One thing is for sure. People blame God for all sorts of things. Even atheists blame God and I have heard it which is very ironic.

The long and short is simple. and NOT proselytizing, but people who REALLY have read the bible know WHY things happen.

Ecclesiastes 9:11
I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all.


In other words. SHIT HAPPENS!!!

This is a bit long, but I hope worth your time. With all due respect, I must say you have committed so many fallacies in your statements immediately above that it is not possible to name them all here in this thread, let alone try to explain them. My sincere hope is the one thing you “take away” from this discussion is a desire to hone your cognitive abilities. It takes education.

Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” these words are no less insightful today than they were when he wrote them in 1985.

Despite our best efforts, we are all vulnerable to believing things without using logic or having proper evidence—and it doesn’t matter how educated or well read we are.

Today I want to persuade you that you—yes, you— simultaneously believe many things that are mutually contradictory.

Human brains seem to be divided up into different sections, with different, even mutually exclusive sets of beliefs. This situation— the architecture of human cognition— allows hypocrisy as just one kind of inconsistency.

This explains why everyone else is a hypocrite, but not us.

Our brains seem to be hardwired to have our beliefs come first and explanations for our beliefs second.

Although we are skilled at recognizing the cognitive biases in other people’s thinking, we often have blinders on when it comes to our own.

There are methods for avoiding these pitfalls of human nature. A major one is how we individually handle cognitive dissonance. For most people there are some beliefs are not amendable to change. In fact, most beliefs are not changeable.

The most difficult beliefs for people to examine are those beliefs which have been
(1) held for a long time,
(2) adopted before age of reason, and
(3) most often repeated.

Which explains why it is almost impossible to have a conversation on the two subjects one should never discuss socially: Religious and political beliefs. Both of these belief sets are indoctrinated by parents, teachers, religious leaders, and other adults, almost from birth, many years before the age of reason, and they are the most often repeatedly “drummed” into them. People will kill based upon their beliefs, but they will not examine whether the belief is true or false.

I agree. I am retired and had a bit of time to see if I could wrap him around his own thoughts. I failed.

I'm not going to join this discussion because I've enough arguments with believers, so just this one thing...

"Denying there is a god is meaningless until the term is defined." Yes, of course we have to define our terms before we can have a decent discussion about them, but do you think that anyone growing up in the US doesn't have a workable concept of god that's close enough to everyone else's to have a serious talk?

This is so simple. It's been right under our noses all the time: a test for the existence of God.

Let us do this experiment. Everyone do it, atheists, agnostics, Christians, Zoroastrians and whatever: Talk to your god and tell him if he can do anything — such as create the world in six days, kill his own son for the sins of the world, set the galaxies in motion — then surely he can appear in your living room for five minutes so that you can chat.

What a small thing for the God of the universe. Nothing is too hard for him (Jeremiah 32:27); with God all things are possible (Matt. 19:16). And we’re not even asking him for a miracle, like water to wine so we can party. We just want him to spend five minutes with us in person. If he really loves us so much (John 3:16), he should be willing to spend some time to remove our doubts.

Please try this in your own home. Let me know the results. I’m particularly interested in what he looks like — if he has an elephant's head, for instance, there are going to be lots of disillusioned Muslims.

I just read in today’s newspaper (July 9, 2015) there are those who believe the great earthquake in Nepal happed because the Red God’s chariot was built without observing construction rituals. If Pat Robertson — with his excellent grasp of unreality — were still alive, he would claim credit for the Christian god Yahweh. Alas, Robertson is not longer here. The Red God wins. Using the thought process contained in this thread, the Christians now have to prove there is no Red God.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/wo...

What point? That you do not believe in the possibility as far as you are able to comprehend the matter? I understand that part completely. I am simply clarifying what to me is comprehensible, logical, and sound.

You are trying to assert definitions from your own understanding which form a straw man argument. I am providing an alternative and very real proposition to consider. Whether or not you choose to do so - even just for the simple act of understanding a different point of view - is completely up to you.

I read it, but it was not worth responding to because it is higher in the higher in the hierarchy of the discussion and more fundamental matters must be first refined.

My standards are set by standard, out of the book, logic. Nothing of mystery here. To ask questions or to point out errors in the Bible, Christianity or other religions is not an assassination or attack upon “the faith.” But, to call it such is to confess to taking a psychologically defensive position because one cannot explain the errors. I seriously doubt you can formulate an intelligible definition of the god you, personally, believe in. If you can, I an open to it.

Well said.

All religions and philosophies are at war for the intellects of mankind. It is a contest of ideas of which every single one is a participant - including atheism, Objectivism, secularism, every form of theism, communism, fascism, etc. ad infinitum. The question placed before each and every one of us is to ferret out of all this noise which one single set of beliefs we are going to adopt. We start out by relying on the proclamations of others but eventually it is a personal decision made by actually living and acting out value decisions. Then we adjust and change based on new information - if we are realistic.

I just read in today’s newspaper (July 9, 2015) there are those who believe the great earthquake in Nepal happed because the Red God’s chariot was built without observing construction rituals. If Pat Robertson — with his excellent grasp of unreality — were still alive, he would claim credit for the Christian god Yahweh. Alas, Robertson is not longer here. The Red God wins. Using the thought process contained in this thread, the Christians now have to prove there is no Red God. Perhaps the Christians are atheistsf when it comes to recognizing the Red God as a god.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/wo...

"Denying there is a god is meaningless until the term is defined."

