How does God work again?

1robin · Jun 25, 2018

Bob the Unbeliever said:
So? At one time, in the not-too-distant past? The majority of the planet believed the earth was both flat, and the center of the universe.

Why do you usually only respond to 20% of my posts? You refer to a concept called a population fallacy, but I what I posted isn't one.

They were all --- every one-- wrong.

You need to fully read what you respond to. In this instant someone said the Gandalf and Christ were equal I just proved they weren't.

Argument From Popularity is a Logical Fallacy-- it holds no weight.

It can't occur unless I said because something was popular it was true which I didn't do to begin with. Please read what you respond to so you don't look silly and waste my time.

Bob the Unbeliever · Jun 25, 2018

1robin said:
Bob, you are truly one for the record books. Your statement could serve as the picture in an encyclopedia for what the terms hypocrite and biased mean. Your actually saying that the only testimony you would allow must be from those that agree with you and then you call ME biased. This is utterly absurd.

Nope. Nice little Straw Man / Projection you have built up there. Be a shame if someone were to knock it down.....

There are, in case you were unaware (and you seem quite unaware of a whole lot of things with respect to actual reality) there are non-christian biblical scholars out and about...

Seeing as they do not have a Dog in the Race? Their findings would likely be less biased.

It has #*)%#Q)(% to do with what I like or do not like-- it has everything to do with Human Nature. And your continued use of Ad Hom against anyone you do not like?

Well... that does not speak well for your character.

However, your post above, does seem to fit well within your general overall attitude....

1robin said:
I have a little time on my hands at the moment so I will have a LIMITED discussion with you for now but please don't make me regret any more than I already do.

Condescending and self-superior post duly noted. Do your ears pop when you climb up into your Ivory Tower? Asking for a friend...

1robin said:
Before you get too far down Loony lane here you need to go back and deal with the expert testimony I posted in post #250.

Condescending and Ad Hom post duly noted. Curious: do your legs ever ache, from climbing 99 steps to the top of that Ivory Tower?

Ooops! My bad-- it would be 666 steps to the top. Sorry about that! I had completely forgotten, as It's been over a decade since I climbed up there myself... let's see... it was back in 2005, the last time I was there...

Bob the Unbeliever · Jun 25, 2018

1robin said:
Why do you usually only respond to 20% of my posts? You refer to a concept called a population fallacy, but I what I posted isn't one.

Absolutely false. You posted a comment-- that was 100% based on "Well LOTS and LOTS of people DO IT! Why don't YOU?"

Which is the very definition of Argument From Popularity Logical Fallacy-- go look it up. And it doesn't matter WHAT the subject was?

If your "justification" was based on "LOTS AND LOTS DO IT--PROMISE" then you are guilty.

1robin said:
You need to fully read what you respond to. In this instant someone said the Gandalf and Christ were equal I just proved they weren't.

No-- you proved nothing of the sort! Both are fictional characters, and your attempt to claim, "well LOTSESESS OF PEOPLESESSES DUN'T THUNK SO! SO THERE!" does not prove anything-- except that lots of people are easily fooled.

Which anyone paying attention already knows...

1robin said:
It can't occur unless I said because something was popular it was true which I didn't do to begin with. Please read what you respond to so you don't look silly and waste my time.

You claimed that christ wasn't a mythic figure-- which is patently false.

Note-- being a Mythic Figure has nothing to do with whether the figure in question existed at one point or not.

Bob the Unbeliever · Jun 25, 2018

1robin said:
Why do you usually only respond to 20% of my posts?

Frankly, that's about as far as I get read, before I start to laugh out loud-- my co-workers are starting to give me funny looks, too....

Once I hit a brick-wall of blatant false statement(s)? I kinda lose interest in further reading....

... most especially if lots of biblely stuff is also included-- as if nobody else int he world has ever read the silly thing....

1robin · Jun 25, 2018

Bob the Unbeliever said:
Nope. Nice little Straw Man / Projection you have built up there. Be a shame if someone were to knock it down.....

This is not an argument.

There are, in case you were unaware (and you seem quite unaware of a whole lot of things with respect to actual reality) there are non-christian biblical scholars out and about...

This is not an argument.

Seeing as they do not have a Dog in the Race? Their findings would likely be less biased.

Not an argument.

It has #*)%#Q)(% to do with what I like or do not like-- it has everything to do with Human Nature. And your continued use of Ad Hom against anyone you do not like?

I did not say anything about you may or may not like.

Well... that does not speak well for your character.

Not an argument.

However, your post above, does seem to fit well within your general overall attitude....

Come of it man this is not an argument it is empty color commentary.

Condescending and self-superior post duly noted. Do your ears pop when you climb up into your Ivory Tower? Asking for a friend...

