Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 16:36:00 329a43 No. 1508 [Last 50 Posts]
Alright Atheist - Christian here, a few of you have come to our board, started discussion questions and fled upon losing
like here
http://8ch.net/christian/res/13452.html and here
http://8ch.net/christian/res/13505.html so perhaps on your board someone can provide meaningful answers:
1) 95 - 15 % of the world believes in some form of God, so isn't the fact that you can't or don't evidence of some lack of capacity for religiousness on your part. Isn't your position like a blind man who says that sight isn't real just because they can't experience it, whereas the vast majority of the world's population experience it just fine. Similarly, you say God isn't real because you can't experience it despite the fact that the vast majority of the world's population do experience it?
How can you discount God just because you dont experience him when the vast majority of humanity does. Really if you want your movement to be taken seriously you have to come to terms with this and give an explanation thats a little better than - most humans are deluded / stupid / wrong.
2) Numerous recorded and attested miracles have occured in the 20th century
two examples are
i) the fatima miracles
Mary appeared to 3 children, gave them a set of prophecies and said she would prove the legitimacy by making the sun do weird things on October 13th 1917. It did, the prophecies also predicted the 2nd world war, the rise and fall of the soviet union, and other major world events of the 20th century.
ii)Our lady of Akita
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Akita In 1973 a staute of mary started weeping, this was attested to by a scientific crew that was allowed to examine the staute
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_F%C3%A1tima Your world view requires that miracles are not possible, that there must be some other explanation, and so you close your eyes to them, or discount them. This hardly seems objective or scientific to discount evidence based on pre-concieved notions
You defined natural laws as things that can be broken and so you choose to adopt a world view in which miracles, which by definition are violations of natural law, are not possible. And you use that to shut your eyes to the enormous evidence of actual miracles that happen continuously.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 16:48:33 329a43 No. 1511
sorry typo where it said 95 - 15 % of the world believes in some sort of God it should be 95 - 85 % of the world believes in some form of god
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 16:52:05 b72587 No. 1512
>>1508 Fatima?
A miracle?
At the height of the First World War when European Christian men are killing each other in surreal numbers, the queen of heaven looks down and says.. I think I'll go talk to some punk ass kids.
She couldn't appear over the a battle field and make all the guns jam?
Just for a moment.. Just stop all that horrible suffering for a minute or two.
even your fellow Christians will rip you a new one if you start talking about the Virgin Mary and Fatima..
Protestants hate the adoration of the Saints, esp. the Queen of Heaven thing.
And why has your God's power declined so much over the centuries?
He went turning the Nile into blood, and parting the Red Sea to crying statues and appearing on toast.
What's next for God,, card tricks?
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 17:10:37 329a43 No. 1516
>>1512 see here what you`re doing is not offering evidene against the miracle, what you`re doing is presenting reasons why you think it could have been done better - which is hardly evidence contributing to or denying something`s existence
for example I think it`s foolish for kangaroos to exist the way they do - they`re goofy looking things, they hop instead of walk - what`s the deal with that
but pointing out how kangaroos seem foolish to me is not evidence against the existance of kangaroos is it
When faced with a picture of a Kangaroo or eyewitness accounts of kangaroos, I can`t say it`s foolish and disprove it`s existance that way can I
I have to actually show why kangaroos are not real, why their eyewitness acouunts and photos are forgeries
Similarly when faced with this photo of our lady of Akita, plus the eyewitness accounts, media reports, and scientific examination you have to do better than say it sounds foolish you if you want to disprove its existance
just basic logic
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 17:31:01 b72587 No. 1518
>>1516 Dude,,
Some condensation on a statue is not a miracle.
Here's a Hindu miracle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_milk_miracle I don't know what is a more absurd idea, an all powerful all knowing being that does nothing or an all powerful all knowing being that does parlor tricks.
and you didn't answer my question about your God's declining power.. Manna fell from the sky to feed Moses and friends, Jesus and a bunch of other people came back from the dead.
Matthew 27:52-53
"The tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs, and after Jesus' resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many people."
Why are modern miracles so weak?
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 17:38:40 b72587 No. 1520
>>1516 And here's a more likely explanation.
How to make a weeping statue:
In his book "The Unexplained," Doctor Karl P.N. Shuker, mentions a paper by Dr. Luigi Garlaschelli from Pavia University published in Chemistry in Britain. It describes how to make a statue weep.
An except from the book is: "What is needed is a hollow statue made of a porous material such as plaster or ceramic. The icon must be glazed or painted with some sort of impermeable coating. If the statue is then filled up with a liquid (surreptitiously, through a tiny hole in the head, for example), the porous material will absorb it, but the glazing will stop it from flowing out. If the glazing, however, is imperceptibly scratched away on or around the eyes, tear-like drops will leak out, as if materialising from thin air. If the cavity behind the eyes is small enough, once all the liquid has dripped out there are virtually no traces left in the icon. When I put it to the test, this trick proved to be very satisfactory, baffling all onlookers
Which is more likely.. Someone pulled this gag,, or God made a statue cry instead of doing something useful.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 17:39:32 329a43 No. 1521
>>1518 no we`re getting somehwhere, so you say condensation is not a miracle - you are offering an alternative example
so now we can examine this scientifically
is this what condensation looks like - does it run down in a stright line like a drizzle - here photo of condensation - I guess it`s not what conensation looks like
can we find another example where condensation has appeared in the form of tear drops in a straight line and only from the eye and continues to do this for 6 years.
and yes other religions have miracles as well - all the more proof that natural laws are often violated in religious contexts
when you go to the modern miracles being weak thing - well we`re getting into subjective feelings not logic
and it`s sad that atheists who claim to be objective and logical would use subjective arguements like `ìt`s weak`
it`s a palor trick, or it`s foolish in the face of objective evidence
lessons in logic - can you disprove objective facts with subjective feelings
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 17:42:16 329a43 No. 1522
>>1520 >What is needed is a hollow statue made of a porous material such as plaster or ceramic. the akita staute was made of wood, wept for 6 years and wept material that scientific examination revelaed to be human blood and sweat mix
thats alot of blood and sweat
but even if its a concoction or fake, youd need something other than wood for it to work as your doctor Luigi so graciously pointed out
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 18:02:09 b72587 No. 1523
>>1521 Wait a sec..
Did you just say the Hindu thing was real?
First of all, a real Christian would never proclaim the validity of a heathen supernatural event,, unless to condemn it as a trick of the devil.
Secondly,, you didn't read the link.
The statues didn't drink the milk, it was pulled into the porous stone by Capillary action.
The effect was recreated by a scientist.
Your article did not mention the duration of the "crying" or examination of the fluids involved.
and the fake statue needs a hollow statue made of a porous material..
wood is porous.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 18:03:47 8a4c6d No. 1524
1) Prove to *me* that there's gods or a god. I can't prove to you that your god you imagine doesn't exist. That's your major malfunction with the assertion. Believe as you want but it's usually the euphoric christians and muslims that are knocking on people's doors and online asserting gods. Rarely do people assert what they don't see or imagine.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 18:08:44 329a43 No. 1525
>>1523 I believe that God will appear to all who seek him and reach out to him
Although Christ is the way, God is not so narrow minded as to turn away from good souls and sincere worship just because they do it in a slightly different way, this is the divine creator of the universe after all
The indian science ministry concluded it was capillary action, but that explanation is inaccurate for several reasons
1) it happened for 3 days all over the world and stopped after three days - after the three days people tried to feed the idols milk and they wouldnt accept it
2) cpillary action would be limited by the weight of the staute, yet newspaper and eyewitness reports show that the statues were drinking milk at various temples world wide all day to such an extent that they consumed several times their own body-weight
thus it could not be capillary action
>>1524 we are talking about two specific miracles here
1) the akita miracle
2) the fatima miracles
But what these miracles have in common is that they happen only within religious contexts, regularly within religious contexts, and do not happen outside of religious contexts - which is what makes it unlikely that tye are just some yet un-undestood nature of the universe - unless you are proposing that prayer and religion might affect the universe - in which case you might wish to recant atheism
not a single atheist has produced any meaningful arguement against these mircles, just as I said before, you are discounting their validity off hand without proper examination, which can only be describe as a dogmatic willingness to ignore evidence contradictory to your world view
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 18:28:25 b703d2 No. 1528
>>1508 1 - How are you sure you're not the blind one?
2 - And what about all the other "miracles" that other religions attest.
Do you worship the gods of other religions when their miracles occur? No you do not. Why? Because you use miracles to strengthen the belief you already have in your god. Not the other way around.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 18:31:38 b72587 No. 1529
>>1525 There is so much wrong with your argument I don't know where to start.
If I told you Elvis landed in a spaceship and told us all to eat more tacos your refusal to believe would not really be a "dogmatic willingness to ignore evidence".
extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 18:32:06 8a4c6d No. 1530
>>1525 Just about every people of every belief or non-belief has had coincidences like this happen. Search related:
https://www.google.com/search?q=flying+spaghetti+monster+sighting&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=tNjHVIrLHfT7sASuzICgAQ&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAg&biw=1858&bih=983 Plenty of people have yet not found "him". Belief isn't a choice. If you can convince me, I'll believe or have faith. But what good is belief/faith if you have to be convinced. That's not really a choice. You can't choose to believe in gravity, it's obvious. If you can convince me something's real or obvious, I'll believe it. I've been on the internet for 15+ years and no one has ever convinced me of god or gods, no matter how much I've looked.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 18:41:12 329a43 No. 1533
>>1528 well the blind metaphor was used to illustrate the majority position vs the minority position
Atheists say they cannot feel God - but the vast mojority of people say they can. So an Atheist to deny God because they can't feel it is like a blind man to deny sight because the can't see it, or a deaf man denying sound because he can't hear it
as a minority, the fact that your minority can't experience something is not a very good arguement for the position that the experience is not possible or the experience is just delusional - and in my mind atheists have not meanginfully contended with this fact yet
that God is merciful and will appear and show love to any who reach out to him
bible
ask and it shall be given unto you, seek and ye shall find
Jesus had a story where someone who was not Christian healed someone miraculous, and the disciples tried to stop him, but Jesus rebuked his disciples s and said - whoever does my will comes in my name
This is how I explain miracles in other religions, whomever does the will of God, whomever is pure of heart in their intentions is of God
>>1529 and I have presented evidence including photographs, there are eyewitnesses testimonies, in the case of Akita sicientific examinations and the fact that it was broadcast on Japanese national TV
This would be more than enough proof to prove the occurrence of any other event - you are just raising the bar unreasonably high for things that prove god simply because you would rather not believe
>>1530 >>1530 as my post in the OP and global statistics show that is simply not the case - the vast majority of people have found him - atheists are a tiny minority of the global population
Sure you have no choice in your belief - but you are making a choice right now to ignore the overwhelmig evidence in the form of miracles and testimony of the vast majority of believers - it is similar to how creationists ignore evidence for evolution - it is not that you are choosing not to believe, you are choosing to ignore all the evidence and all the reasons to believe
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 18:49:26 96de55 No. 1534
First of all, did you read the FAQ? One of the things it says is that most athiests are technically agnostic atheists. We cannot indeed proove that there is or is not a god, however we beleive that it is mostly unlikely and that science will most likely tell us where we came from.
Do they really experience it though? From what it sounds to me, you think just because you have so much faith in something, it must be true. I don't really understand how christians cross faith with truth. Faith != Truth. It doesn't matter how many people believe it. Deep down, you might know the real truth, but you are afraid of what will happen if you "loose your way". That was me at least.
Next you give us these supposed miracles. The thing is though, how can you be certain they are not of forgery? You seem to be convinced because the government verified that, it is so. I wouldn't be surprised at all if that lady of Akita thing was an attempt to give Christianity more of a ground in Japan, where it is not a very influential religion. Furthermore, you also assume that these miracles were acts of God and Mary, and not done by any other being pretending to be them.
The lady said "look at the sun!" But really what do you think is going to happen if you stare at the sun for a while? The sun damages your eyes with prolonged exposure, so can you really believe with complete certainty that such thing was a miracle?
Here's another wikipedia article, this time for you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_Sun "Despite these assertions, not all witnesses reported seeing the sun "dance". Some people only saw the radiant colors. Others, including some believers, saw nothing at all.[28] No scientific accounts exist[clarification needed] of any unusual solar or astronomic activity during the time the sun was reported to have "danced", and there are no witness reports of any unusual solar phenomenon further than 64 kilometres (40 mi) out from Cova da Iria.[29]"
As time goes on, we see less of these miracles it seems, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if it's because of rising scepticism, and the rise of technology and scientific thought.
And another thing: Predictions are only remembered by history when they come true. If I need to really back up anything further I will, but I hope you get my point.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 18:49:33 b72587 No. 1535
>>1533 God is merciful? Not is this life and not on this plane of existence anyway.
God will appear and show love.. Still waiting on that.
You didn't provide a line to the "scientific investigations".
and I don't care if something has been television.. Ancient Aliens is terrible crap and it's on t.v.
A majority of people believing something can win an election, but it doesn't change reality.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 19:05:41 329a43 No. 1536
>>1534 >>1534 I'm not asking you to prove that there is no god, I'm asking you to contend with the evidence that there is
Estimates of the number of people present range from between 30,000 to 40,000 by Avelino de Almeida, writing for the Portuguese newspaper O Século,[7] to 100,000, estimated by Dr. Joseph Garrett, professor of natural sciences at the University of Coimbra,[8] both of whom were present on that day.
yeah I remember that time I watched the sun after a rainstorm and had it turn dull and careen and zigzag across the sky before me and 30 000 other witnesses who all saw the same thing - happens all the time - people stare at the sun every time there is an eclipse - dont see any similar reports
>>1535 the examinations were carried out by Professor Sagisaka of the Univerity of Akita - specialist in Foresenic medicine
I dont have a copy of his report on hand - but perhaps you can write to the university and ask for it should you have that much doubt
It was good enough for the vatican to put their stamp of approval on it - which they have never done to a single crying marry apparation in the past
I dont think the credibility question you are trying to raise is a very good one because I dont see any evidence of lack of credibility here amongst the nuns, local bishop or the examiner
//campus.udayton.edu/mary/resources/akita_apparition.html
http://www.catholictradition.org/Mary/akita.htm
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 19:07:38 8a4c6d No. 1537
>>1533 You're basically saying because most people believe, therefore true (Argumentum_ad_populum). You can dose the majority of people with LSD and they can see visions, it doesn't mean they're "real" when sober. What you experience in your mind you can't expect everyone else to so don't come here expecting people to disprove the god you experience and don't come here expecting people to prove there are no gods.
And no, I saw your evidence to believe and I don't believe it. Do you want me to post a video of me seeing your video? I can prove I watched it but it still hasn't proven anything to me. Now do you get it? You can't choose to believe what doesn't get you to believe.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 19:10:27 329a43 No. 1538
>>1537 I am saying that if the majority of the people in the world claim to have an experience of or feel the presence of God - that this experience is credible and cannot be discounted simply because there is a tiny minority that do not experience this presence
the majority of people in this World are not under the influence of LSD or any other drug
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 19:13:32 b72587 No. 1539
>>1536 This is from the link you posted.
examination of the fluids was conducted by Dr. Sagisaka of the Department of Forensic Medicine, School of Medicine, University of Akita. The results were given on November 30, 1981 and revealed that:
"The object examined has adhering to it human liquids which belong to the blood group O." Since the first analysis revealed that the blood belonged to group B and the sweat and tears to group AB, it has been established that the fluids belong to three different blood groups.
The fluids coming from different people is kind of odd.
I have not been a practicing Catholic for years, but I don't think the Virgin Mary is three people in one Saint..
Or did they change doctrine again?
