To any Atheists, I Have a Few Scenarios for you to Look At.

[Kerr]

You mean white swans actually exist? BS! they are all black.

You must have seen and albino swan.

Cheers

Technically... isn´t that a white swan?

 

[richardlowellt]

The Atheist Life:

Fight Christians,
Fight Religion,

Some do some don't it's not necessary to do either.

Enjoy life,

Absolutely, to the fullest.

Nothing is a sin, you can do whatever you want,

Nope, i can't rape my neighbors 18 year old daughter no matter how hot she is, and i can't torture and murder my boss, although the thought has crossed my mind.

Eat have sex 24/7 it doesn't matter

Now your talking, absolutely, although at my age i will run out of gas at some point and need a brief rest.

Atheism is the belief of no Gods

Stupid statement how can you believe in something you know doesn't exist.



Just face it...Religion will never die.[/QUOTE]Oh it will eventually, already church memberships are down considerably, Catholics are leaving the church in record numbers, very soon science will tell us all we need to know, it will give us eternal life if we chose, in less than a hundred years our life spans have increased enormously, religion was useful in our species infancy, another hundred years or so we will have outgrown all need for an imaginary being.

 

[DarkSun]

Indeed - being ignorant doesn't necessarily make you an idiot. Of course, it doesn't help your case either.

I'm not ignorant either.

 

[DarkSun]

Sorry if it's a strawman, but I don't see that yet. Could you explain why it's a strawman. I'm missing that.

A straw man is a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue. The basic idea is to "win" an argument by leading attention away from the argument and to another topic.

Straw man - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I'd get a better source, but there really isn't much point.

I wasn't trying to say that you're right or wrong or deluded or anything. I'm not trying to suggest that all atheists are idiots or that theists are idiots for being celebate after some old man tells them whatever. So since your post had absolutely nothing to do with what I was getting at whatsoever, it was a strawman by definition.

Perhaps I'm a nitpicker, but this scenario itself is flawed. Perhaps you remember Black Elk, who had a similar vision? When he told his people,they not only took it seriously, but also undertook to "manifest" the vision through an elaborate ceremony. He was honored as a seer. Native Americans have always respected dreams and visions.

My bad.

I too want to see how this is a strawman. Particularly given that you seemed unwilling to confront such analogies in previous treads.

I can imagine OJ’s lawyer in court during his next case telling the jury that since they cannot disprove aliens involvement with the evidence they must acquit due to contaminated evidence. Thankfully our justice systems don’t work on the flawed principles of the OP’s logic.

I was trying to show that theists and atheists are each equally justified based on the lack of evidence for God's existence and the lack of evidence against it.

Whether or not you can find the proof for a negative or not is irrelevant too - because there still isn't any proof for or against besides what makes sense to the individual based on their objective experiences.

I don't get it.. Was it my dream or the girls dream? And who is that girl anyway?
And why on earth would I keep telling others my dream if they all think it's just a dream anyway? Why would "what I believe" and "what I keep telling them" be the same?

Not the point.

I have no need to prove him wrong, I don't care if he has a different belief from mine. Besides, it is just a swan. Beautifull creatures, but not interresting enough for me to discover the black swan. Whenever I see one I'll tell my friend he was right.

Relevance?

I get the feeling that when you said "to any atheist...", you actually didn't mean me at all?
I do not view the kid as poor and neither is he brainwashed. After all, at his age he could have been me running out of that church. His parents might be feeding lies, but I asume they are in that church as well and do not see it as lies. Furthermore, If I would need to prove anything to the boy, it would still mean I would have to get int hat church or wait for the boy to come back. Both are not interresting enough to spend my time on.

Still not what I was getting at, but I'll frubal you for that.

Now I know I am only the first to really answer the questions, I am curious as to why you made them..

See above. But I am surprised by the amount of people who seem to feel like I'm attacking them. I don't see why their automatic preference would be to assume I'm ignorant.

Ooh! Is this like 2-Minute Mysteries?.

