Raf

I made a deliberate decision not to reply to WordWolf's thread in doctrinal, because it's doctrinal, or here, because of the time investment that would be required to handle the material adequately. But someone somewhere should point out: the notion that Genesis correctly outlines the progress of the appearance of life on earth is... not correct. I mean, Genesis has plant life beginning before aquatic life. That is not correct. Sharks have been around longer than trees. It fails [as most would] to recognize that some animal life went from land to sea, not just sea to land. Whales evolved from land mammals. But Genesis has "the great creatures of the sea" appearing before land animals. Hard to imagine whales were not included in "great creatures of the sea." Birds. Meanwhile, descended from reptile like ancestors. So did mammals. Which means you can't say [as Genesis 1 does] that birds preceded land animals. I don't need to nitpick Genesis. But I would not subscribe to the notion that it got anything "right" about the progression of the appearance of life on earth, ESPECIALLY after taking into account that plant life showed up before the sun, moon and stars were placed in the giant dome covering the earth and keeping it from being flooded by the waters above. Would this be appropriate to post on WordWolf's thread? Maybe. But it doesn't feel very sportsmanlike.

I made a deliberate decision not to reply to WordWolf's thread in doctrinal, because it's doctrinal, or here, because of the time investment that would be required to handle the material adequately. But someone somewhere should point out: the notion that Genesis correctly outlines the progress of the appearance of life on earth is... not correct. I mean, Genesis has plant life beginning before sea life. That is not correct. It fails [as most would] to recognize that some animal life went from land to sea, not just sea to land. Whales evolved from land mammals. But Genesis has "the great creatures of the sea" appearing before land animals. Hard to imagine whales were not included in "great creatures of the sea." I don't need to nitpick Genesis. But I would not subscribe to the notion that it got anything "right" about the progression of the appearance of life on earth, ESPECIALLY after taking into account that plant life showed up before the sun, moon and stars were placed in the giant dome covering the earth and keeping it from being flooded by the waters above.

One of the things atheists constantly need to contend with is the constant invocation of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. In short, this is a technique in which a member of a group denounces another member of the same group for a real or perceived difference that the atheist is somehow supposed to account for prior to making any criticism. "I understand you don't like Christianity because A, but you need to realize REAL Christians reject A." Meanwhile most don't. You do. But only because you know A is indefensible even though you wish it weren't. "You know. most Christians don't believe the Bible is inerrant." They don't? Ok, so when we complain about errors in the Bible, we're not undermining your... "Shut up about errors in the Bible. That doesn't prove anything!" Sure it does. It proves the book has errors and you can't rely on it as history, for example. "No True Christian considers the Bible an account of history." Fantastic. So we agree Exodus and the Great Flood, among other stories, never happened. "How do YOU know they never happened?" But you JUST SAID we can't trust the Bible as history. "PROVE IT'S WRONG!" There is no record of the 10 plagues or the firstborn of everyone in Egypt dying. "No True Christian believes that's history." It is IMPOSSIBLE to have a rational discussion with people who "debate" like this. It's one excuse after another and we're just standing by watching you twist yourself into a pretzel and begging you to see reason by asking "DO YOU HEAR YOURSELF?!?!" There are some people who follow a version of Christianity so unique to themselves that it's impossible for anyone to discuss it with them rationally. "My Christianity holds that Genesis didn't really happen but it talks about these stories to impart spiritual truths that, when you look really closely at them, make us better people." Except they don't. Lesson: If God tells you to kill your kid, the morally correct answer is "NO YOU BLOOMING SOCIOPATH! I WILL NOT KILL MY SON! AND IF THAT'S YOUR IDEA OF A TEST, I'D BETTER HAVE PASSED BY SAYING NO, YOU SICK THUCK!" But no, Abraham is the HERO of this story. Unless he were alive today. Someone kills their kid today and says God told them to do it, you KNOW he's psychotic, no questions asked. But it happens in the desert 5,000 years ago and you're supposed to say "What Incredible Faith!" NO! Why do we accept conduct from the characters of the Bible that we would never accept today, even those who claimed back then they were acting on God's instructions? "Ok, here's what I need you to do. You see those people over there? Kill them all. All of them. Even the kids. Kill every last one of them. Leave none alive." William Lane Craig looks at that instruction and feels sorry for the poor person who has to do all that killing. The trauma! How about having a little compassion for the women and children being killed? Nope. Not an ounce. The real victims are the killers. They were just following God's instruction. Poor things. And WE don't get to say this is morally indefensible because if we do, get this, WE are arrogant! You know...

You're supposed to say the magic words: "Modcat5 killed Mufasa." Then we can change it.

