Peterson,

Having read your hateful and vitriolic posts, athiesm stands head and shoulders above your bigoted and vile religious beliefs.

Grow up, your kind is what drives decent people away from the church.

When are the Atheists in this debate (and Mr Dawkins) going to realise that attacking religion as a way of proving that God does not exist is not a valid argument. Proving that religion is all smoke and mirrors is easy. But proving religion is smoke and mirrors does nothing to prove there is not a God. God and religion are two separate issues.

There is no possibility of convincing anyone with a religious bent that there is no God because what they believe in nothing (even if they think it is something) and you are attacking nothing. It is like attacking the morning mist with a sword.

As an Agnostic I can say with certainty that religion has no substance, it is nothing. How about giving the Atheist argument without resorting to attacking nothing? If you attack nothing your proofs are nothing. Do your arguments have substance?

I’m gonna start a new law and call it “AJ’s Law”:

"As an online discussion about religion grows longer, the probability that a Theist will mention Marxism approaches 1".

Graham,

There’s not much I can add to what Shadow Minister and Bushbasher have said other than to point-out that you are giving religion an undeserved legitimacy by asserting that those who don’t believe it still have a “faith” - even if just a little bit.

If there were even the slightest bit of evidence for religious belief then you may have a point, but since there isn’t, you’re effectively saying that anyone can invent any old nonsense and those who don’t accept, or think about it have a “faith”.

Sure, many people hold religious beliefs, but pointing that out would be a fallacy when there is nothing to rationally or objectively justify those beliefs.

Severin,

I’d rather not go into the individual cases of people posting here, but in my experience, Christians who claim they were Christians, then became Atheists, then became Christians again, actually mean they were Christians, got angry and rebelled against the God they still believed in, then forgave that God and went back to the church.

Theists often mistake ‘not believing’ for ’believing, but hating a God’ (e.g. Runner). Just as self-proclaimed “Agnostics” mistake ‘a lack of belief in God/s’ with ‘a claim to absolute knowledge on the topic’.

To clarify though, I would never suggest that Graham was a “fraudster”. He doesn’t profit from his story.

Trav,

It may appear as though I have a lot of time on my hands, but the arguments for religion are so flawed that it really doesn’t take that long to slap a response together.

<<Hence, we’re both right on [Ruse’s opinion of Dawkins]>>

Do you know what I mean by ‘Argument from Authority’ and why it’s a fallacy? You’re arguing against Dawkins as if I rely on his credibility. Please leave the strawman alone.

I’ve read a bit of Plantinga and Craig (among others) but it’s difficult to continue reading something that falls down at its premise.

Continued…

…Continued

These guys are pretty light-weight philosophers if li’l ol’ me can spot the flaws in their arguments.

A good critique of Plantinga’s flawed ontological argument can be found at http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2009/01/on-plantingas-ontological-argument.html

<<Quantum physics has not shown that something can come from nothing.>>

I didn’t say it had. Only that it challenged what we know about cause and effect.

My point was that we don’t know whether or not the universe had a cause. Quantum physics isn’t needed for that.

<<What is your definition of evidence? What type of evidence are you after?>>

I define ‘evidence’ as a reason for belief or disbelief. I’m after any sort of reliable evidence. Ancient texts from ignorant sheep herders are not reliable.

<<Historical evidence can be found in the form of documents.>>

The documents in themselves are not reliable. The only thing they prove is that some people wrote a story about a guy who was allegedly the son of a God. That’s it.

The Gospels and Tacitus and Josephus are all hearsay. There’s a reason hearsay is rejected in a court of law.

Going by your logic, the testimony of alleged alien abductees is reliable too. Of course, you don’t think that. Your willingness to believe in your religion makes you selective about what evidence you think is reliable.

<<Historical study of these documents yields that certain things are historically certain.>>

The only historical certainty is that someone, or some people wrote some stories. That those stories are accurate is a leap-of-faith that you’re taking.

<<...are you asking me to explain the historical methodologies in more detail?>>

If you think it’ll make a difference. I suspect those “methodologies” will still rely on the assumption that the stories are actually true though.

<<We’re talking accountability in the here and now versus unknown bliss at some future point.>>

My point is that people are going to be fine with accountability if they think they’re going to earn themselves an eternity in Heaven.

Continued...

...Continued

But what of the large percentage of religious people in prisons?

Religion obviously didn’t make them feel accountable, and those who converted in prison only help to prove my point about conversion stories.

<<Besides, if people thought there was no reason to believe in the future bliss, why would they continue believing it?

They wouldn’t.

You made the point that people who choose to believe, do so despite the notion of being held accountable.

So I countered it by explaining to you that no one is going to stop believing just because they don’t want to be held accountable, since trading and eternity of bliss for 80 odd years of selfish pleasures would be stupid.

<<The only remaining question is whether or not there’s actually a provider of that grace...>>

My point was that religions uses devious and manipulative tactics to drawn in and keep their followers.

A good indication that it’s all fake.

<<...why should a Christian be obliged or even necessarily be able to find an answer to every question?>>

Exactly!

An omnibenevolent God is obliged to provide the answers rather than hiding in obscurity.

<<...there's plenty of questions the atheist has no answer for- for example, why matter is eternal or why matter came from nothingness?>>

And there’s plenty of questions the Theist has no answer for- for example, why God is eternal or why God came from nothingness?

Or we could take Carl Sagan’s application of Occam’s razor here and simply save a step by concluding that the origin of matter is unknowable, or that matter is eternal:

“In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to pursue the question, we must, of course ask next where God comes from? And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed?” (Carl Sagan, Cosmos, page 257)

Anyway, there’s been many posts going back and forth here and still we haven’t even started building a ‘case for Christ’.

AJP, rules like Godwin's Law and the newly-minted AJ's law seem to just be attempts to shut down legitimate discussion by ridiculing individuals.

One of the basic tenets of Marxism is atheism. It is an atheistic philosophy which in various forms has hegemonic aims which include converting others to its way of viewing the world.

It may not be your form of atheism, but to deny that it is an atheistic philosophy as you appear to do is as illogical as me denying that Catholicism is a form of Christianity because I don't like a lot of its tenets and beliefs, not to mention behaviours.

One of the rhetorical tricks to try to villify religion and advance atheism is to characterise religion by the behaviour of its worst adherents, but to define atheism so narrowly that it has no adherents who do anything less benign than write books and argue on Internet forums.

Just as I can't disown the inquisition, you can't disown Stalin's gulags.

You've missed the point on "faith" too, which means to believe in something without being able to prove it. Atheists believe that the material world is all there is to know. I don't think you can fundamentally prove that, or at least prove it given our current knowledge. In which case it is an assertion, or a form of faith. I'm not defining it as faith by reference to religion.

For me there is a mystery at the heart of life which is most probably not accessible by human conscious or knowledge. I call that mystery God. Jesus and his teachings present a way of approaching that mystery which is for me valid and insightful and which provide a set of principles and ways of behaviour that promote a good life. They are also a cultural testament to man's developing understanding of the world philosophically, theologically and scientifically.