Last day today?

[quannum]

"You are strawman of atheism is illogical"?

What?

oh no a typo, my whole argument is now invalid ...

How is everyone agnostic, including the people with specific stated beliefs?

I may have to reconsider my offer, your ability to state obvious implications of other statements may not be as well developed as I thought it was.

gnosticism has to do with having knowledge. agnosticism is the negation of that state.

do theists claim to have knowledge of god? .. i hope not, they have faith and faith, one can argue, is the antithesis of reason. so they are without (a) having knowledge (gnostic)

do athesists claim to have knowledge of god? no. do they claim to have knowledge of no god? no. so the result is the same, without (a) having knowledge (gnostic)

my personal position is that of bertrand russell's

How is this so confusing: belief or non-belief without proof or reason is not logical.

non-belief in santa claus is illogical?

[BRP]

You can prove Santa Claus doesn't exist, he is a fairly simple concept compared to God.

EDIT: Speaking of Santa Claus, most atheist attack dogs remind me of kids who felt superior because they found out Santa Claus was fake without understand why and went around being douchebags about it.

[quannum]

You can prove Santa Claus doesn't exist, he is a fairly simple concept compared to God.

EDIT: Speaking of Santa Claus, most atheist attack dogs remind me of kids who felt superior because they found out Santa Claus was fake without understand why and went around being douchebags about it.

santa claus just isn't detectable to people who don't believe in him, etc, etc.

i don't see the relevance your edit has to this discussion.

[BRP]

Santa Claus is a man who delivers presents to children. We can now, with our very advance science and technology and common sense, can see that is false. The concept of a God isn't as easy to prove wrong.

Second part is: Stop being douchebags, goddamn.

[Woozie]

In the midst of all this arguing, you guys missed an amazing post:

Hey guys they put up a live webcam in the LHC, it's actually pretty cool

http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html

I laughed so hard at that.

[quannum]

Santa Claus is a man who delivers presents to children. We can now, with our very advance science and technology and common sense, can see that is false.

but can they see why kids love the taste of cinnamon toast crunch?

Second part is: Stop being douchebags, goddamn.

you first.

[Max™]

Yeah, that's a pretty stupid argument.

Woozie wins though, I didn't check that cam feed, and that is pretty funny.

[Quicklet]

So I learned today that there will likely be a project in Europe to create lasers that can emit extremely focused pulses of light for various purposes. One goal is to cause spontaneous pair particle production by providing enough energy to the vacuum. The other goal is to (purposely) create miniature black holes in order to study the radiation given off. I'm wondering whether or not there will be black hole doomsayers when this rolls around as well, given that it doesn't sound as exciting as smashing particles together.

[guartz]

"You are strawman of atheism is illogical"?

What?

How is this so confusing: belief or non-belief without proof or reason is not logical.

How is everyone agnostic, including the people with specific stated beliefs?

I may have to reconsider my offer, your ability to state obvious implications of other statements may not be as well developed as I thought it was.

Your full of it, because you are talking about God not as a concept, but as physical reality.

obviously everyone here believes in God as an idea or a concept, but nobody here has seen, or physically felt God in physical reality.

Hence, it would be completely arbitrary to believe in god as a physical entity. Since no evidence aside from other humans sharing that idea or concept of God.

on a flip side, gravity exists also as a concept, except everyone here has witnessed gravity manifest itself. So belief in gravity is justified.

[guartz]

whoops, i meant to link brp not you max.

ehh. too lazy to fix.

[Eratosthenes]

I'm not opposed to the idea that whatever is ultimately responsible for the existence of reality may be an intelligent being, I just see no reason to believe it.

[Kaylia]

non-belief in santa claus is illogical?

Santa Claus' existence is worthless because it's not used to explain anything. God on the other hand is used to explain things that science will never be able to expain (science can't find a causeless cause).

It's not a proof that God exist or not, but I don't think you can compare Santa Clauss to the concept of God in general


and rofl at the .gif..missed it on last page.

[Denchi]

Instead of telling someone "you have to go read, conversation over!" why not quote these philosophers?

Yeah it's almost as bad as saying something like "believing in God is illogical"

Rene Descartes: "Thus it is not improper to conclude from this that physics, astronomy, medicine, and all the other disciplines that are dependent upon the consideration of composite things are doubtful, and that, on the other hand, arithmetic, geometry, and other such disciplines, which treat of nothing but the simplest and most general things and which are indifferent as to whether these things do or do not in fact exist, contain something certain and indubitable."

