Comments on: $10,000 and growing fast

By: Phil

Phil — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 09:14:50 +0000

Yeah, come back Benji. I’ll box his ears if he misbehaves. He can be such a naughty boy….

By: Cyberguy

Cyberguy — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 07:25:23 +0000

Benji come back…

I’ll play nice.

By: Cyberguy

Cyberguy — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 21:40:58 +0000

Thanks Phil – I accept your point.

Sorry, Benji.

By: Phil

Phil — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 20:26:33 +0000

Cyberguy,
I understand your exasperation. You have indeed answered all the questions before, and pretty well I thought. Rather than address your answers Benji is just repeating the questions like a broken record. That’s just lazy. And perhaps disingenuous.
This laziness is perhaps the biggest barrier to genuine debate. Many believers just don’t want to extend themselves beyond their comfort zone.
Their approach is the intellectual equivalent of sticking their fingers in their ears and chanting “Nyaaa, nyaaa…can’t hear you”.
Still, despite provocation, no need to abuse them, you are better than that. You are a formidable debater of the evidence, stick to that and I for one will follow your posts with support and enjoyment.
Cheers
Phil

By: Cyberguy

Cyberguy — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 12:21:14 +0000

Phil

Also, I already answered his same question in my reply 107!

He has asked the same question twice and I have answered it twice.

I am entiled to get a bit short with the guy, if he does not read my actual answers.

Cyberguy

By: Cyberguy

Cyberguy — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 12:05:22 +0000

Phil

I take your point.

But consider this. His questions have been asked and answered so often that it is an insult he has not made the effort to investigate them himself. Atheists are CONSTANTLY answering these same questions.

If christians had any integrity they would put the word out among themselves “Don’t use Pascal’s Wager – that one doesn’t work any more”.

Both my last two replies, on Pascals’ Wager and what evidence would convince me of god, I have answered so many times that I got tired of answering – so I saved a standard answer. My replies to Benji was simply cut-and-pasted from my saved version, with a tweak here or there.

It pisses me off when christians trot out 340 year-old arguments and think they are new.

By: Phil

Phil — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 10:32:15 +0000

Cyberguy
O…K… so much for keeping it polite.
Coffee anyone?
Benji doesn’t piss me off. I am patient because it took me years of guilt-ridden questioning to reject what is a highly evolved brain parasite, replete with its own immune system for defending its hegemony.
Apologies for the lurid description but hey, how would you describe something that rules and limits your life while proclaiming to do the opposite?
I don’t give up so easily on people that could be me at an earlier stage.
I think we may have had this conversation before. Different strokes eh?

By: Cyberguy

Cyberguy — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 08:32:03 +0000

Phil

Benji is just a fucking loser and he pisses me off with his dumb-arse shit. He has no fucking brains.

Cyberguy

By: Phil

Phil — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 20:42:35 +0000

Benji,
You really need to take that challenge seriously, just a little real world evidence should not be too much to ask.
Admiring your work as always Cyberguy.
I didn’t think I needed to comment except to make one point:
We are arguing against a belief that many WANT to be true. I know, I’ve been there myself. All evidence or logic will be twisted and made to conform with the belivers paradigm…untill he/she makes a personal choice to get honest, and allow for the possibility that the paradigm is flawed. For most this is well out of their comfort zone.
For me it took a number of years of noticing that the real world did not entirely conform to my belief-system model. With religion, unlike science, questioning the model is not encouraged…which just made me question the model more. But there it is, a personal choice based on a level of curiosity that not every beliver has. How curious and honest are you Benji?

By: Cyberguy

Cyberguy — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 12:00:44 +0000

Benji

Some examples that would provide evidence for the existence of some sort of god:

1. Documented prayer answered in an unambiguous way (amputees healed) that cannot be satisfactorily explained in naturalistic terms.

2. Prayer for a sick person statistically improving the chances of that person surviving usually fatal diseases such as cancer (this experiment has been done, and shows no difference between prayer and no prayer).

3. One religious group clearly being more “fortunate” to a statistically significant level than equivalent others who do not subscribe to the same religion. “Fortunate” means they experience increased positive random events and decreased negative random events (e.g. significantly less affected by natural disasters, more likely to win lotto, etc) compared to others.

4. You can also test whether the prayers of various religions and sects that believe in such a God have a statistically significant higher chance of being answered in an unambiguous way compared to other sects.

4. Out of sequence fossils that cannot be explained through natural selection (Fact: no out-of-sequence fossils have ever been found, which strengthens the argument for natural selection).

5. True irreducable complexity that can not be explained by a sequence of DNA steps (no irreducable complexity has ever been found).

6. A prophecy or knowledge that unambiguously could not have been known at the time, e.g if there had been a clear description of atoms or WWII in the bible. Basically anything in the Bible that is true, but could not have been written using the knowledge of the time.

So far no evidence of the above types has been found.