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 19:20:44 329a43 No. 1540
>>1539 >>1539 I dont think weeping and sweating stautes have human type single blood types
also for it to be a mix of type O and type AB and B actually lend in credbility as type O and AB are very rare in Japan where this even occurred
Also sister Agnes was type B so the O and AB could not have come from her.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 19:33:38 b72587 No. 1541
>>1540 Blood type is possible to determine from any blood fluid.
Of course, the super-natural manifestation of Mary's saintly bloodly fluids might have different rules.
The Church says she was assumed into Heaven.. Maybe all those years in Heaven has changed her cell structure.
This is a much more logical explanation for why three different blood types were detected than that three people used their own bodily fluids in a hoax.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 19:38:24 c2bc97 No. 1542
>>1541 >three people used their own bodily fluids in a hoax You answered your own question.
What cell structure? She's dead if she ever was alive.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 19:44:01 329a43 No. 1543
>>1516 >>1541 >>1541 well there are alot of obsticles you hae to overcome for that to work - you have to show why it happened over a period of 6 years - that's alot of blood and sweat over a long period of time
and explain how the crying effect was managed with a relatively non-porus method like hardwood where all the atheist made fakes utilized pours methods like ceramic or plaster
also I think the fact that the stautes tears contained 3 blood types is not really convincing evidence of its forgery - its simply something you find weird and thus are counting as evidence against it - which really is the major atheist position isnt it - I think its weird so it cant be real . . . kinda like me and my war on kangaroos described here
>>1516 really look its hopping around doing jump kicks, what a weird beast, no way it exists, more likely its a hoax I tell you
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 19:59:38 b72587 No. 1544
>>1543 I suppose we can chalk up the Virgin Mary having three different blood types at once as a "Holy mystery"
after all it's not anyone has ever committed a fraud with this sort of thing.
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/miracles_or_deception_the_pathetic_case_of_audrey_santo/
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 20:06:40 329a43 No. 1545
>>1544 the weakness of your claim of fraud is that you bring no evidence for this improbable claim
you bring no mechanism by which liquid can be made to pass through wood, you bring no mechanism by which 6 years worth of blood and sweat can be collected
nor do you bring any explaination for how the staute started glowing in front of many witnesses prior to the tears
you bring no explanation or evidence other than it must be a fraud because I think it is weird and strange. Kinda like how I think Kangaroos are a fraud because I think they are wird and strange, and all the witness evidence and photographs cant convince me otherwise.
Do you know that people think there are things called tree kanagroos - I mean really how weird does this thing get. Its not like the existance of animals have been faked before - we used to think there were unicorns, we discounted them, why not kangaroos
I mean whats more likely, that australia has a large bipedal animal that hops everywhere even on trees and puts babies in its pouches, and exists nowhere else in the world or that this is just some clever fraud by tourism Australia
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 20:14:52 b72587 No. 1546
>>1545 So if the glove doesn't fit we must acquit..
Are you ghost of Johnnie Cochran?
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 20:27:39 8a4c6d No. 1547
>>1545 Was there evidence of any non-biased third parties inspecting it?
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 20:30:52 329a43 No. 1550
>>1546 all I am saying is that you cant dismiss objective evidence as fraudulent or fake without any evidence of fraud or fakery simply because you find it is strange or improbable -
feelings that something is strange or improbable is a subjective feelings and to be true to the principle of rational inquiry you cannot dismiss objective occurrences based merely on subjective feelings that that make you feel as if something is unlikely
sort of like my feelings about kanagaroos
>>1547 in the case of akita there was a forensic specialist Dr. Sagisaka of the Department of Forensic Medicine, School of Medicine, University of Akita
and a TV news crew examined it, filmed it and broadcast it to Japan
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 21:07:50 b72587 No. 1553
>>1550 Do you accept forensic specialist Dr. Sagisaka as unbiased?
His discovery that the fluids found on the statue were from three people is kind of big red flag.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 21:10:16 329a43 No. 1554
>>1553 >>1553 >Do you accept forensic specialist Dr. Sagisaka as unbiased? until I see any evidence of bias, yes, he seems like the cloest available qualified expert and was not of the faith
The evidence was from three different blood types - why is that a red flag? Why does that make it less likely to be genuine? I've seen no other reason to think of it as contravening evidence other than "but that's weird"
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 21:11:14 c2bc97 No. 1555
>>1550 >evidence If a anomaly would be proven fake, it would not mean there is no God. But if it's real, it doesn't prove anything. Is that what you're really arguing for?
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 21:12:14 8a4c6d No. 1556
>>1550 Doesn't your god have higher priorities, sick kids, homeless, etc than to make a statue bleed so it can "prove" to us your god is real so we can have faith which doesn't need proof?
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 21:17:10 329a43 No. 1557
>>1555 no what I am arguing for is that you can't take an objective event like this and count it as fake or consider it disproven without any evidence that shows it a fraud or a fake merely because it makes you uncomfortable or because you think it is strange.
It's just the evidence question - for you to reliablely say it's fake, you have to bring some evidence that it's fake just like for me to show kangaroos are fake, I have to show evidene
>>1556 this was addressed earlier in the thread please read the thread again
the mere fact that you think that these stautes or other events are examples of misguided priorities or not cool enough, doesn't mean they aren't facts - it doesn't mean that the statute didn't cry and it doesn't mean the sun didn't zig zag following prophecies by certain girls
all it means is that you think that God should be doing something else, or that these miracles are pointless, which is a fine opinoin for you to have, but the fact that you think it's pointless or stupid is not exactly a counterarguement against the legitimacy of these events
I've said it over and over again you subjective feelings about these events does not count as evidence against these events any more than my subjective feelings about kangaroos counts as evidence against them
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 21:23:28 8c601d No. 1559
>>1557 Greek guy made a steam engine to lift temple doors and convince people it was a miracle two thousand years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_of_Alexandria Okay I'd have to see this statue but could there not be holes around the eyes? Besides you know what would be a real miracle? If hundreds of these mary statues around the world started weeping simultaneously, I mean why stop at one? And for what purpose would only making one weep? Why does not God drop mans from the sky like he used to, this time to feed those starving Africans? Why does he not do us a real miracle rather than doing something I could do with a pump and a plaster sculpture? Lastly, why did the statue stop crying? Did someone run out of blood? Did the pump break and no one could fix it?
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 21:26:19 8c601d No. 1560
>>1522 Oh, I just thought maybe the area around the eyes had thinner wood. I also know when I have a cold drink in my hand water condensces on the glass around the cup.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 21:27:14 8a4c6d No. 1561
>>1557 But anon, you have subjective feelings about your religion which gives you bias. Maybe yours doesn't count. Extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence. That's not nearly enough evidence for me to believe in a bleeding statue, let alone a god.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 21:35:02 c2bc97 No. 1562
>>1557 Allow me to rephrase.
You are arguing this is proof of God. But there were 3 blood types. Did not reveal when searched for by what are now atheists. Is God one who would hid, using smoke and mirrors? Who does the Bible attribute this type of tricks to?
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 21:35:56 329a43 No. 1563
>>1559 you have seen the statue
>>1516 here is another one clear picture
as for hundreds of mary stautes weeping simultaenously, it's not possible from a verification standpoint, the catholic church has serious examination requirements before they will consider a miracle legitimate, Akita is the only weeping mary they have approved of,
Catholic miracles are used to give legitimacy to prophecies, so the Akita statute came with a propehcy and so did the Fatima one - and the miracles were supposed to be a sign that the prophecy was true - so there would be no real purpose fulfilled to go to a larger audience
But there is an example from another religion, Hindu Cows all over the world simultaneously drinking milk for 3 days and stopping after 3 days
>>1561 That`s true I have subjective feelings about my religion, but we are talking about something very simple here
did this statute cry, did the sun zig zag, we have evidence from news media, scientific examinations, witnesses
so given that all this evidence is not good enough or discounted - what evidence would count
and is there a reason that this evidence is being discounted other than - `it`s extraordinary` because to me feeling something is extrodinary is amazing is a feeling - and discounting something based on feeling is irrational
remember logical fallacy - arguement from incredulity
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity arent you commiting that fallacy now
>>1560 I dont think so - Im not sure how thin that wood would have to be to allow liquid to seep through like that
as to the condensation trick, I think you will find that the effect is greatly reduced if you use a wooden cup, even a thin one
see
http://kirimoto.net/eng/coffeecup.html >>1562 I am not following could you rephrase again please
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 21:39:16 329a43 No. 1564
File: 1422394756127.jpg (172.75 KB, 1098x629, 1098:629, Milk_Miracle_Cow_Do_they_D….jpg )
>>1563 sorry by Hindu cows, I mean hindu statutes or objects of worship we discussed it here
>>1518 >>1521 >>1523 >>1525
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 21:43:36 c2bc97 No. 1565
>>1563 God miracles do not make it clear it was Him. He did not make it that what to do to feel/follow. The miracle contained three blood types. At the very least, it could have been one. If this miracle is real, then at least argue for a deity whose book did not speak against trickery and confusion.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 21:55:49 329a43 No. 1567
>>1565 Well you are right in one sense - there is no undeniable proof that it was definately God who did this particular miracle
My problem with this line of arguement comes back against to arguement from emotion - yes the facts are incredilous and confusion and strange - but all of these things are feelings and not one of these things is really an evidence against the reality of these miracles
it`s simply emotional discomfort or the desire for better miracle
maybe it`s not clear it was him from this miracle - but the question you have to ask is how clear does it have to be - how certain does it have to be, and until it`s made 100% clear as in he comes down himself and says ``Hi I`m here, ready for a press conference`` until that time - will you discount or look away from all other evidence in favor of it
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 21:57:47 dfd3f3 No. 1568
>>1508 1) Bandwagon fallacy
2) None of them have stood up to scientific inquiry
I was in that first thread. The atheists didn't lose the debate. Getting in the last word doesn't constitute as winning.
No buddy, it's the other way around from where I'm standing.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 21:59:15 8a4c6d No. 1569
>>1563 I find it incredulous, but that it's incredulous isn't my argument. And besides if my arguments have any logical fallacies, I'm not using my argument to assert something is real.
Not enough proof.
lol, no. It orbits.
You've proved nothing to me. Unless you have more data, you're just wasting your time and everyone else's.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 22:02:27 329a43 No. 1571
>>1568 so what data surfices - we have new reports, scientific examinations, witness accounts of large numbers of people -
so its not a quesiton of not enough data - its a quesiton of you choosing to ignore the data presented
I mean look at your post - not a shred of evidence - not one not even an arguement - all you said is not enough - I dont believe it - it didnt happen
do you see how you are not being rational - you are choosing willfully to ignore or dismiss evidence you don't like without giving any reason
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 22:05:07 329a43 No. 1572
>>1571 sorry
>>1571 was meant for
>>1569 as for you
>>1568 well then the threads are still up - regal us with your counter arguments
as for 1 its not a bandwagon fallacy when you choose to listen to the personal testimony of over 85 % of the worlds population that they feel the presense of God - its a fallacy to ignore testimonial evidence of the large segment of population without having a reason to do so
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 22:10:09 dfd3f3 No. 1573
>>1572 >well then the threads are still up - regal us with your counter arguments It's funny that you say that, because I've already posted in that thread. Here's my post:
>>>/christian/13485 It is.
It isn't is they don't have scientific evidence to back up their claims, and of all those people you'd think at lest one of them would, but they don't.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 22:14:02 329a43 No. 1574
>>1573 wrong thread anon - check OP
http://8ch.net/christian/res/13452.html and here
http://8ch.net/christian/res/13505.html as for your bandwagon fallcy its bandwagoning to believe that hearing is real - because there are deaf people who cannot hear and we shouldnt assume that the majority can hear things just beacause its popular - I mean there is no scientific evidence proving that air vibrations actually create the sound we hear, or that light waves are reflecting into our eyes in any way that reflects reality - it could all just be a delusion by your standard - at some point we have to accept the experiential testimony of the majority of human beings unless we have a reason to discount it
as for lack of scientific evidene to back up claims - we have evidence I posted two examples - Fatima and Akita - you are simply chosen to ignore them because you dont like them
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 22:24:20 dfd3f3 No. 1575
>>1574 >wrong thread anon Nope, check again. The thread with the cat OP, I replied to that one.
I could easily claim the same thing.
Their is.
No.
Not having scientific evidence to back up your claim is reason enough to discount it.
Your problem is, you don't understand what does and doesn't constitute as evidence, or what a fallacy is.
No you don't
They haven't been proven scientifically.
No. I could easily say that you're choosing to believe them because you like them.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 22:29:32 329a43 No. 1576
>>1575 well no you cant because there are only 15 % of you - and like the blind man who disputes sight you are not claiming perception you are claiming lack of perception, and you are making claims about other`s perceptions (that they are deluded or wrong)
If you find it post it - better yet, read Kants critique of pure reason and see me after class
whats the definition of proven scientifically - we had a scientist analyze it and say its valid -
we have eye witnesses
we have media reports
thats about the same ammmount of evidence we have for the boston marathon bombings, or the moon landing
why are those accepted as evidence, but this - with the exact same, if not greater, amount of data is discounted
the problem anon isnt that it hasnt been proven scientifically - the problem anon is that you use the words `proven scientifically` to offhandedly discount evidence of things you don`t like
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 22:38:10 8a4c6d No. 1577
Crying statues prove nothing of gods. To think this constitutes proof of your god is to think we're a bunch of idiots. There's plenty of places on the internet that accepts this kind of "proof" or will wallow in your folly but here, ain't nobody got time fo dat.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 22:42:17 329a43 No. 1578
>>1577 so a religious staute of God starts crying - despite the fact that statues, being inanimate cant cry - and your reaction is
most people would think its pretty good evidence
look the main point of this thread isnt that god exists, its that atheists willfully choose to close their eyes to all evidence of Gods exitance, and I think that has been demonstrated quite well
Its not that there is no evidence, its just that you willingly choose not to see it or offhandedly discount it when it does come along
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 22:44:06 dfd3f3 No. 1579
>>1576 >well no you cant because there are only 15 % of you https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/bandwagon You claim I'm blind while I claim you're blind, we get nowhere.
There's a reason it's called philosophy and not science.
>a scientist You need to do more than that. You need multiple scientists to run tests independent of each other. Than all their finding are subjected to peer review.
Pulling a rabbit out a hat in front of an audience doesn't prove magic is real.
Implying the media doesn't lie.
Nope.
Also, an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence.
Or maybe I'm using the word correctly, and you're not.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 22:48:51 329a43 No. 1580
>>1579 Nope.
now you are just flat out lying to yourself
every day you turn on the news hear stories and believe that they are true
here is a story for which there is more evidence- we have eyewitnesses, media and scientific analysis
but you are discounting it -
extrodinary claims - extrodinary evidence
guess what
extrodinary is a subjective standard isnt it -
kinda like what your atheism is based on - subjective feelings
thats because you misunderstood - or chose not to understand the arguemnet
85 % of the worlds population says they percieve something - and you are saying that they are wrong and their perception is wrong - without a shred of evidence for it
Think about that for a second - 6 billion people say they see something and you are saying they are wrong just because you dont too
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 22:50:45 329a43 No. 1581
>>1580 your claim is basically that we need super evidence for religious stuff - extraordinary amounts of evidence, simply because of your subjective feeling that the claim is extrodinary
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 22:55:35 139f2b No. 1582
>fled upon losing
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 22:57:04 8a4c6d No. 1583
>>1578 Yes, you've said it. You've provided no meaningful proof at all and trying to spam that "proof" over and over in the thread is doing nothing but making you look like a euphoric christian that just can't handle people with different beliefs or nonbeliefs.
