FAITH
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@Old Man Re: To Intruder - "I suggest you continue playing with your toys in the sandpit."
Hey, you forgot to warn him to not eat the mushy brown nuggets... *looking toward sandbox*... Oops. Nevermind. Too late. Oddly enough, though, he seems to be enjoying them. Oh, well... *shrugging shoulders*...
@Old man shouts, I really wish people did read some of it like you do because they'd be obeying "don't steal" and "don't murder", which I'm certain you are aware many dont obey.
How have you not noticed your many errors and misunderstanding? Why would I waste my time repeating what you ignore?
@The Intrusive Re: To Old Man - "Why would I waste my time repeating what you ignore?"
...*eyes blinking rapidly*.... *hitting side of head with palm of hand to reset tripped breakers*.... What the...??? No way!... *staring in disbelief*... How is that even possible??? Dude, your attempts at insults are actually getting WORSE!.... HOW???... *exasperated sigh*... *pacing back and forth while thinking*... Okay, look, here's the deal. I am well aware of how you jr. high 8th graders think it is way uncool to associate with the younger grade school students. It's almost taboo. I understand. However, your little bad-boy clique is failing you horribly at the moment. Therefore, I suggest you go find a nearby 4th grader and ask him/her to give you a few pointers... *holding hand up in placating manner*... I know, I know, I know! Just calm down and listen, though. Normally I wouldn't suggest such extreme measures, but emergency action must be taken at this point. Trust me, it's for your own good.
@ Intruder
You have given no alternative explanation for those verses that clearly claim omnipotence for your god. You seem to be claiming some "deeper understanding" but without one single example to illustrate your assertion..
You then bring in random fragments of commandments, once again with no explanation as to their relevance to the discussion.
Perhaps you could dilute the cordials you are drinking a bit more, at least until you start to be coherent. .
As it is you are making no argument, merely typing at random.
@Old man shouts This is the first post of your's where you've sounded somewhat civil. Soon you'd actually work out the difference between a discussion and an argument.
I have faith in you.
@ Intruder
And still no answers from you.
You do not have any, empty vessels seem to make the most noise.
Fucking muppet.
@Old man shouts, Yet, hear you making the most noise.
I still have faith in you though. Let me know when you've read the entire book instead of quoting selective verses out of your misunderstood context.
@The Intruder: Didn't you see the sign? "Check Your Faith At The Front Door"
Your posts would be a lot less juvenile and your responses much more thought out had you simply followed the directions.
@Cognostic, True Christians do not TEST their FAITH: THEY APPLY IT.
This, is the sort of ignorance you guys talk about. Your error however, is in thinking this stupidity is the stupidity of God and every one else who reads the Bible and not that of he individual Intruder.
A wiser person might argue that "THEY APPLY IT" is the same as "TEST their FAITH". But like you, why test the brain when you can make up crap in your head and believe it?
Only the brainless unquestioningly follow instructions as you assume they do, despite the fact that you know they don't follow the instruction that clearly states, "don't kill" and "don't lie".
Are you sure your understanding of the sign you see at the door isn't "Check Your Brain At The Front Door"? You have my permission to ignore it!
@Cognostic, True Christians do not TEST their FAITH: THEY APPLY IT. (Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha .... and you see the results! They have been applying it for 2000 years and not a fucking thing is going their way! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.)
RE: "don't kill" and "don't lie".
Your god butchers 25 million innocent men, women and Children in your Holy book of "do not kill." Fuck off! Your god threatens eternal death and damnation to all who disbelieve in his bullshit. Fuck Off! Even the Jesus of the New Testament is exempt from his own teachings as he beats men and women in the market place and overturns their tables. As he displays his bigotry and instructs disciples that non-believers are swine. Only a piece of shit follows a piece of shit god. The Bible is not a book of morality, it is the opposite. From beginning to end it is a book of God's failures, blood sacrifices to right those failures, and an ultimate promise of damnation, even for most who believe. Fuck your god.
The sign on the door clearly states, "CHECK YOUR FAITH". You just don't have the ability to see it with your God Goggles on. Take them off for just a moment and you will begin to see the shit you are standing in.
@ Intruder
I can wager I have read more versions of the "bible" including versions labelled "anathema" , "lost" gospels and other ancillary texts than you have decades of life.
All you are displaying here is an appalling ignorance of debate, your own vacuous arrogance and a severe lack of any corroboration for your claims.
When your first claim of your god's lack of omnipotence and irresponsibility regarding evil was proven wrong in so many verses from your Bible, you have resorted to empty insults.
Entertaining as your stupidity and lack of debating skills may be to your peers, it doesn't cut the mustard here.
It just makes you appear as a mewling amateur.
So please crawl off, take your hermeneutics elsewhere and shove them where Cog flavors his bananas. Muppet.
