DescentBB

Nightshade wrote: And there's the name calling. lol...

A friend of mine replied to your assertions on those passages:

"I would tell him to actually read the verses and the surrounding text that he's talking about. Virgins for example (not 9 year olds.) And the beheading in the previous passage was done by an evil king that was denounced many, many times in his account. That's like saying the US condones murder because some criminals have committed murder even though they were caught and prosecuted for it. The first passage was a parable, not an account. It was about "a hard man" and his treatment of people."

See everyone? This is what an alt-righter does. crap on facts that contradict their position and play the victim.

snoopy wrote:1. I wouldn't exactly bank on what Sam Harris has to say about religion in general... his level of scholarship on the matter isn't exactly high quality

I would expect that assessment of an atheist by a theist that actually believes in the words written in those multiple thousand year old tomes of rumor, hearsay and outright fantasy.

But hey...if you want to believe in the tooth fairy- be my guest...but don't expect me to respect those beliefs or assertions as unassailable fact.

Ferno wrote:This is what an alt-righter does. crap on facts that contradict their position and play the victim.

If you think I'm "alt-right," you've been smoking too much weed.

I just think you're not right......

Nightshade wrote:

Ferno wrote:This is what an alt-righter does. crap on facts that contradict their position and play the victim.

If you think I'm "alt-right," you've been smoking too much weed.

This man here has read, absorbed and executed another alt-right play. Trying to goad someone into reacting emotionally so they can play the victim. It's what they want.

Will he or won't he sign THIS little executive order?

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-ex ... d=45209220

Nightshade wrote:

snoopy wrote:1. I wouldn't exactly bank on what Sam Harris has to say about religion in general... his level of scholarship on the matter isn't exactly high quality

I would expect that assessment of an atheist by a theist that actually believes in the words written in those multiple thousand year old tomes of rumor, hearsay and outright fantasy.

But hey...if you want to believe in the tooth fairy- be my guest...but don't expect me to respect those beliefs or assertions as unassailable fact.

See the end of my post: I'm not asking you to uphold my beliefs as unassailable fact... I'm asking you to make a cogent argument for why the Bible should be seen as, as you put it, "rumor, hearsay and outright fantasy" when most serious historians and philosophers recognize it as much more than that.

Ferno wrote:It already IS.

Abortion clinic bombings.

antivaxxers.

global warming denialism.

Intelligent design

Fernho you're so foolish... amazing how people actually believe in global warming... plants need CO2 to breathe! The universe can't just put itself together without a Creator... evolution is a stupid hypothesis... if it can even be called that. Foolish mortals!

You're kidding snoopy. you're seriously going to pull an argument from authority with the bible?

It is essentially rumor, heresy and outright fantasy. There is no anthropological, historical, seismic, geologic or paleontological evidence supporting anything in the bible. Zero evidence of any kind supports it.

Noah's ark and the great flood? Doesn't exist and didn't happen.

Adam and Eve? Do not exist.

Sodom and Gomorrah? Nope.

David and Goliath? Nope again.

Having personal beliefs is alright. But pushing it and treating it as if it somehow as fact? that's not alright. Hell, some of the stories in the bible are physically impossible.

when belief runs afoul of provable facts, you believe a falsehood and it's time to reconsider. Case in point 8000 year old(or less) Earth. Easily proven false. Dinosaurs and man coexistant? Easily made to look utterly preposterous. And so on. Beyond that, I figure folks are free to pick their poisons.

Burlyman wrote:

Ferno wrote:It already IS.

Abortion clinic bombings.

antivaxxers.

global warming denialism.

Intelligent design

Fernho you're so foolish... amazing how people actually believe in global warming... plants need CO2 to breathe! The universe can't just put itself together without a Creator... evolution is a stupid hypothesis... if it can even be called that. Foolish mortals!