If that's proof, there's plenty of proof that others have of their own god or gods yet you ignore it. I don't have time to peruse all the gods in this list and listen to every euphoric theist rag on about his proof of "miraculous" things that proves their god is real. Get over it.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 22:59:40 329a43 No. 1584
>>1582 that was you - I donna it looked to me like you fled when the going got tough
seeing as you didn't present an argument all I can say is there there, dont be sad, its easy to get BTFO when your wrong
>>1583 would you look at those shifting goalposts - I wasnt here arguing a particular God, I was arguing the existance of God
the mere fact that people call him different names and imagine his his appearance in different ways is not an argument against God - after all, God doesn't actually have a physical appearance or actual name
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 23:02:35 dfd3f3 No. 1585
>>1580 >scientific analysis I actually have been looking into it. The scientific analysis of Lady of Akita is just to see if the blood was real. That's it. That's not scientific evidence that the miracle was real.
So?
Again, rabbit out of a hat.
There's no scientific proof. Deal with it.
Oh no, I understand. You just don't understand how flawed your logic is.
Bandwagon I don't need evidence to disprove the unproven.
Have you ever heard the story, the Emperor New Clothes?
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 23:03:17 8c601d No. 1586
Coincidentally I walked past a mary statue made of plaster today. Around the iris were engraved deep circles and i thought…there could be cracks or openings in those pupils to allow this statue to bleed.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 23:03:59 8a4c6d No. 1587
>>1584 The mere fact you think those gods in that list is your god just shows how conceited and ignorant you are. They can have their own belief and their own gods if they wish. If you looked over some of the religions of the gods there, you'd find probably a few that you'd think isn't your god.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 23:07:27 139f2b No. 1588
>>1584 >that was you - I donna it looked to me like you fled when the going got tough >seeing as you didn't present an argument all I can say is there there, dont be sad, its easy to get BTFO when your wrong Look at your post and look at mine, I said what is on my mind and detailed my 1 month old posts again. And what you are doing now is trying to make me look like an idiot, typical bible thumper behaviour. When arguments don't work, appeal to emotion.
I said what I had to say one month ago, and now. I can detail my post even more, and try to debunk your miracles. But I wouldn't waste any more time debating anything with a person who doesn't want to admit when he's wrong.
If you take 15 minutes of research on your crying statues, moving suns, natural body preservation, and apparitions of illusions you would see that you have no reason to assume that those things could prove that your god exists.
Last reply again, call this feeling because I "lost", I will call it time that's not wasted being angry at someone who isn't open to debate, but is just there to defend his emotions in front of logic.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 23:08:07 329a43 No. 1589
>>1586 >>1586 thats nice but how is it relevant to akits wooden staute with eyes that look like this
>>1563 do you see what you are doing here, you are speculating on why it could be false to avoid dealing with the facts before you
>>1585 nah you can tell yourself you are being honest with yourself but that isnt so
you are asking for proof that the miracle is real
its kind of like asking for proof that the moon landing is real or the kennedy assination was real
the fact is you can`t prove or disprove events in a scientific manner
you prove or disprove theories
no one does scientific analysis on the moon landing
you look at the facts see how well it`s attested too and accept it
the same should apply with Akita and Fatima, it`s no more extrodinary than the claim that man walked on the moon
the only reason it`s being held to artificial and impossible standards is because you don`t want to believe it
you want to pretend it`s not real somehow so you make up in your head reasons why it`s not
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 23:09:09 139f2b No. 1590
>>1584 Oh, and I forgot, you are not arguing with just one person here, IDs would be helpful and this is making the discussion confusing. In this thread, I am just this guy.
>>1588 So enjoy your shit discussion because you won't have more attention from me.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 23:12:05 329a43 No. 1591
>>1587 look here`s the thing what does God look like, what is God`s name, what are his characteristics. We are talking about someone largely beyond human comprehension so every description or perception of him will largely be imperfect
so the mere fact that different people have slightly different conclusions doesn`t mean it`s not real
I mean look at the weird similarities between desperate relgiions
1) there are entities higher than men
2) they are concerned with morality and ethics
3) they are concerned with humans
4) there is an afterlife and they play a role in it
weird that australian aborigines, Christians, Hindus, Greeks Hebrews, and Vikings would have all reached similar conclusions isnt it, suggests they are perceiving the same thing
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 23:15:49 8a4c6d No. 1593
>>1589 The fact of the matter is, even considering that it's surprising to think you actually believe in crying statues and probably angels, demons, etc, it should be okay for people to not want to believe. You seem to have an issue with that.
I stand up for any belief where it's okay to believe as you like as long as you're not 'euphoric' about it. You're pretty well close to being euphoric about it, meaning, annoying people with your belief and not accepting other people just want no part of it.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 23:19:31 329a43 No. 1594
>>1593 well it`s not really fair for me to denegrate you for not believing in deamons because I cant see them, dont have photos of them etc.
But this stuff
well I got photos, there are eye witnesses, scientific examinations
I mean its a tangible staute, its right there, and we have witnesses to the sun miracle, and weve gone over the hindu statutes drinking milk
this is physical, you can see it, others have seen it, to discount that stuff is really evidence of willful blindness or ignoring contravening facts, its right there in physical form
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 23:19:32 8a4c6d No. 1595
>>1591 1. Wrong. Some had gods that were just as fallible as man.
2. Wrong.
3. No. Some believe in an impersonal god, that's benign and lets humans do their thing.
4. Not everyone believes in an afterlife, even some theists.
Less talk from you, more ears. When you're young, you tend to spout on way more than you have knowledge. Go read up on other gods and beliefs before you come here and try to school us on why your god is real.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 23:21:10 7e3fa1 No. 1596
Most of you ITT are missing the point I think.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 23:33:11 139f2b No. 1598
>>1596 Don't bother man, did you not think other people, including me, pointed out that stuff? There are so many things that could prove tens of other religions true, why must every unexplained event be proclaimed by the bible? It's just stupid and if he was an open minded person he would had thought of that himself. Don't bother.
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 23:39:48 329a43 No. 1601
>>1595 every single major religion has the 4 characteristics I mentioned and most minor ones do too, the fact that there are offhand excpetions doesn't disprove general rules, sociological data, like religion, is about generalizing from particulars
As for ethis of Gods, even if all gods werent ethical themselves, they almost universally expect a high degree of ethics from people, for example Greek Gods misbehaved alot, but would also reap horrible vengeance on misbehaving humans
Think of it like a mountain, the people living to the North and South of the mountain will describe different shapes when asked to describe the mountain, does that mean the mountain is not real - not it means its so big that we can't really glimpse the totality of it, we just see bits
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 23:49:19 329a43 No. 1602
File: 1422402559881.jpg (20.51 KB, 684x505, 684:505, Fatima-Miracle of the Sun-….jpg )
>>1596 >>1596 I think an anon alluded to that near the bening of the thread
my answer was context
for example, if the staute of liberty started crying tomorrow, I wouldn't have much of an argument for God, same with if the sun just randomly zig zaged for no reason
the issue here is context, these sorts of miracles, these violations of natural law only happen in a religious context, and they continuously happen in a religious context, I'll admit they don't only happen in my religoin, Hindus and Buddhists and Muslims have their share as well, but once you get out of that, you don't really see many claims of miralces,
no one claims that studying art, or famous art gallries or being good at horse racing will result in miracles, it happens only in the context of relion and so it makes sense to think it's connected to religion.
so for example, Akita happened in a church with a religious staute following a religious vision of a religious figure
Fatima happened following similar apparitions of a religious figure and a religious prophecy
The Hindu milk miracle happened in the context of Hindu religious figures following a Hindu religious vision
The fact that these miracles, these violations of natural law, only occur in the context of religion and continuously in the context of religion, seems to be good evidence that they are connected to religion in some meaningful way.
I don't expect an athesit to look at these and covert, my main point is that atheists often claim that there is no evidence for God or relgion - but there is, there is tangable physical evidence that you and photograph and see, like these miracles, the problem is that Ahteists seem to discount or ignore these pieces of evidence offhand without any meaningful scrutiney
there is evidence, atheists just choose ot to see it
Anyways, it's been a good discussion, I'd like to continue, but I have to get some work done, please continue to post your arguments, I'll try and come back tomorrow or the day after to respond to them the best I can
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 23:50:25 8a4c6d No. 1603
>>1601 Let's assume everyone in the world that worships god or gods is worshipping the same god and it's a 1/10000000 chance it's your god. That's still an argumentum ad populum. Besides, the more people that believe in one thing the more skeptical I become because that's how I am and society needs that. All eggs…one basket…etc. Because more people believe is still not proof. It's still not proof that makes me *want* to believe either.
Now will you stop spamming the thread with that tired old argument?
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 23:58:10 329a43 No. 1604
>>1603 one last response befoer I take off for now
if the people, those 6 billion, all claimed to believe based on bind faith then you have something
the fact is when you talk to religious people, across various religions, they all say they feel the presence of God, Christians say they do, I strated a thread on /islam/ about it and they agree that they feel a similar experience,
so they are not arguing from blind faith, they say they feel something, they experience God in some way
so you are not arguing against belief, you are arguing against perception, the feeling these people have of God, and they can describe the feeling check Islam, the thread is still up, people describe it, Christians and Muslims describe the felling of God's presence
http://8ch.net/islam/res/2185.html so what you are doing is not discounting belief of 6 billion people, you are discounting the perception of 6 billion people, which makes your arguement weaker
here is
atheist spokesmen talking about how atheists fail when they deny these spiritual perceptions, the great weakness of atheism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpaVLLObU80 anyways gotta go, hope we can continue this discussion later, please post arguments if you have them so I can take a look at hem later
Anonymous 01/27/15 (Tue) 23:59:02 8a4c6d No. 1605
>>1602 It's crazy things, or miracles as you say, and you can claim crazy things happen in other contexts. You're only choosing the crazy things that happen in the context you're exposed with and looking for. Plenty of crazy things happened with other people and other beliefs, religious and not, but it doesn't mean it's real.
Bigfoot, aliens, ghosts, loch ness monster, Bermuda triangle stuff, time travel, all crazy things. Do you see those people going out proselytizing that it's real as much as you? I don't, at least not in my circle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deities
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 00:02:29 55fcdc No. 1606
>>1602 Have you ever considered that maybe the only reason they happen in a religious context is because the religious are so quick to put meaning into otherwise unmiraculous events? How many grand unheard of happenings go on all around the world that people don't know about because the people investigating it are more interested in finding out why those events are occurring than saying it must be a sign from God.
Your entire argument seems to be based on the fallacy of popular opinion. Several people saw it, they couldn't explain it, thus it's a sign from God. The same kind of logic has been used to justify doomsday prophesies from sightings of comets and supernovas. No one knew what they were or how they worked so they all assumed it was God telling them something.
Here we are again. Crying statues. According to these claims, it happened all at once. Now how about testing this out. Has there been any attempts at replicating the event?
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 00:04:02 8a4c6d No. 1608
>>1604 Ok, I have a feeling no gods exist. Then you'll try that same argument that more believe. I had that same feeling as a christian as I do as an atheist. It's not a religious feeling, it's a human feeling.
Atheists don't fail at denying perceptions. Atheist is a non-belief. You can never fail at a religious belief, that's your own choice and a guaranteed right that I fought for in the military. To claim atheists fail is a pretty troll-y thing to say.
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 00:27:59 139f2b No. 1610
How can you be so gullible OP? It doesn't matter what the majority thinks, people voting for someone doesn't mean they made a good choice.
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 00:33:12 139f2b No. 1611
>>1608 Hey man, I also have a feeling that god doesn't exist. Guess that makes two of us, now it's just a numbers game right OP? Whoever has the most people believing in something wins. Basically, your entire thread is based off this.
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 01:37:16 7e3fa1 No. 1614
>>1602 >same with if the sun just randomly zig zaged for no reason Jesus
Christ , dude. You are so out of touch with reality.
Gee, maybe when it happens in other contexts people just go "Well that sure was a bizarre and unexplained event," but when there's any semblance of religious context they say it's a miracle. This one time I was out hiking and I saw a tree that had fallen really weird. It looked like it had been hit by lightning because a large portion of the trunk seemed to have exploded. The weird part was that the trunk wasn't sitting where it should have fallen. The stump was right in the middle of the fallen trunk, like the trunk had been moved about 30 feet after it fell. If I believed in giants, the obvious answer would be that a giant got mad and punched the tree, then started dragging it away to beat his nagging giant wife with, but dropped it and ran when he heard us coming. But I don't believe in giants, so I just said "Fuck if I know. Weird, huh?" and kept hiking.
Yeah, if you presuppose the existence of God and throw logic out the window. I don't. This shit ain't evidence to someone who isn't already suffering confirmation bias like you are. Show me how a crying statue is in any way supportive of the notion that the universe was created by an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being who interceded in human affairs in the past as specified in the bible.
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 02:13:07 b72587 No. 1615
>>1559 It's sort of ironic that the early Christians used to expose this thing in Pagan temples and now they say you shouldn't put god to the test.
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 02:24:51 b72587 No. 1616
>>1591 Their concepts of the supernatural are very different.
In the Norse end of the world myth even the gods die..
Hindus don't even believe the world ends it goes on forever, just repeating cycles. and the Hindus believed in reincarnation.
Greek gods are blasphemous to the Hebrews.
It's more a testimony to the huge variety of human cultures and imagination..
But you can refine this argument a bit if you read "The Golden Bough" by Frazer. He discussed similar ideas in folk magic across cultures.
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 06:45:37 9f4894 No. 1626
Fucking sage this shit. Why do we have to put up with /christian/ bullshit on our board?
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 07:18:24 dfd3f3 No. 1629
>>1508 >2 atheists made a thread on /christian/ >One debated well and left >The other just made a thread an never posted in it >OP claims to have 'won' both arguments because he got the last say >Comes here to brag about it >Tries use arguments he used in one of those threads >Get's his ass handed to him You make me proud /atheist/
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 07:19:39 dfd3f3 No. 1630
>>1626 Nah, we don't want to be like /christian/. Let them make debate threads if they want too. If you don't like them just hide them.
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 08:02:36 b72587 No. 1631
>>1629 All we had to do was actually read the posts he presented as evidence.
Three separate blood types for one saint was right there.
but this thread was fun. I learned how to make a statue cry.
I think I can do something fun with that knowledge.
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 13:10:26 8a4c6d No. 1638
There's also the mystery of the weeping Buddha so he must be the real god. Which one is the real one, guys? This must be satan playing his evil games again.
OP 01/28/15 (Wed) 15:21:23 329a43 No. 1641
>>1629 congratulations on your great victory
so let's start with the one interesting and challenging argument you guys posted since yesterday . . .
>>1605 the difference between things like crypto zoology and ufology and there miracles is the level of attestation
for example, with things like big foot, loch-ness, UFOs and all that weird stuff, we might have an off video that could be something else, some eyewitnesses, etc. and that's the level of evidence we have to work with
this is different, the level of attestation we have for miracles and miraculous events is much higher. For Example with Akita, anyone in the world for 6 years could go down and see the statue crying, they could touch the staute, you could have scientists examine it, TV crews went and saw it.
it's a level of attestation, that I think mirrors ordinary everyday events
I mean take an every day attested event like Giants win the Pennant - people might not like this, but no one will doubt it, because we can watch it on TV, we can see it on news outlets, on baseball night, we can go to the game ourselves and see it, and many who wanted to go did go to the game and see it.
I think with miracles like the Hindu milk miracle or our lady of Akita or the Fatima miracle, the level of attestation is much closer to Giants winning the pennant than it is to UFOs or Loch Ness, which takes them, as mysterious and strange as these miracles are, out of the realm of that crypto stuff and into the realm of the everyday
OP 01/28/15 (Wed) 15:29:26 329a43 No. 1642
>>1606 >Have you ever considered that maybe the only reason they happen in a religious context is because the religious are so quick to put meaning into otherwise unmiraculous events? possibly - but with the hindu milk miracle, or Akita or the sun miracle (following a prophecy by yonung girls with a vision and message from the virgin Mary)
I find it difficult to conclude that they are anything but a religious based miracle. The level at which these events are tied to religious facts like visions and religious figures seems unreasonable to conclude that they are just a random happening.
