Raf

DRAGO!

My point was that it's easier to disprove the Christian God than it is to disprove the deist God because unlike the deist God, the Christian God makes testable claims. That fail. Genesis flood was ONE EXAMPLE. I listed a handful, and there are literally dozens more. My argument was cumulative. Your critique of my argument isolated one point I made, failed to debunk it, and then proceeded as though some rhetorical point had been made when it had not.

Out of politeness, I changed my vocabulary from "They are not producing languages" to "they cannot prove they are producing languages." This is out of deference to the argument that they could be speaking a pre-Tower of Babel (fictional incident) language that has not been heard since the days of Nimrod. If I have been imperfect in my articulation, I am sorry. I continue to wait for one single solitary documented incident of producing a known human language that was not performed or observed thirdhand involving anonymous participants who are no longer on the same side of the planet as those of us saying "prove it." One more time for the people in the back. I don't have to prove it's not a language. You have to prove it is. But all you do is declare that it is and then try to shift the burden to me to prove it's not based on something you heard yourself say in the shower. If I were calling B.S. on a Muslim using the same argument, you would be standing right beside me Truth be told, I am being overly polite in making the concession that these could be undetected languages. They're not. But there's no way to prove it and, more to the point, there's no need. "They are producing a language" is an affirmative claim, and the burden of proof for an affirmative claim lies with the person making it, not the person denying it. It boils down to the major weakness of my thesis, which is still stronger than its antithesis: because my claim is that ALL SIT is fake, I can be proved wrong BY ONE person producing a language. ONE. Hasn't happened, except in your shower and among anonymous Asians and Africans conveniently unavailable for verification. Nothing in this resurrected discussion is new. If someone's GOT some evidence to share, I'm down. But this incessant "you can't prove it's not a language" directed at people who do not have the burden of proof in the FIRST place has begun to bore me. Produce a language, prove it, or nothing you say is new. This isn't faith. Faith is believing it's a language without a scrap of evidence to prove it, while making excuse after excuse after excuse why the results we detect are completely consistent with my thesis and not consistent with yours. Calling it "faith" doesn't make it so. And calling it "not disproven" doesn't make it a language.

No one is arguing that the writers of the Bible did not exist. The characters in it are another story. Yertle the turtle does not exist. Turtles do. A god may exist. But it's not the fictional character who performed the fictional deeds of Genesis and Exodus. And Joshua. And Jonah. And especially Job! Yeah, someone wrote those stories. Never claimed otherwise. But you're claiming a character in those stories is the Author of them. There is no reason to believe that.

You're very nice, but I can't take this seriously as a defense of Christianity. You're making a better case against it than I am, comparing the writers of the Bible to Dr. Seuss.

Holy cow.

Mocking my comments does not discredit them. If you're familiar with a phoneme, you can incorporate it into SIT without a supernatural explanation. That is perfectly sound logic, and to treat it as a "gotcha" makes no sense. Of COURSE you can incorporate phonemes you're aware of, even if they're part of a language you don't speak. The issue is you're aware of them, and this is in the literature. It's not "made up" to account for anything. If two languages share a phonemic inventory, and a sample of SIT fits that inventory, then it should be a piece of cake to determine whether the SIT matches any of those languages. So far, hasn't happened. Still waiting. Not holding my breath. Assuming you are correct and there are languages that share phonemic inventories, dandy! We still have ZERO documented examples of SIT producing a known language (barring unverifiable anecdotes whose participants are conveniently a. anonymous and b. half a world away). You can ask for the checklist that you've already reviewed many times, if you'd like. I don't see why you're arguing with me on a point on which we agree: the "what makes it a language" checklist did not apply to our discussion. You are correct. Now you want me to prove that you're right? Why? For you to accuse me of "making it up..." damn, bro, that's false and you KNOW it. Especially after I just agreed with you on the subject. I didn't make up jack, and I can't help it if you don't remember the very checklists we discussed and agreed were irrelevant to our discussion. That's YOUR faulty memory, not mine. Do not accuse me of making s* up just because your memory failed. Convenient. Cop out, though. Sorry, it is. It is exactly the kind of explanation you expect from someone trying to explain why you should not expect to find evidence for your claim. It's the dragon in the garage principle. "I have a dragon in my garage." Oh yeah? Let me see it. "It's invisible." Ok. Let me feel it. Let's throw a blanket over it or something. "It's incorporeal. That won't work." Fine, let's use infrared. "That won't work either. It's non-thermal." Joo no, I's starting to sink joo no has a dragon in joo garage. [Concept stolen from Carl Sagan]. Look, you make a testable claim, and then when someone tests it, you start going through logical somersaults to avoid the test. It's not a human language. The connection is shut off when people are watching. It's non-thermal. Meanwhile, the people being recorded don't think they're faking it when they're doing it "while you are filming," which means by your definition they are faking it without realizing they are faking it, which is exactly my thesis in the first place. I say we all did that and you're all doing it! Not that you lack sincerity. Not that you're bad people. You're just not doing anything supernatural. If you were, you'd be producing languages. You're not, because you're not. So, to mix humor from another thread, maybe it's time for people to get out of the Nile!