One thing I have tried to be careful about, and you guys can "report" me (or others) if I'm wrong, is trying to keep the "critical" posts off the main doctrinal sections (Matters of Faith and Doctrinal). Nonbelievers are just as welcome to post there, but those pages are set up to give believers space to explore without our constant interference. An unbelieving perspective would threaten to derail EVERY doctrinal discussion if not for that fact (just like Mike's thesis derails any discussion that's not already about Mike's thesis. It just does. I'm not judging). Bottom line, I think, is that we have a doctrinal section where people are talking about Genesis 1, Purgatory, the Trinity, what God thinks of you, the cry of triumph, the unforgivable sin and numerous other issues. Sometimes a non-believer's view is tangentially relevant. Usually it's not. When I participate in those threads, it's typically minimal, makes its point, and then backs away. I think ANYONE can comment on the Bible on its own terms. You don't need to be a believer. For example, I think "My God My God, why hast thou forsaken me" was, doctrinally, Jesus quoting Psalm 22 and not making up some new expression for VPW to clarify 2,000 years later. And I said that on the thread. Because it's a doctrinal thread. I also believe that never happened. I did not say that on the thread. Because it's off topic and inappropriate. So I kept that to myself because it was beside the point. And we could do that with LOTS of issues. Point is, the notion that Christians are unwelcome at GSC and that their beliefs are constantly under fire to get shouted down is a false one. It is untrue. The reason posters seem to feel that way is that they come into the atheist subforum and think that we are somehow obliged to give Christian beliefs a deference to which no other religion is entitled. This isn't even remotely complicated: The atheist subforum exists to give people like me a chance to demonstrate why I believe what I do without getting in YOUR space. It gives people like Charity a place to "come out" and share their journey. It gives people like Stayed Too Long a place to vent. All without disrupting honest discussions about doctrine. You cannot come on this forum unless you do so voluntarily, and you don't get to come here and issue blanket denunciations of people for the crime of disagreeing with you. Calling someone "arrogant" or "egotistical" is namecalling. It does not further discussion. It is not constructive criticism. It's judgmental namecalling, and if it had been handled the way it should at its first occurrence, perhaps that would have been more efficient. But then I would be accused of censorship, which happened ANYWAY. If you want to challenge my ideas, then challenge them. But YOU CHOSE TO MAKE THIS ABOUT ME by attacking ME and not by engaging in an honest discussion. When you saw you had no logical or reasonable grounds to disagree with me, you went STRAIGHT to the personal attacks. And it's not the first time. It's like you walked into an R-rated movie and were shocked that it had bad language, violence and nudity. Dude, you walked into an R-rated movie. What did you THINK you were going to find? But then you take it too far and you claim there are no PG movies anymore, no G movies. When there are. You just keep buying tickets to the R-rated ones. That's on you. You don't like it, you stay out. Go watch another movie. Go participate in another discussion. There are dozens, and the atheists on this site are pretty much leaving them alone. Why are you?

Clearly I killed skyrider. OS is perfectly welcome to post. He is not welcome to LIE. DWBH used this site to libel people. He proceeded to harass me on various social media sites in an effort to defame me before my friends, colleagues and peers. I DARE you talk to him personally about his relationship with me and why we're no longer on speaking terms. Bring a tape recorder. You called me a dog and got mad at MY vitriol? Please. GET YOURSELF Once again, people are perfectly welcome to post all sorts of views about all sorts of things. What you want is not equal treatment, but privilege. You want to be able to call us arrogant and dogs and closed-minded and biased [and I see now that you have decided to escalate the name-calling], and you want us to not respond. You and I had it out, we made our peace, and that was that. But for some reason this thread has you gobsmacked to the point where you can't disagree with Charity or with me without being personal about it, calling us names and accusing us of lacking your open-mindedness (which is not open-minded at all). This is not how people with evidence on their side behave. This is how one behaves when one has lost a debate centered on ideas but still wants to appear to have some standing. Like I said, I asked the other mods to have a look so that I am not moderating myself.

FYI: I did alert the other moderator(s) about the content of this thread, but I did not request any action be taken. I alerted them both to make sure we were ALL in compliance with site rules AND to make sure that I personally was held accountable to someone other than myself. Thank you.

I was teasing.

The whole scheme is just odd. He pays the price. He is the price. He is the creditor to whom the debt is owed. But Satan gets the blame for killing him. And the princes of this world: demons. They did it. And if they knew the result, they would not have killed him. But that makes no sense at all.

If that was only implicit then I am not doing my job as a communicator.

Why did Jesus have to die? Why is death the wage of sin? God could have made the wage of sin anything he wanted. $3.50. But he made it death. Why? Because to do otherwise would not be just. But God establishes and defines justice, doesn't he? So if he says the wages of sin is a sincere apology and a sternly worded letter, that would be JUST, because he said so. Stoning a man to death for picking up sticks on the wrong day of the week is JUST because God said so. Why shouldn't reducing the wages of sin from death to two bits be just? Ah, because it doesn't EXPLAIN anything. God as the determiner of morality and justice makes ZERO sense, especially when you consider the downright barbaric penalties he levies for insignificant infractions while treating slavery as more acceptable than shellfish and cheeseburgers. "BuT iT was AnOtHeR tImE" say the same people who tell us morality is absolute and subjective morality is wishy washy.

