totally. and that's why a vast majority of what goes on in this forum is so pointless (cue the next person critically examining my sentence and so forth).

I remember reading on here a few months ago a poster claiming he prayed for a bike and then he somehow got given a bike a couple of weeks later.
It came back to me when I was reading the 'Miracle of Allah...' thread.

So basically my reading of the situation is as follows:
The Prayer Games: Final Scores

Christian God: bike, crumpled 5 dollar bill
Allah: Saves a life in a building collapse

Allah seems to be ahead but I think both players in the game missed so many opportunities that none of them leave the field with any glory.

“But so that we may not cause offense, go to the lake and throw out your line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a four-drachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours. You can thank me for this medium-sized miracle later.” --Jesus

or rather, you have faith that it rewards faith and repentance...

Its totally wrong i many atheists ceases. You all seem to forget many atheists are former Christians and did and lived what Doggg demands.

When you say things like this, you perpetuate the idea that you're using "Anything that in anyway discredits or casts any doubt on religion" to the neglect of intellectual honesty. At the minimum, it is very reminiscient of your list of people perscuted by Christians for their scientific discoveries:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...6&postcount=24

Seriously Aaron, this is a bit sad, quoting me out of context (See below for the full quote)and using OrP's lack of confidence in examples I provided in a completely different conversation in an attempt to undermine confidence in the examples in this thread is pretty desperate even by your standards.

Are you going to Ad hominen me until I get bored and ignore you, or do you have a useful, on topic contribution to offer? My guess is that it will be the former.

If you have evidence to support your religious beliefs, that would not just interest me, it would fascinate me and blow my mind. I don't think you do though, so I'll focus on the evidence that suggests that religions are basically a placebo since that's all that's available..

I provided the link to provide the opportunity for fuller context in both cases. But you don't seem to realize that the fuller context doesn't actually help your cause.

I'm demonstrating by explicit example of your habit of presenting very bad information as being true, and trying to build arguments around faulty premises. The even broader context of the thread I linked shows that you did this, bouncing back and forth between claiming that you're trying to prove a point and allowing yourself endless freedom for "speculation."

I am going to continue to challenge you on your lack of intellectual honesty. I welcome you to present your case for those three examples that you cited, and fully explain how it is you think they actually justify your claim. It will go down pretty much like the thread I just linked.

You can ignore me if you want. That's within your capacity.

LOL -- I'm quite certain you don't know what it means to have evidence. I remind you that you cited an example of someone who lived in the BCE as being persecuted by Christians for their scientific thinking.

That last sentence is a typical misrepresentation of what really happened.

You know Aaron, some of your claims have a basis in truth and others are complete misunderstandings. Either way, if you could just treat them the way Zumby or OrP do I could have some respect for you and even learn from you, but you exaggerate, twist and misquote to achieve whatever petty piece of pedantry you're currently fixating on and it's tiresome.

I've actually enjoyed some conversations with you but they nearly always end the same way and taken as a whole, you reduce the pleasure I get from being a member here. I don't want to feel any stress the next time I log on, wondering what new irritating, frustrating, personal attack I'll feel I have to respond to. Because of that, and for everyone else's sake, so they don't have to put up with this petty bickering, I'm putting you on my ignore list.

I'll cite a series of posts, and I welcome you to say what really happened.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...6&postcount=24

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...0&postcount=35

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...5&postcount=37

Okay. Go ahead and explain how I'm misrepresenting you. I'm certainly willing to be proven wrong in my assessment. But it seems quite clear that you included Thales of Miletus in a list of people suppressed by Christians and Christianity, but then you changed the context to talk about not limiting yourself to Christianity.

I tried that. In the first thread I linked to, that's what I did. And you presented absolutely nothing that looked like you had an interest in intellectual honesty and open-mindedness in the discussion. It's not pedantry. You're simply very wrong and pretty unwilling to concede your errors.

Okay.

Isn't mightyboosh the guy who claimed that Moses (and christians) stole all of their ideas from Plato and other philosophers who lived hundreds of years later?

Edit: Yes. Now I remember. It was about the Golden Rule.