:biglaugh:

Nothing in her dream occured, so while "proof" lies in that piece of evidence that convinces, there is no evidence here that could convince.

What she said turned out to be true, though. And even if the elder may have been justified in telling the woman she was deluded, because there was no evidence for what she was saying... there was no evidence against it either. So we have the elder's viewpoint, and the girl's viewpoint. Who has more evidence in your eyes?

Keep in mind that a lack of evidence for a statement does not count as evidence against it. That would be like saying that a lack of evidence for black swans counts as evidence against them... when actually, they really do exist.

I like the suggestion to travel to Australia and find out for oneself. That would supply the needed piece of evidence.

But black swans can't exist. There is no evidence for the existence of black swans here so black swans cannot exist at all. If black swans are really all that great, then they should show themselves.

Apart from that I could never think those things, to prove a speculative opinion to be true would require entirely too much work (convincing the child's parents to allow the child to participate, getting licences and permits, hiring investigators and psychologists, devising and conducting empirical experiments), not to mention expensive.

Define: "brainwashed"... Isn't "common sense" just the collection of prejudices acquired by the age of eighteen?

Here's a scenario for you.

Imagine that you actually begin to think things through.

Arrogance.

That's a silly thing to disbelieve, considering the vast diversity of species I would already be familiar with - and considering I'd be learning about more every day due to the trophies brought back to England by colonialists. Is my friend a notorious liar or something? Why would I have decided swans have to be white? That smacks of irrational dogma. Hardly my thing.

Actually, the major premise of the time was that all swans are white. Kind of like how the major premise for disease is currently that only proteins, viruses or bacteria can cause it. Whether silly or not, we tend to stick to our premises about reality until proven wrong... you don't have to be a theist for that to be true for you (again, all views are equally valid unless they conflict with the evidence).

And you would be surprised how many people back in England didn't believe that swans could ever be black.

This is an easy one. Picture you're walking down a block with a mosque, a synagogue, a Mormon temple, a Baptist church and a Catholic church, as well as places of worship for a dozen other "one true path" religions. All of a sudden, one child comes out of each of them, approaches you, and in unison they all ask "Why aren't you inside my church learning the truth"? It is possible that only one child is NOT deluded and brainwashed and the rest are. But since there is no way to determine which of the children that might be, and because the "truth" they are all being taught has a host of characteristics in common - none stand out as being any more plausible than the rest - the only rational (not to mention fair) conclusion to draw is that they are all deluded and being indoctrinated with falsehoods.

Or that they're all looking at the same thing from different angles - including yourself.

Why was it real, exactly? It just felt real? No more than a month ago, I woke up in the middle of the night and saw red-haired woman pinned to my ceiling across the room, screaming at me. It was a strange, very real, sleep-paralysis hallucination. Why would anyone believe that she was real? The human mind is a screwed up thing.

Irrelevant.

Ask your friend to shoot one and have it mounted and sent back, if you can't make the trip yourself. I'll remain skeptical until I see evidence, (though the claim is believable enough that I may soften my position based on hearsay).

The feathers were obviously painted.

The hell it can't. If you believe in the God of the Bible, then tell that to Job or Abraham or Noah. They got face-to-face sit-downs. In those days, people got killed by she-bears for making fun of a bald guy. If you're saying that this character actually exists, then where is he? Where's the infidel smoting? Why do scientific double-blind studies show that prayer is ineffective when it was clearly promised to be effective in the Bible?

Bigoted, stereotyping and irrelevant.

You don't appear to have a clue what a strawman is.

I like how your default assumption of anyone who disagrees with you is that they must be ignorant.

I'll respond to the rest later.

 

[dogsgod]

A straw man is when one makes up a supposedly analogous scenario that's easy to tear down, as if tearing down the straw man diminishes your opponents argument.

The wiki definition was that of a red herring, red herrings are used to distract attention away from the main argument.