I mean really we have tons of statues in tons of art galleries in the world and they never start crying or drinking milk, or communicating through visions - and that's with or without visions or kids playing pranks or whatever - it simply doesn't happen
I think this sort of stuff is really unprecedented and simply doesn't happen outside of religious context
For your arguement to really carry any weight - you'd have to give examples of miraculous events in a secular context that were written off - and I don't think you'll find anything that's comparable to the Hindu milk miracle or Akita, or the miracle of the sun, and these are by far no where near the only miracles and no where near the best attested miracles
OP 01/28/15 (Wed) 15:54:36 329a43 No. 1643
>>1610 >>1611 My argument from perception seems to like it's being misunderstood/misinterpreted alot here.
I think that might be my fault because it's a much more complex one than I made it out to be. The big issue is I am not talking about the beleif of the majority, I am talking about the perception of the majority. Were I talking about mere belief, your arguments would be effective, since I am talking about perception, they are not effective.
Let me explain by way example, I was in Korea for a while, and I tried to learn their language. What was interesting was there are sounds in Korean that I simply can't seem to percieve, for example, they had something between a k/g and a t/d sound and this eu sound which is different from this other eu sound which they had which sounded exactly the same to me. I couldn't tell the difference the two.
So the point is there are sounds, pronunciations in Korean that I simply couldn't hear. Being an English speaker, my perception simply wasn't trained to pick up these slight differences in pronunciation that make up these different sounds.
The other English speakers also struggled to perceive the sounds in Korean pronunciation. Does this mean that these sounds don't exist?
No, 40 million koreans do seem to pick up theses sounds, and that seems to be good evidence that they really are perceiving some differences in pronunciation that English speakers cannot - simply because our ears haven't been trained to pick up these sounds.
Now the argument that these sounds/pronunciations don't exist simply because I and my English speaking friends can't hear them wouldn't be a good argument. the perception of 40 million Korans is a good argument for the existence of these sounds, and my mere non-perception is not a very good argument against it.
Similarly if the testimony of 40 million Koreans is enough to establish the existences of sounds I can't perceive, what does it mean when there are 6 billion people attesting the perception of a God that certain people can't see. Can that perception be over-ruled because some people, who haven't made any particular effort to obtain such a perception, lack any such perception?
>>1614 your arguments I believe looks like a rehash of 1606's argument and was answered here
>>1642
OP 01/28/15 (Wed) 16:06:06 329a43 No. 1644
>>1616 there are differences and that's to be expected considering desperate cultures
but the similarities are kinda odd isn't it considering it comes from cultures that aren't related to each other and don't have any contact with each other
I don't think the Golden Bough is really a good argument against it - because the argument is basically "humans are programmed to come up with deities that fit certain specifications" which really is just mere conjecture, there's no evidence for it and no reason to believe that our neurons have somehow made us inclined to invent Gods that have very specific sorts of traits.
>>1631 this was dealt with before - I called it the argument from "I think it's kinda weird therefore it's fake"
>>1638 This was also dealt with before, it is doubtful that any real God would choose to interact exclusively with only a single culture or religion, but would likely want to reach out to any who worship and reach out to him in earnest.
I don't think the weeping Buddha is a very good example of one of these miracles, but you are right miracles do happen in all or nearly all religions. That doesn't seem to weaken the claims of any one religion it seems to boost the claims of all religions - at least on the points in which they agree - that there exists a diety, something higher than us and that this deity is concerned about our ethical lives
ie.
>yfw god exists
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 16:47:49 8a4c6d No. 1647
>>1642 You've made your mind up and you're not interested in learning. There's no getting through to some people. You will always suffer your beliefs.
Secular people don't view things like this as "miracles" so you and they won't find it. I suppose they could find some but you wouldn't believe them because you have your mind made up on which god to believe. You're stuck on loose events that you think are relevant.
You never addressed my point that if your god needs faith, what sort of good is proof? If we have proof, one doesn't need faith. And belief isn't a choice. I can't believe what I'm not convinced to believe. You can spam this board all day and say a statue cries but it'll never be proof of gods.
>>1643 Because sounds exist that we haven't heard means your god exists? No one is making assertions here. You're the one coming to our board asserting your beliefs. Atheism is about nonbelief.
>>1644 People from lots of ages and cultures have claimed to see UFOS and ape creatures like Yeti, Sasquatch, swamp monster, etc.
Because your god is reaching out to other religions, who's to say others aren't doing your gods wishes? Perhaps even us atheists may be speaking his views without knowing. Maybe he's speaking through us to tell you to stop your idolatry. Maybe other people have beliefs too that are more righteous than your own yet that righteous belief may be of putting humanity before gods.
So it's apparently up to you to decide the correct religion and yours is the correct one? You can't seem to fathom other people have beliefs differently than you do and different gods.
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 17:07:07 329a43 No. 1648
>>1647 >>1647 you are rewriting the scope of the challenge, the challenge wasn't to find something secular people called a miracle, its to find a similarly miraculous even on the same scope
I think Ive repeated it over and over again, there is evidence, enough for any rational person to believe in God. Certain people just choose not to see it. Thats the whole point of this thread.
There is a difference between faith in God and faith that God exists
Its called argument by analogy, I was drawing parallels between perception of God and perception of Korean sounds
You are still misunderstanding the argument for some reason, maybe another atheist on here can clear it up. The issue is the mere non-perception of some people is not an arguement against the perception of a great number of people. My non perception of certain Korean sounds is not an argument against their existence any more than your non perception of the feeling of God is convincing argument of the non existance of that perception.
what the English speaker in Korea arguement demonstrates is that the fact that many people say they percieve something (like korean sounds) is an arguement for the existance of something, and that the mere fact that some people cannot perceive it is not argument against its existence. Just like many peoples experience of God is convincing argument of the reality of that perception and the mere non perception of God by some is not a convincing arguement against that perception.
you misunderstand my argument, I was making a point about base logic
the argument is not that my diety is the correct one - the argument is that the mere fact that many religions have miracles is not an argument that tends to show that any one religion is false. It is an arguement that shows that several religions likely have elements of truth
for example, in weight lifting, some people believe in reps till exhaustion, some people believe in sets, some people believe in high rep low weight
now the fact that all these methods seem to build muscles for people who try them is not an argument against any of these methods, it just shows that all these methods have some truth to them
same goes for multiple religions displaying miracles
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 17:35:22 8a4c6d No. 1649
>>1648 How can you have faith in something when you have no faith it exists?
No, belief isn't a choice. You don't choose not to believe in Santa, right? A man named St. Nick did exist, there is history of his account and there have been people claiming they saw him.
You'll never prove a god by claiming a statue cries. Go learn more about other people's gods before you come here and spam the board with the same repetitive arguments all centering around a "crying" statue.
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 17:52:00 329a43 No. 1650
>>1649 >How can you have faith in something when you have no faith it exists? that was pointing out a linguistic nuiance when religious people talk about faith in God, we mean faith that God will protect us, love us etc.
not necessary belief in God. Belief in God doesn`t require faith, it requires only a rational examination of the evidence.
Belief isnt a choice by whether we choose to examine the evidence is.
So lets look at cretationists. They dont believe in evolution because they believe in biblical literlism. So when things like fossil evidence and Mendelian genetics and other similar evidence turns up, they will choose to discount it, ignore it or explain it away without giving it any meaningful analysis. I think Atheists are similar, except at the opposite end of the spectrum, they choose to believe in a goodless universe, and like creationists, they will dismiss or explain away any evidence of God without any meaningful examination.
So as we can see with both atheists and creationists, there is an element of choice being exercised as to to what they will believe, in the form of choice as to what evidence they will take seriously
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 18:23:00 8c601d No. 1653
>>1650 > Belief in God doesn`t require faith, it requires only a rational examination of the evidence. Um….no. You have not provided any evidence, you only think you have. There is also no evidence otherwise my philosophy teacher wouldn't have been agnostic. Were there overwhelming evidence we would be the ones forced to rely on the "faith" card to profess our disbelief in a God. Instead have the tools to tear apart the bible piece by piece, using scientific discoveries, internal inconsistencies, historical evidence, cross-studies, and so forth. If there once was a God, he was one that left us considerable tools and evidence to doubt him.
The only reason you believe in God is because you've assumed it's true and then let everything else fit in place around that. This is the meaning of coming to God on faith alone. You're supposed to shut off your brain and accept one principle and everything can fit. I can tell you that you can turn on your brain and accept the opposite principal and everything will fit better, without the inconsistancies you had to wrestle with such as "why does an all-powerful god allow so much evil?" Or "why did a fair God never show himself to the american indians, condemning them to hell for 1400 years?"
Many of us are ex-christians and aren't arguing from a position of ignorance you know.
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 18:47:22 329a43 No. 1654
>>1653 >>1653 >>1653 look at your words and compare them to the words of creatisits and what they say about evolution - it really is like a mirror, they claim to be able to tear evolution up, they claim darwinianism is a matter of faith
in the same way they stand before fossils and laugh without any examination, and say it's not proof and that evolution hasn't been proven
you too stand before a weeping staute, a zig zaging sun, and milk drinking idols and laugh and dismiss without any examination
you are really no different
you might not like what you see in the mirror anon, it might be that you have began to mirror the very thing you hate most
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 19:02:08 8a4c6d No. 1655
>>1650 Which doesn't answer the question, how can you have faith that something that you think doesn't exist will protect you?
You have to be troll, surely. You come and say this while your only evidence being a "crying" statue.
Go measure all the evidence for other people's gods, I'm sure you have time and willingness to give their gods or beliefs a chance. To expect other people to give your god a chance and you not others' is a bit conceited.
I could turn the tables and say you're choosing not to believe us.
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 19:04:49 329a43 No. 1656
>>1655 >Which doesn't answer the question, how can you have faith that something that you think doesn't exist will protect you? you can't
I'm just drawing a distinction btween faith in God and belief in his existance
faith in God requires a leap of faith, belief that the diety has your back requires faith.
Belief in a diety doesn't
you have to read the thread before making statements like that
see weight lifting example here
>>1648 the fact that many religions have miracles doesn't make that less likely to be true, it makes it more likely that many religions have elements of truth, after all one of my examples in this thread has been the Hindu milk miracle
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 19:13:54 8a4c6d No. 1657
>>1656 I've read all your posts and I'm not convinced. You haven't proved there's any gods and you haven't convinced me on why I should believe in crying statues or gods. Believing in gods is irrelevant to my life. I'm happy and successful enough without theistic beliefs.
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 19:18:41 329a43 No. 1659
I keep wanting to post this quote in this thread but haven't had a chance yet so I'll say it here
millions of people have had spiritual experiences, and millions more have had glimmers of them. These experiences are the most important and trans formative experiences of their lives. If we as atheists ignore these experiences as delusions or shams, we appear less wise than even our most crazy religious opponents I don't know if the universe is stranger than we suppose, or stranger than we can suppose, but I know that it's stranger than we as atheists tend to represent it as We give the impression that we are well on the way to purging the world of mystery. In fact there is good reason to believe that mystery may be ineradicable >>1657 the issue is not whether I have convinced you or whether you have an individual benefit in believing
The issue is, is there rational reason to believe and are atheists choosing to ignore evidence when they don't believe
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 19:20:20 329a43 No. 1661
>>1659 the quote is from Sam Harris in his speech at an atheist convention
around the 35 minute mark here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODz7kRS2XPs
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 19:29:13 8a4c6d No. 1662
>>1659 You think people are choosing to ignore your beliefs? Millions of other people can say that you're choosing to ignore their beliefs? You come to a board where people are perfectly fine with holding no belief in gods and say people are "choosing to ignore" your god or beliefs.
Go. Go into the great wild internet and find other beliefs and try to understand those before you claim people are ignoring yours.
In the antenna world, you'd be classified as having all mouth, no ears. Most of us are well versed in religions and aware of the many gods people believe. No one said you don't believe it but many have said they don't believe your evidence. I've read your replies, watched your videos and so on. No matter how many times you spam the same thing over and over, it won't do any good unless you provide something new.
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 19:33:32 329a43 No. 1663
>>1662 just a slight correction, my allegation is not that you are choosing to ignore my beliefs
my suggesting is that you are choosing to ignore evidence in favor of the beleif in god which 6 billion of my fellow humans share with me, and I have in this thread produced photograph and media evidence of three pieces of evidence that are attested to as well as any other even in ordinary history - as well attested to as the giant winning the world series and I am accusing you and other atheists of ignoring or discoutning these and other similar picies of evidence, along with the perception and experiences of 6 billion of my religious peers simply on the grounds that it doesn't fit in without you world view
in short I am accusing you of being irrational in your disbelief
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 19:42:21 8c601d No. 1664
>>1663 Get…this…through…your…thick…head. What you have provided is not evidence, and will never be evidence. No one here will ever believe something so silly could be evidence.
However, if you're this stubborn about wasting everyone's time, at least gives a few giggles and provide a lot more "evidence." But I suspect you're going to keep repeating the same inadmissable crap about one statue on this thread. Hence I proclaim this thread dead. No need for the wise to read further folks.
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 19:44:35 8a4c6d No. 1665
>>1663 To hold no belief is not irrational. The jist of your argument is:
>appeal to emotion (very few people believe in gods because they have to, they usually do it because it's emotionally fulfilling to think of something "greater" that's in charge). I have no emotional reason to believe or disbelieve in your god. >can't be explained, therefore god like many things that weren't explained before but now have explanation. Unless you have something more to add, I'm pretty sure you've convinced exactly 0 people of your god.
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 19:46:50 329a43 No. 1666
>>1664 well I do have other evidence, incorruptible, non rotting bodies, that you can go see if you like, I can produce a list of churches
but that's not the issue here
the issue is that the claim I'm getting is "this is not evidence," "this doesn't count as evidence" etc. etc.
and never a reason why
>>1665 that's a bit of a recycled argument you are making, the point is if something happens in religious contexts, and strictly in religious contexts and continually in religious contexts, it's a good bet that it is religious
It doesn't matter if I've convinced anyone, the I've brought forth evidence so the onus is on this board, the atheist community to give
reasons not feelings, or emotions but
reasons as to why this evidence should not be considered
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 19:48:17 8a4c6d No. 1667
>>1666 Nice trips, Satan.
www.scientificamerican.com/article/serratia-marcescens-bacteria-holy-statues-bleed/
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 19:51:27 329a43 No. 1668
>>1667 a little better, but not much, because if you read earlier in the thread they did a forensic test on the emissions from Akita and it was human blood sweat and tears with blood types, so it definitely wasn't bacteria
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 19:52:01 8a4c6d No. 1669
>>1666 You're asking us to disprove something for which we have no scientific equipment to disprove. No, it doesn't work that way. If I have a statue that does something neat in relation to my god, I can't tell you my god's real and that you have to disprove it when you have no means to access or analyze the statue.
I'm sure if any secularists knew how euphoric it would make christians in the future and just how much they'd rely on it, they'd probably do a better job of analyzing it.
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 19:55:49 8a4c6d No. 1670
>>1668 Ok, let's say it was human meaning from humans. Point? That means it couldn't possibly be a hoax from humans, right?
That means it's real because normally statues cry statue tears. derp.
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 19:55:50 329a43 No. 1671
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>>1669 those were good trips if I say so myself
you are right if all I brought you was that one staute, it could be dismissed
but I did bring you more
I brought you the crying staute, the zigzaging and flying sun, the Hindu milk miracle, all of which happened in the modern day and are attested to
I could provide more examples, but I don't think that's really the issue here,
there is enough here that should make any reasonable person stop and go - wait, something's going on here, something that points to God
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 19:57:40 329a43 No. 1672
>>1670 well we talked about that in this thread too - we talked about how fake statues require prous materials like ceramic or plaster whereas this statue was made from wood ruling that out - we actually had a great discussion above about wooden cups and the porousness of wood
we talked about how the staute cried for 6 years making it hard to fake for that duration.
