Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by C on January 18, 2011 at 11:04am

I deleted my first facebook profile because of my bold, and seemingly acrimonious, comments on my page about religion.  I am a minority, went to a predominantly black university, and am from the South...

I am now back on facebook and don't usually post anything at all because my views are drastically different from those that I know.  I haven't even added most of my previous friends again.  So, I know how it feels!  I am confident in my beliefs, but everyone needs someone in their corner. 

 

Permalink Reply by Carolyn on January 18, 2011 at 11:25am

I am now back on facebook and don't usually post anything at all because my views are drastically different from those that I know...  am confident in my beliefs, but everyone needs someone in their corner. 

 

Ha- "amen sister"!!! We atheists/ free thinkers need to stick together!

 

Permalink Reply by Yusuf Said on January 18, 2011 at 1:32pm

Hi Zac, Im Joe. I have a problem on facebook as well with my atheism. Apparently I am "intolerant" because I openly mock religion. I don't mock individuals just the general Christian and Islamic faiths which has had me un-friended quite a lot. Now I am down to about 20 friends which aren't overly insecure about their religion and allow my criticism. I would be happy to add you, just send me a personal mail on AN with your name so I can find you on fb.

 

Joe

Permalink Reply by Alvaro Ramos on January 18, 2011 at 1:51pm

I use to post on FB stuff from Jesus & Mo: it is so good that, the 'aggressive' catholics become speechless... http://www.jesusandmo.net/

Permalink Reply by Alex The Realist on January 20, 2011 at 8:39pm

I'll add you! I deal with the same issue. Everyday there's something about F**king god, so I feel its my duty to let it be known that I don't believe in that fairytale. I'd call it garbage, but you can see, smell, and feel that. We know where garbage comes from.

Permalink Reply by Mike Gage on January 21, 2011 at 4:25pm

I'm in Saint Louis too Zac. I'll add you, though, I agree with the early comment about it being a bit antagonistic.

Permalink Reply by Richard Healy on January 22, 2011 at 3:13am

As part of giving Zac a helping hand, I've been debating a theistic visitor to Zac's page called Lisa.

 

We've got a little Q&A thing going, and I'm just about to start typing out my replies, but to help me think I put the back-and-forth into a word document which I thought you all might like to take a look at - see below - and then I was curious, how might you go about tackling each of the claims and assertions she has made.

 

I'll let you know how I do.

 

 

Attachments:

• QandAwithLisa.doc, 72 KB

Permalink Reply by Joseph P on January 22, 2011 at 10:44am

Wow,that sort of thing is so not worth doing, unless someone is genuinely interested in learning.  Are you doing this in front of an audience?  If not, you're wasting your time.

 

2C and 6C are classic examples of faithful blindness to mounds of disproving evidence, grabbing onto any evidence that seems to support your beliefs and ignoring anything that contradicts it.  Her statement that the Bible is the only one that does what it does is full of nonsense.  There are no words of God in the New Testament.  There are only the words of Jesus.  If the Koran is right about him only being a prophet and not the son of God, then that puts them on an equal footing.

 

So, her book is the only one that contains the exact myth that she likes?  The simple response is "So what?"  They're all books of the similar caliber of myth.  That's the point, not the exact stories.  And if she thinks that the Bible is the only one that correlates with the world, she's reading from it so selectively.  If she's not willing to read the whole thing cover to cover, rather than just reading the bits that her preacher feeds her, then she can't possibly make that claim.

 

Until you can disabuse her of the idea that the Bible is the perfect word, written by God, you're not going to get anywhere.  I mean the freaking Catholic church has records of how they made the damned thing.  Scholars have picked through it and discovered that whole chapters of the New Testament are almost certainly forgeries.  God clearly did not guide its formation, which throws everything in it into question.  Once you see where people have screwed with it after the stuff was written down, the original writing down of the text comes into question, as well.

 

Then, once you introduce things like the Ugarit texts, the whole damned thing falls apart.

