Are you an atheist? (1 Viewer)

[Mike375]

Atheism is a religion. It requires faith and belief that there is either no God or god or outside force, call it what you will.

Trying to prove there is no God or gods is as impossible has trying to prove there is God or gods.

However, the law of averages would suggest there is life in the universe that is a notch up from us. Now consider for a moment how we compare to a chimpanzee. The difference is about 10,000 times greater than the difference between a chimpanzee and the ant.

Now consider the following...it's the middle of a hot and nice sunny week. The little lizards and insects are out and about. Then you decide to mow the lawn and then water the garden. Their millions of years of instinct say this situation is impossible. Thus to them you are supernatural.

 

[dan-cat]

Below, I have posted a you-tube video url to check out and challenge you to watch at least two hours of it with if not an open mind, at the very least an inquisitive one.

I have a reasonably open mind but that doesn't extend to trusting confessed plagiarizers. So thanks for the 2 hour invite but I'll pass.

 

[Frothingslosh]

1. Only an idiot who refuses to accept that their beliefs may not be the ultimate be-all and end-all can possibly think atheism is a religion, seeing as atheism is defined by LACK of belief in the supernatural, while religion REQUIRES belief in said supernatural. All you do by calling it a religion is show yourself as a closed-minded chest-beater with no actual interest in actually discussing the topic at hand. "Atheism is a religion" is the mantra of the religious fanatics who, knowing full well they cannot hold their own in a discussion on religion, attempt to divert it by making knowingly false claims about atheists in an attempt to derail the conversation from actual discussion about religion.
2. I have little interest in spending two hours watching some deluded fool attempt to explain that the Bible is literal truth because the Bible says so. Even if I did, the work week is a lousy time to expect ANYONE to spend two hours watching that drivel.
3. I have never said that the Bible tells us nothing. It does a wonderful job of relating the genocidal, blood-soaked history of Israel. The teachings attributed directly to Jesus make for, overall, a wonderful guide for how to live a good life. Of course, they require love of one's fellow man, charity, acceptance of the poor and the needy, and even the acceptance of immigrants, so virtually no Christian - specifically including Bladerunner - can be bothered to actually FOLLOW those teachings. The problem is that most Christians prefer to follow the Old Testament, cherry-pick the bits and parts of the Bible that they can use to support their hatred of others, even to the point of taking part of a sentence in Jesus' condemnation of divorce completely out of context in order to 'prove' his 'DO NOT DIVORCE' statement was really 'NO GAYS ALLOWED', and generally try to use the Bible to justify their absolutely unwavering devotion to greed and hatred as them being 'True Christians'. As Gandhi put it:

   “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

4. The typical stance of virtually all Christians is that God created the universe. Mike's suggestion that God is simply an alien is...unusual...for a Christian.
5. However, the suggestion that there are aliens 'a notch above us' indicates a profound lack of understanding of what evolution is and how it works. There is no 'above' or 'below' when it comes to evolution - there is simply what survives, and what does not. There is certainly an impetus toward greater complexity, but only insofar as it increases the odds of survival and reproduction.
6. "Choose wisely". How insanely pompous, smug, and condescending.

 

[jeremy.lankenau]

If a two-hour video can convince anyone to change what they hold to be true, they didn't spend much time or effort getting a grip on their reality (actual or perceived).

 

[Libre]

Now consider for a moment how we compare to a chimpanzee. The difference is about 10,000 times greater than the difference between a chimpanzee and the ant.

Mike - do you really think a chimp is closer to an ant than a human? I would argue the reverse - a chimp is actually very close to a human in physiology and abilities. The smartest chimps are smarter than many humans. Chimps can be taught language and tool use. A one year old chimp and a one year old human could almost be indistinguishable, except for the hairy arms, etc.
I'm trying to understand this PART of your post - only the part I quoted. I don't get the rest of your post either, about atheism actually being a religion or the part about the lizards in the garden. I think you're quite wrong about both of those as well, but I only want to tackle the chimpanzee comparison right now. Would you care to elaborate?