It's not enough to assert another possibility, you have to show the possibility is reasonable
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 19:59:58 8a4c6d No. 1673
>>1671 >sun (that can be a secular event) >Hindu "miracle"(Explained by most as capillary action. Hey look my sponge soaks up milk, it's a "miracle"!) No.
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 20:02:26 f192a6 No. 1674
File: 1422475265136.jpg (287.77 KB, 850x777, 850:777, sample-c0b5c96957495b1e216….jpg )
I am amazed that the OP is still clinging to argumentum ad populum despite having it pointed out to him many times ITT.
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 20:04:09 8a4c6d No. 1675
> fake statues require prous materials like ceramic or plaster whereas this statue was made from wood ruling that out
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 20:08:05 329a43 No. 1676
>>1673 this is getting a bit frustrating because these are all rehashes of arguments that were dealt with earlier
that's vague as . . . should I use the word hell?
It wasn't because the virgin mary came to a group of kids in a vision and told them the sun would do this on that date, and that this sun miracle was to be proof of the authenticity of a written prophecy she gave them in 1917 which predicted the second world war as well as the rise and fall of the soviet union
so without that religious context, your arguement is valid, with the context, it falls apart
not possible because when it happened people all rushed to the temples and started feeding the stautes milk and they drank milk many times their body wieght. Also the event happened the world over for a set time and stopped abrubtly after three days. I know this not because I am a Hindu (I'm not) but because I followed this story in the papers.
http://hinduism.about.com/od/history/a/Ganesha-Milk-Miracle.htm >>1674 I have already dealt with the argumentum ad populum issue here with the Korean language example, this thread could get quite boring if I have to go over the same arguments over and over again
remember the reliance is not on common belief but common perception which takes it outside of the scope of appeal to popularity bandwagon type things
>>1643 >>1648
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 20:10:44 329a43 No. 1677
>>1675 plaster and ceramic would let water flow through, wood would not, this is why when atheist scientists replicated the crying Mary experiment they used plaster and ceramic but not wood
sage sage 01/28/15 (Wed) 20:15:20 8a4c6d No. 1678
sage
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 20:19:06 329a43 No. 1679
>>1678 shall I take the angry ad hominims as a sign of weakness and declare victory now, or shall I wait
I am not here to give you proof, I am here to point out that you are willfully ignoring or dismissing the great amount of proof that exists
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 20:24:09 f192a6 No. 1680
>>1676 You mean "sidestepped." Korean is not that fucking difficult to get a grasp on. You just suck at picking up on sounds which are unfamiliar to you.
You're not the only one who's had experience with foreign languages, buddy. My Korean instructors were baffled by my ability to master spelling and pronunciation as quickly as I did, yet fail to retain the meaning of the words and phrases I had been attempting to learn.
It's not some mystical magical shit that's on a wavelength you can't pick up. You just suck and you didn't bother to try. Phonetics is easy as shit. This is the core of your problem; you're not an analytical person. A bunch of people make a claim, and instead of investigating it, you go "oh well I guess they must be right since there's so many of them, I guess I'm just the dummy here!" You walk away thinking more of this experience than it really was, because you can't be bothered to pry into it until you do understand it.
When you use an analogy, it has to actually facilitate understanding, not be a pointless digression or a demonstration of your intellectual laziness.
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 20:25:36 e0d387 No. 1681
>>1508 You know I think it would be fun to be a Christian troll. I could go to /religon/ /atheist/ and be immune to any argument. People could write pages to me and I'd refute them with, "But you don't understand my EVIDENCE! My evidence is the surging love I feel in my penis…er heart! That confirms everything! And look, I saw a Tellytubbies show where the sun came out on a rainy day and boy golly that's proof miracles exist! Why can't you guys see what I see? Why can't you be as smart as me, lol?"
I'm tempted to pretend to be a Christian and troll everyone here but I outgrew that phase. Besides, I couldn't bother to keep doing it nearly as long as areal believer, since I hate Christian hypocrites.
sage 01/28/15 (Wed) 20:32:32 8a4c6d No. 1682
>>1679 You think belief in gods are a victory or non-victory. There's one of your problems. It seems more about egos than helping others. Go vomit your euphoria at /christian/.
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 20:34:18 329a43 No. 1683
>>1681 I believe a part of my calling is specifically for you atheists,
notice I didn't use any bible verses or arguments about love or anything like that, every single argument was logical and based on modern verifiable facts
also it was much more respectful than the atheists on the Christian board, notice I engaged with everyones arguments on a serious level, I dint downplay or dismiss any arguments
In short, I am playing by your rules here not mine
>>1680 you seemed to missed the arguement, korean sounds existed whether I percieved them or not, my non perception is not an argument against the perception of you or Korean people
the fact that my friends and I were slow learners and you were better doesnt mean you are faking it, it means that these sounds are harder for me and my English friends, we had a hard time with them
whereas the fact that you and many korans can hear and differentiate between these sounds shows that they do in fact exist, despite my non perception
We can draw an analogy beween this and religion can we not
if the fact that Korean peoples claim to perceive these sounds is a good argument that they do in fact exist, then the fact that 6 billion people percieve God is a good arguement that this perception is true
and if my and English speakers non-perception of these sounds is not good argument for their non existence, then your non perception of God is not a good argument against the existence of God
thats the argument from perception
>>1682 nah I mean victory as in you got nothing left except to sling mud
sage 01/28/15 (Wed) 20:40:36 8a4c6d No. 1684
>>1683 We "won" this argument. You're the one stuck with a god and biblical rules you have to follow. We're the free ones. You're the tool that falls for false icons. Read above. If you think using ad hominem means you lost, you lost plenty.
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 20:55:06 f192a6 No. 1685
>>1683 The critical difference is verifiability. Audio is verifiable. Korean people don't simply claim to be able to produce and perceive sounds that you aren't able to distinguish - they are constantly demonstrating it, and if you ask them, they will slow down and dissect it for you until you understand. You seem to be content to merely assume that they must have some magical power that you don't have, and that's all there is to it. This is what I mean when I say that you are non-analytical. I didn't pick up on some of the sounds which don't have English equivalents at first, either. So instead of throwing my hands up and going "oh well" I went out of my way to look up tons of audio and explanations. I watched Korean movies and television, read instructional books, and questioned my teachers, and I practiced until I got it. You chalked it up to Koreans simply being having magical perception powers that you lacked.
There is no such thing as the perception argument. You made it up to excuse yourself from the chore of figuring out shit that you don't understand. Perception does not dictate reality - reality does.
Meanwhile you still cannot get around the highly plausible possibility that many of those whom you count among the faithful are faking it in order to achieve better status or access to more resources in a theist-friendly world, or to avoid the very seriously negative consequences of being an open atheist in a world which is very hostile to nonbelief.
In fact, what this whole analogy really is is just the tale of the Emperor who wore no clothes. His tailor told him that he had fashioned for him a set of robes that would be completely invisible to anyone who was unworthy of his station. So who was willing to say that the emperor was actually stark naked? Nobody who wanted to keep their station in his empire. What you are doing is presuming that everyone who says the emperor is wearing fine clothes must be right because they are apparently perceiving something you can't, but in the end, it is still argumentum ad populum, because you are not saying that this would be the case if only one person claimed they could see the clothes. You are refusing to be the person who considers the highly probably possibility that none of them can see the emperor's clothes, and are simply saying that they can, because they are under intense pressure on an individual level to do so.
And where would you even go with this "perception" argument. How many people exactly need to profess a belief in something for it to be true? And what if a large number of people make a claim which directly contradicts the claim of another large number of people? Are we sinking into the same problem as Pascal's wager, where the obvious fallacy is that it is not a binary? We are not talking about belief versus nonbelief here. There are many beliefs with contradicting truth claims. Do you think the Hindus must be right because there are so many of them claiming similar things and thus they must be seeing something you cannot? Do you think Muslims are right about Mohammed flying off into the sky on a winged horse because there are so many Muslims in the world? Which of their claims get to be true based on simply being stated by many of them? What will you do when their claims contradict the claims of Christianity? What of the various sects of Christianity which contradict and refute each other? Is everyone right because everyone perceives what they perceive?
Utter nonsense.
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 20:57:45 329a43 No. 1686
>>1685 >>1685 but its not verifiable to me and most other English speakers because we simply cant hear those differences in sound - it is only verifiable to those who learn Korean or are Korean
you could argue that computer technology changes that but then you'd end up with the rather absurd conclusion that Korean sounds were not verifiable and unscientific prior to the invention of audio equipment and suddenly became verifiable and scientific after
sage 01/28/15 (Wed) 21:05:41 8a4c6d No. 1687
>>1686 >asks to verify what isn't known to others In this case, you aren't teaching anyone Korean, you're teaching something that can't be verified. Oh, but it can? If it can be verified, there is no reason to have faith.
sage 01/28/15 (Wed) 21:12:04 8a4c6d No. 1688
>>1686 Also, when you posit something, the burden of proof is on you. But one thing you're forgetting is, and I'll stress…
When you posit something, you have to not only be burdened by proving it but proving to other people why it has relevance. You can tell people of all kinds of things that they don't believe exists or know of but if that "proof" takes too much time out of their life, you should give them a reason why they should investigate your proofs.
What will we get out of you getting us to believe? And if you assume we should sit here and read your walls of text and your links elsewhere, you should assume others will ask of you to also believe in their gods. They may ask because it may be just as fulfilling to them as you believing in your god.
To think you have something of importance to take up everyone's time here, there should very well be something in it for us if you ask us to believe. What do we have to gain by believing in gods?
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 21:15:19 f192a6 No. 1689
>>1686 >it is only verifiable to those who learn Korean or are Korean People who learned Korean were formerly in the category of people who did not know Korean. They can be taught its phonetics. That is the verifiability. You're not unable to learn this. You just gave up.
This is not an analogy to Yahweh. Yahweh is an unverifiable claim which sits next to all the other ones, including claims about Zeus, Odin, and Quetzalcoatl. If Yahweh deserves special consideration, then so do all of the others. You don't believe in any of them for the same reasons that I don't believe that Yahweh is anything other than the invention of a bronze-age Palestinian tribe.
This is nothing like the phonetics of a foreign language. You are reaching for a connection which simply isn't there.
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 21:21:01 329a43 No. 1690
>>1689 >>1687 well my position and the position of most religious people is that verification is available in the same way that korean verbs are
if you learn Korean and put effort into it, you can get Korean just fine
similar if you learn about religion and try praying, you will be able to percieve God as well
It might take longer for some, some might be weaker, but it is available in the same way that Korean is.
For example I struggled with Koran consonats but with great effort I was able to hear them. Similarly I struggled with religion and search for God, and I was able to perceive it.
The two are very similar in terms of verifiability - both are open to anyone who makes an effort to learn and perceive
and I think a convincing arguement for that can be made in terms of religious people and their efforms to experience God and the divine
It seems given the similarities it is inconsistent to believe in Korean consonants but not in God
>>1688 I believe I can prove the superiority of my religious belief, but I want to keep things simple to keep from getting sidetracked and unrolling too many balls of string in one thread
the important thing for now is I do sincerely believe that you can reach and experience God through a variety of religious traditions so I would like to stick to arguing that more limited position - merely that God exists and through religion, any religion, you can experience him, which is true
sage 01/28/15 (Wed) 21:31:51 8a4c6d No. 1691
>>1690 No, no beliefs are superior to others. Your euphoria is showing.
In other words, you can't talk about anything else because you spew the same "crying statue" crap over and over and that's all you know.
Anonymous 01/28/15 (Wed) 21:33:22 9f3857 No. 1692
>>1691 Why are you putting sage in the name field?
sage 01/28/15 (Wed) 21:37:50 8a4c6d No. 1693
>>1692 Because I'm a believer in sage.
smoek saeg evrday:) E-mail field nublet. 01/29/15 (Thu) 14:11:51 38901d No. 1735
>>1693 That's not how you do sage.
Anonymous 01/29/15 (Thu) 19:42:41 2ff105 No. 1747
OP, detail right now how you perceive your god, what you feel when you are connected to him
Anonymous 01/29/15 (Thu) 20:17:31 8aa20c No. 1749
>>1690 Holy shit you suck at analogies. There is no similarity because korean consonants are a concept not an entity. You can't believe or not believe in them.
Anonymous 01/29/15 (Thu) 20:26:18 8aa20c No. 1750
>>1686 They were verifiable ever since they existed. Simple test that would verify that the consonants were actually comunicated between two koreans would be asking one of them to tell another a piece of information provided by a tester, and then the tester would ask the other korean for the information. That analogy is flawed.
Anonymous 01/30/15 (Fri) 03:35:43 329a43 No. 1757
>>1749 korean consonants are a sound, sounds are things not concepts, some people can hear and distinguish these sounds others can't
>>1747 feeling of presence, I've already dealt with the issue by pointing to the Islam thread where people described their feelings
http://8ch.net/islam/res/2185.html basically people are saying they feel something and your position is "no they aren't" that's a pretty weak position considering there are about 6 billion people who do feel this.
>>1750 you can devise the same simple test for religion, two people pray can have similar feelings as to the presence
a muslim and a christian feels god's presence in the same way (peace +joy + contentment)
Anonymous 01/30/15 (Fri) 04:20:05 329a43 No. 1758
>>1750 >>1757 your arguement is interesting so I want to expand on it a bit further, korean has sounds like s vs ss and k/g vs/ g and d/t vs d. because these sounds appear in full fledged words it's not always possible to tell if they hear the sounds by just watching them communicate, they might just easily be picking up the meaning by listening to the full word and the context, so really it's not fully verifiable in this way - when you add things like accents and mispronunciation, things become extremely complex and not quite so easy to test in the way you suggest,
so the verifiablity level might actually be closer to religion, where the only way to really be sure is to learn the language and train yourself the hear the sounds yourself
Anonymous 01/30/15 (Fri) 15:44:41 a8fcda No. 1761
>>1690 >well my position and the position of most religious people You keep saying that you do not use argumentum ad populum but then you just keep going back to it. That's fine, but if you're going to do this, then you absolutely must address my point about Christianity butchering the fuck out of nonbelievers during its medieval rise to power. You have been completely silent on this issue and I have allowed you to digress into your silly Korean language analogies, but you are in an argumentative deficit from having completely ignored my point, and it's time to collect on the debt. It's time for you to explain to me how having numbers on your side isn't completely discredited by Christianity's barbaric past of violent suppression and coercion. Stop ignoring the point.
This whole analogy is absurd. You yourself detailed how modern technology can be used to detect sounds which are difficult for the human ear to perceive, but desperately tried to handwave it away as suggesting that sounds don't exist until we develop technology to detect them.
This is an enormous flaw in your reasoning and failing to overcome it is a large part of why you are still a theist. You literally think that things don't exist until we devise a means to perceive them, and you confuse personal delusion for perception.
You are also confusing the slurring of language for the imperceptibility of sounds within that language. English and Korean are both category five languages - the most difficult for people to learn as a second language - and a large part of that is thanks to the many exceptions and instances in which native speakers simply omit letters which you would expect to hear if you were simply reading the words off of a paper without knowing about those exceptions. Just like there's no phonetic difference between "your" and "you're," or "their," "there," and "they're," fluent speakers can use context and experience to quickly discern meaning even when words are phonetically indistinguishable from each other.
Your analogy sucks, but it seems decent enough to you because you are conflating "intangible" with "nonexistent," in the same way that Stefan Molyneux does when he describes Government. Yahweh is nonexistent. Language is intangible. Learn the difference; it could save you from being roped into one of the world's most popular cults.
Anonymous 01/30/15 (Fri) 16:38:26 d84958 No. 1766
>>1758 >>1757 You don't think nonbelievers feel "something" that tells them it's false? Just because that "something" isn't replaced with another doesn't believe that feeling of "something", perhaps spirituality, is invalid.
