atheists and religious holidays

[Phi for All]

Miracles match realality, because many Christians have experianced them, like my mom. Now, it's not like this was impossible, but have you ever been walking, and then you just stop, for no reason? You have no clue how stopped. That happened to her, when she was walking towards her car in a parking lot. She was very close, then, she stopped, and a dump truck ran right over her car.Why?

You don't think it might have been because the dump truck in the parking lot made a HUGE amount of noise and gave a HUGE profile in her peripheral vision? Those are pretty big HUGE clues.

[njaohnt]

" Christianity is the biggest religion in the world"

And we all know that a hundred thousand lemmings can't be wrong. Really, that's not a valid point. In particular there are roughly half as many atheists as Christians so it's not like it's totally one-sided.

"I have never seen any miracles from other religions"

I have never seen any miracles at all. However it is well documented that other religions claim miracles too.

"I think that it means there will be more of them, and they will be more severe."

What you "think" isn't evidence: what can you actually show to be true?

"All unjustness will be made up to the Christians after their death."

That's logically impossible. And it's also begging the question.

"It doesn't say you can't."

Oh yes it does. Look it up

Leviticus 18 22

"But there's lots of evidence, it's not blind. "

show us some then.

No, you don't understand the verse. Look at it again. If you're in the KJV I recommend you switch to NIV because KJV is even more confusing.

 

About the first part…

Do you really have to point out every little thing I say? Does a reason have to mean that it's right? No. Stop look at the little things I say and start looking for the big ones. I've decided to stop posting here, and just post evidence in my Christian Evidence now.

 

You don't think it might have been because the dump truck in the parking lot made a HUGE amount of noise and gave a HUGE profile in her peripheral vision? Those are pretty big HUGE clues.

No. I don't think she have stopped for the noise.

 

I was stopped at an intersection. The road perpendicular comes down a large hill to the traffic lights. When my light went green I hesitated. Right as the car behind me started to honk its horn, a fully laden truck went through the opposing red light with failed brakes. Did God stop me? If so, why did God waste a "miracle" on a non-christian? It's simply far more plausible that I noticed something wrong with my peripheral senses and the action they were warning me about happened beofre I had time to consiously perceive the threat.

I would say it is a miracle. Perhaps God realized that you are going to be a Christian in the future, or somehow the world would be better with you.

 

Whilst true, over 2/3rds of the world are not Christian. Most of the humans - which God supposedly holds an incomprehensibly deep love for are condemned to burn in hell for eternity, for not holding a belief. Given believing or not believing in something is not a conscious choice but a position you are compelled to by consideration of the evidence, God will punish most people with incomprehensible severity for eternity, for something beyond their control. That rather at odds with incomprehensibly deep love, don't you think?

It's the Devil, not God who is punishing you.

Here's some miracles Islam claims: http://www.miraclesofislam.com/

Here's some attributed to Budda: http://en.wikipedia...._Gautama_Buddha

Here's some for hinduism: http://en.wikipedia....du_milk_miracle

 

you get the picture.

 

Notice how these are so obviously wrong?

 

What prediction does the existence of God make and how can we measure it?

We can't measure it, but we can look at miracles.

[Moontanman]

No, you don't understand the verse. Look at it again. If you're in the KJV I recommend you switch to NIV because KJV is even more confusing.

 

About the first part…

Do you really have to point out every little thing I say? Does a reason have to mean that it's right? No. Stop look at the little things I say and start looking for the big ones. I've decided to stop posting here, and just post evidence in my Christian Evidence now.

 

 

No. I don't think she have stopped for the noise.

 

I would say it is a miracle. Perhaps God realized that you are going to be a Christian in the future, or somehow the world would be better with you.

It's the Devil, not God who is punishing you.

Notice how these are so obviously wrong?

We can't measure it, but we can look at miracles.

 

 

An unlikely event is not a miracle, do you count all the times you hesitate but no dump truck comes by? Get real, statistically unlikely things happen, they've happened to me doesn't mean god was protecting me anymore than it means that a woman who didn't hesitate and was run over was killed by gods lack of warning her was that a miracle as well? Why not?

 

You have a very low bar for what a miracle is... Is every breath you take a miracle? Is the chemistry that keeps you body alive on a micro scale a miracle? Is anything, in your way of thinking not a miracle? Come on njaohnt, be a bit more discriminating than that...

 

I remember a story about a guy who lived someplace, i think it was someplace near the north sea, but anyway he decided to kill himself, he methodically taped up his windows and doors and turned on the natural gas and laid down to take a nap. His brother, or some relative called him just before he went to sleep, and in their conversation it came up that he was killing himself (I can't remember all the details) but his brother told how much god loved him and how he was lucky because the natural gas where he lived was almost pure hydrogen and was not dangerously poisonous. He told him to shut off the gas and he would be there as quickly as possible to help him untape his windows and talk some more about god. so the guy turns off the gas and sits down to wait on his relative, took out a cigarette to relieve his nerves and.... well the windows didn't need to be untaped... Which part of that was a miracle? The relative who called at the correct moment to keep him from being suffocated? Or lighting up the cigarette to calm his nerves as he waited? Or the miscommunication about the danger of hydrogen gas?

Edited March 19, 2012 by Moontanman

[Edtharan]

It's the Devil, not God who is punishing you.