There's always too much of a good thing, CO2, or specifically carbon, being one of them. In addition, we humans are deforesting the planet at an alarming rate and we're producing far more carbon when we burn fuel than the earth can reabsorb. We may have already passed the point where plants can uptake enough CO2 to even make a difference. All that free carbon is going right into the atmosphere, so it's not contained or locked up to prevent it being turned into CO2 in the atmosphere. Plus, there are other reservoirs of carbon that need to be part of the whole equation, like ocean sediments and rocks, which lock carbon up from getting into the atmosphere for a very long time. Unbalance the system and we'll eventually get disaster.

http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseu ... 05_2.shtml

Ferno wrote:You're kidding snoopy. you're seriously going to pull an argument from authority with the bible?

It is essentially rumor, heresy and outright fantasy. There is no anthropological, historical, seismic, geologic or paleontological evidence supporting anything in the bible. Zero evidence of any kind supports it.

Noah's ark and the great flood? Doesn't exist and didn't happen.

Adam and Eve? Do not exist.

Sodom and Gomorrah? Nope.

David and Goliath? Nope again.

Having personal beliefs is alright. But pushing it and treating it as if it somehow as fact? that's not alright. Hell, some of the stories in the bible are physically impossible.

I see a lot of assertions... no arguments. I notice that you conveniently neglected to assert that Jesus' existence was also fantasy... do you care to attempt that assertion? I can reflect your sentiment right back at you: having personal beliefs about the Bible is alright but pushing them and treating them as if they are fact? That's not alright.

I realize that young earth creationism is easy to dump on... okay - but is young earth creationism explicitly taught in the Bible? Furthermore, given a God who can create everything literally from nothing, is creating the appearance of age really logically incongruent? (For the record, I tend to go old earth creationism, personally.) It's easy to say "science proves it false" when you're essentially adding a "given naturalism" to the equation, and no one would disagree with "given naturalism, theistic creation is false."

snoopy wrote:I realize that young earth creationism is easy to dump on... okay - but is young earth creationism explicitly taught in the Bible? Furthermore, given a God who can create everything literally from nothing, is creating the appearance of age really logically incongruent? (For the record, I tend to go old earth creationism, personally.) It's easy to say "science proves it false" when you're essentially adding a "given naturalism" to the equation, and no one would disagree with "given naturalism, theistic creation is false."

Or, alternatively, if you add "given Occam's razor" to the equation, then young earth creationism is false.

snoopy wrote: I see a lot of assertions... no arguments. I notice that you conveniently neglected to assert that Jesus' existence was also fantasy... do you care to attempt that assertion?

Because it's included in the previous statement. No adam and eve = no jesus (and so on and so forth. 'it follows'). Trying to create a distinction where there is none is splitting hairs.

I can reflect your sentiment right back at you: having personal beliefs about the Bible is alright but pushing them and treating them as if they are fact? That's not alright.

Belief and fact are not the same thing.

but is young earth creationism explicitly taught in the Bible?

People teaching young earth creationism pull it directly from the belief that the earth is 6000 years old and that dinosaurs lived with man. It's not and they didn't.

Furthermore, given a God who can create everything literally from nothing, is creating the appearance of age really logically incongruent? (For the record, I tend to go old earth creationism, personally.) It's easy to say "science proves it false" when you're essentially adding a "given naturalism" to the equation, and no one would disagree with "given naturalism, theistic creation is false."[/quote]

For this argument to hold even a bit of water, there has to be just the slightest bit of evidence that there was a Creator. For even if a Creator were to create everything from nothing, the creator would first have to exist. So, what created the creator?

And it wasn't east for science to prove it was false. For the process of science to disprove anything is the hardest thing we as a species can do.

Snoopy, why would God bother to create an earth where the rock layers are folded and the ocean sediments are miles thick? Why go to that level of detail, detail that's not even necessary for supporting life? That's something that takes millennia to occur and it would not be a detail that's even important in the grand scheme of things when creating a planet just for human habitation. It would be long boring process to wait for and watch anyway.

Now you could make the case that since God is eternal and that the perspective or passage of time may be different for a God, that He created the Earth millennia before he started seeding it with life and that humans were the final touch, who could disprove that? You can't. That idea aside however, the earth cannot be only 6000 years old within a human time scale because of all that very old detail that's staring at us from the rocks on land and from the sediments at the bottom of the oceans. Our planet is very OLD property. Plus what about all the ancient fossil remains of prehistoric humans that have been found mostly in Africa, the surmised cradle of creation. Where did they come from and why do they exist if recent man is all the Bible tells us about and I mean by recent as within the last 10,000 years? Why even put fossils in the rocks in the first place? It's all superfluous detail that's unnecessary for human existence.