You the same old ad populum argument. Just because more people feel one thing than another doesn't mean it's true. If that's the case, Sanatana Dharma or perhaps Shamanism, some of the oldest and also most popular religions at some point you could claim as true using your point. But no, that's not good enough so you claim their god is the same as yours so you can say yours is the most popular. At least in the case of Hinduism and you'll probably claim the Shamanist god too.
If more people out-vote you, does that make them more correct? I don't think you would argue so readily if that fallacy didn't work in your favor.
Anonymous 01/30/15 (Fri) 16:44:55 329a43 No. 1767
>>1766 well you don't you admitted that right, you guys admitted you don't feel anything
let's keep those old "there are many intereptations of God and many religions therefore all of them are wrong" to this thread . . . just as a matter of organization. I mean it would suck to have to keep refuting the same bland arguments over and over
http://8ch.net/atheism/res/1728.html >>1761 well if you want to take the position that Korean was completely unverifiable nonsense prior to 1950s and started being verifiable after the invention of modern technology, that's your business, but you're going to get laughed at
no that's what you are saying, Im saying the opposite - see point above - Korean consonants, like perceptions of God, exist whether or not everyone can perceive them and exist whether or not we have the technology to perceive them. We can rely on the consensus of Korean percivers just as we can rely on the consensus of the religious percievers.
well the argument here is whether God exists, not whether Christians are nice people.
Anonymous 01/30/15 (Fri) 16:58:50 d84958 No. 1770
>>1767 Apparently most of us don't feel what you feel. Just because it's so doesn't mean it's "nothing". It's still "something" that they view as worth standing up for.
Leave religion out of this. Some religions don't believe in gods. Also by saying "god" is a disservice to the other religions, the polytheistic ones. And no, not all religions believe in the same "god" you do. You're going to have to learn more about theology before you can have a successful debate here.
It's been a while since I've encountered someone so dense and so stubborn not to learn about anyone else's lives. Go do yourself a service and read about polytheism and other aspects of theology before you shit up the board with ad populum arguments.
Anonymous 01/30/15 (Fri) 17:34:11 d0bc70 No. 1772
>>1767 >you guys So those miracles and feelings…? Do you have a moment to talk about pic related?
If it is about their god, then he's pretty bad at leading. If not necessarily, there could be another one, sure. There could be someone that could do anything but keeps choosing not to.
Anonymous 01/30/15 (Fri) 20:10:52 775d2b No. 1779
>>1757 >you can devise the same simple test for religion, two people pray can have similar feelings as to the presence I have no doubt in their feeling of presence of god, I jume.
>>1758 Can they pronounce them on their own or inside of an arbitrary vowel? If so the test could be devised.
But even if I "felt the presence of god" it would still be no proof of his existence to me. Senses If two religious people are imperfect and they can fool me.
The korean's ability to communicate using hard to hear sounds is the proof of their existence. If you show me a christian who told god something in prayer and ask him to tell that to another christian then a similar test could be done and that would be some solid evidence for a god.
Anonymous 01/30/15 (Fri) 20:13:09 775d2b No. 1780
>>1779 Wow I fucked it up pretty bad.
please ignore the "me<newline>
<newline>
>>1758"
Anonymous 01/31/15 (Sat) 02:59:11 329a43 No. 1784
>>1770 look to avoid getting into this hooky new age "but not all religions worship god" crap, we're going to go by the standard dictionary definition of religion. . . and everything else. Dictionary definition or nothing because otherwise the whole conversation becomes arguing definitions
>>1772 look I knew this would likely come up, and I'm going to have to be honest with you, I cannot prove that christianity is the true religion. I can argue that Jesus' teachings were very good . . . but of course that's not objective. All I can do is convincingly show that there are rational reasons to believe in God. Unfortunately I cannot logically prove that Christianity is the true religion.
we're just going to go by broad definition of god - (superhuman being or beings having power over people and nature according to the dictionary)
>>1779 not really we're talking consonants not verbs, so they could be telling based on context the same way we can tell the difference between there and their despite no sound differences.
also this is consonats we're tlaking about, so it's be like if the letter 'i' and 'e' sounded exactly the same in english - it'd be hard, but wi'd managi, languagi wouldn't fall apart.
Anonymous 01/31/15 (Sat) 03:02:32 329a43 No. 1785
>>1784 sorry
should be
Anonymous 01/31/15 (Sat) 05:02:13 8c601d No. 1792
>>1784 >>1784 Then you should have argued for those moral reasons from the beginning instead of wasting eveyone's time with this statue crap. (I'm assuming you're the OP.)
Anonymous 01/31/15 (Sat) 05:02:33 8c601d No. 1794
>>1784 Then you should have argued for those moral reasons from the beginning instead of wasting eveyone's time with this statue crap. (I'm assuming you're the OP.)
Anonymous 01/31/15 (Sat) 05:05:11 329a43 No. 1795
>>1792 >>1792 moral reasons what? what are you talking about?
the thread from the beginning was always proving the existance of God - not about morals or proving christianity
anyways, this thread is getting boring,
what say I stop responding for now, I'll come up with another argument for next week and we can debate that one.
Anonymous 01/31/15 (Sat) 05:45:34 e2eff9 No. 1802
>>1795 Yes, you failed. Try again next week to convince us of your true and perfect religion.
>>1784 That's not nice. The Egyptions or Greeks would call your definition "hooky new age crap". The definition was originally applied for gods, not your "one true god".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion
Anonymous 01/31/15 (Sat) 05:47:35 8c601d No. 1803
>>1784 >>1795 Pick one argument and stick with it until you lose.
Anonymous 01/31/15 (Sat) 05:53:53 329a43 No. 1804
>>1803 >>1803 well if you want to find the part in my OP that references proving the christianity rather than just God . . .
the post made references to God, not Christianity, numerous miracles (although examples were christian the arguement referenced miracles in general)
and the intuition refereed to intuition felt by 95 to 85 % of the world - clearly referring to religious people in general not just Christians
I phrased myself pretty clearly, I can't be blamed for how some people choose to interpret things
Anonymous 01/31/15 (Sat) 05:58:24 329a43 No. 1805
File: 1422683904850.jpg (24.32 KB, 726x241, 726:241, ScreenHunter_71 Jan. 30 21….jpg )
>>1802 >>1802 fine - but my argument applies to god or gods, a christian, Hindu or Greek would be able to use it equally effectively to prove their deity
the point was to prove a deity not prove Christianity
by hooky new age I was referring to those "I am spiritual and religious but don't believe in God" types
Anonymous 01/31/15 (Sat) 06:09:59 e2eff9 No. 1806
>>1805 Can't you just accept people are spiritual? Even a lot of us atheists can accept this. It's a pretty benign feeling that doesn't have to be occupied with ideas of gods and morals. For a lot of us, with or without religion, we still act as our natural selves. I know I didn't change my natural self when I was a christian, it was mostly in a superficial way.
When that spiritual part of ourselves gets filled with junk, pardon my indignation, things that tell it or point it to what it has to do or should do, it doesn't seem to come from the heart. I think 90% of us, roughly have this feeling you have but you're trying to fill this spirituality in others with way too much verbal force and you lose that part of your spirituality, it creates anger in the end and on others.
I'm an atheist but sort of align with Wu Wei Taoism. The force at which you debate nullifies the good you intend. I also feel this oneness with the universe and others at times, you could almost call me religion in a way. But I don't believe in gods. What does a god bring you that you don't already have?
Anonymous 01/31/15 (Sat) 06:17:41 e2eff9 No. 1807
>>1806 *call me religious in a way*
I really wish chans had better editing options. But I think morality comes within. It's not something that necessarily has to come from word of mouth from a god. I feel a oneness, a kinship, with all and that primal spirituality I feel tells me that whatever way we got here shouldn't be spent wasting it away with thanks. And a lot of the time, in my experience, what I do in heart is often the best decision rather than doing what someone tells me to do, not something you have to force yourself to do. I guess this is where I align with Taoism a bit, that what comes from the natural heart is generally what's good.
Anonymous 01/31/15 (Sat) 06:30:05 329a43 No. 1809
>>1806 >>1807 I'm not going to argue these weird points, Taoism, apart from what westerners would like to interpret as in their own version, does have deities - it's like the westerners who adopt buddhism while rejecting the gods, cosmology and everything else that makes it buddhist
either way all I'm saying is stick to the dictionary definition of religion, which is belief in some kind of higher being
Anonymous 01/31/15 (Sat) 07:09:07 e2eff9 No. 1813
>>1809 I never said I was Taoist.
If you're the OP from the statue thread, you were using the "it's weird, therefore not true" sarcastically in reaction to remarks like you just made.
Nice way of mocking people again in the name of your "religion of peace".
This definition of worshipping a being, this idol worship, you seem to think is all religion is. Religion =/= gods. Maybe to you, not everyone. I just pointed to the wikipedia article that thoroughly states my case.
Anonymous 01/31/15 (Sat) 07:59:00 592615 No. 1816
>>1784 I'm aware that all language have partial redundancies but if these sounds are essential to understanding a language then the speaker must be able to distinguish when they appear and when they do not. If they were 100% redundant then you wouldn't need to learn them to learn korean. Your teacher would never correct you because he would always hear them from context. Context can be removed for the purpose of the test. You're the only one here who seems to know korean so I would like you to answer the questions: Can they be pronounced on their own? Can they be pronounced between two arbitrary vowels or syllables like "ba[insert any tricky consonant here]ka"?
Anonymous 01/31/15 (Sat) 08:23:13 592615 No. 1817
>>1804 I see, atheists "flee upon losing" and christians "get bored".
>>1784 >All I can do is convincingly show that there are rational reasons to believe in God Then you must remember that the burden of proof is on you. When we suggest a hoax as a possible explanation for miracles you keep demanding a complete instruction manual on how to perform that hoax. The thing is we don't have to do that, you are the one who must prove that the cause of the "miracle" was supernatural without doubt if you want to prove your point. Just beause I'm unable to come up with an idea about how to orchestrate a hoax doesn't prove that it hasn't been done. It's the same kind of fallacy as with the Stonehenge; people assumed that It must have been ancient aliens just because no one today is able to do something like that (except this one guy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYQBDhkBfr0 ). Just becuase no one knew how doesn't mean it didn't happen. The burden of proof is on the one suggesting supernatural events.
Anonymous 01/31/15 (Sat) 16:03:48 329a43 No. 1820
>>1817 >>1817 that's ridiculous, that's like demandin proof for evolution and then yelling hoax at every fossil that comes along, you don't have to prove that every tiny piece of evidence is not a hoax
you atheists really are terrible at the evidence thing
>>1816 >>1816 consonants are always pronunced with vowels attached
see video here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdiR-6e1h0o if you noticed the bah and pah will sound exactly the same to you
same with jah and cha
kah gah
dah and tah
I don't know if Koreans sit down and try and distinguish on vowels alone or whether they can - but really we are pushing the scope of the analogy here - all that really matters here is that in ordinary cirumstances no one demands this level of evidence to prove that Korean sounds exists, we take their word for it because 40 million people with no reason to lie and no evdience that they are deluded
Anonymous 01/31/15 (Sat) 17:20:11 e2eff9 No. 1823
>>1820 tldr;
Some newfriend from the /christian/ hugbox thinks he could come here and convert us. Finds out just why atheism is just as logical as any belief or non-belief and that atheists aren't satan from the christian bible trying to test people.
I can see you're wearing down now. Your demeanor started out ok but I noticed you're starting to get a bit sour as your "evidence" in mind weakens and you're shown that there's other ways to approach and satisfy the spiritual side. That the christian god isn't the only valid god and that there's other religions and non-religions that can be just as valid as your own.
Congratulations, you're on your way to becoming enlightened. Here is your complimentary fedora.
Anonymous 01/31/15 (Sat) 18:06:37 592615 No. 1826
>>1820 >no one demands this level of evidence to prove that Korean sounds exists Becuase the idea of sounds that are hard to hear isn't nearly as extraordinary as that of god.
And it would be easy to determine wether koreans can distinguish their consonants. just tell on in secret to tell another "gah kah kah gah gah kah" or another random sequence and ask the other to write them down. Then if the consonants were really different and both speakers can distinguish them the second guy will have written the same sequence. Analogously for other consonants.
Thus the korean consonats analogy is flawed. There are two reasons I would not be as suspicious about them as in the case of god. One: It's not as much of an extraordinary, illogical and vaguely defined concept and two: koreans do use their various consonants to comunicate and are able to notice if someone is pronouncing the right one or not.
Anonymous 01/31/15 (Sat) 18:17:26 d10111 No. 1827
>>1820 You are suffering from Christian Apologia Syndrome: a problem whereby you churn up some hair-brained argument entirely within the echo chamber of your own religious community, and then try to wield it against an atheist community only to have it ripped to shreds or immediately identified as fallacious. Having prepared poorly, you lack additional ammunition, so you cling desperately to your failed argument, rather than trying to move on and attempt a better one.
This refusal to ingest new information and corrections from sources external to the in-group is typical of religion. You argue as though you have never once researched your opponent's positions or arguments before attempting to join the debate. That is lazy and very poor form, and it inevitably leads to an embarrassing situation for you, whereby you can only respond by making empty declarations of victory and running back to your old hugbox.
You were offered multiple opportunities to explain the barbaric butchery of medieval Christianity and how much of a factor that played in the popularity of the religion among the childhood-indoctrinated descendents of those who survived it, and you completely ignored the point. You cannot ignore this point while continuing to wield argument ad populum. It will not work if the "popularity" of Christianity can be shown to be the result of violent coercion. You cannot skirt around this and pretend like it never happened. Violent coercion is the explanation for religious popularity, and it blows completely out of the water your delusion that most people believe because it must be true. You cannot just ignore this and expect to have a two-way conversation about this topic.
You pretend that audible sounds are equal to imaginations about invisible sky wizards and try to claim that personal euphoria must be some magical deity-detector, and you refuse to acknowledge that feelings are not anything like the real perceptions of your sensory input, nor are they indicative of any sort of proof about anything other than emotional shit firing off in your brain in the completely mundane and corporeal way it always does. You are literally incapable of determining the difference between sensory input and emotional stimulus. And you are trying to claim this as a point for your case. This is pitiable behavior. I'm almost embarrassed for you. If I were still a Christian, I would ask you to stop trying to represent the religion or argue for it.
You get told again and again what an argument ad populum fallacy is and repeatedly continue to use it anyway. You demonstrate more with this than with anything else you say that you find information to be repulsive if it doesn't serve you. What you are doing here is not arguing, because even in an argument you should be prepared to ingest new information and incorporate it into your understanding of the world, not just reject anything you don't like because it doesn't work for you at the time. What you are doing is apologia and proselytizing. That's not an argument or a debate. That's you trying to advertise for your cult.
You need to learn how to adapt and process new information, and adjust your arguments and come up with new ones accordingly. Clinging to your old, already-debunked nonsense will get you nowhere.
Anonymous 01/31/15 (Sat) 18:36:16 6545a1 No. 1830
>>1827 >bbut muh 6 billion religious people! >higher number = victory!
Anonymous 01/31/15 (Sat) 18:50:26 329a43 No. 1831
>>1826 when we require two differing levels of evidence from things, we need to offer objective standards for the differing levels of evidence, extraordinary is not objective, as for vaguely defined, I don't think that's a problem, many things are vaguely defined because they are hard to understand, like black holes, or dark matter. It may not be exactly like Koran consonants in that sense, which are well defined,
I admit the analogy is imperfect, as all analogies are, God is not exactly like Korean consonants in exactly the same way, but in terms of perception and evidentiary requirements it is similar. And that's what really matters here, and that's what this analogy is about - the evidentiary requirements.
