Belief Versus The Scientific Method

Phat writes: I tend to favor....

Taking up your cross daily and following Jesus is not about what YOU favor.

I get so frustrated trying to explain my arguments and in some way validate my belief to your loyal peanut gallery. To be honest, I'm not as worried about trying to convince myself. I know what I experienced and though not experiencing signs and wonders today, I honestly believe that this whole religion thing will resurface nationally as a major debate and issue amongst the people.

I feel at that point that thee will be public debate/discussion regarding some of the same issues that we go over and over and over here.

For the record, I never agreed with the Moral Majority or the politicizing of religion and belief that first occurred in 1979 through Jerry Falwell Sr.

I have never thought that religion should have such a prominent place in politics, though it does play a role at shaping public opinion on major issues such as Green New Deals, Abortion, Gay Marriage, and Supreme Court nominees.

Phat writes: Guilt is a Catholic thing. Protestants feel "Blessed", Highly Favored" and occasionally boast about being a "peculiar people".

jar writes: Once again Phat, you are simply showing your ignorance about Christianity. Guilt is an HONESTY thing rather than a Catholic thing.

For one thing, I was semi-joking. AZPaul is semi-joking hoping to get a laugh from his peanut gallery and it would be the type of joke that I would freely share among the people at a church. You always show such an extreme disdain and "pity" for evangelicals that I should have known that you would react the way you did. Catholic "guilt" implies that a Catholic may worry that God was mad with them whereas a Charismatic would never think such a thing unless they were willfully sinning.(Hebrews 10:26).

jar writes: It is only those Christian Cults that are totally divorced from reality that feel "Blessed", Highly Favored" and occasionally boast about being a "peculiar people".

Yeah I forgot that you berate us for having the audacity to think we are any more blessed or favored than a womanizing, drunken atheist who laughs at organized religion and our "sky daddy".

Not that you likely don't have a point. Really, though. Lighten up on the CCoI. It seems you carry a lifelong pity for them, little realizing that we ALL are lacking something. You yourself said that though a believer, you will most certainly be wrong about GOD.

The thing that I hate about your argument is when you push the insistence that all evidence points to religion and the Bible itself as being strictly a human creation. I don't believe that for a minute and I also will say I don't like this idea that im supposed to do what Jesus commanded even if He didnt exist and even if I got nothing out of it. What do you guys think I am? An Ascetic Monk?

ringo writes: Taking up your cross daily and following Jesus is not about what YOU favor.

So I attempt a bit of levity and am essentially told to get busy and embrace suffering. What are you? Channeling Jesus?

Phat writes: Yeah I forgot that you berate us for having the audacity to think we are any more blessed or favored than a womanizing, drunken atheist who laughs at organized religion and our "sky daddy".

What does the evidence show Phat?

Is there ANY evidence that there is any fewer percentage of Biblical Christians that are womanizing drunkards than there are atheists who are womanizing drunkards?

Have you even actually listed to the old Biblical Christian Hymn "The Church has one foundation"?

Does it bother you that it codifies women as property?

Phat writes: So I attempt a bit of levity...

What levity?

Phat writes: ... and am essentially told to get busy and embrace suffering. What are you? Channeling Jesus?

I have never promised you anything but blood, sweat, toil and tears - as opposed to the aplogists who promise you a get-out-of-hell-free card and secret messages from Jesus with no effort required on your part.

Yes, life is hard, especially when you consider the hardships in the other guy's life.

jar writes: Does it bother you that it codifies women as property?

I dont see it.

Show me where in the lyrics.

quote:

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The church has one foundation,
’Tis Jesus Christ her Lord;
She is His new creation,
Through water by the word.
From heav’n He came and sought her
To be His holy bride;
With His own blood He bought her,
And for her life He died.
Elect from every nation,
Yet one o’er all the earth,
Her charter of salvation—
One Lord, one faith, one birth.
One holy name she blesses,
Partakes one holy food;
And to one hope she presses,
With every grace endued.
Long with a scornful wonder
Men saw her sore oppressed,
By schisms rent asunder,
By heresies distressed.
Yet saints their watch were keeping
To hail a brighter day,
When God should stop their weeping,
Take their reproach away.
The evening sun is shining,
The cloudy day is past;
The time of their repining
Is at an end at last.
The voice of God is calling
To unity again;
Division walls are falling,
With all the creeds of men.
Back to the one foundation,
From sects and creeds made free,
Come saints of every nation
To blessed unity.
Once more the ancient glory
Shines as in days of old,
And tells the wondrous story—
One God, one faith, one fold.

