The Glade 4.0

That is a complete non-sequiter. One can not prove any negative, on any subject. By that logic, evidence is meaningless in any context.

You're trying to put a wall between subjects of faith and science where there isn't one.. just a hazy grey area.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Assume that human technology has progressed to the point of us being able to create and manipulate an entire universe, but that we as human beings are identical to our current selves; nothing special about us other than technology. Would such an act at least disprove, to you, the necessity of a god?

Flatly false.

I can easily prove that 3 times 5 is not equal to 40.
I can easily prove that this glass of water does not contain a Boeing 747.

The necessity is a different question than the actuality. In any case, it's very difficult to envision how us being able to create an exact duplicate universe would work, and what the implications were, or what our observations would be as we approached that point, so the only answer is.. maybe.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I didn't mean to say that we'd create an exact duplicate. I meant to say that we could create our own entire universe, manipulating things like physical laws if we so chose, or we could also set the stage exactly as it is now to see what happens. The implications is that we'd have all of the physical "powers" of a god, pretty much anything someone would require as "proof" of a god, without the omnipotence.

Sorry, but you don't get to make up your own rules of logic. In the first case, you disproved that 5x3=40 by showing that it equals 15. You didn't prove a negative, you proved a mutually exclusive positive. The second case is the same. You can easily prove that a glass of water does not hold a 747 by demonstrating that a 747 can hold a glass of water.

Burden of Proof



I see no reason to discuss this with you further, since you have devolved to inventing your own principles of reasoning.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Exact duplicate or not, I still don't know that we can really imagine what the implications of that would be. However, if we could do that, it would bring to the fore the issue of "well, where did OURS come from then?" We might be able to determine that by the same means we create the new universe, but we also might not.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Wait... WHAT???
You assert that you cannot prove a negative.
I counter your claim by stating that it IS possible, citing two examples binary possibilities.
You link to a wikipedia article where they specifically state how you prove a negative,which agrees with me, and declare victory as if I'm making things up???

The whole point is I'm trying to pull the whole concept of ANY kind of proof out a discussion of God. You're arguing in circles-- I say "Don't try to prove/disprove God" and you say "God can't be disproved, because nothing can be disproved" I counter the second half of your argument without touching the first (you can indeed can disprove things), and that you seem to want to say "Don't try to disprove God." which is the point I tried to make initially.

Any logical proof of an omnipotent Deity is useless because said deity can change the rules of logic in the first place, or remove/create any evidence.

Just pull 'evidence' 'proof' and all such words out of your vocabulary when discussing faith. We'll get along fine. Share with us your own experiences with God. Talk about how He/She/It has touched your life. Tell us about your moral compass. Just stop trying to prove matters of faith.


and just as a total aside, your assertion that a because a glass fits inside a 747, a 747 cannot fit inside a glass, is a poor proof. A balloon can fit inside a glass coke bottle, but a glass coke bottle can indeed fit inside a balloon because the balloon's volume is not fixed.

Well, if we could demonstrate omnipotence was possible, then it would make any claims of an omnipotent deity less extraordinary.

No, not at all. It's just that after 10 or so pages of people whinging about how mean atheists are, I felt like injecting a little comparative perspective.



Yeah, I figured the counter would be to point to the Nazis and the Communists. In those cases, though, they weren't persecuting homosexuals or religious people in the name of atheism, but rather, in the name of the State. Atheism was just a means to an end (the embodiment of all power and authority in the State), and any competition with or deviation from that was anathema.

Beyond that, though, my impression was that the discussion was mostly focused on contemporary westerners/Americans. Everyone knows the Islamists are nuts. Everyone knows the Soviets and the Nazis were evil. The debate seemed to be more about who was more annoying and/or close-minded - your loudmouth atheist brother-in-law or your devout, born-again neighbor. My point was simply that the loudmouth atheist brother-in-law may be annoying and obnoxious, but that's about it, whereas there is a very real possibility that your devout, born-again neighbor supports violently repressive policies against gays and other people who don't follow her religious dictates. Figured that was worth keeping in mind.

No, not at all. It's just that after 10 or so pages of people whinging about how mean atheists are, I felt like injecting a little comparative perspective.



Lets keep this close to home for some perspective. How many threads can you remember during the history of the glade that were started with the sole purpose of mocking, insulting, poking fun of, what have you, people of the religious flavor? Then try to remember threads created by religious folk for the sole purpose of doing the same to the non religious type.

I'll wait.

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"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

How many threads can you remember during the history of the glade that were started with the sole purpose of mocking, insulting, poking fun of, what have you, people of the liberal flavor?

Is this thread about politics? At least then we start getting even. Try again. Still waiting.

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"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

You asked the question, you answer it. Links please.

I asked RD. He is free to answer if he chooses. As are you.

