You made the claim that you had evidence for the existence of God and Jesus is the son of God!

All you have done is ignore this! I even predicted you would. What else do you want? Check mate! Stop nit picking every post I make!

Continue with proving your claim, else stop claiming it!

I could of, Aaron knows this already. There a ton of Christians who believe this because they were taught to believe this.

You see just like every theist, Aaron too nitpicks what he wants to believe and dismisses other stuff that just seem illogical. I did not think you could have it both ways, when the book the Bible is the word of God, the truth!

Are you quite certain that this is what I claimed?

How many times have I claimed it? I'm quite certain that you are the one in the thread making claim after claim after claim, and also the one refusing to substantiate them. Maybe if I have a few minutes later today, I'll go back through the thread and requote all the claims you've made.

You keep making these analogies that make sense, as they are truths. But they are terrible analogies.

According to your own logic, God is created by somebody or something else!

I mean if you can't see that based on your analogies then there's not much else we can talk about!

More properly worded, "According to the logic that SuperMario7 asserts that you should have..."

I mean if you can't see that the lack of understanding of how people come to hold their beliefs is relevant to understanding how an individual would come to a belief then there's not much else we can talk about!

So you are saying that complexity was just already there in the first place?

I guess we humans did not evolve at all did we. I guess we always had complex instruments such as computers, X-rays, stealth jets, advanced weapons, musical instruments etc etc etc the list is endless! We evolved to make such things, from primitive beings. The evidence is all around you, you'd have to be blind stupid not to see it!!!

Look at how we evolve one step at a time. We build a house from mud, from straw, from clay 1000's of years ago. look now, our housing! We built sewers, only recently few hundred years ago. I mean everything you see, is literally being improved upon, evolving over time.

For you now to say that evolution is not true, you would literally have to be the biggest deny-er in the world.

But Jesus didn't speak English.

Since the mods had to obliterate a number of posts because SuperMario used mental illnesses as an insult (or something similar), I'll come back to this from a different angle since my subsequent response was removed as part of the purge.

My challenge stands. Go quote where I made the claim.

I'll give you some help. Your first post to me was #144.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=144

That post was in response to a reply I made to a now-banned poster in #113.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=113

This can be traced backwards to post #104, in which the banned poster challenged Pokerlogist on the existence of Jesus.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=104

Incidentally, I posted evidence in favor of Jesus' existence in #116 and #148.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=116

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=148

nope, logic doesnt tell you that at all. I dont think you understand what "logic" is.
And such a strawman. "The jungle randomly happened to build this complex city"? really? No. we know, from experience, what human designed stuff looks like. and you are conveniently leaving out that we think the jungle isnt designed. What is the equivalent of the jungle, when we look at stuff in reality. What are you comparing the universe against, in order to say its designed?

This is just the watchmaker argument. You are assuming that appearance of design = designer. You are assuming that the only way complexity can occur is with a designer. You are assuming the conclusion that you want to reach, before you even start.

You also havent defined "designed" .what characteristics or qualities allow you to conclude that something is designed?

random mutations + time + selection pressures = increasing complexity. This is pretty well understood, enough to be called "fact"

If you read the bible it has conflicting ideas like an eye for an eye or turn the other cheek. So, at least form my atheist perspective, there arent many One Truths. Or its not possible for a believer to not do a little nitpicking/interpreting. And you kind of did that too with the six thousand year old stuff.

I don't assume that just because someone is paid a high income that they must be using fraudulent business practices. Nor do I make that assumption about ministers. They could be well paid because of high talent. Thus, pointing out that some ministers with a high income are using fraudulent practices doesn't really address the point.

Galileo would disagree with you. The dark ages were dark precisely because of a lack of science, and stupification repackaged as spirituality.

Modern historians would disagree with this.

I don't even recall Galileo giving much historical commentary. Do you have the ability to cite this one?

I was referring to Galileo's inquisition, which illustrates that science and religion mix like oil and water. Galileo's science was a threat to the heirarchy of the time.

Put it this way, every time a scientist discovers something, it takes away from the mystery, or as some believe, "God's creation". This is my interpretation, and why religious dogma must set its sights on science to remain relevant and domineering.

This is fairly myopic view of the intersection of religion and science. Both have existed in various forms for a couple millenia. Would you like to present a more broad-based historical analysis of your position?

