had a long email correspondence and who, like you, has been given to lurking creepily around schools in order to prey on young children. He had repeated the utterly brain-dead caricature "definition" of punctuated equilibria (PE) as "a snake laid an egg and a bird hatched out." And he did so even after I had explained his mistake to him in some detail, so I challenged him to explain PE to me. He replied with a very well-written description of PE which was quite surprisingly accurate. And then a bit later he repeated his stupid "bird hatching out of a snake egg" yet again! When I took him to task for that, he pulled his usual dishonest evasive tricks of either changing the subject or simply running away yet again.Well, the fact that his accurate description of PE was so well-written should have been the first clue to what he had done -- he could never ever hold his own in any discussion nor could he ever discuss nor defend any of his own claims despite repeatedly describing himself as a genius (perhaps nowadays a "stable genius"?). It is now obvious that he had simply search the Web for an article on PE and did a copy-and-paste without having learned a single damned thing.2. Do you remember Crazynutsx, a member here from May-June 2011 (EvC Forum: Crazynutsx Topic Index)? A young gamer from the UK and a YEC who had created his own creationist forum which he announced here to recruit members. A few of us, myself included, took him up on it. He very quickly realized that he was in way over his head. Not only did he repeatedly commit plagiarism in his "replies" (for which I lectured him sternly), but he as an admin then resorted to deleting both his own and other members' posts and then lying about it. He finally abandoned his own forum without notice, after which it had been taken over by Japanese hackers who used it mainly to advertise merchandise and dental services. I'm not sure what its current status is, though I think I've seen some subsequent attempts of new people trying to add to the creationism threads.In the case that brings this up, he had posted the tired old "leap seconds" claim (ie, "at the rate that the earth's spin is slowing down, a few millions of years ago it would have been spinning impossibly fast hence it must be young" -- when he created the claim, Walter Brown did not understand leap seconds and so came up with a deceleration rate that was hundreds of times higher than it actually is; see my page, DWISE1'S CREATION / EVOLUTION PAGE: Earth's Rotation is Slowing for more information).At one point (the end of it, actually), he "wrote" a reply which was a complete copy-and-paste plagiarism. Not only that, but he had copy-and-pasted the classic refutation of his own claim: Thwaite and Awbrey's As the World Turns: Can Creationists Keep Time? (1982). That is called a "double howler."So if you do no more than to blindly copy-and-paste without trying to learn anything, then you will be in danger of making a complete fool of yourself.Yeah, yeah, I know! You are proud to be considered a fool since Jesus said that you would be called a fool for believing in him. During the Jesus Freak Movement (c. 1970) there was even a clown ministry called "Fools for Christ" (absolutely true story; they even appeared in full clown makeup).But that is not what's happening. You (and these two examples) are not being considered fools for believing in Jesus, but rather because you (pl) are doing and saying foolish things completely independent of any religious belief. And furthermore, instead of demonstrating the strength of your faith, your (pl) persistent foolishness only serves to discredit both you and your religion including your god.Why insist on doing damage to the Cause of Christ?

Just how the FUCK is this J. Noble Dagget and just what the FUCK doe he have to do with anything at FUCKING at all?Wasn't he once one of the recepticals of RedJack, the murdering entity also known as "Jack the Ripper" (Wolf in the Fold)?My ex-wife's family had a Trivial Pursuit tradition. If you had no idea what the answer was, you'd respond with "Godzilla." Actually, years later in a later edition, that was the actual correct answer, but to quote from the movie, "Irma La Douce", (translating from German, which is the only language I've ever seen that movie in), "That is another story." ("Das ist eine andre Geschichte.").So then you have a similar personal tradition. If you have no idea how to answer a question, you invoke "J. Nobel Daggett". WHy? WHO THE FUCK CARES? Just so long as you can divert our attention away from the actual question, you are just pleased as punch!YOU FUCKING LYING PIECE OF SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So what? Leonard Nimoy even wrote a book, "I Am Not Spock", trying to break out of being typecast. A character is a character, not the person portraying that character.Mr. Deity is a character who is distracted and not very competent. That does not mean that Brian Keith Dalton, who portrays Mr. Deity, is the same. Nor does that mean that Dalton's other videos (eg, The Way of the Mister) has him playing that same inept character.For that matter, your "J.Noble Daggett" references have all been to "The Way of the Mister" videos and never (to my knowledge) to any "Mr. Deity" videos. Until right now.Therefore, you are engaging in deliberate character assassination. How very Christian of you!The two Way of the Mister videos which you poo-poo'd aside with obscure J.Noble Daggett references did make some very good points, points that you wished to avoid, hence your deflection. Didn't you understand what he was saying?In the future, how's about you address the issues instead of deflecting with obscure movie references?

