I can recognise to atheists that they perceive the body of the person as the essential person because its chemistry can be spatially measures, but to theists they ought to see the character of person as the essential being. That the body is merely as a vehicle through which the real person is expressed. One may body build before acting the other might meditate before action.

Nearly another three weeks gone by, mjpb.

Since your lack of replies have been few and far between for long enough to demonstrate that, not only do you have no interest in providing your evidence for god, but that you cannot possibly be this busy for this long, this will be my last attempt at keeping the thread open as you will no longer be able to reasonably argue that the thread closed by accident.

Nor can you reasonably argue that I didn’t make an effort to keep the thread going since it is clearly pointless considering you’re online right now (presumably checking the thread with fingers and toes crossed in the hope that the thread closes tomorrow) and not attempting to keep it going yourself.

I trust we’ll cross swords once again sometime in the future when this thread has closed.

AJ Philips,

I’d much prefer to cross swords again before this thread is closed. Didn’t you give your word you would keep it going? I was apprehensive about walking into here and it is as bad as I expected. (I am not following this day by day so I need to do a lot of rereading and reassembling in this thread seems to be a bigger task than the answering.) Your responses to my post on p39 strewn out with a few revisitations to p43. I will reassemble things in my response.

“Philo was unable to back his claim or demonstrate why I was wrong.”

Philo is a Christian. He has a faith himself. He gave a definition consistent with what he talks about as his faith and noted the obvious corollary. What is there to back up? If I disagree with you based on a porn movie that is set in your type of workplace would you think you need to back it up or just think I have a blind spot because it is contrary to your real experience? Now I know you argue that you have anecdotal support and I have pointed out my dissimilar experience but you can‘t assume Philo has read through all the voluminous posts.

All you did was assert a variation of your usual definition and accused him of making it up. You then gave a cute comeback to that corollary (and made the usual claim about evidence). Yet you assume he is unable to demonstrate why you are wrong. Besides avoiding redundancy what has he done to indicate that? Has he disappeared from the discussion? It is you who are making a bold statement.

If I’m being rude and unfair I seem to be in congenial company. Did you deliberately avoid describing it as arrogant because the comments are reasonable? You are happy to direct people to comparisons the beliefs of billions of people to looking at chicken entrails but get sensitive when I observe that you dismiss completely the definitions of faith of the only people who can meaningfully define it.

You did not demonstrate anything of the sort with CS Lewis’ definition and I responded to your attempt to do so. The issue was certainly not closed with your post.

Atheist pornographers tell people that their faith is something contrary to what people with religious faith refer to as faith. That straw man makes us look rather silly. They do it for the entertainment value (hence the atheist porn description). However you seem to believe it as gospel. That looks like a blind spot sorry.

Ironically you proved the point by missing it. What I pointed out in the previous paragraph seems obvious but it doesn’t even seem to have occurred to you. You don’t seem deficient. I bet that if it suited your argument you would grasp it immediately. Hence it looks like a blind spot. Of course the rude comments about theists you make and/or support get rationalized so well that looks like another blind spot. Then there was the hypocrisy of atheist pornographers… It is the difference between faith and blind faith. With blind faith a blind spot is needed.

You seem to do everything with olo filters etc. Please consider using internet history as it would save time and lead to less suspicion. Alternatively just look yourself up and find the recent post on the list that takes you to the thread. That works even after it slips from history.

Please also consider not telling me that when “you weigh it up it doesn’t look good”. I know when I am too busy to contribute so you are hardly going to convince me to believe an incorrect inference. That is up there with your faith definition thing.

<<All I see is people convert to atheism when they worry about the burden of carrying the cross.>>

“Well I know this isn’t true because, not only did I never see that in all my years as a Christian, but the threat of hell and/or promise of heaven is too strong for anyone to give up just because there might be something hard about being a Christian. What kind of an idiot would trade an eternity of bliss for an eternity of torment just because of a temporary difficulty?”

Becoming an atheist avoids the need to think you are losing an eternity of bliss. You seem to be saying that atheists believe in heaven and hell but they don‘t. Otherwise why are they worried about heaven and hell? If you remained a theist and made the trade you would be an idiot but that wouldn’t make sense.

You accuse me of being slack for speaking of something that is in my personal experience and something I have observed but “many people know” something so I am supposed to ignore my experience to avoid “fooling with this”. I’m starting to wonder if you left Christianity because you had a faith that didn’t meet the CS Lewis definition but was more akin to the atheist pornographer definition? Such a faith would be very fragile. A personal tragedy leading to blind faith would easily be substituted by feeling foolish in the face of allegations that the faith was always based on a lack of evidence or something equally insulting (and misguided).

What secular system? The secular system that believes rather unflattering things about other people even when they get an explanation from the horse’s mouth.

“You’ve just described every atheist. Myself included.”

No. Pericles doesn’t seem to have that blind spot. You are dogmatic about extreme things even when it isn’t reasonable to hold the belief. You dogmatically stick to a definition of faith even though it should be obvious that atheist pornographers are just trying to be entertaining and even when you hear theists giving a definition that describes their own faith.

“…given my word”…

Agreed. Thanks. Although in spite of coming back so many times you missed the fact that I had already stuck a toe in about evidence.

“I have the luxury of simply changing my beliefs if the evidence proves me wrong”

I have heard many theists say the same. After chatting I suspect that even if a man came back from the dead you would be unconvinced that there is something in theism.

“We are not talking about laws of the land that have ramifications on a whole society. You’re analogy is invalid”

Well I thought that theism was a such a significant scourge that even people who you believe are just deriving comfort from it need to be shaken from it. Isn’t that what you think? That is pretty significant.

Anyway why am I wrong? As I said in situations such as laws of the land that is when things like burden of proof are introduced for convenience. We aren’t talking about laws of the land that import those types of things so isn’t that a reason why it doesn’t apply? I don’t understand.

<<Further, to be taken seriously many negative statements eg. "there are no atoms" require evidence while there corresponding positive statement would not.>>

Yes, because there is evidence that atoms exist. Theists are yet to provide any evidence at all, and so the burden of proof remains on them and will solely until they can provide some. Then things may change.

I know you like to keep chanting that there is no evidence for theism but could you answer my reasoning explaining why an automatic burden of proof as a matter of logic doesn’t make sense. Pretending otherwise is just a disingenuous ploy of atheist pornographers. The fact that quite often negative statements can be translated into positive statements and that some negative statements (whether or not you agree this applies to theism) require evidence to be taken seriously but the corresponding positive statement don’t require evidence supports my argument.