Empty and arrogant color commentary.

Condescending and Ad Hom post duly noted. Curious: do your legs ever ache, from climbing 99 steps to the top of that Ivory Tower?

Ooops! My bad-- it would be 666 steps to the top. Sorry about that! I had completely forgotten, as It's been over a decade since I climbed up there myself... let's see... it was back in 2005, the last time I was there...

Wow, not a single argument (even a bad one) in your entire post to even consider. Keep this up and this discussion won't last long.

Bob the Unbeliever · Jun 25, 2018

1robin said:
This is not an argument.

This is not an argument.

Not an argument.

I did not say anything about you may or may not like.

Not an argument.

Come of it man this is not an argument it is empty color commentary.

Empty and arrogant color commentary.

Wow, not a single argument (even a bad one) in your entire post to even consider. Keep this up and this discussion won't last long.

Physician! Heal thyself! Take a loooong look in the mirror-- and look at your very ugly and condescending posts to me, first.

I could re-use your post, above, and apply " Not an argument." to your last 3 posts...

In fact? I could likely apply them to .... most of your posts herein.

1robin · Jun 25, 2018

Bob the Unbeliever said:
Absolutely false. You posted a comment-- that was 100% based on "Well LOTS and LOTS of people DO IT! Why don't YOU?"

Which is the very definition of Argument From Popularity Logical Fallacy-- go look it up. And it doesn't matter WHAT the subject was?

If your "justification" was based on "LOTS AND LOTS DO IT--PROMISE" then you are guilty.

You apparently did not read what you responded to and do not care.

Someone said Gandalf and Christ are equal. I said that they weren't because one has billions of followers and the other doesn't. Can you read what your responding to or not?

No-- you proved nothing of the sort! Both are fictional characters, and your attempt to claim, "well LOTSESESS OF PEOPLESESSES DUN'T THUNK SO! SO THERE!" does not prove anything-- except that lots of people are easily fooled.

I proved exactly what I said I did. try and catch up or get out of the way.

You claimed that christ wasn't a mythic figure-- which is patently false.

Quote anywhere where I said Christ is not a mythic figure. I don't believe he is one but I never said he wasn't. Keep up for pity's sake.

Note-- being a Mythic Figure has nothing to do with whether the figure in question existed at one point or not.

I didn't claim Christ was not a mythic figure. Who is it your responding to? It isn't me.

Bob the Unbeliever · Jun 25, 2018

1robin said:
Not an argument.

Actually? You are lying, here-- my argument was that there are non-christian bible scholars, and THEIR research has more reliability than christian bible scholars.

Which was and is the entirety of my previous few posts!

The one you objected to by attempting to impune my characters like the good little judgmental person you are.

Lest you have forgotten? This is one of your posts-- one of the ugliest I've seen in several days, in fact:

But it is a testament to your character.

1robin said:
Bob, you are truly one for the record books. Your statement could serve as the picture in an encyclopedia for what the terms hypocrite and biased mean. Your actually saying that the only testimony you would allow must be from those that agree with you and then you call ME biased. This is utterly absurd.
...
Before you get too far down Loony lane ... .

Who Would Jesus Insult?

Bob the Unbeliever · Jun 25, 2018

1robin said:
Someone said Gandalf and Christ are equal. I said that they weren't because one has billions of followers and the other doesn't. Can you read what your responding to or not?

That is literally, a textbook example of Argument From Popularity Logical Fallacy!

1robin · Jun 25, 2018

Bob the Unbeliever said:
Frankly, that's about as far as I get read, before I start to laugh out loud-- my co-workers are starting to give me funny looks, too....

Once I hit a brick-wall of blatant false statement(s)? I kinda lose interest in further reading....

... most especially if lots of biblely stuff is also included-- as if nobody else int he world has ever read the silly thing....

You sought me out not the other way around. You sent me 9 posts in a row (6 in just 15 minutes), your the one seeking me out. You found a post I sent to someone else, you didn't read it apparently and only responded to a sentence fragment from it. If you think so little of my posts you shouldn't be seeking me out.

1robin · Jun 25, 2018

Bob the Unbeliever said:
Physician! Heal thyself! Take a loooong look in the mirror-- and look at your very ugly and condescending posts to me, first.

I could re-use your post, above, and apply " Not an argument." to your last 3 posts...

In fact? I could likely apply them to .... most of your posts herein.

Not an argument.

1robin · Jun 25, 2018

Bob the Unbeliever said:
Actually? You are lying, here-- my argument was that there are non-christian bible scholars, and THEIR research has more reliability than christian bible scholars.

Which was and is the entirety of my previous few posts!