That's fairly hypocritical of you, given your cherry picking which parts to believe are valid. Is murder ok for instance, or slavery, or trafficking women prisoners as sex slaves if they're virgins?
The Intruder has stopped putting forward any arguments and is just throwing his toys out of the pram.
@ David
Agreed. And he has failed to reference any verse that contradicts my position as illustrated by his own bible.
Just another christian who has been preached at, cherry picked verses, done apologetics 101, viewed some YouTube vids and is suddenly a professor of biblical meaning.
They seem to appear here on a depressingly regular basis to entertain us all with their lively ignorance, mendacity and lack of knowledge on their faith's origins.
Re: Intruder to Old Man - "I'm going to advise you to ditch the faith in what you believe and consider becoming an atheist and check the evidence in front of you."
*eyes squinched shut* ...*fingertips at side of head rubbing temples*... *grooooooooan*.... *deeeeep calming breath*.... Wow... I mean, just.... wow... *pleading to the masses*... Somebody, please, tell me where I went wrong! The young lad had potential. I swear I saw a small glimmer of hope that he could become so much better. So I took him under my wing and attempted to gently guide him in the ways of cutting-edge sarcasm and proper delivery of backhand insults. Alas, it would appear my efforts have been in vain. I have failed... *hanging head in shame*... I should have recognized from the beginning he lacked the capacity to fully comprehend the artistic intricacies of the methods I was attempting to impart upon him. However, looking back, I now realize I allowed my faith in his abilities to obscure my vision and prevent me from seeing his true mental inadequacies.
@Old Man
Now, because of my misjudgment, a terrible injustice has been committed. And it grieves me so that I am the one to blame for it. Therefore, I would like to offer a most sincere apology to you in the hopes you will forgive my misguided evaluations. Old Man, you are worthy and deserving of a far greater quality and more intellectually calculated levels of insults than those recently directed toward you by my young protege. Please know he is not to blame for this travesty, for it is I who should have recognized his inabilities to absorb the lessons that would allow him to produce higher degrees of invective innuendos. Again, it pains me to no end that you had to suffer such ill-planned and mediocre taunts from an amateur that is clearly hampered by some form of cerebral deficiency. And I regret I did not see the signs of such sooner, so as to have potentially avoided the indignation you had to endure. Again, my most sincere apologies to you, Old Man... *heavy sigh*...
@ Tin Man
Your very gentlemanly apology is accepted. Here, have one of Cog's Bananas. Don't worry about the brown circle halfway up.....he gave (threw) it at me. I couldn't see properly ( some poo had hit my goggles) but he seemed to be squatting just before he threw (gave) it to me.
I think we are dealing with son of "Programmer Jordan", but with less intelligence. Certainly an inability to argue a single topic. I must admit the insults lack any sort of subtlety and appear to be fired in a haphazard manner, rather like a blind hamster wielding a crossbow.
The straw men are badly constructed, leaking, and seem to be made of greenery rather than robust, yellow gold, dry stalks of substance. The quality of theist on these forums is definitely declining.
And the lies are just fucking transparent. On the ennui scale it rates a 9.9.
What about the verses encouraging and condoning murder? You can't just cherry pick the bits you want to believe and pretend this means the bible offers any kind of cogent message or narrative.
@The.... (Dun-dun-dunnnnn)... Introller Re: To Old Man - "Lol! You must think not using one's brain when reading the Bible applies to the instructions that you give too."
Awwww, maaaan.... C'mon! Really?... *shaking head in disappointment*... Wow... It's as if you aren't even trying now. Seriously... You're now attempting to go after Old Man with THAT lame candy-ass weak material?... *face palm*... Ugh... Look, Jr., allow me to give you a couple of quick pointers. First of all, you totally screwed the pooch by assuming Old Man even has a brain functiong at your astounding capacity. (Why the hell do you think he wears that goofy-ass helmet?) Matter of fact, I'm pretty sure most everybody here is in utter awe of your intellectual prowess. (But that's another topic altogether.) Secondly, though, where is that spark of comedic genius I saw from you earlier? It's as though you have just completely given up. So sad...
Well, shit. I suppose my expectations for you were just a bit too high... *exasperated sigh*... Of course, I know I have only myself to blame for that. I really should have known better, considering your current condition. You're what... twelve or thirteen, maybe? So, yeah, going through puberty must be very stressful and disorienting for you at the moment. Cheer up, though, buddy, because it does eventually get better. However, just one little piece of advice for you, if I may. When masturbating to all those anime videos, please exercise some common courtesy and clean up your mess. It is totally unfair to make your mommy clean up after you. There's a good lad.
@ The Intruder
"Seriously? So if you go and kill someone, "your god is responsible for it? "
I will repeat what I told you before, that I am arguing from a position of theism to uncover the fallacies, evil, and inconsistencies in religion. If I steadily maintained my position as an atheist, my response for almost every question would be "I do not believe in a god, please demonstrate such". I do not want to slam the door shut on conversation, so I maintain the argument AS IF there was a god and your religious dogma was valid.