... 3 meditations later

"Thus, from what has been said, I must conclude that God necessarily exists."

...

"Nor can it be said that this idea of God is perhaps materially false and thus can originate from nothing, as I remarked just now about the ideas of heat and cold, and the like."


Kant: “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”

"Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them."

"Reason can never prove the existence of God."

"Religion is the recognition of all our duties as divine commands."


Aristotle: Can't find any of the quotes, but very much believed in a supreme being. Or the "Unmoved mover." He reasoned it was the only way to explain things in the world, most notably Physics.

Leibniz: "One must hold as certain that the more a mind desires to know order, reason, the beauty of things which God has produced, and the more he is moved to imitate this order in the things which God has left to his direction, the happier he will be."

"It is most true, as a result, that one cannot know God without loving one's brother, that one cannot have wisdom without having charity (which is the real touchstone of virtue), and that one even advances one's own good in working for that of others…."

"Neither the norm of conduct itself, nor the essence of the just, depends on his [God's] free decision, but rather on eternal truths, objects of the divine intellect, which constitute, so to speak, the essence of divinity itself. . . . And, indeed, justice follows certain rules of equality and of proportion [which are] no less founded in the immutable nature of things, and in the divine ideas, than are the principles of arithmetic and of geometry"

I'm getting lazy but....

Charles Peirce believed in a God too.

Anyways. If you want to deny the existence of a God, fine, but don't say it's illogical, because there's plenty of logic behind the great thinkers that believe there is one.

[Mr. Flippy]

my opinion, and dont hate. religion is mind control for the masses. those who fear the unknown turn to some sort of belief system to empower them and give them peace of mind. its worked for a relly long time (dont know exactly how long organized religion has been around). but yet in this day and time, as stated before, religion is coming towards its end as we further progress with technology and science. we do live in an age where proof is needed not just hypothesis. i myself do not claim to be of any organized religion, but yet i hold my beliefs to help me understand what cannot explained. my belief system is more of an almalgamation of ideas both scientific and ,how do i say this,.. spirtual, without being relegious. i.e reincarnation, aura fields and paranormal activity. i choose to believe becuase it helps me, as i said above, have peace of mind.

[Denchi]

Well you're talking about 1000000 different topics there. To believe in a God does not mean to belong to a religion. A general understanding of a higher being has no "religious" implications. Science does not answer all of life's questions. Science is quantitative, not qualitative. You don't get moral judgments from science. If we all believed in science in technology we would be a giant nihilistic society. If you attribute science to objective purposes, then you're probably no better off than anyone who believes in God.

[BRP]

you first.

For that to happen I would have to tell people they are both wrong and stupid for thinking something, but be unable to provide proof for it.

Santa Claus' deeds can all be understood and proven not to exist. He is not the one putting toys under the christmas trees.

Until someone can prove God is not doing this or that, everyone is speaking out of their ass. Science requires proven material before you start preaching it as fact. So the only thing you can accomplish by telling people they are wrong for believing in God is looking like a high-and-mighty douchebag.

[Shuvo]

For that to happen I would have to tell people they are both wrong and stupid for thinking something, but be unable to provide proof for it.

Santa Claus' deeds can all be understood and proven not to exist. He is not the one putting toys under the christmas trees.

Until someone can prove God is not doing this or that, everyone is speaking out of their ass. Science requires proven material before you start preaching it as fact. So the only thing you can accomplish by telling people they are wrong for believing in God is looking like a high-and-mighty douchebag.

I don't really understand why Theists keep saying "You can't prove god doesn't exist' over and over in these discussions, it would be much more difficult to prove that God does exist. While their is no proof, their is at least evidence for the former.

For me I personally became an Atheist when I was 14 and asked myself the following question (Well I was thinking about it for a few years before 14):

"Where did God come from?"

The only answer I could get was that God has always existed, which to me seemed a lot less likely then the big bang theory. On one end you have an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient all-powerful sentient being, on the other you have a hunk of rock which just decided to explode some day. The latter option seems much more logical. I never believed in Santa Clause either even as a 6yo, despite my parents trying really to, so I think my overall viewpoint is pretty unbiased .

[Denchi]

So like, where did the big bang come from? Did it just happen?

[Shuvo]

So like, where did the big bang come from? Did it just happen?

It was much more likely, yes.

[Eratosthenes]

Personally, I ditched religion when I realized that it could never answer "Why should I believe that?" with anything other than "Because something will hurt you if you don't."