The one you objected to by attempting to impune my characters like the good little judgmental person you are.

Lest you have forgotten? This is one of your posts-- one of the ugliest I've seen in several days, in fact:

But it is a testament to your character.

Who Would Jesus Insult?

Ok, you didn't make it far. Your accusing me of lying is a bridge too far. To know I am lying you must know that what I said is wrong and you must know that I knew it was wrong and posted it anyway (this you cannot possibly do) so we are done here and if it keeps up I will put you on my ignore list.

Evangelicalhumanist · Jun 25, 2018

1robin said:
I have shown that Allah and Yahweh are not the same deity. This you deny and you use the possible fact they are both are Abrahamic faiths they must be the same deity. This is impossible.
I believe Islam is from Satan and the reason they have superficial similarities is because Satan's greatest tactic is as an Angel of light that choses to copy God.

Actually, what is impossible, in my view, is the entire panoply of beliefs that seem able to simultaneously accept inescapable contradictions, as both Christianity and Islam do:

That there is ONLY ONE GOD
That there is also something called a Satan that has power seemingly equal to God's, being able to thwart God's will with impunity

Consider this: God has managed to convince less than one third of humanity of His Own Truth -- and in ways that contradict one another from denomination to denomination and from sect to sect, while Satan has managed to convince over two thirds of humanity that God does not exist in the way (or one of the ways) in which the Christian God wants to be known.

This would seem to make Satan more powerful (or at least capable) than God, and therefore also more godlike.

Quite clearly, to anyone who looks at it honestly even for a second, "Thy will be done" is simply wishful thinking.

Evangelicalhumanist · Jun 25, 2018

1robin said:
Unlike most things this really isn't opinion based. In the oldest existing documents X is said to be a characteristic of Allah and X' is said to be a characteristic of Yahweh x ad naseum. By the law of non-contradiction then not only is Allah mutually exclusive with Yahweh both can't possibly exist. It is much worse than just that they are different it's that only one (if any) can possibly exist.

You are making a non-argument here, because you are not talking about which God's exist or what characteristics they may or may not have. No, instead you are talking about what some humans (fallible, or imaginative, more likely both) say about their various conceptions of gods.

And until God does what any real God should be able to do an make everything about himself known with clarity to every human being, that's all you're talking about. The thing nobody is actually talking about is God, because nobody has any access to any real knowledge at all about God -- including whether there even is such a thing.

Evangelicalhumanist · Jun 25, 2018

sojourner said:
Not so. Even an all-powerful God requires the receiver to do the actual work of receiving. Because this isn’t about forcing, it’s about reciprocity.

God may very well know that the receiver isn’t recriving. But it’s not God’s job to do the work of receiving. That’s why it’s a partnership.

Now, looked at in the light of logic, this is simply bizarre!

Every "revealed religion," which they all are, by the way, depends utterly on this idea of a God communicating and "the faithful" receiving the communication and understanding it correctly. Every one, with God communicating variously through Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Paul, Baha'u'llah, Joseph Smith, and thousands of other named and unnamed "prophets" through history. And yet, at the end of the day, either one of two things has happened:

A whole lot of prophets "heard from God" and passed it along to the rest of us, but God was saying different things to each of them, or
A whole lot of people imagined they "heard from God" but only very few were actually listening to "the real God," and actually and accurately hearing what was being communicated by this real God
In the latter case, the only thing left to dispute is which prophets, and which God, and how can you know?

And the trouble really is this: there is no possible way to know which. No faith has any actually superior evidence for the factual claims it makes than any other faith, for the simple reason that no faith has any actual evidence -- save what prophets have claimed -- than any other. Thus, all religious beliefs have an equal claim to the truth, because their claims are all based on the same unevidenced revelations, and if that is the case, they are all of equal value.

And to my mind, if that last statement is true, as I think it is, they all have no value at all in terms of truth, only whatever comfort the "faithful" take from whichever of those many unevidenced beliefs they happen to follow.

Earthling · Jun 25, 2018

Evangelicalhumanist said:
The quote above was posted in a discussion thread, and I did not want to interrupt that. Still, there is something here that I think really needs to be discussed, and that is what I've highlighted in red. It says, "[G]od made then cosmos, and then he sent [J]esus [C]hrist to show us the rules of how we should play the game of life.

Is this really, given the history of the human race as far as we know it, really likely to be the case, or even close?