---

Correct, you don't see it. It's another example of Male Privilege and how people simply accept what the want rather than what is there.

Look again.

It was a sign of the times when first written but the sad and pitiful part is that even today you don't see it.

Edited by jar, : No reason given.

There you go again, lumping *all* of the apologists into one corrupt barrel. I dont see it. And I trust (to a degree) much of what modern ones teach. I dont even know who you learn from.

Here is one who teaches soundly. I could tell within the first 5 minutes of listening that the guy knew what he was talking about.

I like this guy on YouTube. He defends the Bible very well. This is the second video I watched.

Also:
10 Quick reasons you shouldn’t be so quick to write off Christianity

Feel free to challenge, scoff, and trash this.

Phat writes: Also: 10 Quick reasons you shouldn’t be so quick to write off Christianity Feel free to challenge, scoff, and trash this.

Okay.

It's thinly-veiled creationism. And even IF the universe had a beginning, was finely tuned, yadda yadda yadda, that might suggest a creator but it has NOTHING to do with Christianity.

If you think you can defend any of that tripe, go ahead.

He defends the Bible very well.

Oh, wow.

It's an exercise is carefully describing things in ways intended to fool the gullible.

And you fell for it.

Yeah I forgot that you berate us for having the audacity to think we are any more blessed or favored than a womanizing, drunken atheist who laughs at organized religion and our "sky daddy".

Really? You are seriously going to push that old stupid shite?

In the meantime, we are all sick and tired of Repuglians pulled that same old stupid shite of projecting their own sick perversions onto their opponents in the height of hypocrisy.

Believers' lies about atheists' motivations are based on their own sick longings. Here is the literal testimonial of a local creationist (and one of the worst liars I have ever had to suffer, besides perhaps Trump (but that is a close call) ) of how he had become a fake atheist:

quote:

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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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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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Besides his first sin against English ("They took my sister and I ... " -- please please please study some German (or any other inflected language, though Russian can be a bit more difficult, ну? (Да, я говорю мало по русскиы, конечно) in order to learn the most basic things about case), he just told us in no uncertain terms that it was not evolution, but rather HIS OWN RELIGIOUS TRAINING that had turned him into a "atheist". He wanted to find a legalistic loophole to allow him to sin guilt-free and he found one that had been taught to him his entire life: if you don't believe in God then you are not responsible for your actions and you can freely sin in every which way you could possibly want.

Furthermore in our email correspondence, he stated emphatically that he had continued to believe in God and had prayed to God every single night of his "atheism". All of that demonstrates decisively that he was just a fake atheist, though he insists that he was an actual atheist and so he knows exactly why atheists are atheists. Complete and utter BS lies.

The truth of the matter is that atheists are more moral than "true Christians" are. Referring to developmental psychology, moral reasoning also goes through stages of development. To test where a child is in moral reasoning, we can use the Jean Valjean scenario from "Les Misérables" in which a man becomes a hunted convict for having stolen a loaf of bread to feed his starving family, though sometimes redressed as stealing an expensive medicine to save his dying wife's life. The earliest most primitive stage is "rules-based morality" in which some authority makes the rules and your job is simply to follow those rules. Basically the Nürnberg Defense ("Ich befolgte nur meine Befehle.", "I was only following orders."). Milgram's infamous psychology experiment in which "teachers" would electrocute "students" to death exposed this mode of morality: if an authority figure takes full responsibility for your actions, then you can commit the most unthinkable acts as directed to by that authority figure.

Most adults, especially "true Christians", are stuck in rules-based morality. God tells me to kill gays and abortion doctors, so that is what I will do. I am not responsible for those killings, but rather God is. Yes, that is intentionally extreme, but that is their mind-set. But thus belief in God as your sole responsibility for being moral is actually a cop-out. If God tells you to do something immoral, then the bad consequences of your actions are not your fault, but rather God's, the One Authority who took full responsibility for your actions. You were only following your Befehle. Thus, "true Christian" teachings that atheists don't believe in God in order to escape responsibility for their actions is a complete reversal of reality: "true Christians" use God in order to escape from responsibility for their own heinous misdeeds, choosing to blame God for the great damage they cause.

Rather, atheists do take personal responsibility for their own actions. We have no other choice! Nobody else to blame!

And BTW. Women are not objects, but rather people in their own right. Objectifying them is far more a Christian thing than an atheist thing. Unless you happen to be yet another a theist pretending to be a fake atheist.

So please do not blame atheists for your own moral shortcomings*.