In your feeble attempt to snatch an "ah hah, gotcha" moment, you are blatantly ignoring the position I have accepted in order to further a conversation. And since I did previously describe this manner of conversation (to you) by accepting the theist dogma for the sake of debate, you have displayed dishonesty by grasping at an imaginary gotcha moment..
Based on the theist theology, this god is responsible for everything, nothing happens that this god is not aware of, and capable of predicting and changing. And just for the record, if there was a god, free will would not exist. But that is a can of worms that would require a separate thread.
Based on my personal position as an atheist, murder is one of the most heinous of despicable acts, something I would be incredibly loath to do.
I do not capitalize the noun "god" because I do not accept it as being proven to exist, and it if did exist, it definitely is not worthy of any respect or owning a capitalized name.
I do not call a worm "Worm", and I do not call this unproven hypothetical god "God".
If you desire for me to change the capitalization you must 1) prove a god exists and 2) that his god is worthy of respect.
I wouldn't resort to ad hominem attacks like stupid if I were you, especially if you lack the intelligence to understand that culpability for an act need not be limited solely to the person committing that act. Even fallible human law recognises the act of aiding and abetting a crime, so how stupid would someone have to be to claim a perfectly benevolent being with limitless power and knowledge exists, but is not in any way culpable for doing nothing to prevent ubiquitous suffering? Worse still is the claim this being designed and created a planet where continuous ubiquitous suffering was an inevitable consequence, and long before the first humans evolved for this asinine idea that such a deity could shift the blame onto one species of evolved primate.
Yes indeed, you'd be wise to avoid throwing words like stupid around, if such a simple concept is beyond your rationale. Or the simple concept that claiming that same deity regularly intervenes through miracles, but cherry picks the result in the most arbitrary and callous fashion, and yet is not culpable for suffering it could therefore according to your religion's own rationale, have easily prevented.
Next time some rich televangelist is thanking your deity for his wealth or someone is gushing praise on that deity for the miracle of saving their life in a catastrophe that killed thousands, including children and babies, you may want to ponder what manner of cruel sadistic amoral being would wield such power in such a callous and indifferent way. Then thank your lucky stars there isn't a shred of objective evidence that it is real.
I know I do, every day....
Do you believe your deity has no choice but to allow evil and suffering? Why do people pray for it to intervene then? What are we to make of claims for miraculous interventions. The claim that a deity can intervene, and does so to create miracles, is directly contradicted by the fact it allows continuous and ubiquitous suffering. Not just allows it either, but designed and created such a world, with ubiquitous suffering in the form of disease and predation, and this existed for millions of years before humans evolved, thus exists independently of any human actions.
The insentient and therefore indifferent process of evolution, by comparison explains the existence of suffering thoroughly,a and it fits all the objective evidence. Faith is pretty meaningless next to this weight of evidence. Especially when that faith is directly at odds with many of the facts.
@Sheldon Well, from my understanding of the bible and from what l have observed, this world is not what God wants it to be yet. lt is a fallen world where God does not reign supreme and his will is not done on earth as it is in heaven.
Apart from the bible, my observation alone tells me that this world is the work of a programmer( not necessarily a magical creator). This programmer also probably operates by faith and calls things that are not as though they were.
There are bad designs in this program, but the programmer doesn't want to be involved in this world( his program) to directly fix it. The bad designs are inevitable and come as a result of the good, for instance earthquakes in a way are necessary for our balance and survival on earth, but they can also cause destruction and death.
So evil is inevitable in this world by design, if there is to be good in the first place.
So it seems the programmer doesn't want to necessarily remove evil, rather he has given his robots power to overcome all evil and to be completely in charge, but they have to discover this power and it takes a long time, so he grudgingly intervenes once in a while perhaps until the son of man becomes a true ruler of the worlds, having power over death, sicknesses and diseases, then that would be the kingdom of God on earth ruled by man.
Religion and science are not opposed to one another. They work together for the same purpose, which is the pursuit of happiness. They only do it in different ways.
From the parable of the talents by jesus, we know that God doesn't want us to waste our talents but to use them and even gain more, this would include practicing science. Science was actually born from faith. ln the past, science and religion were almost thesame thing, infact science was a religion and still is, because science comes from philosophy and philosophy is a twin sister of religion, it has always been.
@The Intruder
Ah the famous "programmer" analogy...
Another unevidenced assertion, this long seemingly endless list of unevidenced assertions is very tedious. However the claim doesn't help, as it directly contradicts the claim that the christian deity has limitless power, therefore it is absurd to follow this claim with the asinine assertion there is anything it can't control. This is precisely what I mean when I stated that many of your religion's claims are directly at odds with the objective evidence. Epicurus summed up the contradiction nicely, and did it millennia before humans created your religion and deity.