Of course the subtitle begs the question: "is there any other kind of god?"And, yes as Phat should know all too well, the Bible is part of that literature. First, one of the founders of modern forensic science established Locard's exchange principle:

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In forensic science, Locard's principle holds that the perpetrator of a crime will bring something into the crime scene and leave with something from it, and that both can be used as forensic evidence. Dr. Edmond Locard (1877–1966) was a pioneer in forensic science who became known as the Sherlock Holmes of Lyon, France. He formulated the basic principle of forensic science as: "Every contact leaves a trace". It is generally understood as "with contact between two items, there will be an exchange." Paul L. Kirk expressed the principle as follows:

Wherever he steps, whatever he touches, whatever he leaves, even unconsciously, will serve as a silent witness against him. Not only his fingerprints or his footprints, but his hair, the fibres from his clothes, the glass he breaks, the tool mark he leaves, the paint he scratches, the blood or semen he deposits or collects. All of these and more, bear mute witness against him. This is evidence that does not forget. It is not confused by the excitement of the moment. It is not absent because human witnesses are. It is factual evidence. Physical evidence cannot be wrong, it cannot perjure itself, it cannot be wholly absent. Only human failure to find it, study and understand it, can diminish its value.

Fragmentary or trace evidence is any type of material left at (or taken from) a crime scene, or the result of contact between two surfaces, such as shoes and the floor covering or soil, or fibres from where someone sat on an upholstered chair.

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Similarly in science, every process leaves behind some evidence, which of course could be destroyed by another process but then that second process would itself leave behind evidence.Plus those "conjures of mind", such the gods have proven to be, could instead be pink fairies or purple demons. Without being bogged down by the bothersome requirement of tiresome evidence, Phat and anyone else can make up any supernatural beastie that you want.They just have no justification in expecting the rest of us to believe what they claim about their creations.

Really? You really still believe that complete and utter BS lie your religion has poisoned your mind with? Despite having us here to explain it to you over and over and over and over again (as we have already done so many times). 
Break it down to basics. You believe things. Why do you believe those things? What is the most basic reason for believing something? For anybody to believe something. Think about it.The most basic reason for believing something is that you find it credible. You find it possible to believe it. Even if it is something that is completely and utterly false (eg, all of Q-Anon bat-shite crazy nonsense, Trump's claims (any of them, but currently the biggest porker is that he had actually won the election)), as long as you find it credible then you are able to believe it.[Grammatical Note: the "you" used in this paragraph was the generic you what does not refer to you, Phat, personally but rather to some unspecified generic person. See also the English "one" (as in "What would one do in such a situation?"), the French "on" (surprisingly very heavily used; my ears prick up every time I hear it being used in French content on Netflix), the German "man" (eg, "Man ist, was man ißt", "One is what one eats."). ]So then what happens when you (generic) cannot find something to be credible? Would one be able to believe in it? Only with difficulty, such that inordinate pressure would need to be exerted in order to convince you, ranging from peer or societal pressure (eg, old New Yorker cartoon in which one man at a cocktail party tells another, "Actually, my beliefs are the same as the Unitarians', except I'm not as brave as they are.") to the tools of the trade in the Inquisition (eg, thumbscrews, red-hot pokers).Take that one more step: what happens when you (generic) find something completely incredible such that it is impossible for you to believe it? Would you (personal; AKA "Phat") be able to believe something that is clearly and undeniably incredible?Why do you (personal, Phat) not believe in most of the gods that exist (eg, Wotan (AKA "Odin"), Thor, Zeus, Marduk, Bel and Anu (the Givers of the Law to Hammurabi), etc). At the most basic level, it is because you do not find them credible. Why do we atheists also not believe in them? Because we do not find them credible. Why do we also not believe in YHWH? For the same reason.One old atheist argument to YHWH-ists (though mainly the Christian ones, since they are the more belligerent type) is to inform them that they are also atheists since they do not believe in any of those other gods; we just believe in one less god than they do. 
Here is a testimonial from a local YEC activist who constantly and loudly proclaims that he used to be an atheist until he was "saved" by YEC. Let us evaluate his own testimonial from a tract that he told me he was very proud of (because of the formatting he could do because it was in an early Word format -- talk about how superficial these "true Christians" can be!):