Final thought for now: It takes a LOT to process a loss of faith. There is a period of intense emotion akin to mourning. Not the loss of a relationship with a nonexistent god, but a recognition that so much time and energy has been wasted in his service that could certainly have benefitted real people instead. If I took the money I gave the church and sent it instead to cancer or als research or autism or clean water or even just a gotdang food bank, I would have actually helped more people. It is exhausting to come to terms with what just happened in our lives. Charity came here to share that journey. The disrespect shown in return, the accusations of arrogance, the prissy, privileged, entitled ANGER at her gall to format responses in a way that made you unhappy... You wanna talk about not being important enough to DEMAND any such thing!? You wanna talk about who is acting like a f'ing judgmental Pharisee? Charity will respond however she chooses to respond, and if you don't like the method, tough s*it. How DARE you act as if this creates a problem for YOU, after the contempt you've shown for Charity's journey and pain? Ok I need to step away before I lose it.

I watched Emilio Bonifacio on TV on opening day 2009. Two run, inside the park home run. Blew our minds. I can't think of anything else he did on opening day, so I'm going to guess you are right

Biblical cosmology. Apparently I made all this up. So when Paul says he was caught up to the third heaven, he's not traveling forward in time. He's traveling upwards in space. That was the cosmology he would have known: a spherical earth surrounded by multiple concentric heavens. He went to the third one. But that doesn't come from the dozens of scholars who've written peer-reviewed articles and books on the subject. Nope. Comes from me. I made it all up to frustrate chockfull on a message board frequented by tens of people on a good weekend. You gotta admit, faking 50-someodd names for a bibliography and then actually going out and ghostwriting books without taking credit for it might seem like overkill, but you have no idea how important it is for me to win a debate on the Internet. FFS.

Sorry, yes, of course that was correct

By the way, this is what I mean about the challenge of responding to a Gish Gallop. It takes a LOT longer than the nonsense you're trying to refute.