 

[dogsgod]

straw man: creating a false scenario and then attacking it. (e.g., Evolutionists think that everything came about by random chance.) Most evolutionists think in terms of natural selection which may involve incidental elements, but does not depend entirely on random chance. Painting your opponent with false colors only deflects the purpose of the argument. Common fallacies

 

[DarkSun]

straw man: creating a false scenario and then attacking it. (e.g., Evolutionists think that everything came about by random chance.) Most evolutionists think in terms of natural selection which may involve incidental elements, but does not depend entirely on random chance. Painting your opponent with false colors only deflects the purpose of the argument. Common fallacies

If Sunstone was attacking something which I never said (or rather, what he thought I said), how did he not perform a strawman?

Sorry about the dodgey definition, I was in a bit of a rush.

 

[DarkSun]

And I'm the Second Coming of Jesus. You can't disprove it, and I might be on to something. We're on equal ground, really.

On the off chance that you actually believe that: yes we are.

The hell it can't. If you believe in the God of the Bible, then tell that to Job or Abraham or Noah. They got face-to-face sit-downs. In those days, people got killed by she-bears for making fun of a bald guy. If you're saying that this character actually exists, then where is he? Where's the infidel smoting? Why do scientific double-blind studies show that prayer is ineffective when it was clearly promised to be effective in the Bible?

Yes. Where are those black swans, anyway?

Why is it that he's gotten shy just as people have started to ask for evidence? He used to commit religion-specific plagues in Egypt just for kicks.

Lol.

What girl? Maybe you should formulate these posts more carefully.

Looks like it.

If you think your dreams are reality; you're deluded. Something you dream may, or may not, ever happen. That has nothing to do with whether you dreamed it.

I don't believe that personally... but at least I'm willing to admit that I can't prove that belief.

Of course it can; why not? Is there something about swanness and makes it impossible for one to be black? He wasn't.

See previous posts.

Now this is easy. Just set foot inside the church and watch all the child-brainwashing going on.

You still haven't proven anything.

Did you have a point?

They might. And they equally well might not. What on earth is your point?

Read the above posts.

That's right. I'm fighting Christians, enjoying life, eating, and having sex at this very moment.

Atheists are the ultimate multi-taskers.

Bahahahahahaha!

Some Scientologists might be on to something. Also some alien conspiracy theoriests. I just prefer to base my life on the highly probably, not the remotely possible.

Why do you think it's impossible? Have you disproven it, or could it be that you just think it sounds ludicrous without any evidence?

Yes. Also the Tooth Fairyists and a-Tooth Fairy-ists, the unicornists and a-unicornists, and anybody who asserts anything imaginary, apparently, according to you. However, until someone comes forth with evidence of Tooth Fairies, unicorns, and Gods, I think I'll continue to carry on on the fairly safe assumption there's no such thing.

I agree with your disbelief in most of those things. But I don't have any scientific evidence to support that view, which means that both belief and disbelief in the tooth fairy are equally justified.

Is your name eselam? This is his approach to any evidence for evolution. He won't look at it, because he already knows it's impossible.

You haven't posted any evidence. If you have evidence that disproves even the remotest possibility that any God exists then I'd be happy to look at it.

I'm a bit shocked, DarkSun, your posts are usually of much better quality. Having an off day, are we?

You haven't told us when the dream takes place. Is it in Europe prior to 1492? If she is living in Europe, then those ships would be arriving on European shores. No wonder her elders treated her as being delusional. If the dream happened last night then clearly the child has issues that need to be dealt with... and soon.

It's before white men/women ever made contact. Now can you please explain how this is important?

Actually, no. It would depend entirely how much I respected my friend's opinion. If I felt they were truthful and trustworthy, being a reasonable person, I would exclaim disbelief, but would probably say, "Wow, you learn something new everyday! I'll take your word for it as I know you well enough and that you wouldn't lie to me." In my view, only an utter moron would react differently.

Okay, so you would express disbelief. Do you have any proof for such a view? I'm not saying you're not justified in disbelieving, by the way. I'm just asking whether you have scientific proof for the inexistence of black swans. It might have been more meaningful if I'd made the scenario so that black swans were never discovered before, and everyone didn't believe they existed... which would have made them wrong once the evidence had presented itself.