That's an important phrase.

Do you have more to offer than an opinion?

Really? You think religion had nothing to do with the Inquisition?

This seems to necessitate further explanation. On what basis are you drawing the distinction? Proof by "obviousness" isn't successful here.

Are you suggesting that religion plays no role whatsoever in institutional power dynamics?

But yet even you acknowledge that a corrupted Christianity was the pretext for the Inquisition. A corrupted Christianity is still, presumably, a religion. Is the idea that when religion functions as a pretest for persecution that it is blameless?

So for instance, let's say some government decides it doesn't like Jews and so requires all Jews to convert to Christianity. The Christian churches willing go along with this, turning in Jews to the authorities who do not convert, or whom they think are only pretending to have converted. Now, plausibly, that persecution of Jews is a pretext for some other concern. But I would still consider the churches, and hence the religion of which they are a part, to be complicit in this persecution as well.

Not intentionally. It is surely possible for religion to sometimes be an agent of evil without always and only being an agent of evil, or being the cause of all evil.

Jumping ahead, I suspect our disagreement is that I don't think it is correct to reduce the motives of powerful religious people solely to concerns about power - I think the goals of their religion are also factors driving their actions. I believe Muslim jihadists who say they are fighting for their faith. I believe Christians who say they were persecuting heretics in order to preserve their faith.

Are you claiming that these two paradigms represent the totality of possibilities?

If I may chime in, when everyone's in a large heirarchical organizations, everyone blames someone else. For example, the Collusiums, and the Romans. People didn't know they were Roman's without the spectacle, and murder was cheered on, yet nobody in the stadium is entirely blameless.

Everyone's just following orders in a large hierarchy. Can't blame them for just following orders.

I think the higher up you are, the more it becomes about the power of the church. The pope had a lot of influence, and denying the pope the answers to the universe threatened his power, and then this becomes an insult to the faith. It's like telling the pope that he's not the pope, for how can the pope be the pope if his explanations to heavenly bodies are incorrect, or not on par with scientific explanations?

Fear of death means you're willing to act like a cog in a large machine. The afterlife alleviates that fear, and allows the large machine to be seen as something else. So, if science starts to make advances in psychology, then this makes the clerics of the day less relevant, and it's like telling a spiritual guide that you don't need guidance.

Kings also use the religion as the excuse, such as crusades, and devine right. While they probably were believers, they were believers in their own ego, created from the image of God, and had lineage. Many religions try to trace their lines back to God. This to me indicates families in control, staying in control by claiming to be closer to God, such as father Abraham, a song I sang as a kid. And many tribal religions use religion as the excuse to keep their particular tribe in power.

Aaron, history is not one of my strong points, otherwise I'd try to elaborate more. I hope this helps. I think when people don't question authority, they work together, but they have little curiousity as to why.

It's easy to construct a narrative about other people. It's a simple task to declare their motivations and surmise about their experiences abd perspectives. It's also easy to take some general ideas and make them fit whatever ends you choose.

Therefore, you should be wary of your narrative. Simplistic and superficial readings of history are usually quite wrong. I believe that if you looked at both history and your construct with a critical eye, you'll see it for what it is.

It's important to draw parallels, so we can learn how history repeats itself. I don't think you can prove a historical lense like science. How a historian connects events depend on interpretation.

Parallels are important. But superficial parallels are meaningless.

The difference is that historical analysis will *always* have some relationship to the specific facts of the event. Otherwise, you get to a point where you say that any time something bad happens that it was the result of power corrupting the leadership. Or you will say things that basically imply that the only motivation anyone has is a fear of death. Or that every conflict is just a bunch of ego clashes.

The level of extrapolation you're doing in your analysis is wholly unwarranted from an intellectual perspective. This is why books of history tend to be long and dense with detail. The narratives that are told are rich with information and nuance. Those details matter in both presenting and analyzing the history.

Otherwise, you simply get an opinion piece, which is exactly what you've done. One might try to argue that there's no "right" answer when looking at history. But there are some perspectives that are more correct than others (where "correct" means something like proximity to reality).

I get what you're saying, and I'd be the first to admit, but you don't have to use a hyperbolic straw man to make your point. It doesn't make you an exceptional critic. I am curious as to what your interpretation is to Galileo is, and whether you feel science is at odds with religion.