Consider the human timeline, first (condensed and paraphrased from Wikipedia Timeline of human prehistory - Wikipedia):
200,000 years ago homo sapiens appears in Africa
170,000 years ago humans are wearing clothes (the Bible makes that about 6,000 years ago)
82,000 years ago the earliest evidence of personal adornment (perforated seashell beads) in Morocco
70,000 years ago the earliest abstract or symbolic art in Blombos Cave, South Africa
50,000 years ago the earliest sewing needle
42,000 years ago paleolithic flutes in Germany
40,000 - 30,000 years ago the first human settlement in Australia
28,500 years ago New Guinea is populated
20,000 years ago the Kebaran culture in the Levant
20,000 years ago, storage and cooking vessels in China
13,000 years ago the first domestication of sheep
12,000 years ago, Jericho is settled

I could go on and on and on. There were whole civilizations -- all over the world, including all of continents except Antarctica -- for more than 10,000 years before Christ came along. There were entire religions in every corner of this planet before, in fact, the Jews had even heard from (or rather invented) Yaweh!

And for reasons that nobody can give even a remotely reasonable explanation for, this god and this Jesus -- presumably all-powerful, chose a little place at the far end of the Mediterranean Sea -- and only there -- to deliver these rules, leaving all other places in the world unenlightened until Christians could dream up missionaries to go tell them the "good news?" And even then, we cannot forget, that the majority of humans in the world right up until today do not believe in the Christian "rules of how we should play the game of life."

I cannot for the life of me understand how anybody could ignore all of that in order to believe that the Christian version is true in any sense. What was god doing all that time, and in all those other places? And why? Anybody got any ideas that take this out of the realm of myth and into the realm of believability?

The Bible is meticulously recorded. In a few verses, like, from Genesis 5:1-29; Genesis 7:6 can be taken 1, 656 years. From Adam's creation to the global deluge. From the meticulous recording of death and birth. It's like a written stream of time with markers for events within the narrative.

Like this . . .

From Adam’s creation to the birth of Seth 130 years
Then to the birth of Enosh 105 years
To the birth of Kenan 90 years
To the birth of Mahalalel 70 years
To the birth of Jared 65 years
To the birth of Enoch 162 years
To the birth of Methuselah 65 years
To the birth of Lamech 187 years
To the birth of Noah 182 years
To the Flood 600 years
Total 1,656 years

How do you arrive at 200,000 years ago homo sapiens appears in Africa or 170,000 years ago humans are wearing clothes?

Evangelicalhumanist · Jun 25, 2018

Clothes, 170,000 years ago Humans First Wore Clothing 170,000 Years Ago

Evangelicalhumanist · Jun 25, 2018

So, I answered your question, now please find me a single example in all of actual, reliable, recorded and verifiable human history of anybody living over 140 years, since you gratuitously used many of those in your "argument." .

Earthling · Jun 25, 2018

Evangelicalhumanist said:
Clothes, 170,000 years ago Humans First Wore Clothing 170,000 Years Ago

There it is. I'm sorry, for some reason my browser says that link is unavailable, could you explain to me the pertinent portion like I did with my example? Just copy and paste it would be fine.

sojourner · Jun 25, 2018

Bob the Unbeliever said:
I would cast what you describe as "faith", as "hope". There is some tacit understanding that with hope, the possibility exists that the outcome will be.... less than optimal. Disappointing, even.

Whereas with faith, comes the zeal of certitude-- and with that, the changes in the brain that rise up to prevent any and all thoughts that might possibly contra-indicate what is believed.

Antiprocess. I've seen exactly that, among the faithful-- they are literally willing to desire ignorance, lest their faith be shaken or even tested a little bit. Eyes closed, ears stopped up, hands in their pockets, saying "nah-nah-nah-nah" lest something break their faith.

I've seen it in their behaviors too-- refuse to read anything outside the "approved" list, even taking their impressionable children out of public discourse, to shelter them from any stray .... thoughts.

As Lewis Black once quipped? "I would love to believe in a literal genesis flood, or creation. But I have these...... thoughts."

No, I remain unconvinced: Faith is the literal surrender of all reason, and clinging to some perceived (or worse-- something that has been brainwashed into the psyche) "authority".

Which is sad: I can easily program a robot to have such behaviors (assuming a robot could be complex enough to be self-aware). Such that he robot would be incapable of reasoning outside those bounds.

But a human with ... thoughts? Faith keeps getting in the way of those...

You know, there is an epidemic of poor faith choices and faith practices that turn us away from being all we can be ( which is what faith is for). It has literally usurped the essence of faith and turned it into what you describe. Fortunately, there are still many for whom faith is not a surrender of reason, but a blooming of reason. I find that encouraging.

How does God work again?

Christian/Baptist

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"Truth" isn't a thing...

"Truth" isn't a thing...

"Truth" isn't a thing...

David Henson

"Truth" isn't a thing...

"Truth" isn't a thing...

David Henson

Annoyingly Progressive Since 2006