The pot here is having a delightful conversation with the kettle. You see, when I disagree with you, it's because of my sh-t-colored bias. But when I agree it's because I've opened my mind to the possibilities of what Scripture really means underneath those pesky little words it actually uses. I'm curious to know what color glasses you wear when you approach the Book of Mormon and the Q'uran. Since you've established in this post and several that precede it that this kind of tone is fair game, I would like to point out that this one sentence (well, comma splice, anyway) may well be the stupidest, most refutable piece of dung you've ever written on this site, and that's saying a lot. [Sorry: YOU brought dung into the conversation as an acceptable reference to my point of view, so it's only fair]. Of course, there IS a cosmology in Genesis 1 that is actually laid out in Genesis 1. Had you taken a deeper look into the history of the Semitic people and the ancient Canaanites, you would see quite clearly that Genesis 1 reflects an actual ancient belief about what people once thought the universe looked like. Of course, you can't DO that without some degree of humility and acknowledgment of the possibility that you MIGHT be WRONG about something, so I wouldn't expect you to undertake this honest kind of inquiry that you have labeled "poop" to absolve yourself of the responsibility to read a f-ing book or two. The ONLY reason those elements are considered symbolic today is that they have been disproven literally. There is no indication that the writers [plural: there was more than one and likely none of them were named Moses] meant anything other than what they said: that the sky is a giant glass wall holding back an ocean above us, and that there are windows in that wall that were opened to create the flood in Noah's day. It would be delusional to say he was mentally abusing children. But to say someone made up all the stories? Of COURSE someone made up those stories! They're preposterous. But if YOU want to say the stories are TRUE, then it is incumbent on you to document the historicity of each account. You can't even tell me who wrote which gospel! Now, you can call it "delusional" to believe the stories are all made up, but you do that while at the same time dismissing all the miracles of the Q'uran and the Book of Mormon as delusional, and you do so without even making room for the faintest of possibilities that they might be a "record" of something that actually happened. Funny how that works. It's okay to be dismissive of the miracle stories of other holy books, but not of your own. It's almost like, what's the word Jesus [allegedly] used all the time? Hypocrisy? That is LITERALLY what you are doing. You say these stories are true unless we prove them wrong, absolving yourself again of the responsibility in dialectics to prove the affirmative claims you are making. Meanwhile, again, you ignore "probabilities of any kind" that you are wrong to dismiss the miracle claims of other religions. Why is it okay for you to do that to every other religion but it's not okay for us to do that to yours? Yes, but the Epic of Gilgamesh does not hold itself to be the Word of God, and its history is not put forth as a real accounting of events. Also, Spider-Man does not live, even though his comics say he lives in New York City. The fact that a story is placed in a real place, even at a real time, and its characters interact with real people, does not make the story true. Gilgamesh is fiction and never intended to be treated otherwise. Genesis didn't become symbolism until skepticism exposed it as ahistorical. Ok,, number one, the f'ing namecalling has to stop. I let you get away with it before and I regret it. Second, we LITERALLY do not believe we are the center of the universe. You have us confused with Christians, who actually believe the purpose of the universe is earth, the purpose of the earth is life, the purpose of life is man and the purpose of man is God. Actual Chrisitan dogma. The flipping NERVE to accuse us of that which you do! The second stupidest thing you've written in this post, but probably only fourth or fifth stupidest overall on GSC. So it's my responsibility to accept that you are right, period, shut up. Right? Because that's what you are actually saying. "Shut up and accept my views or, if you don't, YOU'RE arrogant." GET YOURSELF I refer you to the previous thread: Religion has a vaccine for the Reason virus. This is magical thinking, not reason. The whole POINT of using WORDS as the means of communication is reason, our ability to discern meaning from words. The ARROGANCE to suggest that because YOU have a proper attitude toward a Creator while the rest of us have a "bias to tear down everything!" The GALL. I have news for you. It's not your humility to the Creator that allows you to excuse away any honest examination of scripture. It's your gullibility. The amount of projecting going on with that statement... there isn't that much projecting at Cannes. Literally not my problem. And you’re the only one having trouble following logic here. Reported as namecalling. Knock it the hell off. Jesus called out the hypocrisy of people who had a surface understanding of scripture but refused to look deeper. I'm just saying, if there are Pharisees in this conversation, it's not the people saying "do what Jesus did: look closer." To me there is absolute gullibility and a nearly psychopathic desire to accept any explanation under the sun as long as it means not having to admit that you are wrong in how you are presenting your arguments for taking Scripture at your word instead of reading it in context and learning a bit more about the history of the people who produced it. You seem to have us confused with Christians again. I think the scripture intends to say what it actually says. God may not have a purpose for every adjective, but writers do. And when you eliminate “perfection” as a goal of the writer, the bottom line is that they choose words for reasons. Had they meant to say the sky was an “expanse,” they would have. They said it’s a firmament because that’s what they thought. They were wrong. End of story, unless you think God was the Author and He meant something deeper. He wasn’t and He didn’t. There is such a thing as an "anti-fundamentalist bias," a rejection of a thought or idea because that thought or idea is held by fundamentalists. The idea that the Bible is anti-gay is a fundamentalist bias. It’s also pretty dead-on accurate, isn’t it. That the scripture can be read and understood because of the words it uses, that's fundamentalist. It's also completely consistent with reason and scripture. But the idea that "I don't like what this says so I'm going to pretend it doesn't really mean that even though it says that quite clearly and historical analysis of what the people of that time believed and taught bears it out. Because I am humble" is indefensible. You have rejected the claims of every one of those groups, and I would bet good money that you did so without giving them a FRACTION of the deference that Charity and I have given your views. Now, I'm going to take a break from this thread so I am not tempted to put the modhat on and treat this obnoxious post of yours with the respect it so truly deserves. This is the Atheism subforum. Christian scripture gets no special treatment here, and that is what you are explicitly demanding of us, under penalty of being subjected to juvenile namecalling and a level of hypocrisy that is astonishing in its lack of self-awareness. If you cannot handle this forum, you are welcome to stay off it. But post this kind of bulls hit again and the response will be, within the rules of this site, appropriate. [Moderator edit to correct formatting issues]

The Challenging Counterfeit, by Raphael Gasson, if memory serves

That's Clark, nice. Anyone wondering what a Gish Gallop looks like, there's a prime example.

William Lane Craig is the master of the Gish Gallop, a form of debate in which you efficiently spout as much bulls hit in the time allotted as you possibly can. Since it takes more time to clean bulls hit than it does to defecate it, the opponent will leave some arguments unanswered strictly because there's not enough time in the world to answer it. Then Craig cites all the points he made that were not refuted and declares victory. Meanwhile ALL his arguments are bulls hit. All of them, without exception or distinction.

Define glove. And fits. I should be able to use whatever definition of fits I want. Shoes don't have epileptic seizures. Therefore faith makes no sense.

Thank you for the education.

Then you will be intentionally derailing the conversation and it will be handled accordingly.

Well in the context of this conversation that is not the meaning. A naturalist in philosophy is someone who believes the natural world is all that is. It is incompatible with spirit or the supernatural. All these words have histories and overlapping definitions. Best bet is to allow people to label themselves and articulate what they mean by these labels.

WordWolf knows the answer but has chosen not to give it. It is not Bob Dylan or To Make You Feel My Love.