Do you not see the contradiction?
Christianity is a big reason why we ever needed a Civil Rights Movement.
America being a Christian Nation is why it's falling behind the rest of the free world.
Are these cannibals who happen to be atheist, or people who used atheism to justify cannibalism? Christianity was used to justify the KKK (a Christian organization!) and is the driving force behind marriage inequality and the belief that rape victims should be forced to have their baby.
You're confusing "faith" with "expectation".
The difference is, atheists put faith in proven scientific facts.... theists put faith in a fairy-tale book....
this is the same dishonest bull that Christians always pull.
One can believe that a plane will land safely and base that belief on thousands upon thousands of planes landing safely over the last century.
One can believe that a light will turn on based on one's own experience of clicking on and off lights.
Does that mean that those things will always happen, though? No, but there is a mountain of evidence supporting that conclusion. There is no evidence that supports your belief in a god, so trying to equate my beliefs and your beliefs with the label faith because, "hurr durr they're both beliefs!" is complete nonsense.
There is a diffence between trust and faith.
Trust is earned, faith is not.
Airlines have earned my trust (US airlines at least) because they operate many millions of passenger miles without killing people every year. I trust them to keep me alive, because I have a good reason to, i.e. their past performance.
I trust that a light will come on when I flip the switch because the power companies that have provided me with power to run light bulbs have done so my entire life, i.e. their past performance. That isn't to say I don't keep a flashlight though.
Faith is believing in something without having a good reason to.
Last edited by RandomGuy; 04-22-2013 at 12:46 PM.
That makes two of us. Although, if I were to believe in predestination, I wouldn't have to worry about that because I wouldn't be the one doing the picking. But then that leads back to a discussion of free will. If God knows who and who will not believe, then does anyone really have free will? And if people don't have free will then what's the point of God creating people to worship Him?
We could go in circles all day, bro. This is why I haven't responded to boutons in this thread.
There absolutely was.
Oh, so God can kill anyone he wants because God says he can."God lawfully has the right to execute judgment upon anyone. The Bible says that all people have sinned against God and are under his righteous judgment. Therefore, their execution is not an arbitrary killing nor is it murder. Murder is the unlawful taking of life. Killing is the lawful taking of life. For example, we can lawfully take a life in defense of our selves, our families, our nations, etc."
Pretty convenient for him.
There are fundamentalist of just about every religion who extend that lawfulness to themselves to justify their own murder. Go figure.
No, I don't. You said that a sacrifice is required. I don't think that's true. If God makes the rules, God can choose for there not to be a sacrifice. I'm not going to cry and be thankful that because God impregnated a woman with himself to kill himself thirty years later to fix a problem that he caused.
Thanks, God!
Image didn't post.
Back on point, Maher is dead-on when he gets on the media for being apologists for Islam. Dawkins goes into the same point in The God Delusion when he details the response to those Danish cartoons a few years ago, when even the moderate Muslim clerics in Europe were bending over backwards to justify the execution order for the artists and the vandalism of the newspaper's office that published them. He killed the media for expressing an understanding with the Muslim 'hurt' from these cartoons as if people should have to respectfully tip-toe around Islam.
The media is equally to blame for making it socially unacceptable to make fun of religion in general. People who believe like the world is 5,000 years old or the superbowl power outage was an act of god (etc.) should be tarred and feathered just like Christians used to tar and feather people for believing the world is round and not the center of the universe.
An even better version.
Not the first time this bit has been used (hundreds of years old):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager
Canned question gets canned response:
More response here:There are many problems with the reasoning in Pascal's Wager, as well as the unsavoury theological assumptions it makes. Like most arguments for the existence of God, it seems more about reassuring existing believers than converting non-believers. This is because in order to convince a non-believer, a theological argument must both prove that the god it argues for is the One True God and disprove all other possibilities. People lacking a belief can see the potential for multiple gods existing, in fact an infinite number, but believers are constrained by their existing view that there is their god or no god. Only in this latter case does the reasoning behind Pascal's Wager make any sense.
In Bayesian terms, this can be stated as saying non-believers attribute uniform prior probabilities to the existence of any particular god; all equal, and all infinitesimal. Pascal's Wager alone cannot update these probabilities as the reasoning applies only to the One True God out of an infinite number of possible gods. Without any further information to whittle this down, the odds of inadvertently worshiping the wrong god is a practical certainty. Only when the probability of a particular god existing increases does Pascal's Wager become useful. For instance, if you could assign one god even a mere 1% chance of being the One True God then it would make sense. Hence for anyone constrained by a bias towards a particular god, the Wager is far more clear cut and supportive of their belief.
The biggest irony of Pascal's Wager as far as Christian apologetics go is that even if it was completely sound it should then suddenly become a huge disincentive for convincing an unbiased party to worship YHWH specifically. By definition worshiping the Judeo-Christian God requires you to give the finger to every other deity or potential deity thanks to the intolerance that is the First Commandment. In the absence of evidence for a specific deity, the theist-to-be would be better off directing some worship to one or more proposed deities that do not require exclusive worship. Pascal's Wager being a lynchpin of Christian apologetics (rather than being a shibboleth that must be denied at all costs) is simply yet another case of cognitive dissonance engendered by Christian privilege.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Pascal's_wager
Christianity is the reason why we continue to morally evolve for the better. Christian arguments are almost always used against evil. “Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God cannot retain it.”
― Abraham Lincoln
Here's how Christians continue to free Slaves Today!!!
America being a Christian Nation is why it's falling behind the rest of the free world.
These generalities are not very intelligent.
You've already stated you believe the Westboro Baptist are true christian organization, so there's not that much hope for you.Are these cannibals who happen to be atheist, or people who used atheism to justify cannibalism? Christianity was used to justify the KKK (a Christian organization!) and is the driving force behind marriage inequality and the belief that rape victims should be forced to have their baby.
If you want to talk about the media tiptoeing around Islam, we should talk about how those primates in Saudi Arabia stone women for driving cars and behead their African/Filipino slave workers for witchcraft.
But then again, the US government has no problem with it either.
Still think it's funny our nation is controlled by a religion that began as a way for some to convince her cuck husband that she didn't cheat and in fact wasn't carrying a bas child.
No True Scotsman, FTW.
Osama wasn't a real Muslim!
Yeah, because when I think of evolving for the better, gay marriage bans and outright rejection of science come to mind
Why aren't they Christian? Who are you to make that judgment? God?
A quote from the 19th century that not's backed by any evidence but said by someone people respect a lot...
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/appeal-to-authority
too lazy; didn't watch
Are you saying the KKK wasn't a Christian organization?
Those primates even poured millions into 9/11 and we tucked that under the rug pretending they had nothing to do with it.
You said God makes the Rules, God Requires a Sacrifice (or payment for sin), but then you go on to say there is no requirement.
If, according to you, God makes the rules then there is a requirement.
I would agree.
Religions tend to use a lot of circular arguments. Talking about the subject almost invariably leads to the underlying circular reasoning implied by faith in such a being.
Personally I think faith is kind of corrosive. Once you open the door to believing in something without evidence it is a bit like doing that first line of heroin or cocaine, as it makes other things that follow seem so much easier. You can so easily put your faith in snake-oil salesmen who are out for nothing more than their personal enrichment, simply because they say pretty things that are emotionally appealing.
That, to me, is why I think religion in general is a bad thing.
Sure religious people might feel themselves called to help the poor, and do some good, but the balance on the scale due to this tilts negative, IMO.
We will do better off as a species when we can give up the safety blanke of a magic man in the sky.
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