I have now run out of patience with your bare assertions, and all such assertions will be dismissed in the same manner they are asserted. quod grātīs asseritur, grātīs negātur is the original Latin of the newly popularised epistemological razor, now renamed after the late author and polemecist, Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens razor applied, and henceforth will be reapplied vigorously where it is warranted.
Sigh, another unevidenced assertion, and again one that is directly contradicted by the core teachings of christianity in the claim for miracles, AS I ALREADY POINTED OUT, do you even read the responses?
Not from an omniscient omnipotent deity, that's an asinine assertion, and again unevidenced, and again already been refuted. This is starting to sound a lot like I'm being preached at, and I don't care for that thank you.
Another contradiction, and this designer is starting to sound like an incompetent bungling halfwit, like the one Heller describes in Catch 22. Do you know what omniscient and omnipotent even mean? Not to mention being callously indifferent to suffering. Each new unevidenced assertion you espouse simply reinforces the contradictions of christianity's core teachings you're trying to solve. Theists have struggled unsuccessfully for centuries with theodicy so I always find it amusing when a theist claims to have solved it, and then trots out the same cliched old rhetoric and fallacies taught to small children in Sunday school classes. It's like religion sticks with some people, and retards their intellectual capacity for critical thinking permanently.
Of course they are, don't be absurd. However the statement is entirely moot, as science validates its assertion with objective evidence, and religion and theists can't demonstrate any for their claims. Nor is science the pursuit of happiness, again this is absurd rhetoric, science is a method, a tool box to help us understand how the physical world and universe works. How we use that knowledge is entirely subjective.
You claim it, but knowledge requires objective evidence, and you can demonstrate none.
The nonsense at the end about the origins of science is as laughable as it is irrelevant. Science is a method, that gathers and tests data and models of the physical world and universe to expand our knowledge of them. Religion is not supported by any objective evidence, neither is the existence of any deity.
To claim science is a religion is imbecillic, a cursory Google of the definitions of both words destroys that farcical piece of rhetoric. So I'm at a loss as to what you hope to achieve by peddling such a dishonest cliche?
Science may well have its origins in philosophy, so what. Modern hydraulic suspension and pneumatic tyres originated from solid wooden wheels on wooden axles, its beyond stupid to claim that means they're the same, again I'm baffled as to what you hope to gain from such obviously dishonest rhetoric.
WHAT OBJECTIVE EVIDENCE CAN YOU DEMONSTRATE FOR ANY DEITY?
If the answer is none, then comparing theism to science is farcical.
@Sheldon on the programmer analogy, what would you say about the creators of the programming language themselves? Are they just like any programmer limited to the language? well yes and no.
Yes, because they set rules to that language which are the rules of software programming, so you can say they are limited to those rules they set.
No, because unlike other ordinary programmers who use the language, the creator of that programming language knows all about that programming language, so it is a different scenario here.
For example, Guido von Rossium who created python knows every software engineering law that python operates by, so in that sense Guido is all knowing when it comes to python compared to any other user of the language, but Guido cannot arbitrarily change the laws of software engineering that makes python work.
The difference between Guido and God in this case is that the laws of creation are intrinsic to the nature of God. Guido only learnt those laws of software by which he created python.
@ Shelley
Here we go, the programmer strikes again. Across the Jordan once more.
Muppet.
@The Intruder
You seem determined to ignore the fact your religion claims your deity is omniscient and omnipotent, and thus would literally have limitless choice, you are attempting to limit that choice with your desperate rationalisations, and of course as usual you don't even pretend to be able to evidence these endless claim.
Is Guido omniscient and omnipotent? FFS why do theists make these facile analogies, it's a not a complex objection they seem to want to ignore, either a deity exists that has limitless power and knowledge, as claimed by christianity and Isam for centuries, or it does not, you're trying to claim both at the same time.
Another completely unevidenced claim you have simply reeled off, and what's more it has no relevance whatsoever.
Let's try Epicurus again then...
“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”
@ The Intruder
" this world is not what God wants it to be yet"
Please expand on this, and explain what your imaginary god wants this world to be?
@David K. Re: To Intruder - "...and explain what your imaginary god wants this world to be?"
I'm gonna take a wild guess here and say Intruder's god wants our world to be something like this...
https://youtu.be/JqowmHgxVJQ
But, of course, it can't be like that right now because that nasty ol' Devil done went an' fucked it all up for everybody.
You do not believe God exists and at the same time you are asking me to prove His duty over the lives of innocent children.
I don't understand you.
You are guilty of the crime called "Faith."
Faith is first believe then work is deployed, this is no blind faith my brother.
Have you proven the existence of your mind like other parts of your body?
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