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WHY IS THIS GUY E MAILING PEOPLE AND OFFERING FREE BOOKS ON CREATION VS EVOLUTION?

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Good question!

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First off, let me share my history with you (don't worry, it will be brief).

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I was raised in Buffalo, New York, and was fortunate to have great parents They took my sister and I to church every Sunday, we attended Sunday school and church camps in the summer. I believed in God, and never gave the issue much thought.

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In sixth grade, I remember seeing a big colorful book produced by Time-Life. It caught my eye, and I opened it up and was pleased to see big colorful drawings. One set of drawings really caught my eye. There was a series of animated drawings that went across two pages. On the far left was a very ape-like character walking on all fours and covered with hair. The character to his right was a little more upright, he had shorter arms, was starting to walk on two legs and had less hair. This progression continued for a few more drawings until at the far right side of the page there was this handsome fellow, a human being! This is called the ascent of man chart that nearly everyone is familiar with.

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In sixth grade, I looked at that chart for a while, smirked, thought it was ridiculous, and went outside and played softball.

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Eventually I made it to ninth grade. While in a Biology class, the teacher was teaching us about evolution and placed the same chart up on the wall. I still remember it. I sat there and studied that chart for a long time. It was on that very day that I recognized a major conflict existed between what this teacher was saying and what the Bible taught. Should I believe my science teacher, who is teaching man has ascended from ape-like animals, or do I believe mommy, daddy, and that book (the Bible) that says God made man instantly from the dust of the ground?" I reasoned that this teacher is a scientist after all, so this must be valid information.

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I had a choice to make that millions of people world wide are faced with. Do I believe the Bible or what is taught as science (please note I did not call it science).

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In ninth grade I chose to go with the science teacher, and considered myself to be an atheist for about 14 years. I took many more science classes in high school and in college (I am a Mechanical Engineer), and none of these classes changed my beliefs, if anything they reinforced my atheist beliefs.

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I assume the majority of you are in college now. Do you understand my story? I am pretty certain you have had several hours of your education dedicated to the teaching of the Theory of Evolution. I would love to hear how this affected you. Has it done anything to your faith? It obliterated mine!

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Question! Why in 6th grade did I think the drawings were ridiculous, but in 9th grade I believed them?

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Was it because I was more intellectual? No. Was it because the Biology teacher explained it so convincingly? Not really. The real reason for my becoming an atheist in 9th grade can be summed up in one word...hormones. In 6th grade I did not have much temptation in my life. Perhaps my biggest sins were a lie here and there, throwing snowballs at the school bus and riding my minibike where I shouldn't.

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But in 9th grade a whole new world opened up to me. The temptation of drinking, drugs and premarital sex presented themselves to me at exactly the same time I was being taught evolution. I knew the Bible said that being drunk and having sex outside of marriage was wrong, but here is my science teacher, telling me the origin of man is completely contradictory to what the Bible taught as the origin of man. I felt excited.....and decided the Theory of Evolution was for me, after all the Bible was scientifically wrong on the very first page!! I considered myself to be an atheist. As an atheist I no longer had to abide by any rules but my own. If I wanted to get drunk, no problem, if I wanted to try to have premarital sex no problem, I now belonged to the evolution "religion" (religion meaning a system of beliefs built on faith) that allowed me to sin without guilt.

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It was not the data that made me an atheist, it was the conclusion, a belief that made me the judge of right and wrong. Those cartoon drawings of ape men did look sharp, but I wanted to believe them emotionally, more than I really believed them intellectually.