Precisely. One must be able to define one's object of worship before worship is possible. I completely agree. Many faiths - even Christian faiths - fail in this basic principle. This leads many such as yourself to conclude that it is therefore impossible. So the real conversation should be to describe what would be possible and then to look for it.

"The epistemology and psychology of their thinking is Platonistic as opposed to Aristotelian reason."

Uh, actually, the philosophy of the Christian isn't Greek in origin - it goes back much further than that. Trying to assign either of those two schools of thought to Christian thinking is to fall into the trap of thinking only those two schools of thought are available. Philosophy and religion both are all about how one thinks and how those thoughts translate into action. I would strongly suggest refraining from attempting to pigeon-hole any philosophy by describing it in terms of another philosophy. Instead, just take the individual beliefs for what they are.

"They add fanasy..."

Pure unsubstantiated conjecture. One unnecessarily limits one's self in the exploration of reality when declaring that anything one can not sense by touch, taste, sight, smell, sound, or feel is irrelevant. To deny that a non-five-senses experience carries weight or exists in reality is to refuse the one tool on which Christian religion is based - intuition or spirit. It is one thing not to use a telescope to see the planets yourself, but quite another to tell someone else that not only have they not done it despite their claims, but that such a thing is impossible.

This is what you misunderstand. Most religious people - including Christians - make their choices based on a view of existence that perpetuates past death. They continue to live! They do not fear death per se, but are motivated by anticipation of what follows death according to their individual beliefs on the matter.

Atheists are most commonly nihilists who take death as the cessation of consciousness. This is a significant difference from the religionist because it directly determines the scope or long-term view one considers when making decisions and evaluating consequences. That is why I assert that one's standpoint on death absolutely is crucial to one's outlook on life.

If you believed that you would sometime meet anyone and everyone you had ever interacted with in this life in the next, can you honestly tell me that wouldn't affect how you interacted with them? Of course it would! Does that supplant reason? Not in the slightest! It simply extends one's view of consequence substantially.

Again, I'm not trying to tell you how to live, I'm simply offering you another perspective and demonstrating why this is of such monumental consequence. How one views death is of tremendous importance precisely because it affects how one lives life.

Pride is a virtue, not humility.
Any value assigned to religion is in one's "head", not in reality.
You obviously don't accept Rand's Metaphysics and Epistemology sufficiently enough to be an Obj.ist.

It has to do with viability. She does say there is room for debate after the first trimester

You have to think about it more philosophically. The right of the mother to her body cannot be conflicted with some assumed right of the fetus.
The fetus is a potential, not yet independent and actual being; rights cannot apply to it.

I explained to you the basis on which Christians operate. My object was not to prove anything to you but to help you to see the situation from their perspective. You are of course under no obligation to believe it at all.

To me, anything that affects how you act is a philosophy - especially if it forms the basis of one's view of the purpose of life. If it is a motivating factor in decision making and value judgments, it falls in the realm of philosophy.

As to the existence of God, it is pointless to prove it. Those who ask for such refuse to acknowledge the proof already in existence such as the creation of this solar system, this world, and it's attributes -which defy the odds. Further, it is the purpose or plan behind life which is central to the matter of God. Being forced to acknowledge His existence does neither you nor I any good with respect to our growth and development.

I have a little trouble squaring AR's pro-abortion position with her views against initiating force against another. Can you define "actual person" for me? Why isn't a fetus a person? It has a full complement of DNA that is distinct from that of its parents and doesn't undergo any measurable changes in the instant that it exits the birth canal.

If no force is initiated against it, it will grow to term and be delivered and surely the fetus can't be said to have initiated force against its mother justifying its potential termination since it was a totally passive participant in its conception. If the test of personhood is some level of mental development or economic self-sufficiency the logical fallout might include infanticide through neglect.

Am I missing something?

Bravo. My work in thermodynamics of evolution shows that no species can evolve unless it is more energy efficient than its competitors. Any species which sacrifices, at a net cost to it, some energy to another cannot survive and is extinct. Altruism is biologically lethal so why is man the only species which claims it can get away with what would extinct any other species? Christ knows.

AmericanGreatness
The reason I argue with Christians and not econuts is Christians believe, not know, in a moral system. Its easier to argue about the purpose of morality with someone who grasps the need for a moral system than someone who cannot accept the idea of a system of related values. So Christians can have their own Valhalla Valley and when they find a rational standard to choose between the thousands of religious systems they can come over to the Gulch by taking the Oath.

J well thought out. Now the trick is to find out can you know that there is something you cannot find because there is no sense data available from any physically existing means. We are observing stuff in the body at the atomic level and in s pace. There is no evidence, sense data, that there is anything we need to know beyond our senses. Four billions years of evolution says that no species existing today has any need for information it cant access. So a person who claims they know something not available to the senses is flat out lying. Recent work in information theory shows that information can only be coded transmitted and received and decoded by thermodynamic systems. God by definition cannot be a thermodynamic system. Keep working on this you are making progress. Claims to know something know one else can know is the idea Plato used to justify tyranny.

The problem with christians is they use their emotions as the basis of their views. You cant change a persons automatic emotional response to the values they have chosen. You have to change the way they choose their values which to them is an emotional not rational process. So Christians historically realized like ISIS that beheading beats thinking.

Based on your attitude, then, perhaps you should just take anyone here who IS and DOES believe in God make a blanket policy that state ATHEISTS ONLY all others will be blocked and banned.

Until such time as that, your claim on "reason" and your implication that ONLY atheists possess reason is a total fallacy.