Actually, I would be far more likely to ask the little bugger why he was talking to strangers when his parents weren't around, but hey, that's just me.

Irrelevant, but good point.

So much for your amusing scenarios. Back to the drawing board.

:areyoucra

Can't, but I can demonstrate that there is no relevant correlation between dreams and reality that would imply any such predictive power of dreams.

Good point. That's probably what the elder was thinking.

Semantics. Prove that there's no red green, that there's no round square. This is more a problem of rigidly sticking to definitions without understanding the concepts in context.

I don't see the relevance... but that's probably because don't understand what you mean. Could you please elaborate?

Why? I don't know anything about the boy. He might be the evil genious doing the brainwashing.

Possibly.

What are you getting at anyway?

Read the above posts.

The only one I can think of is Pocahontas, though the genocide in Mexico and elsewhere had been underway for about a hundred years by the time she died, under the name Rebecca Wolfe, in England.

:bow:

You mean white swans actually exist? BS! they are all black.

You must have seen and albino swan.

Cheers

You mean BLACK swans actually exist? What world do you live on, man!? I'm going to have to ask you to recant your belief in black swans, or else I shall have to declare a Holy War against you.

 

[Commoner]

I don't see the relevance... but that's probably because don't understand what you mean. Could you please elaborate?

Sure.

When someting is very rigidly defined - like "a square", you can logically disprove the existance of something like a "round square". But, a "swan" is much more than just "a white bird". The question there is, could a black swan still be a swan, even though one of its attributes is not typical of a swan? How far can the definition of a swan be stretched?

If a child were born with two heads, would we not call it human anymore, since a human being has one head, two arms, two legs? Of course not, the child has all the other attributes of a human being, so it's human.

So, it really depends on the context. I couldn't just flat out say, "no, there are no black swans" like I could say "there are no round squares". There might indeed exist a black swan, so I wouldn't find it impossible. I wouldn't consider my friend's letter as proof though, and I certainly wouldn't go around convincing others that black swans exist.


BTW Darksun, haven't we already been through this "it's equally justified to believe as it is to disbelieve in something if there is no proof either way" crap? I'd hate to have to repeat myself!

 

[Autodidact]

Dark Sun:

You didn't ask for evidence or proof, and you didn't tell us what on earth your obscure point is. Then you replied that people had not provided evidence or proof, and missed your point. Not very effective.

If you want evidence (or proof) that there is no God, then ask for it.

 

[Herr Heinrich]

Imagine these scenarios:

1 - You're a native American living freely in Europe. One night, you have a dream about white men coming to your land in big ships. The dream turns bleak. You dream of sickness, of disease, of death, of pain all because of the white men. When you wake up, you were so sure that the dream was real - but when you tell your elders they automatically console you... and tell you that such a thing will never happen, and that it was all a figment of your imagination. You keep believing what you saw to be true, and eventually everyone around you gives up on you as being deluded. Prove that the girl's dream was wrong.

2 - You're living in England in the 1750s. You have a firm view in mind that all swans are white. Someone then travels to Australia fifty years later and sends you back a letter telling you that they saw a black swan. But this can't be true. Swans are white. Your friend is obviously lying because black swans clearly don't exist, as you've never seen one yourself before. Prove that the man was lying.

3 - You're walking passed a church one day. The year is 2010 and your life is going pretty darn well. Suddenly, a small child strolls out and asks you why you're not inside. Not believing in a God of any kind, you smile to the boy and say you don't belong there. The boy frowns and walks back inside. You sigh. That poor child is being brainwashed. He's deluded and his parents are feeding lies to him. Prove this to be true.

I see what you are trying to say here. I like your scenarios, very nice. The burden of proof is on the believer though. It is hard to prove a negative.

 

[Smoke]

I like how your default assumption of anyone who disagrees with you is that they must be ignorant.

It's not my default assumption.

I was trying to show that theists and atheists are each equally justified based on the lack of evidence for God's existence and the lack of evidence against it.