 
 
*FOOTNOTE:
Back when streaking (running naked in public) was a thing in the early 70's, during the Oscars when David Niven was presenting some guy streaked across the stage. David Niven recovered with a remark that some people should refrain from airing their own short-comings in public.

Another take is that if life had never evolved on this planet, then we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

There's also a probability fallacy involved, though I don't remember its name. Basically, you are sitting in a poker game. What is the probability that you would have that exact hand that you are holding? Abysmally small. Therefore, you are not holding that exact hand. Wait, what?

And that is exactly where that probability fallacy falls apart. Yes, we can calculate the probability of getting a particular hand and it is very small. But once you do have your hand, then it's a done deal, 100% probability! What are the odds of getting that particular hand? Doesn't matter, because I already have it!

So what are the odds of the universe and life on earth being the way that it is? Doesn't matter, because it already happened! Otherwise, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

nwr writes: It's an exercise is carefully describing things in ways intended to fool the gullible.

OK upon further reflection, the guy that made the two videos is a bit biased and annoying, but he has some arguments. He quotes some scholarly atheists in order to support his arguments, but I am a bit skeptical that he constructed the arguments correctly. The question is if he is lying. You likely assume that to be so in every case of apologetic defense such as this one. Im not as biased against the accuracy of scripture and more important, the accuracy of events describe in those times. I will say this much. I always was unimpressed and dismissive of the arguments made by folks such as Dawkins, Dennett and Carrier. They had an axe to grind. Keep in mind also that I believethat there is a spiritual war going on. Assignments against the truth of the living Christ will always exist.

Regardng the arguments contained within thhe link, I find many convincing arguments...not so much in support of my apologetic wishes but based on logic and common sense.

ringo writes: It's thinly-veiled creationism. And even IF the universe had a beginning, was finely tuned, yadda yadda yadda, that might suggest a creator but it has NOTHING to do with Christianity.

I dont see anything suggesting creationism...unless perhaps you are worried that any argument that supports the Christian God assumes creationism to begin with. I never give creationism a second thought. What I DO is I read the arguments and form my own beliefs and opinions or hone and revise the beliefs I already hold.

ringo writes: And even IF the universe had a beginning, was finely tuned, yadda yadda yadda, that might suggest a creator but it has NOTHING to do with Christianity.

OK lets think. We have three basic options here.
1) No Creator of all seen and unseen. (of any garden variety)
2) The Christian God exists. The stories are basically true, having been tweaked to filter out human error and bias from facts. (In this regard, the onus is in disproving the arguments in video#1)
3) GOD, A Force, A Ground of all Being, or an undefined spiritual reality exists. (Ringo is careful to distance this concept from the Christian God, for some reason)

Lets introduce some links to some rabbit trails and take on each argument one by one.

1) Surely you don’t actually believe Jesus rose from the dead?
2) “You’re a Christian because of your dad” : Discussing Freud and the connection between belief and upbringing

quote:

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We’ve all heard it before. You are a Christian because your parents were, hence, we should not take your faith seriously. It is simply something handed down to you. Or you’re a Christian because you live in a “white” country or you’re a Christian because you are weak and need a crutch.

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3) 8 KEY WAYS ATHEISTS CONTRADICT THEMSELVES (granted they use the "eye complexity" argument in this one, but the argument is constructed well and has some thinking points. They discuss chance and the ridiculousness of the concept, as I tried to do.

quote:

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Chance is a probability term reflected in the odds of a horse winning, the adjustments in a stock price based off an earnings downgrade or the price for a bet offered by a casino. It is not something which makes your breakfast, brushes your teeth or drives your car.

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Gotta love it!

4) 10 Quick reasons you shouldn’t be so quick to write off Christianity Good arguments in this link. I will expand them here.

quote:

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Christianity far from being a crutch for the weak grew and continues to spread during times of intense persecution.
We’ve all heard it before- Christianity is just a religion for the weak. Something you cling to in order to make yourself feel better and live a naive life. Such a view is ignorant of the original roots of Christianity as well as the fact Christianity today grows fastest in the places where there is the most intense persecution.
NT Wright reminds us conspiracies are based off greed, power and lust and I can hardly see how being willing to die for a lie would help feed greed, power or lust..

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More in the link.

I have to say that those links are pretty awful. Standard apologetic trash. Including your favourite strawman.

If you want to discuss any of those pages in detail, I suggest you start another topic to do so.

(Oh, and I don’t know why you keep going on about “spiritual warfare” - it seems to be just an excuse to reject the truth which really suggests you’re not on the side you think you are).