 

Essentially, you're going about this all the wrong way.  Having a huge list of questions going all at once allows her to bog you down and swamp you with preachy bullshit.  You need to focus the discussion a bit more and address things in order.  Until she demonstrates that the Bible is the word of God, discussing anything in it is useless.

Permalink Reply by Richard Healy on January 22, 2011 at 11:40am

Every other theist I challenged ran away screaming (ain't that so, Zac - Bill 2nd Law of Thermodynamics / evolution has never been observed  - never seen hide nor hair of him again)

 

 The Q&A arose becuase there was a bit of a tempestuous moment regarding challenges so we said, alright we'd think of some  Lisa to her credit - actually said alright bring it on - the novelty of that was enough to pique my interest.

 

I thinkj of it a bit like t like Bruce Wayne fighting off those six inmates at the start of the rebooted Batman "You're practice" he says to the scary giant before breaking his jaw.

 

Have you ever known a discussion with a theist be productive? No of course not I'm just keeping my Occam Razor well oiled and checking the aerodynamics on my rhetorical hammers, ready for throwing. ;^)

 

The so what's / you can't possibly know that's / the bible isn't eyewitness testimony  / no proof god exists therefore the bible can't be taken to be the word of god espeically when we know it isn't - is exactly where I was going..

Permalink Reply by Joseph P on January 22, 2011 at 1:52pm

Ahhh, true.  There's always value in practice, for when you're ready to try out someone who really knows what they're talking about.  And yeah, in this case, you work with what you've got.

 

And actually, yes, I've known discussions with theists to be productive.  It's just very rare and only accomplishes anything when they're already questioning their faith.  You need to be there at the right moment, rather than the pastor with his mindless, emotional, comfort bullshit.

 

This one definitely isn't in that camp.  She's out to convert the atheists, because she's been lied to by her pastor or someone similar, about what makes someone an atheist (as evidenced by the first point in the document).  We're in the enviable position of understanding our opposition while not being understood by them, ourselves.  We know what makes people theists: childhood indoctrination, reinforced by emotional reinforcement (wow, I need to start getting more caffeine before I post; thesaurus fail) and threats of hell or similar.

 

There's a useful chunk mentioned here, at 5:55:

 

 

You'll have to do a bit of googling to expand upon the brief mention, but there's the bit I was speaking of previously, about part of one of the Gospels being a forgery.  Hell, just watch the whole thing, though.  Sunderb00t is a trip.  He's called 4 times, before Matt banned him from the show, after the last appearance.

Permalink Reply by Richard Healy on January 22, 2011 at 2:47pm

Ah yes,  the last twelve verses of Mark.  I have my copy of Misquoting Jesus within arms reach, I think it might come in useful for that bit about "God in the flesh" since scholars agree - that interpretation is just the sect that won the schism battle.  The particular reference for that is I think in Luke in the garden of Gethsemane when Jesus weeps tears that fall like blood or as blood - depending on which manuscript you read, between the fleshy Jesus or the spiritual Jesus - or the third category the fully man/fully god compromisers who get the best of both worlds.

 

My favourite is the woman caught in adultary ('let he who is without sin') definitively not originally part of the bible - well see if I can;t wrangle her round to that one on the matter of "we know what Jesus said"

 

"as evidenced by the first point in the document"

 

Oh yes the unhappy childhood remark.  Yes she said she was going out on a limb on that one - I said I wished her a happy landing on something soft 'cos that bough broke: my childhood was safe and warm and happy and my encounter with the godly fairly benign, I just realised somewhere around age 18 that I really didn't believe it and about 3 years later I really got sorting through why I didn't believe it.

 

Thanks for the AE link. I've been steadily consuming the archive....

Permalink Reply by Joseph P on January 22, 2011 at 2:58pm

Likewise.  The worst you can say about the religious components of my childhood is that they were boring and nonsensical.

 

And yeah, I've been through the entire A.E. archive, myself.  I had a lot of time on my hands at one point, recently.

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