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"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

In other words, you threw out question with the hopes of implying the board Christians are some oppressed minority, without actually expecting to answer. This way you can play the victim card without actually showing your work! Yay! *golfclap*

Mainly its because religious people are easily mocked. Low hanging fruit if you will.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Honestly, I don't remember many threads explicitly started to mock religious people for being religious, but I certainly do remember many threads in which such mockery occurred. I'm not a fan of it. And I agree that it's far more common than explicit mockery of the non-religious. That said, I don't think mockery is really the kind of in-your-face behavior from religious people that's being called out. In my OP, the comic was calling out the disingenuousness of couching judgmental attitudes and discriminatory policy in the language of religious "love" and then getting upset when people point out that disingenuousness. And although I've only popped in and out of the thread since then, it seems like Aizle and TheRiov are mostly talking about the annoyance and obnoxiousness of proselytizing and ubiquitous religious references rather than mockery.

This is a very religious country (by contemporary western standards anyway), and outward symbols and statements of people's faith are commonplace to the point of being virtually unnoticeable most of the time. I mean, imagine going over to a co-worker's house for a barbecue and finding that he had a little sign hanging in every room that said, "There is no god." Pretty obnoxious, right? Now ask yourself if you'd feel the same way if he were Catholic and he instead had a little cross in every room. I doubt it. To you, as a Christian, seeing crosses or hearing people say they're "blessed" or hearing the President invoke God in every speech is just ordinary background stuff, barely even noticeable, but to an atheist, those are overt, in your face, declarations of people's faith. As I said upthread, I don't think it's a big deal, but I can kind of understand how it can start to get annoying and/or frustrating for some people.

That's exactly what you did here.



Which brings me back to my original point. Funny or not, witty or not, you posted something you knew would get a rise from folks on the board, then walked away from the thread to let it run its course. This is trolling. It is fine to do so, don't get me wrong, but it's pretty blatant.

As to your more recent point, if you walked around displaying as much atheism as an evangelical Christian does his religion, you'd be challenged much more frequently than he would be. I agree with you on this, and it is not proper.

However, take a lesson from the majority of evangelicals. You can profess your faith, or lack thereof, as frequently as you like. But, if in the process, you're mocking someone else, putting them down, or acting like you are better than them, whether regarding religion or other, you're just a douchebag. That's not necessarily directed at you, but it's certainly more applicable to others in this thread. Most evangelicals do not mock the beliefs of others.

Since when do victims need to show their work to play their card?

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Actually, that's not what I did. The comic doesn't mock people for being religious; it mocks them for being disingenuous assholes. Big difference. For example, switch it to something non-religious. Instead of a religious person talking about Christian love, make it a caricature of a liberal going on about how important it is to not discriminate against people, to treat everyone as equals, etc., etc., while at the same time linking those ideals to support for affirmative action, race-specific scholarships, hate crimes legislation, etc. The woman responds, "You're an *******," and, he shoots back that she's a racist. That wouldn't be mocking liberals generally for being liberals; it would be mocking the (arguably) obvious inconsistency between the guy's paeans to equality and his racially-discriminatory policy preferences.


On the contrary, before I posted the OP, I debated whether it should even go into Hellfire. Last time I posted a thread poking fun at anti-gay sentiments, people wondered why I didn't just post it in the General forum. That time, it was just habit, but this time, I consciously decided I'd better Hellfire it just in case the religious angle got someone's back up (which...surprise!...it did), but I figured it was 50/50 that people would just shrug again. No one here is really anti-gay, so I thought folks might just see the comic for what it is: a send-up of disingenuous assholes who cloak their bigotry in lip-service about Christian love, not of Christians generally. Apparently not though.


No real disagreement here, except to note that if someone's being a dick, the fact that their dickish behavior is religiously motivated shouldn't insulate them from being called a dick, which, again, is exactly what the comic I posted was intended to do.

I'm not sure why this matters.



There's not a "very real" possibility at all. Very few fundamentalists support violence against gays at all. Those that do tend also to be the loudest.

We should also keep in mind that atheists support prohibiting parents from teaching their religion to their children. Oh, they're cute about how they put it, claiming it's "freedom of religion" or in Richard Dawkins's case claiming it's abusive to allow it but the implication is using the authority of the state to stamp out religion one kid at a time.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

*facepalm*

Both a 747 and a glass of water (or rather, any given glass of water) ARE objects of a fixed size, and before you bring up a hypothetical glass of water big enough to contain a 747, that glass wouldn't also fit inside a 747 and wouldn't be anything we recognize as a "glass of water" anyhow. It is not a "poor proof" just because I did not explain to you that both of those objects have a fixed size. There is absolutely no reason I should need to explain that blindingly obvious fact.

This was worth responding to only because it illustrates exactly why you are not worth responding to on this matter. You are completely unfamiliar with rules of logic or proper reasoning (despite apparently having the conceit that you know something about them) and acting as if I'm being completely unreasonable for using them even when I cite them to you. Take your "wait WHAT" nonsense somewhere else; I didn't invent the concept of burden of proof.

You are seriously unbelievable. Really.. "but a balloon doesn't have a fixed size!" Moving the goalposts doesn't begin to cover this absurdity.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Where do you get the idea that anyone would think someone putting up a "there is no God" sign in his house would be obnoxious to anyone? Or at least, any more so than someone putting crosses up in their house would be obnoxious to some people here.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

LOL, no I didnt. I was very specific in what I was trying to relay to RD in what I replied to and it seemed he got it. Not surprising you didn't

I didn't claim anyone was oppressed.

Remember to stay 100 yards away from those schools, TheRiov.

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"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."