According to the bible, it is not the devil that is sending to be punished, the devil is more like a prosecutor in a trial. God is supposed to deliver your verdict and send you to be punished. I suppose you might consider the devil as the one punishing you because it is also his job to carry out the judgements of God on the ones that God finds guilty.

 

Notice how these are so obviously wrong?

This is also the problem with the "miracles" as claimed by Christianity, and even you. With your "miracle" where your mother stopped in the parking lot, you refuse to acknowledge that there could have been some other cause for her to stop, like that fact that a garbage truck is really big, makes lots of noise and would have been seen long before it hit your mother's car, that is unless she is blind and completely deaf (if she is then the miracle is that she was driving in the first place).

 

So your argument "Notice how these are so obviously wrong?" also apply to the miracles of Christianity. Every single miracle that has been reported has an explanation that does not require the intervention of an supernatural entity.

 

In other words, we just accept a few less miracles than you do, and for exactly the same reason you reject the ones that you do reject.

 

We can't measure it, but we can look at miracles.

Evidence is information that allows us to distinguish between 2 or more claims. If the information does not allow us to distinguish between them, then it is not evidence (and is useless in a debate). The only use of such information is for re-enforcing an already established bias.

 

Science requires evidence because it destroys existing bias if they are wrong (if they are right then it doesn't destroy them).

 

Think of a person panning for gold. The idea of panning is that you gently remove the material that is not gold. This is because Gold has certain properties (ie: heavy) that allows it to be sorted by agitation of the material in the pan.

 

Truth is like gold, it has certain properties, and evidence and logical inquiry are the way to remove the falsities from all the information around us.

 

There are two types of faith:

1) Faith based on evidence and truth

2) Blind faith

 

With blind faith, you accept things just because you are told them (and they match with your bias). If you start with a false bias, this just increases the falsity until it dominates. With Faith based on evidence, because is uses evidence, it challenges bias and seeks to correct false bias. It causes any falsity in your bias to become smaller.

 

In both cases you have faith and belief, but in one you recognise that there are people in the world that either maliciously want you to believe incorrect things (eg: con artists) and people who, though ignorance believe wrong things.

 

Take a parable from the bible, about how a wise king when presented with a dilemma chose to use enquiry and evidence to make the decision. He was presented with two women claiming to be the mother of the child (they didn't have DNA evidence back then) and offered a solution which put the child in danger, the real mother responded as a real mother would, but the false mother reacted differently.

 

So, even the bible tells you to use evidence and investigation in working out the truth of things. Why not follow the teachings of the bible you put your belief in and apply logical investigation and require evidence in determining where your faith lies.

[Phi for All]

I've decided to stop posting here, and just post evidence in my Christian Evidence now.

Good idea, because so far, there is no evidence there.

 

No. I don't think she have stopped for the noise.

I think your mother is smarter than YOU think she is, because the sound of a big dump truck in a parking lot would get most people's attention. Even if they didn't look around for it, it's very likely to make them stop or at least slow down.

[dragonstar57]

So basically, you were raised in a world of good. You had to face the real evil of the world, and you became like them...however I never went to that real evil world(Christian school) -- yet, perhaps -- and maybe that is why I have not turned evil. You atheists really worry me about the net generation, because you were raised in good, and you turned bad. So if almost all the Christians turned bad, then almost everyone would be atheists, and that would be bad.

 

 

Now, yeah, you went to Catholic school, and that I've heard is not much different from the normal school -- from the looks of it, not many of the kids at that school were Christians -- so that must have been pretty evil.

I'm not sure if this is the topic that had that list of countries that said if then were religious, but that probably was wrong. I found a book that said that Christianity is more popular than anything else in the world. Agnostics were next, and atheists were 8^th.

 

 

Great story. Can I put that in my signature?

I wasn't going to reply to this at first assuming someone would give a more than satisfactory response no such luck

(from context I have surmised that you believe in the whole excepting Jesus into your heart absolves you of sin kind of Christianity)

here are the most obvious problems

1. this statement (which I assume is meant to be some kind of argument for the existence of a god) has the existence of as a premise. therefore this argument (if argument it is, is invalid)

2. you have a black and white moral view where people that believe what you believe are good and those who disagree are bad. I do not intend to commit ad hominem but this does not speak towards any measure of maturity on your part this argument sounds childish in the extreme.

3. the common explanation is that atheists are punished not for their atheism but for the sins that they have committed not being absolved by accepting Jesus. this makes one of 2 claims.

a.the sins that are not directly harmful to another or not malicious are worthy of eternal torture albeit you can suck up to the judge and he will make it go away. or that b.the act of believing that he exists and saying you want his guidance is a significant enough action to absolve one of the worst atrocities ever committed.

additionally there is a reason we have different punishments for different crimes because different crimes have differing severities [s?] and

we acknowledge that the only fair thing to do is to punish fairly to the crime. no crime is capable of being deserving of eternal torture.

Stalin could have learned a thing or two from your god.

additionally the idea that the devil would do as he was told and torture those who do not believe in god is ridiculous. the devil was a angel who rebelled and I find the idea of him falling in line with gods plan for him to be highly unlikely.

ps. i must admit I am somewhat shocked how far this has strayed from the original topic, however I assume I should have known it would drift this way eventually.