The other thing I have to ask is: If God exists, why did he create such horrendous and monstrous diseases and then decide to do nothing about people suffering? That's about as malevolent as it gets.

Ferno wrote:

snoopy wrote: I see a lot of assertions... no arguments. I notice that you conveniently neglected to assert that Jesus' existence was also fantasy... do you care to attempt that assertion?

Because it's included in the previous statement. No adam and eve = no jesus (and so on and so forth. 'it follows'). Trying to create a distinction where there is none is splitting hairs.

I can reflect your sentiment right back at you: having personal beliefs about the Bible is alright but pushing them and treating them as if they are fact? That's not alright.

Belief and fact are not the same thing.

but is young earth creationism explicitly taught in the Bible?

People teaching young earth creationism pull it directly from the belief that the earth is 6000 years old and that dinosaurs lived with man. It's not and they didn't.

Furthermore, given a God who can create everything literally from nothing, is creating the appearance of age really logically incongruent? (For the record, I tend to go old earth creationism, personally.) It's easy to say "science proves it false" when you're essentially adding a "given naturalism" to the equation, and no one would disagree with "given naturalism, theistic creation is false."

For this argument to hold even a bit of water, there has to be just the slightest bit of evidence that there was a Creator. For even if a Creator were to create everything from nothing, the creator would first have to exist. So, what created the creator?

And it wasn't east for science to prove it was false. For the process of science to disprove anything is the hardest thing we as a species can do.[/quote]

We have touched on the historicity of Jesus before: there is virtually universal acceptance among historians that Jesus was a real person who really lived. Who he really was is hotly debated, but the question of whether there really was a historical figure by the name of Jesus isn't really open for debate, at least if you want your position to be taken seriously.

As far as logic goes: it's clearly a question of starting points - and everyone has to start with an "I believe" leap from which to assemble your logical construct. Application of Occam's razor, scientific process, and other logic tools all depend on application of axioms that you accept as true. Your challenge of "who created the creator" can similarly be levied against any philosophy of origins - all of them have to start with some sort of first cause. So, that brings me back to your argument about evidence of a creator: I say that it's everywhere around you, you say that it's nowhere to be found.... and depending on where you start, you can logically get to both places.

snoopy wrote:We have touched on the historicity of Jesus before: there is virtually universal acceptance among historians that Jesus was a real person who really lived. Who he really was is hotly debated, but the question of whether there really was a historical figure by the name of Jesus isn't really open for debate, at least if you want your position to be taken seriously.

This always seemed like an underdefined question to me. For example, if I were to take your post extremely literally, was there a person named Jesus, then of course there was--there were a whole lot of people named Jesus at that time. But that's probably not what people mean when they say there was a historical Jesus. What if only 50% of what is in the New Testament actually happened to a Jesus? What if only 10%? Only 5%? What if, for instance, the narrative of Jesus in the New Testament was a combination of different people's lives and teachings? Before I can evaluate your claim that there was a historical Jesus, I would like you to clarify what you mean by a historical Jesus.

snoopy wrote:As far as logic goes: it's clearly a question of starting points - and everyone has to start with an "I believe" leap from which to assemble your logical construct. Application of Occam's razor, scientific process, and other logic tools all depend on application of axioms that you accept as true. Your challenge of "who created the creator" can similarly be levied against any philosophy of origins - all of them have to start with some sort of first cause. So, that brings me back to your argument about evidence of a creator: I say that it's everywhere around you, you say that it's nowhere to be found.... and depending on where you start, you can logically get to both places.

I wonder, since you are religious, if you really think this? Do you think that the difference between being saved and being condemned can sometimes solely be the result of arbitrarily making a "correct" or "incorrect" axiomatic assumption? For me, the origin of the universe might be an interesting question to ponder, but to you, I may have a moral obligation to hold the correct belief under threat of my own demise.