Everybody knew what you were trying to show. It's your constant theme, and it's nonsense. If we accepted your argument, we would also conclude that it's just as reasonable to believe in leprechauns as not to believe in them. It would be just as reasonable to believe that the Queen is a vampire, or that the Dalai Lama is a werewolf, or that goldfish are in communication with an extraterrestrial race, or that breaking your nose exactly three times before the age of thirty proves you are the reincarnation of a German Emperor, as to disbelieve any of those things.

I agree with your disbelief in most of those things. But I don't have any scientific evidence to support that view, which means that both belief and disbelief in the tooth fairy are equally justified.

I think you have here established your level of credibility.

I'm not aware of anybody who held a dogmatic belief at the beginning of the nineteenth century that black swans could not exist, or who argued the impossibility of black swans even after they were discovered by Europeans, but if they had, so what? I'm not arguing the impossibility of gods; I'm merely stating the obvious fact that there is no objective evidence for gods. I don't believe in gods because I have no reason to believe in them, just as I presently have no reason to believe in neon green swans. If you can produce objective evidence of neon green swans, I'll be happy to look at the evidence and accept it if it's convincing -- just as Europeans, when they encountered black swans, recognized them as swans.

In fact, it's a rare atheist who believes that gods cannot exist. That belief is more commonly held by theists, who often (though not always) believe that gods other than their own cannot exist. Many a Christian will tell you with absolute certainty either that the Aesir cannot exist or that if they do exist they must necessarily be demons. Just about any Muslim will tell you that Jesus cannot be God's Son. Atheists rarely describe their disbelief in such terms.

I can agree with you that it's just as reasonable to believe that gods may exist as it is to believe that they cannot exist. But I don't believe gods cannot exist. I simply don't believe they do, just as I don't believe that the Queen is a vampire or that the Dalai Lama is a werewolf. And theists don't believe gods may exist, they believe they, or some of them or one of them, does exist, just as somebody might believe the Queen is a vampire.

 

[Magic Man]

Imagine these scenarios:

1 - You're a native American living freely in Europe. One night, you have a dream about white men coming to your land in big ships. The dream turns bleak. You dream of sickness, of disease, of death, of pain all because of the white men. When you wake up, you were so sure that the dream was real - but when you tell your elders they automatically console you... and tell you that such a thing will never happen, and that it was all a figment of your imagination. You keep believing what you saw to be true, and eventually everyone around you gives up on you as being deluded. Prove that the girl's dream was wrong.

You know, you're right. We should just accept anything anybody ever says. I mean, it's always possible that they're not deluded. I better read up on my conspiracy theories. I don't want there to be egg on my face when they come true and I sillily (yes, I used it) doubted them.

2 - You're living in England in the 1750s. You have a firm view in mind that all swans are white. Someone then travels to Australia fifty years later and sends you back a letter telling you that they saw a black swan. But this can't be true. Swans are white. Your friend is obviously lying because black swans clearly don't exist, as you've never seen one yourself before. Prove that the man was lying.

That's just stupid. Who cares if there's a black swan? There's no reason to believe there couldn't be. There's reason to believe that a theistic, omnimax god doesn't exist.

3 - You're walking passed a church one day. The year is 2010 and your life is going pretty darn well. Suddenly, a small child strolls out and asks you why you're not inside. Not believing in a God of any kind, you smile to the boy and say you don't belong there. The boy frowns and walks back inside. You sigh. That poor child is being brainwashed. He's deluded and his parents are feeding lies to him. Prove this to be true.

Well, the parents are just passing down what they've learned. If they believe in an omnimax, theistic, interventionalist god, they have no reason for believing in it other than what they've been told by others.

 

[Kilgore Trout]

I'm not ignorant either.

If you're not ignorant, then you're intellectually dishonest.

 

[Magic Man]

I was trying to show that theists and atheists are each equally justified based on the lack of evidence for God's existence and the lack of evidence against it.

No, they're not. That's where you're wrong, and that's what everyone's trying to tell you.