Korea is a bit of a hermit kingdom, until relatively recently they were very isolated from the rest of the World (it was under dictatorship in recent history) and so interactions between Koreans and the outside world were rare. I could go around in Korea and pronunce k and g sound the same way, or the b and p sounds the same way and get by. Now that could be because their culture of saving face meant that they wouldn't want to correct me. It could be because they simply don't know how to react to foreigners. Now if you were a foreigner walking around in a small Korean town, it could be easy to get the idea into your head that hey, maybe these sounds aren't really that different. But we don't - we don't even think that. Why - it's not because we assume that there's some experiment that we can use to verify it. Now what we do is, every day, in our lives, we make the assumption that the testimony of large numbers of people is accurate, and we make the assumption that when large numbers of people say they see or feel something, it is reliable. This is a base assupmtion we make not just in courts but also in science, history and everything else, the testimony of large groups is reliable. . . With the exception of religious experiences. . . the one area for which we don't seem to allow for that assumption
yes - think of it like this, when some people go on a plane or boat they get motion sickness - this is entirely a feeling, and we are not certain what causes motion sickness biologically, there are competing explanations. Hoever we do not doubt that it is a real emotion and that it is in relation to a real event.
Another example is something my mother experiences, chronic pain. Believe it or not (despite the poor spelling and grammar Ive demonstrated here) I am a lawyer, I did a lot of personal injury and accident cases when I started out and I noticed that a lot of people suffer from Chronic pain as a result of accidents, often for long periods, even years after an accident. I noticed that many insurance company examiners doubt the existence of chronic pain (probably because they are biased). Unfortunately, I am not aware of any tests, other than the patients reports as to their experience, to demonstrate whether this pain is real. Perhaps MRI could detect it, but we don't use that in medicine currently as a diagnostic tool. Of course the medical community at large has recognized the existence of Chronic pain, and its based on the same basic reasoning - if a majority of people say they feel something, its probably true, they probably really are feeling something
Anonymous 01/31/15 (Sat) 18:51:14 329a43 No. 1832
>>1827 sorry the last paragraph of
>>1831 was directed to you
Anonymous 01/31/15 (Sat) 19:46:32 592615 No. 1833
>in terms of perception and evidentiary requirements it is similar
Anonymous 01/31/15 (Sat) 19:57:54 d10111 No. 1834
>>1831 God help us all.
Anonymous 01/31/15 (Sat) 20:35:11 8c601d No. 1836
>>1831 My friend is teaching me Korean. I cannot yet replicate all of the vowels and consonants but I sure as fuck can hear them. (At least when someone takes the time to speak slowly and precisely rather rushing and slurring everything the way native speakers do - which is fine for them since they know the grammar and can figure out what word was intended by context. It's harder for a learner to get it.
I don't get your point. English is my native primary language and I'm getting it, so you can't even claim It is because I came from a similar language. It feels like an awful lazy analogy you wrote in a couple minutes from some random personal experience or thing you read, and it's not convincing to my personal experience.
As a side note from a student of Korean, King Sejong said a smart man could learn hanguel (the Korean alphabet) in a day, and a dumb man in a week. I'm a dumb man and it took me at over a week (15 minutes here, 15 minutes there), but I got the alphabet memorized. It's a freaking easy and logical syllabry compared to most it's neighbors. If you're seriously studying it and don't get it, you probably haven't put enough time into it after work. The grammar is almost the same as Japanese, (easy) and you don't need to fucking learn the Chinese characters anymore. It's a very learnable language, and I could even give you helpful links if you're interested.
>>1834 Op must have slept through the requires class(es?) on critical thinking. I took one philosophy class in my life but I can still see through many of these logical fallacies.
Anonymous 01/31/15 (Sat) 21:34:15 e2eff9 No. 1837
>>1831 >if a majority of people say they feel something, its probably true, they probably really are feeling something Now that you've gone away from the statues, you're hanging on this argument and it's been explained before. Many people have that same feeling but they don't believe in gods. This "feeling", this spiritual part of people, has been hijacked by various religious leaders, prophets, and other new age, psychic, and spiritual people throughout the ages. It's the same feeling, just filled with different words and ideas. You claim your ideas and words that tingle your spiritual senses are true while not giving credence to everyone else's that don't believe in gods.
Sure, a lot of people have that feeling and it's a true feeling, it just doesn't necessarily make the ideas and words true that occupy those feelings. Some people's spirit feels occupied with other gods and sometimes no gods but a spiritual feeling nonetheless.
Anonymous 01/31/15 (Sat) 22:42:32 93501c No. 1839
Can't be assed to read the whole thread…
Anonymous 01/31/15 (Sat) 23:10:33 b26cf4 No. 1840
>>1839 No. Just argumentum ad populum and crying statue being spammed with every response.
Anonymous 02/01/15 (Sun) 01:22:33 38901d No. 1844
>>1837 These spiritual sensations people speak of seem to involve self-manipulation to start pumping serotonin into one's own body. I hope there is some science performed to confirm show/disprove my hypothesis.
Anonymous 02/01/15 (Sun) 03:09:59 d10111 No. 1855
>>1839 The closest he ever came to even acknowledging the point was
>>1767 Specifically, he said:
>well the argument here is whether God exists, not whether Christians are nice people. So the point makes him extremely uncomfortable and he is unable to directly engage with it. He relies on argument ad populum but does not want to acknowledge that the popularity he relies upon was purchased with rivers of blood spilled from the throats of the unfaithful.
What is staggering is how many times he has completely ignored the point even though it has been brought up to him several times in this thread alone. A fine example of willful ignorance.
I'm sure he will run back to his Christian echo chambers begging for a response to this point. He will probably return with a No True Scotsman fallacy.
Anonymous 02/01/15 (Sun) 04:03:56 6e024b No. 1862
>>1844 It's basically brain damage.
Source:
munews.missouri.edu/news-releases/2012/0418-distinct-%E2%80%9Cgod-spot%E2%80%9D-in-the-brain-does-not-exist-mu-researcher-says/
Anonymous 02/01/15 (Sun) 06:37:04 cf24b1 No. 1869
>>1508 >so isn't the fact that you can't or don't evidence of some lack of capacity for religiousness on your part It's possible at least in my case, I don't remember ever being strongly religious. However I do tend to have strong or radical views in other areas and can awed by things of great beauty and power, so I don't see a huge difference between these feelings and feelings of religiosity except that the latter are in a religious context and the former are not.
Except that it would be trivially easy to prove to the blind that sight exists, which is why no blind person does deny the existence of sight. The evidence that "religious experiences" have any validity is much more shaky. If God is real, then I shouldn't need direct contact with him to prove that he's real, the people who do have that contact should be able to demonstrate it by proving, for instance, that prayer works (protip: it doesn't).
Why? Let me emphasize something here: there is absolutely no limit to the number of people that can be wrong about something. I wouldn't be surprised to find out there was shit everyone in the world is wrong about, including me.
cont.
Anonymous 02/01/15 (Sun) 06:37:37 cf24b1 No. 1870
>>1869 >miracles There are many skeptics who make it their job to examine claims of miracles and the supernatural in depth (it is unreasonable to expect every atheist to do this personally) and some, like James Randi, debunk them with such a high success rate that it's hard to believe that "the real thing" is out there. Still, no one will ever be able to cover every claim of supernatural interference since bullshit claims are practically limitless in number so those who wish to believe will cling to whatever they can.
To quote the wikipedia article you linked
>No movement or other phenomenon of the sun was recorded by scientists at the time.[6] Not all witnesses reported seeing the sun "dance". Some people only saw the radiant colors, and others, including some believers, saw nothing at all.[14][15] To quote
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4110 >There's an experiment you can do. Stand on the sidewalk and point up toward the top of a building. People walking by will look up too. Some of them will pause. If another person looks at them, they might point up as well. Anything anyone sees will be assumed to be what you were pointing at. Go to Starbucks, have a coffee, and watch the fun. To me it's not only plausible, it's probable that if a single person at Cova da Iria told that desperate crowd that the sun looked strange, you'd have had ten thousand people agreeing "Yeah, it did look a little funky, kind of jumped around and danced when I tried to look at it," or whatever they thought they saw. And this would have happened on October 12, June 1, or any other day you choose. http://paranormal.about.com/od/marianapparitions/a/fatima-prophecies.htm They were all either vague, not published until after the events had already taken place. And man, they're really having to stretch to find a workable interpretation for that third secret.
>this was attested to by a scientific crew that was allowed to examine the staute I'm not seeing anything about a scientific crew in that link. All I see is
>Bishop John Shojiro Ito of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Niigata who had been an eyewitness to some of the events at Akita initially approved the apparition in 1984. We are not discounting evidence, merely weighing it against an overwhelming amount of contrary evidence that tells us that the world works a certain way, that statues cannot cry and the sun does not suddenly decide to do tricks. These are extraordinary claims that require extraordinary evidence.
Well yes, but on the other hand, many things that were once thought by science to be unbreakable physical laws were proven not to be, particularly on an extremely large or small scale. This happened because there was
strong empirical evidence that certain phenomena did not obey these laws and I doubt many atheists discount the discoveries of quantum mechanics on the grounds that Newtonian physics simply can't be broken. We are willing to change our worldview, but only in the face of strong evidence, evidence that is objective, repeatable, and can be properly tested.
Anonymous 02/01/15 (Sun) 06:44:42 cf24b1 No. 1872
>>1869 >>1870 Aaaaaaaand I just realized that the post I replied to was four days old. I hope OP is still around because I spent more time on that response than I intended to.
Anonymous 02/01/15 (Sun) 07:19:35 a77474 No. 1874
>>1508 >modified pascale's wager The FSM is a perfect example of why this argument is chickenshit. We have just as much evidence for the FSM as your god. Hell, there are people that legitimately believe in the slenderman just the same as yaweigh.
1 of 2 Anonymous 02/01/15 (Sun) 08:23:02 329a43 No. 1880
>>1833 we already dealt with this right
remember the example of making the e and i sound exactly alike in English,
>>1872 I'm still around and I'm going to respond to you the best I can because you're one of the few responders who took the time to put forward a thoughtful argument
there are hoaxes out there but I choose examples that are unlikely to be hoaxes (Fatima young girls prophecy of sun zigzaging turned out to be true, + also prophesized the 2nd world war and rise and fall the soviet union)
Akita - tears with scientific backing
Hindu milk miracle
these are all ones that are highly reliable
I didn't post anything about a scientific crew in the OP but it was posted later in the thread, it was done by a professor of forensic medicine
the overwhelming contrary evidence that the world worked the way was achieved through a willful desire to ignore miracles and religious evidence. It was the result of Enlightenment thinkers like Hume advocating throwing out anything that has any semblance of religious or supernatural to advocate this naturalistic world view and to fight the domination of the church.
Today that perfect mechanical Newtonian world is falling apart, we are seeing more and more that mystery is at every level of the universe, that many things cannot be so easily explained. And in light of that, it might not make sense to so quickly dismiss religious miracles as probable hoaxes because an outdated and short lived world view.
2 of 2 Anonymous 02/01/15 (Sun) 08:27:45 329a43 No. 1881
I am going to continue with this line of reasoning to go back to chronic pain for a moment.
Anonymous 02/01/15 (Sun) 13:42:55 065b78 No. 1885
The Amityville Horror is proof that God is dead and we should worship Satan.
Anonymous 02/01/15 (Sun) 14:25:51 e40f83 No. 1889
>>1880 >>wi would stell be abli to communicati Okay but my point about heuristics and the insignificance of that matter still stands. Argumentum ad populum might be enough to convince someone in certain situation but it's still a fallacy.
Anonymous 02/01/15 (Sun) 14:28:45 e40f83 No. 1892
>>1881 We don't say that people who say they can feel god don't feel it. We say that it doesn't prove god exists. Just like patients feeling pain doesn't prove that there is something wrong with them other than the fact that they are feeling pain. This analogy actually works against your point.
Anonymous 02/01/15 (Sun) 14:53:09 38901d No. 1895
.
Anonymous 02/01/15 (Sun) 16:25:40 6e024b No. 1896
>>1881 It's pretty pathetic. You're wanting to believe so bad you're filling in these holes of doubt with bullshit no sane human would believe. And in your quest for find proof for your god, of trying to find him in the physical world, you're doing what he wouldn't want you to do, oh ye of little faith.
Anonymous 02/01/15 (Sun) 17:03:05 a77474 No. 1899
>>1881 >except for the pascals wager one, but that was just silly You mind addressing the fact that there is better evidence for slenderman than christ?
Anonymous 02/02/15 (Mon) 18:53:01 bf72fc No. 1975
>1) 95 - 15 % of the world believes in some form of God, so isn't the fact that you can't or don't evidence of some lack of capacity for religiousness on your part.
Anonymous 02/03/15 (Tue) 15:17:56 db07a6 No. 2027
>>1975 >Argument from popularity Slow down bro. He doesn't understand those quite well yet.
Anonymous 04/04/15 (Sat) 01:48:49 8c601d No. 6113
Bumping so newcomers know we've already debunked statuefag on miracles and he refused to listen to the counter-arguments and just kept repeating himself. You might as well save your breath on his newer troll threads, like the one on "Most scientists are not atheists"
Anonymous 04/04/15 (Sat) 01:54:44 8c601d No. 6114
By the way, most times when you see a miracle it just chance. Statistically speaking, unlikely things happen frequently within a month, and rarer things become more likely as the period of time increases. People are prone to being impressed when they believe any unusual occurance is a miracle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littlewood%27s_law
Anonymous 04/04/15 (Sat) 02:31:57 329a43 No. 6116
>>6114 >>6114 I'm sorry is a mathematical formulation based on a given set of assumptions a form of scientific fact. Before I came to this board I thought science was based on observations and experiments. You people have a weird definition of science.
>>6113 And I'm certain atheists can point to that post or series of posts - where it was debunked
Anonymous 04/04/15 (Sat) 03:06:17 fd6799 No. 6121
File: 1428116777451.jpg (33.25 KB, 479x358, 479:358, This_strikes_fear_into_the….jpg )
>>6116 HOLY FUCKING SHIT!
YOU'RE STILL HERE?
Whenever an Anon here would call someone "the statuefag" I thought it was just a joke. Like when a religious person goes full retard they get called "statuefag" as a reference to this thread. Just to remind people just how fucking crazy religious people can be sometimes. But no, it's not a joke. You're still here, still posting… actively by looks of it.
This thread is about 3 months old. Anon bumps it to remind us of the statuefag. Then you, THE infamous statuefag, replies him only like half an hour later. I can barely believe it. Holy fuck.
Anonymous 04/04/15 (Sat) 03:14:28 329a43 No. 6122
>>6121 Yes I posted it 3 months ago, I haven't really posted much since, because it didn't really seem like the debates would accomplish anything of worth.
Then I started posting again recently but it's starting to look like it won't accomplish much.
Anonymous 04/04/15 (Sat) 03:21:23 f2fa74 No. 6123
>>6122 >yfw statuefag tried for 3 months to get banned by being a spamming, insulting and retarded faggot to prove that /atheism/ would censor him >he is still active and achieved nothing but at least
>he got labeled as statue fag because of how much of a faggot he was
Anonymous 04/04/15 (Sat) 03:39:27 329a43 No. 6127
YouTube embed. Click thumbnail to play. >>6123 well I like to think I have achieved some things, such as that atheism will yell staute fag to discredit the person rather than address the argument. I know one fundamental truth, I will never convince the person I am debating again, but that was never the point, embed video related.
also it's been nice to watch you guys spazz and yell christ fag or staute fag at each other degrading the dicourse here long after I am gone, which I can be confident will continue long after I am gone.
If I may quote Jesus " a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand"
Incidently, by yelling staute fag, and throwing ad hominems about my irrationality (how ironic can you get) no one has responded to the legitimate points made here
>>6116
Anonymous 04/04/15 (Sat) 03:44:32 f2fa74 No. 6128
>>6127 > also it's been nice to watch you guys spazz and yell christ fag or staute fag at each other Yeah, it sure must be nice to act retarded over the span of a few months and somehow be surprised if people think you'd still be around here. Very surprising right? It's not like you made a fool of yourself or something.
