Comment by Loren Miller on June 15, 2012 at 4:05pm

Any chance of reproducing it here?  Not a member of Facebook, nor likely to become one!

Comment by Richard Healy on June 15, 2012 at 4:29pm

Um....I'll se about copy > pasting it all into something legible tomorrow. right now I need snoozes...

Comment by Jeff Dempsey on June 15, 2012 at 10:26pm

I just posted today as a matter of fact that I am a Atheist on Facebook.  And, by what means did I do this you say; "Why, I posted my badge from Atheist Nexus on my Facebook!

So, I look to loose a few friends and piss-off many, many more!  So, what!  Lol!

Comment by Richard Healy on June 16, 2012 at 3:34am

You task me Loren.... but I have a solution!

Then we switch to my page... after some pleasantries we get stuck in...

And that is where we find things as I wake up today: only by setting aside ALL of what we verifiably know about reality and how it works does the "painting > painter; creation> creator" argument make any sense, which is what I'm about to go and say to him, but this will in his view just mean I'm a functionary of Satan .. or something.

Comment by Loren Miller on June 16, 2012 at 6:19am

Thanks for your efforts, Richard.

As for the conversation, it's pretty much as I expected: a bunch of flowery language and talk about possibilities versus dealing in FACTS and in the MECHANISMS which give rise to those facts.  The believers for what I've seen don't much want to deal in either, because they upset the applecart.

"The whole world would have heard the message?!?"  China never did, nor did Japan.  Neither record a flood of stupendous volume, completely covering either country or describe in their histories people who lived multiple centuries.  "People forgot HOW to live for centuries???"  That one doesn't even deserve the dignity of a reply!  Do we have to get into the question of how Noah got the kangaroos from Australia and lemurs from Madagascar? 

As for the earth being 6,000 years old or so, there are fossilized trees with rings far older, never mind samarium, potassium and rubidium samples which give consistent radiometric evidence of our planet's age on a scale of billions of years rather than thousands.  I suppose Yahweh did it all this way to fool his creation into thinking that maybe Earth was 4.5 billion years old, "to challenge our faith."  If that's the case, then this deity is not only a bloodthirsty, megalomaniacal egotist, but a trickster and deceiver of the first water.  WHY would anyone worship such a bastard?  Oh, because we are a bunch of dumb humans who can't see his whole purpose.  Besides, we were TOLD TO!

All of this reinforces something I've said for a long time: that it is far easier to believe something simplistic than it is to KNOW and UNDERSTAND something far more complex.  Yet it is that knowing in detail which gives rise to the quality of life and the increasing longevity we currently enjoy in the 21st century.  Those benefits are the result of scientific pursuits which mankind has only been engaged in systematically for roughly the last 4-500 years, where religion and superstition have held the day for orders of magnitude longer.  It should be no surprise that those misguided myths continue to dominate human perception; human social inertia has maintained them and it will take energy and effort to turn that inertia to a more intelligent direction.

The sad part is that we will very likely be fighting that tendency toward laziness and ignorance all the way.  Whether those traits are hard-wired in us or not, I don't know.  This is my admittedly subjective analysis of how things stand at the moment.

Comment by Richard Healy on June 16, 2012 at 10:43am

It's reached a new nadir of WTF -today - in his last message (seen below) he advances this idea that humans immediately following the act of creation are for want of a better word 'perfect' - and there then proceeds over the succeeding generations 'a gradual degradation of the pattern' if you will such then humans alive today are at the furthest point from God's original model - and this is somehow bound up with our increasing knowledge of science (AKA Satan's great deception) in that we are all somehow at our most corrupted and removed from the divine, which is why it's so fucking impossible to identify.

What hope of a reasonable dialogue with something so twisted, conspiratorial and make-believe as that?

Comment by Loren Miller on June 16, 2012 at 10:59am

"Satan's deception" works awfully well, and across multiple disciplines and metrics.  The guy musta been thorough when he was putting it all together, eh?

Honestly, when people are so deluded as to completely obviate the idea of the functionality of science in favor of the complete irrationality of the bible, I'd tell 'em to have fun in their rubber room and not waste any further time with them.  That's how True Believers are, and I'm not convinced there is any changing them.

Comment by Richard Healy on June 16, 2012 at 11:03am

Micah accuses me of being 'narrow-minded' wanting evidence for my beliefs. I think we have in him the perfect demonstration of that adage - a mind so open his brain has fallen out.

I mean just when I think I understand it, he comes up with this complete alternate history that is so flagrantly false I don't know where to begin. His poor children will be raised to be fundamentalists. It's a crying shame.

As for the interloper who has ideas about humans 'forgetting' how to live for centuries at a time - who thought Jesus was a Buddhist! - "well we all go a little mad sometimes" as the philosopher Norman Bates had it, with the religious the change of state appears permanent.

Comment by Secular Forces 2013 on June 16, 2012 at 3:52pm

wow they're such fools... falling for whatever flavor as long as there's some 'god' mention.. the cop out of it all. the gap filler hate builder (especially w/some beat yer kids into fear and hate the different folks)=kinda shit really not good..

surely they have no answer to this white-black collar criminal leader of theirs:
http://www.atheistnexus.org/forum/topics/so-that-s-why-kerry-mccain...

Comment by Richard Healy on June 16, 2012 at 4:23pm

Remember, I'm the narrow-minded one:


"Nice, but since any and all organisms dated in this specific magnitude are hilariously wrong, I'd say that this finding doesn't reflect the emphasis you're looking for since the finding just completely based on an Evolutionary Applied Model. #1) Any and all dates from any form of dating using uniformitarianism are at the most - laughable, #2) Any Mode, Evidence or Construction supported only by the evolutionary community is hardly enough to sway my thoughts, #3) any platform or theory based on long-ages (previously defined by uniformitarianism), is at most a theory, but truly a bizarre work of fiction."

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