I murder my next-door neighbor. There's obviously no reason for me to have done this. It was not provoked at all, and there are multiple witnesses to attest to the fact that I did it in cold blood. My defense is that Satan made me do it, and it wasn't my fault at all. Should I go free because the government can't prove that Satan didn't make me do it? Or should they lock me up because my defense is utter BS?

See above. But I am surprised by the amount of people who seem to feel like I'm attacking them. I don't see why their automatic preference would be to assume I'm ignorant.

It's not about attacking. It's about the fact that you're clearly ignorant about the subject you seem to think you know something about.

What she said turned out to be true, though. And even if the elder may have been justified in telling the woman she was deluded, because there was no evidence for what she was saying... there was no evidence against it either. So we have the elder's viewpoint, and the girl's viewpoint. Who has more evidence in your eyes?

The elder's. You don't seem to understand. As humans, we constantly act on experience. Our minds constantly decide what's good info and what's not in order for us to function normally. While the girl's dream may be right, we have no reason to believe it is, unless she's had other dreams that came true. If this is the first time, why should anyone believe it'll come true? That would go against every experience.

Keep in mind that a lack of evidence for a statement does not count as evidence against it.

Yes, it does.

That would be like saying that a lack of evidence for black swans counts as evidence against them... when actually, they really do exist.

Yes, if there's no evidence for the existence of black swans, that counts as evidence against their existence. If new evidence comes to light, like finding a live black swan, then that can trump the earlier lack of evidence. So far, I know of no such evidence for a theistic god.

But black swans can't exist.

Why not? What is is about being a swan that means it inherently can't be black? You're misunderstanding. There's reason to believe that an omnimax, interventionalist god can't exist because it doesn't make sense according to everything we know about the universe. The concept contains contradictions that can't be reconciled. There's nothing contradictory about a black swan.

There is no evidence for the existence of black swans here so black swans cannot exist at all. If black swans are really all that great, then they should show themselves.

Arrogance.

Nope, just honesty.

(again, all views are equally valid unless they conflict with the evidence).

Yes, and atheists have a problem with the theistic gods people believe in precisely because they conflict with the evidence we have.

 

[Smoke]

It's not about attacking.

In a way, it is. He has specifically addressed his point -- that believing in gods and disbelieving in gods are equally reasonable -- to atheists. One can't help noticing that he didn't address it to theists and atheists, or to theists alone, but just to atheists. Surely, if he were both correct and impartial, he'd be trying to convince both atheists and theists.

 

[Magic Man]

...or that breaking your nose exactly three times before the age of thirty proves you are the reincarnation of a German Emperor, as to disbelieve any of those things.

Wait, wait, wait. Are you trying to tell me that's not true? My 30th birthday is next month, so now would be a good time to let me know.

 

[Magic Man]

In a way, it is. He has specifically addressed his point -- that believing in gods and disbelieving in gods are equally reasonable -- to atheists. One can't help noticing that he didn't address it to theists and atheists, or to theists alone, but just to atheists. Surely, if he were both correct and impartial, he'd be trying to convince both atheists and theists.

True. Good point.

 

[dorsk188]

Irrelevant.

You keep saying that word, but I don't think it means what you think it means.

The feathers were obviously painted.

You must have done very poorly on your anatomy test if you can't tell the difference between a black feather and a white feather covered in black paint. If you examine the specimen (living or dead) and determine it is indeed a black swan, then you should change your position.

To take your analogy to the next level, it's more like your friend has sent you a letter saying: "There are black swans in Austrailia, but I can't send one back to you, and if you come to Austrailia, they might not be here anymore, but TRUST ME." If I received a letter like that, I would begin to think my friend was having a bit of fun.

Bigoted, stereotyping and irrelevant.

And what did I say that was factually incorrect?

On the off chance that you actually believe that: yes we are.

Then I have a Nigerian prince I'd like to introduce you to.

Yes. Where are those black swans, anyway?

A reasonable question to ask before accepting the claim they exist.

 

[gnomon]

Arrogance.

You got something right.

Arrogant I am and make no bones about it.