Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Nelson on July 17, 2009 at 12:44am

yeah, weird that it dropped your comment into a random place.

anyway, an atheist bible study or a creative writing class? i guess they'd overlap huh? :)

all kidding aside i'd actually find an atheist bible study, a bible study that gets into the bible from a historical-critical standpoint, to be interesting. you may have noticed from my past posts on TA, i find that stuff fascinating. i've always been into history.

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Permalink Reply by Reggie on July 17, 2009 at 7:40am

I was only 20 percent joking about it. :)

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Permalink Reply by Brutus on July 16, 2009 at 7:36pm

I guess it is useful to rely on the Bible to show how it does mean what people think it means to to impeach its authority by pointing out contradictions or implausibility. Those tend to be arguments about the Bible itself.

In terms of specific "factual" assertions by believers, I still think one is better off not getting dragged into their turf. While the average Christian probably does not know much about the Bible except for the stories everyone knows, a dedicated fundy will go toe to toe with you and will eventually paint you into a rhetorical corner.

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Permalink Reply by Frink on July 14, 2009 at 5:25pm

Your uncle is an idiot. I thought the claim that "chemical impulses that travel at a rate of a billion per second to the brain" looked fishy, so I looked up the frequency of optical nerve synapses. As it turns out, my doubts were well-founded.

According to the article:
"With about 1,000,000 ganglion cells, the human retina would transmit data at roughly the rate of an Ethernet connection, or 10 million bits per second."

10 mbps. My network card is faster than that. If you want to put it in terms he'll understand (albeit a flawed analogy), tell him it's the equivalent of a 10Mhz processor. An old, single-core Pentium 4 processor makes calculations at 320 times that.

But then, even an ethernet connection isn't a good example, because we're not even talking about single impulses. To reach the 10 MHz mentioned in the article, you need a bandwidth of 1,000,000 ganglia to hit the targeted freqency. I guess man is just a better engineer than god.

At any rate, tell him to stop copying and pasting from his idiotic religious hate sites if he's not willing to check their claims.

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Permalink Reply by Beka on July 14, 2009 at 7:02pm

Thank you for that very enlightening info! I will definately have to pass that on to him. Yeah, I know he's an idiot. Funny thing is, he acts like he's more intelligent than most people. Very arrogant. Ho hum. But, whatever, he's blinded by faith.

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Permalink Reply by Brutus on July 16, 2009 at 7:38pm

Ignorant people always act like they are the smartest people in the room. He may have a great deal of native intelligence, but what good does that do if it is locked in a box?

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Permalink Reply by STRANGE~ONE on July 15, 2009 at 8:29am

Its hard to even try to talk to someone such as this. My uncle in somewhat the same. But his isn't religion based, its political.
I have tried to explain to them how they present themselves by using the Tarot card 'The Fool'. And each time they immediately dub what I say satanic in nature and evil.
Its obvious just how added in that verse is in the bible.
Those who were not convinced, were called fools. Or Burned.
Why? Cause god is the Omnipotent Crouton of Societies Salad!
But I think he is the most Egotistical god head ever created out of mankind's mind. Giving the
perfect reflection of gods creator. God is in the image of man. Mans perfection syndrome.

Really all you can use is: An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.

The Conscience has 3 places to it. The Visual(our vanity), The Ego(our pride), & The Shadow( our place to throw the problems we don't want to deal with). With the shadow everyone knows that its like a landfill.
It will eventually get so full it over flows and that's when things like anger and hate, nervous breakdowns and such mess our lives up.


It sounds like your uncle is a self centered person, whom will never be able to use his own mind.
He tests people because his shadow is over flowing and he has not learned how to use those skills threw
his own mind to clean it out. This is what occurs in organized religion. The wall. Gotta love Pink Floyde. People are afraid of their own minds.
And to empower it is told to them to be a sin.
That's why we have so many medications, therapists, and crazy wards to lock down or up our own ability to deal with our being.
Hopefully someday someone will give him a taste of his own medicine. Because even Christians turn on their fellow followers. Because they have the same problems he has.

They have allowed an idea, to envelope their lives. And in this they have given all control to it.
Remember they live by an ideal that calls seeking knowledge outside of their bible. Evil!
He is scared. You are not. Just keep that in your mind when you have to listen to his crap.

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Permalink Reply by Jeff Langston on July 15, 2009 at 10:30am

I absolutely LOOOOOVVVVEEEEEE this quote - "Cause god is the Omnipotent Crouton of Societies Salad!"

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Permalink Reply by STRANGE~ONE on July 16, 2009 at 2:26pm

thanks it just came out. i thought it was fitting. for the god complex lol.

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Permalink Reply by Chelsea on July 16, 2009 at 9:05pm

I have a suggestion! Richard Dawkins addresses the "complexity" argument beautifully in his book, The God Delusion. Morgan posted some of his lecture on the home page on this site. I've copied the part that might be of interest to you below:

"Improbabilities
I want to end by returning to science. It is often said, mainly by the "no-contests", that although there is no positive evidence for the existence of God, nor is there evidence against his existence. So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic.

At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

The trouble with the agnostic argument is that it can be applied to anything. There is an infinite number of hypothetical beliefs we could hold which we can't positively disprove. On the whole, people don't believe in most of them, such as fairies, unicorns, dragons, Father Christmas, and so on. But on the whole they do believe in a creator God, together with whatever particular baggage goes with the religion of their parents.

I suspect the reason is that most people, though not belonging to the "know-nothing" party, nevertheless have a residue of feeling that Darwinian evolution isn't quite big enough to explain everything about life. All I can say as a biologist is that the feeling disappears progressively the more you read about and study what is known about life and evolution.

I want to add one thing more. The more you understand the significance of evolution, the more you are pushed away from the agnostic position and towards atheism. Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.

The great beauty of Darwin's theory of evolution is that it explains how complex, difficult to understand things could have arisen step by plausible step, from simple, easy to understand beginnings. We start our explanation from almost infinitely simple beginnings: pure hydrogen and a huge amount of energy. Our scientific, Darwinian explanations carry us through a series of well-understood gradual steps to all the spectacular beauty and complexity of life.

The alternative hypothesis, that it was all started by a supernatural creator, is not only superfluous, it is also highly improbable. It falls foul of the very argument that was originally put forward in its favour. This is because any God worthy of the name must have been a being of colossal intelligence, a supermind, an entity of extremely low probability--a very improbable being indeed.

Even if the postulation of such an entity explained anything (and we don't need it to), it still wouldn't help because it raises a bigger mystery than it solves."

Not that there is truly any arguing with people who aren't open to considering any other possibilities...

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Permalink Reply by James C on July 17, 2009 at 9:49am

If a fool speaks the truth, is it not still the truth?

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