I thought it was a miracle that it started raining. But my definition of miracle is different to yours. My definition of miracle is - unlikely event/coincidence. So you're telling me that my experience was not a miracle (although to me it was), but that fish being beached somehow is a miracle - because fish never get beached yes?
Yea, I walk among miracles every day as well, except I tend to use a different term for them. I refer to them as - coincidence.
Firstly, the heart is not a brain. It does not perform the functions that you're ascribing to it. Secondly, I see no reason to reward 'faith' because faith opposes logic and reason - the only things that have a solid history of improving your life and the life of people around you.
Once again, the heart is not a brain.
How is anyone able to choose a path if one way leads to heaven and the other way leads to hell? Under you God-paradigm, there is no free-will, because any sane person would choose to behave in a manner that would get them into heaven. That's not free will. Free will would be the ability to do whatever you want, without any repercussions for your choices after-death.

Nope, lol. I wish that they had, it probably would have been an improvement on what did 'influence' them. Do you believe that every Christian story is completely original? If you don't then it's simply a question of how far apart we are on how many stories were copied/assimilated.

Do you take the Bible literally?

really?

Generally that may be true, there's a correlation between level of education (which can reasonably be connected to intelligence) and the likelihood of being Atheist, but there are many intelligent Religious people. Intelligence and religiosity are not mutually exclusive.

That's pretty much so much waving of the white flag, when you feign like you don't know what I'm talking about when I say "heartfelt" or refer to "turning your heart to God" or whatever.

Sad, really, and ridiculous.

I don't think he was pretending he didn't know what you were talking about. Instead he was making the point that it is silly given our knowledge of science to keep referring to the heart as the emotional center, much as it is silly to ascribe other properties to things like souls that we have no indication they even exist. Agree or disagree with that point as you will, but I don't think your characterization of what he was doing is correct.

When did I say that fish never get beached?

Also, didn't I say that the example is NOT a bona-fide miracle?

I think we are firing at the cross-fire right now.


A choice, no doubt.

Really? Thanks for telling me. I didn't know that.


Every day people do plenty of reasonable things that end up in total calamity or disaster. Then what?

Faith does serve a purpose.

The most important of the three, in fact.



Thank you. I'm just being schooled here.



You've been in the forum long enough to know that not every Christian believes in the strict version of the heaven-hell dynamic that you present here.

Oddly enough, I'm not sure your argument is valid anyway. Long before modern scientific theories and philosophies explained so much of the world around us to us, well, people still killed each other, murdered, raped, stole. In a time when you just really, really had to be a drooler not to believe in God, people were just being people, anyway.

God's plan: to ensure Doggg doesn't go a single day hungry, even if it means someone else is out $5.

You often hear Christians calling atheists arrogant, or some similar description (something I find ironic). That aside, isn't this just your own personal shortcomings and prejudice? Perhaps smug people annoy you - ok, fine, but aren't you supposed to love everyone? Should your negative opinion of them be enough to justify condemning them to whatever it is you believe a damned life to be for eternity?!

In my experience, religious people love evidence if it can even be remotely construed as confirming a belief they hold. It's only when evidence is lacking or contrary to a belief that faith all of a sudden becomes a virtue.

how surprising is that Lestat and don't you know people in any other walk of life for whom that's also true?

Of course I do. I'm a poker player and see it all the time. People who look for any evidence that they might be a winning player no matter how scant (maybe they won a few sessions in a row), and then rely on faith that they are just running bad when they lose. You see it in love and many other aspects of life. But it's the WRONG way to think!

I have no interest or use of faith. Either there is demonstrable evidence that something is true or there isn't. If there is, I'm inclined to believe it until shown otherwise. If not, I'm inclined not to believe it until shown otherwise. In my opinion, that's the best way to go through life. Eliminate as many false beliefs as possible.

This is by far my largest issue with the religious, that a lack of critical thinking, a suspension of disbelief and a complete failure to investigate and increase our knowledge and understanding is passed off as a desirable behaviour.

I particularly object to this being taught to children.

now there's a new one!