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No, that was not what had made him a fake atheist (in our email exchange, he insisted that every single night while he was an "atheist" he prayed to God and throughout the time he was an "atheist" he still believed in God, things that are completely inconsistent with actually being an actual atheist). And yet despite his having never actually being an actual atheist, but rather a self-serving fake atheist, he insists that he knows intimately what atheists think and believe and are motivated by. And he is completely and absolutely wrong. As are you. (OK, some atheists had fallen into the same legalistic trap that he had, but that does not speak for the rest of us)Evolution never convinced him to become an "atheist". Rather, it was his own religious training that had done it. As a hormone-laden teenager, he was aching to sin, but because of his religious indoctrination that made him feel guilty. What was he to do?But then there was that LoopHole that his indoctrination handed him on a silver platter. "If you are an atheist, then you can sin to your heart's delight. The only reason for you to be moral is because you are responsible to God. If you no longer believe in God, then you have nobody to be responsible to. You are free to sin all you want to. You could become a complete hedonist who runs down the street naked, raping all the women you could want to, while being a serial ax murderer killing everybody else with nothing to stop you." OK, rather extreme, but that is still what "true Christians" believe that atheists will "devolve" to. But if you were to ask atheists about that, they would affirm that if their Christian neighbors actually believed that if not for being a Christian then they would be a serial ax murderer, then by all means keep those Christian neighbors from ever losing their faith. 
When my ex-wife (at the time non-ex) took a class in Developmental Psychology as part of her Elementary Education degree, she insisted that I also take that class, which I did. And when our older son went to the same university, we insisted that he also take that class, which he did. When my first grandson was about to be born, my present to them was the book, Experimenting with Babies, which I had heard of on Big Bang Theory.Basically, developmental psychology involves "stages of development" in that certain kinds of cognition do not show up at first, but then do show up later as the child grows and develops. For the stages, use "Piaget" as a search word.One chapter in the book (which I lost in the divorce) dealt with moral development, which is admittedly less rigorously developed as other traits. The earliest stages of moral development is based solidly on a single authority, the parent, to decide what is right or wrong. In that case, the authority gives you the rules and your moral responsibility is to follow those rules and your responsibility (ie, to whom you are answerable for breaking those rules) is to that authority, which is initially your own parent.Then as you grow up, you find yourself challenged by more complex moral dilemma. Les Misérables in which a man becomes a life-long fugitive for having stolen a loaf of bread to feed his starving family. More modernly, I think it has been posed as a very dear family member needing life-saving medication that you cannot afford to buy so your only resort is to steal it. That is your moral dilemma between theft and saving a life. And that is the stuff of high drama.But when applied to standard religious training, it becomes far more damning.Why be good? I do not have access to the original text at the moment. A Baptist (or whatever) child has been given the religious education task of learning what the others believe (sorry, but sounds like a set-up to me). When the Baptist child asks why she should be good. The Unitarian minister responds, "Because it is the better way."So why be good? To help others.

As our minister would tell us a few times, there was a church member who once complained to the minister/pastor/priest that he kept giving the same sermons over and over again. The response was, "That's because you still have not learned them!" Uh, demons is what you believe. We don't believe that stuff. The power of suggestion, also of gullibility.Back in the 90's or so an insider to the Pat Robertson televangelism empire wrote a tell-all book about it, "Salvation for Sale". He described personally witnessing Pat Robertson performing a healing. A man was wheeled up in a wheelchair and when Pat Robertson laid his hands upon the man, the color returned to his pallid face and he presented much better, vastly improved. The author did a follow-up call a few days later and found that the man had died the next day after the "healing". It was the man's expectation at work, nothing supernatural that Pat Robertson had ever done. 
Funny side story. Back when Crown bookstores were still a going concern, I asked the clerk if they had "Salvation for Sale". Without missing a beat, he replied that they didn't, but there was a church a few blocks down the street.

On NPR, 01 Apr 2021, Mice That Hear Imaginary Sounds May Help Explain Hallucinations In People:

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A technique that induces imaginary sounds in both mice and people could help scientists understand the brain circuits involved in schizophrenia and other disorders that cause hallucinations.