>implying that if you had a reason to leave you wouldn't had done so months ago >implying anyone takes you seriously now You don't even need a trip or ID, people simply identify you by your idiocy and the way you argue.
Anonymous 04/04/15 (Sat) 03:51:04 329a43 No. 6129
>>6128 >Yeah, it sure must be nice to act retarded over the span of a few months and somehow be surprised if people think you'd still be around here. I'm actually being honest I haven't been here for the entire 3 months, I've made this thread and only came back and started posting recently
But if you guys were noticing people in that span and thinking it was me, I feel extremely gratified because I know that seed of destruction and divisiveness will carry forward.
Well that and I'm the only Christian on here making arguments other than /jesus/ should make it pretty easy to identify.
now if someone could address instead of trying to make this thread about personality
Anonymous 04/04/15 (Sat) 04:47:18 fd6799 No. 6133
>>6128 >Yeah, it sure must be nice to act retarded over the span of a few months and somehow be surprised if people think you'd still be around here. Very surprising right? It's not like you made a fool of yourself or something. Nice burn Anon
This true, I noticed that this board was getting loopier over the past few weeks. I didn't want to believe it, but now it feels obvious. Statuefag is back
>>6129 >Well that and I'm the only Christian on here making arguments other than /jesus/ should make it pretty easy to identify. No no no. /jesus/ my not be very bright, but he's no statuefag. You are dumber than a sack of hammers. You are crazier than squirrel shit. You could train chimps to type, and they'd argue better than you. You are statuefag. You are as bad as NephilimFree. You are fucking retarded.
We don't think you're bad because you're religious. We don't think you're bad because you're a Christian. We think you're bad because you are a person with a really really low IQ that's also really really detached for reality.
>>6123 If statuefag is a troll, then he's a legendary one, I give you that.
Anonymous 04/04/15 (Sat) 05:23:24 329a43 No. 6135
So what is it 10 - 20 posts adhominims and insults and not one response to a very simple challenge
Anonymous 04/04/15 (Sat) 05:26:14 329a43 No. 6136
>>6135 challenge was issued here
>>6116 I think this is what we would call a pretty heinous defeat on your parts. If you want to make me look stupid the best way to do so is to prove me wrong and answer to the challenge. Since you have taken to much more juvenile tactic of calling names on like kids in a schoolyard I can only say that you as a board have collectively been defeated so thoroughly that you remember it several months later.
Anonymous 04/04/15 (Sat) 07:26:04 bf72fc No. 6143
Anonymous 04/04/15 (Sat) 17:14:46 fd6799 No. 6160
Alright statuefag, I want to get to the bottom of this. So, I have some questions for you.
Anonymous 04/04/15 (Sat) 17:37:55 329a43 No. 6161
>>6160 highest level of education was answered in this thread (not directly but through answering questions about occupation) and you should be able to guess a minimum age from that.
The fact that you haven't and need to ask shows that you haven't paid attention to the thread or to the arguements made therein
similar to
>>6143 who claims the arguments are debunked by pointing to points he supposes is unique but were made previously and dealt with and moved past much earlier in the thread.
Honestly you guys aren't very serious about debate, which is why I gave up on this sort of debate and turned instead to attacking you on the basis of your bias and irrationality rather than arguing for the truth or falsity of religion.
Anonymous 04/04/15 (Sat) 18:53:26 bf72fc No. 6165
>>6161 Show me where please
Anonymous 04/04/15 (Sat) 18:57:36 bf72fc No. 6166
>>6165 Also, before you bullshit your way out of them, here are the specific points from that post:
Response to your first point in the OP:
Response to the second point in the OP:
There you go. Now specifically address these two points. Don't go off on a bullshit tangent like you have been this entire thread
Anonymous 04/04/15 (Sat) 19:28:03 fd6799 No. 6169
>>6161 Yes, it's true I don't remember everything that was said in a thread that's 3 months old. So, could you please answer my questions here:
>>6160 I would really appreciate it.
Anonymous 04/05/15 (Sun) 00:41:38 24514b No. 6179
>>1511 >95% >Literally all buddhists, shintoists, confucianists and eastern Asians in general don't believe in any kind of god whatsoever >Nontheism is widely popular in many populous European countries 95% sounds like a very unrealistic upper bound. It makes you look very careless about your claims
no. Geocentrism wasn't true just because nearly every single human man before the 16th century firmly believed it was true. History keeps moving on.
If anything we can conclude that the probability that a religion is true is exceedingly low because there are too many, they are indistinguishable from mere cultural constructions that grow at very specific times and places, like languages, and unlike educated competing hypothesis; none of them is substantially more plausible or testable than the rest, many of them have been completely abandoned despite having millions of firm believers in the past, they are highly incompatible with one another, they have been scientifically proven wrong at many important claims about the nature of things and therefore have had to adapt their beliefs in spite claiming to be absolute truths, none of them has ever reached the point of gathering half the human population, etc.
false aggregation. It turns out most of them think you are plain wrong about your religions beliefs, they think your peculiar view is stupid, and then you all will continue slaughtering one another like you have been doing since the dawn of civilization because you are aware that your worldviews are contradictory. Eventually you take a break and bash on atheists together because they are truly off your category of insanity.
if you were really interested in discovering the truth you would know that serious studies (not the kind of sensationalist and corruptible pseudo-scientific, economically interested shows you see on TV) show that all religious denominations on Earth claim about the same amount of miracles, of which about the same tiny percentage (less than 1%) can't be conclusively proven false, which is not to say they have been proven true as you delusional superanatural people like to think.
/atheism/: remember to SAGE shitty threads
Anonymous 04/05/15 (Sun) 00:45:45 24514b No. 6180
>>1516 >I can't honestly explain something >therefore it is a supernatural event and it is explained by the random story I happen to want to believe in I have never seen evidence against the existence of Zeus or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, yet none believes in them.
You might as well go try to believe in every single religion in the world at the same time please
Anonymous 04/05/15 (Sun) 00:54:31 24514b No. 6181
>Numerous recorded and attested miracles have occured in the 20th century
Anonymous 04/05/15 (Sun) 01:12:57 24514b No. 6182
>>1576 > we had a scientist >a scientist >a >scientist Akita theory of electrostatic fluids when? I would really love to study a masters program in Akita science
Anonymous 04/05/15 (Sun) 01:15:10 24514b No. 6183
>>1578 >being inanimate cant cry so you accept that it didn't happen?
Anonymous 04/05/15 (Sun) 01:50:56 24514b No. 6184
File: 1428198656174.png (200.74 KB, 919x507, 919:507, Capture d'écran de 2015-04….png )
>>1809 >adopt buddhism while rejecting the gods, cosmology and everything else that makes it buddhist the fact that Buddhism derived from Hinduism doesn't mean Buddhism posits that Hindu mythology is metaphysically true, and the fact that Eastern religions are full of superstitious doesn't mean Easterns are generally theist.
Gautama himself taught about rejecting the existence of deities, moreover, he wasn't even a soft atheist but a positive one who claimed that no gods existed whatsoever.
no gods involved. I don't know what shitty dictionary you got that from, but it's quite a biased and schismatic definition of religion
Anonymous 04/05/15 (Sun) 08:02:27 329a43 No. 6195
>>6169 I have answered, it was if you cant be bothered to read the thread GTFO
same goes for the two of you
>>6165 >>6164 as for
>>6180 well if the zeus or the flying spagetti monster statutes start crying the world over, maybe people will feel differently
>>6179 nigga your are a tiny tiny minority of humanity
you see to miss the argument altogether, it was about popular perception not popular opinion, most peopel say they feel something, they feel Gods presence etc. so you are either going to have to say that the majority of humanity is deluded in their perceptions, or admit that maybe you just dont feel it
>>6181 this was dealt with in the thread previously, this is one of the big reasons I stopped responding, people keep repeating the same arguements over and over again out of stupidity
>>6183 well not because I have a scientific mind not an asshole mind, thus I observe and draw conclusions from observations instead of dismissing things outright because of preconceived notions of what can and cannot happen
>>6184 I dont believe it is wise to dignity this jargon laden stupidity with a meaningful reply
Anonymous 04/05/15 (Sun) 10:46:03 bf72fc No. 6213
>>6195 Okay then, show us where, so we can all see it isn't incoherent gibberish like the rest of your replies
Anonymous 04/05/15 (Sun) 15:10:35 827ab3 No. 6222
>>6195 You didn't respond to one key point regarding heuristics
>>1889 >>1837 which pretty much summarizes why us believing in chink chonk sounds doesn't mean it's rational. You accuse us of not reading your points, while you fail to respond to one of ours, fo shame.
Anonymous 04/05/15 (Sun) 22:36:13 329a43 No. 6233
>>1837 >>6222 I don't think there are many spiritual atheists, I have yet to meet any atheists who claimt o have such a feeling Either way when I look at the world it seems like most religious people (and by this I mean actual believers and not cultural christians who go to church because that's their culture or what they were raised to do) are religious either because they have this perception or they give creedence to others who have this perception. Most atheists are atheists because they deny this perception or deny it's reality.
If you want to eke out a form of atheism that does have spirituality, I would be interested. Sam Harris has claimed to but it seems to be nothing more than some rather pointless and extremely dubious mind exercises that any other neuro-scientist would be ashamed to endorse.
As for your claim that this is a key point and the reason why most of you are atheists, I disagree, I think this thread + most atheists I have talked to seem to resort to denying spirituality and spiritual feelings altogether not attempting to fashion some for of godless spirituality
Anonymous 04/05/15 (Sun) 22:44:32 574be7 No. 6234
Hey guys I found instructions on how to make a weeping statue on the internet. Do you think I could make one with an anime figurine I worship, and convince Catholics I have a legitimate region?
Btw here is a list of a bunch of copycat fake weeping statues that were so obvious the Catholic church rejected them. Guess they only wanted there to be one weeping statue to leave room for doubt. If they kept admiting weeping statues as miracles they would definitely be caught by a whistleblower someday.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weeping_statue#List_of_weeping_statues
Anonymous 04/06/15 (Mon) 00:28:53 6d8dc4 No. 6246
>>6234 Seriously guys, I think a bleeding statue would make a grand paperweight for my desk in the office. I would need to make at least two anime statues, so I would have one more than Catholics and be able to convert them. Then I'd just need to find a scientist (any scientist would do, even a Paleontologist friend) to verify blood dripped out. I just need to find a way to make the plastic porous, but hollowing out the head should be simple.
In fact if I ever run a night club I'm going to commission an water fountain with a nymph that menstruates and then dye the water red. Maybe Catholics would stop being so stuck up about having sex if there were more miraculous sculptures that were completely lewd.
Anonymous 04/06/15 (Mon) 03:28:31 cf24b1 No. 6248
>>6233 > I have yet to meet any atheists who claimt o have such a feeling I'd be surprised if you know very many atheists at all, statuefag.
Anonymous 04/06/15 (Mon) 10:05:02 4d4bb9 No. 6262
>>6233 I said it's a key point against your korean consonants example, because you still seem to believe your ad populum is valid based on that.
Anonymous 04/06/15 (Mon) 13:14:38 a5480b No. 6264
>>6233 > Most atheists are atheists because they deny this perception or deny it's reality. statuefag confirmed for being a mind reader who can introspect into the purposes of atheists minds
Anonymous 04/06/15 (Mon) 15:10:48 329a43 No. 6271
>>6262 I'm not certain I understand you, how does it negate the Korean example?
Ad populum is valid if it's based on common perception rather than common opinion. If everyone sees red, but someone else doesn't, we can know that one person is colorblind, we don't question the existence of red. This is what the Korean example is intended to demonstrate.
Anonymous 04/06/15 (Mon) 16:54:15 6dd4b8 No. 6278
>>1525 >God is not so narrow minded as to turn away from good souls and sincere worship just because they do it in a slightly different way, this is the divine creator of the universe after all So are you saying you don't believe in the ten commandments?
>Thou shalt have no other gods before me >Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image
Anonymous 04/06/15 (Mon) 17:58:30 329a43 No. 6283
>>6278 I have repeatedly said this is not the point of the thread, I was trying to prove that there is a rational basis for believing in the existence of God. As to which religion is correct is not the subject of this thread nor is it relevant to any of the points described here.
New covenant Christianity is based on love not on a set of rules - thou shall not kill has been repeatedly disregarded as well as the graven images commandment. Read about new vs old covenant theology in Christianity.
Anonymous 04/06/15 (Mon) 20:09:52 8c601d No. 6289
>>6278 >I have repeatedly said this is not the point of the thread, You're out of new counter points to discuss, which haven't been repeatedly refuted, so perhaps you should follow our lead now.
And you failed to prove anything except how dense you are. I'm sorry your parents abused you with Christianity bro. You might have become a very smart man by now.
Show us the love you preach of statuefag. Practice your tolerance by tolerating our dissenting opinions in your mind.
1) if thou shall not kill is repeatedly disregarded, it sounds like there was more love under the old covenant
2) why did God need to make a new covenant in the first place if he's so perfect? (Why don't you pause for a moment to about it……………………?)
Did you think of a reason?
Does what you were told not make sense?
Are you lost?
We can help you if you'll open your mind.
(Hint: Christianity is not divinely inspired and you could stand to do more research from secular historians and non-Christian sources. Christianity began as one of many ancient cults. It hijacked an older religion and it's leaders replaced the old covenant to make it easier to asser their own power by invalidating the power of existing priests. This thereby gave themselves even more power influence over the lives of the gullible sheep, who would leave their mother and father to follow the apostles, while donating all they had to his ministry.)
3) Catholics make graven images to Mary, Jesus, the saints, and their churches have made over a dozen fake bleeding statues after Akita. You don't call this a violation of this commandment because you're suffering under Catholic delusions, but the Protestants saw the problem and removed those statues to Mary and the saints. Iconlogy is false worship of things other than God, and was thrown out according toa more literal interpretation of the bible.
No sense in implying we don't even know the basic premises of Christianity any less than you do. You can't live in a Christian majority country without learning a lot about it, and most Atheists here probably were former Christians. Just because you have a weaker education, and attach great significance to the little you know about your own faith from diluted sources, doesn't mean there aren't (many) Atheists who are more rigorous about their beliefs than you, and who have taken more time to read more about the things that matter than you've bothered to do.
Anonymous 04/07/15 (Tue) 07:41:37 765346 No. 6316
>>6271 You said that ad populum is a valid way of reasoning because we believe that koreans have different sounding consonants without hearing them for ourselves, so we should also believe in god because people feel god.
Just because everyone believes in korean consonants doesn't mean it's valid reasoning. Ordinary people don't always have enough resources to examine everything and collect solid evidence of facts they believe to be true, so they resort to heuristics. Such heuristics as believing in the perception of others.
If koreans didn't actually have different sounding consonants and were bullshiting all along for kicks or whatever reason and were able to convince people who learn their language to jump in on the bandwagon everyone would fall for it. At least until they performed a double-blind test I proposed earlier for example or disprove it in another way. People are satisfied with incomplete evidence not because that's correct reasoning but because they don't have enough resources to investigate matters that are insignificant to them.
無神論について (日本語で話せ） ピタルさん 04/11/15 (Sat) 23:23:17 064693 No. 6568
YouTube embed. Click thumbnail to play. 日本語でバイブルを見に行った。 イエスは親分みたいです。
その時，イエスは彼に言った，「サタンよ，わたしの後ろに下がれ」（Matthew 4:10）
http://biblehub.com/jpn/matthew/4.htm 馬鹿らしい、やくざみたいです。 英語に比べると、日本語の方が楽しいです。 それじゃ、偶像ファッグとかサム・ハッリスを話しましょうか？