See if I've got this right. The Bible can say "THIS HAPPENED!" And when we look for the evidence that this happened and see quite clearly that it did not (there was no global flood, there was no exodus of 2 million plus people from Egypt), we can say definitively THIS DID NOT HAPPEN. And that doesn't undermine the credibility of the Bible's central thesis? Wha-wha-what? Are you for real? I can understand Jonah and Job, but Genesis and Exodus are kind of crucial. If they didn't literally happen, Israel has no articulated claim to be "chosen" and man has no need for a redeemer. In the context of testing the God hypothesis, if a claim is made that God did ABC, and we are able to definitively determine that ABC never happened, then the hypothesis fails. So yes, that DOES disprove the existence of the Christian God. At the very least, it disproves that the people who made the claims were speaking for Him. Without those claims, there is nothing to support the assertions of the later people who claim to be speaking for Him, all of whom relied on the authority of the of those who spoke for Him before. Moses never existed. He's as much a part of Israeli history as Paul Bunyan is a part of American history. This isn't some trivial distinction.

"The Bible says there is a river Nile in Egypt." Seriously? SFW!? The Hobbit says there were men on earth. That doesn't make it a history textbook, nor does it mean Sauron exists!

By all means, bring on the "future."

Yes, it sounds like that. At first I thought You were making the old "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" claim. I see now that you were not. Good. You see, if an assertion is made that leads one to conclude that evidence should exist, but that evidence does not exist, that is evidence that the assertion is not true. It's not PROOF, but it is CERTAINLY evidence. If I told you my house burned to the ground yesterday and you went to my house and did not see the charred remains of what used to be a standing structure, but instead saw a house that was still standing, you could safely conclude that I lied. If I told you a snowstorm kept me from leaving Fort Lauderdale on May 13, 1986, and you checked weather reports from May 13, 1986 and found no evidence that it snowed that day or any day before or after, then you could safely conclude that I lied. And if I told you that 5,000 to 10,000 years ago the human race was reduced to 8 people, but genetic research revealed no bottleneck that severe, or anywhere within 15,000 years of that time period, you could safely conclude that's an actual error. Come. On. People.

What I mean is, I made a fairly straightforward comment. If the human race was bottlenecked to 8 people at the time of the Flood, genetic research would show it. I never said there have been no bottlenecks ever in the entire history of the human race. My comment has to be taken in context. If the human race bottlenecked to 1,200 people 40,000 years ago, that's fascinating, but it has f-all to do with the flood account in Genesis. So if your rebuttal to my comment does not support a Genesis-era bottleneck bringing the human race down to 8 people, then in the obvious context of this discussion, it is irrelevant. See, this is why I get so painstakingly nitpicky in some of my posts. Because people strain at every single sentence, often out of context, to disprove an assertion not being made.

Why would I cite a study that doesn't exist? Come on, this is trolling, not dialogue!

So in response to my post saying genetic research shows no evidence of a bottleneck of 8 people in a flood that took place 5,000 years ago, you cite an event that meets neither criteria. Come on guys, seriously?