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The technique appears to offer "a way to study psychotic disorders in animals," says Adam Kepecs, a professor of neuroscience and psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

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It also shows how levels of the brain chemical dopamine determine the likelihood that a mouse or a person will perceive something that isn't really there, Kepecs and a team report in this week's issue of the journal Science.

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In my personal experience, while in the hospital after major surgery I became irritated at that dog behind my bed that kept licking itself. It was actually the oxygen bubbling through water, but I could tell it was that d*mned dog!You don't have to be full blown mentally ill or drugged up to have aural hallucinations. Just a minor transient dopamine imbalance could be enough.Nor to misinterpret something that you actually almost hear. If you've been taught that such sounds would be demons, then you would hear demons. 
OBTW, please note that I described what's in that link rather than to just post a bare link.

Dude! I will not even quote your message!Alcohol and grass is all I ever ingested in college. Never acid. At the time, I thought that my growth was stunted. One guy once described me as "the straightest guy he had ever known." At that time (circa 1970) that term had no sexual orientation connotation, but rather meant that I was no hippie freak.In 1976 I enlisted in the US Air Force and underwent basic training. At that time, we were a mix of USAF Regulars (eg, me), Reserve, and Air National Guard. One of the latter two was a pudgy Jewish New Yorker. I know that because early on we had a stereotypical redneck TI (Training Instructor, like a DI only with a wide-brimmed blue cover). Early on, our TI assigned duties, including those in charge of marching recruits to Divine Services (yeah, we had to be marched almost everywhere). He made the assignments for marching the Protestants and then the Catholics. Then he asked if he had missed anybody else. This lone New Yorker raised his hand. "What else is there?", he thundered loudly. Meek response, "I'm Jewish."I will forever love that response to typical Christian hubris.That same recruit later shared with us about one New York City party where he was the "designated straight" at an LSD party including one or both of his parents having to make sure that nobody did anything physically dangerous to themselves. He talked about how tiresome it was to have to herd so many cats.

Remember that one for the next time you need a screenname!I don't know whether you have read the story of my name, but here it is again:

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Over the years, most especially in on-line "creation/evolution" discussions, creationists have often engaged in personal attacks against me just because of my AOL screen name, "DWise1". In fact, one infamous professional creationist, Kent Hovind, went so far as to twice attempt (via email) to pick a fight with me over my screen name in order to avoid answering a very simple question about one of his claims, namely what his source was. I informed him that the story behind that name is really very mundane and has nothing to do with what he was railing against and I presented it to him.
So then why "DWise1"? Here is the story:

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In every multi-user computer system, there are corporate policies for assigning user names. One common one is to append the first letter of the first name to the beginning of the first n letters of the last name (since there's always a limit to the length of the user name), adding numeric digits if the resultant user name has already been assigned. For example, one Dilbert comic depicted a "Brenda Utthead" complaining about the user name they had assigned her.
When I went to work at Hughes Aircraft in 1985, that was their policy, so my user name was "dwise". At the same time, they had bought some of the first Macs, non-networked floppy systems which we used to combine text and graphics in our presentation visuals. To identify my data floppy, I labelled it with my user name, "dwise". Then when I had filled that one and start on a second data diskette, I labeled that one "dwise2" and, for symmetry, I relabelled the first one, "dwise1". Then one day a co-worker read the label of the dwise1 diskette and started to laugh. I didn't get the joke until he told me to read it out loud; up until then I had not realized that it sounded like "The Wise One" and we all had a good laugh over the unintentional pun.

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Then when I signed up for AOL several years later, in the middle of the sign-up process I suddenly had to think up a screen name. All I could think of was that accidental pun and so chose "DWise1" as my screen name.

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Well, there you have the story. Nothing at all to it. And others have also chosen that name, albeit on other domains, of course -- in each domain there can be only one of any user name.

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You never know when "dcrazy1" could come in handy! Keep that one handy in your hip pocket, ever ready to whip it out. It will serve you very well.As you just saw, my own origin story is very mundane. But yours! Priceless!

Actually a valid segue from the topic of randy gods."Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me." -- O B A F G K MWith some new exotic stellar classes -- R, N, S, W -- in my 1975 astronomy class we were taught to extend that mnemonic device with: "Right Now, Smack, Wow!.