The way it works is, you make an assertion, you prove it. You don't send somebody else to prove the assertion that you're making. In other words, you Google it. I am looking forward to evidence that the human race was bottlenecked by 8 people roughly 5,000 years ago. Give or take 5,000 years.

Maybe I'm not looking hard enough, but I don't see a clear distinction drawn between "evidence" and "proof." Anecdotes ARE evidence by definition, but not all evidence is reliable. Joseph Smith said he translated the golden plates. Other people close to him swore they watched him do it, sort of. Those are anecdotes. That they're also horse hit is obvious to even the most gullible of people. But ask a Mormon. A smart one. One who has shown genuine ability in the real world requiring brains. Like Mitt Romney. He buys the evidence. And can anyone of us prove it didn't happen? You were there? Huh? Huh? More later.

I went looking for this post and was pleased to find it. It outlines why I believe the word "tongues" and the word "languages" are interchangeable in the context of this subject. Tongues in the Bible were always known human languages, whether or not they were understood by the speaker or audience.

Honest and for true, I'm trying not to get sucked back into ALL of what we already previously hashed out and left unresolved, but... My memory may be flawed, but I think part of the difficulty regarding "criteria" had to do with the fact that the criteria were inadequate to the question we were asking. That is, "SIT by definition is not used by one person to communicate with another person. Language is. Therefore, SIT is not language." Heck, even I can see the flaw in that logic, so I refuse to make the "criteria" argument without listing the criteria in question, some of which are simply not applicable because when we're talking about SIT, we're not talking about people communicating with each other. This goes back to what I discussed earlier with phonemic inventory, which does use the expertise of linguists with the express purpose of seeking to determine whether a person practicing SIT is producing a known language. The logic goes like this: Every language has a distinct phonemic inventory. Every SIT sample has a distinct phonemic inventory. Conceivably, we should be able to take the phonemic inventory of SIT and match it to a known language, THEN determine whether the actual words and sentences match the language. Presto! Evidence! It doesn't happen. Time and again, when such things have been studied, the phonemic inventory comes back to the speaker's native language, with allowances made for phonemes the person has encountered (Chappy Chanukah!). English speakers who SIT produce rearranged English phonemes, not distinct languages. Likewise for Spanish, French, etc. Chockfull's shower time notwithstanding. Yes, we can anticipate that not every SIT will be matched to a particular language. The SIT may match the phonemic inventories of multiple languages (the longer the sample, the fewer matches). But again, this goes back to something I said earlier: WE ONLY NEED ONE CONFIRMED MATCH OF SIT-TO-LANGUAGE FOR ME TO BE WRONG. One. A. Single. Match. There are plenty of reasons to expect that a particular sample won't match a language. There is no logical reason to think that hundreds, thousands of people SIT on a regular basis and no one can verify it except -- exclusively -- through tales of long ago involving people we conveniently can't find anymore. Here's a good rule of thumb: If you wouldn't accept an argument in defense of a competing religion's claims, do not expect me to accept the same argument in defense of SIT.

My Girl Jamie Lee Curtis Halloween

Before he married Lillith, and before he met Diane, Frasier was married to a children's entertainer named Nanny G, who shows up in three episodes, each time played by a different actress. The last incarnation was a super-horny Laurie Metcalf, who delivered the line in question on the last season of "Frasier." And yes, Kelsey Grammer was finishing his 20th season playing Frasier by that time (nine on Cheers, 11 on his own show). Which means you're up.

Imagine for a moment an empty glass. Saying it's half-full is faith. Saying it's half empty is incomplete. Saying it's empty is not fear. It is not doubt. It is not negative or pessimistic. It's an empty glass. Now I want you to imagine... there's no glass.

In a 2004 episode of this popular series, a character named "Nanny G." (a children's entertainer who's not a main character on the show) looks at her ex-husband (who IS a main character on the show) and says, " Do you know what it's like to play the same character for twenty years?" The audience got a big laugh out of that, with good reason.

Oh, I guess I'm up. Ish.

Nick Stahl Terminator 3: Fall of a Franchise Claire Danes

No shoehorn necessary! I think MY bottom line is that there are so many natural explanations that a supernatural explanation is by definition less plausible. But we can disagree. Wouldn't be the first time.