 

[The_Doc_Man]

"Choose wisely". How insanely pompous, smug, and condescending.

Actually, it is an excerpt from the "2010" Space Odyssey sequel in which a superior intelligence ignites Jupiter to become a mini-sun to enable life to form on one of the Jovian moons. So it is a crib from another source that tries to give the impression of the existence of a god-like intelligence. The "Choose Wisely" (or was it "Choose Well"?) comment is part of the alien admonition to let life develop as it will on that moon.

Pompous? Absolutely - but then again, what religious proselytizers aren't?
Smug? See previous question and answer.
Condescending? See previous question and answer.

I'd be interested in finding out whose cognitive dissonances survive Libre's new thread on the subject of Cognitive Dissonance. But then again, those who have such deeply seated religious beliefs might not be accused of constructive cognition anyway.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Blade, I saw an article in the newspaper this weekend about how the KJV was expressly written with a goal in mind - to counter the beliefs leading to various schisms. The Bible that many people use - good old King James - wasn't divinely inspired. It was created to support the motives of the church hierarchy. And STILL you want to tell us that the Bible is infallible? HAH, I say. HAH and HAH indeed.

Other than that, good to see that you are still alive and kicking.

 

[Frothingslosh]

Actually, it is an excerpt from the "2010" Space Odyssey sequel in which a superior intelligence ignites Jupiter to become a mini-sun to enable life to form on one of the Jovian moons. So it is a crib from another source that tries to give the impression of the existence of a god-like intelligence. The "Choose Wisely" (or was it "Choose Well"?) comment is part of the alien admonition to let life develop as it will on that moon.

Pompous? Absolutely - but then again, what religious proselytizers aren't?
Smug? See previous question and answer.
Condescending? See previous question and answer.

I'd be interested in finding out whose cognitive dissonances survive Libre's new thread on the subject of Cognitive Dissonance. But then again, those who have such deeply seated religious beliefs might not be accused of constructive cognition anyway.

Actually, given Blade's background (his name does NOT come from the movie), I rather doubt he meant it as a quote from 2010. Several times he has told us all we need to start believing his way lest we burn forever in Hell, and I'll give you about 99% odds that's what he meant here, too.

 

[spikepl]

Hmm ... and the other religious freak meant we all just strayed from the one true faith (a rather different one, though, from the first religious freak's one and only and true faith) and I'm sure somewhere there were trials and tribulations scheduled for all of us who fail to return to the fold in time to avoid the beating by the pretty vindictive god (the idea of a vindictive god frying your butt for shear fun is apparently shared by many religions)

 

[Bladerunner]

Blade, I saw an article in the newspaper this weekend about how the KJV was expressly written with a goal in mind - to counter the beliefs leading to various schisms. The Bible that many people use - good old King James - wasn't divinely inspired. It was created to support the motives of the church hierarchy. And STILL you want to tell us that the Bible is infallible? HAH, I say. HAH and HAH indeed.

Other than that, good to see that you are still alive and kicking.

Hi DOC

It is good to be back but I need to inform you the fellow that was giving the video has as many Doctorates as you do. The Bible (KJV) has a few words that are misdefined when using the Hebrew, Septuagint (Greek Translation for those who do not know). One of those words is 'the Church'. It should have been Eclessia (Greek) which means assembly of the people. Now you may think that is the same but there is no where in the Bible that God anoints our present Christian churches to do his work. In other words the churches of today are "NOT OF GOD' including the Catholic Church. When the Bible (KJV) speaks of the Church, Jesus is speaking about the people like you and me.

I think you will find that this author will show you that out of 66 books written by 40+ authors over 3,000 years containing 31,173 verses in the Bible (both OT and NT), that 1817 prophecies explained through 8,353 verses or 26% of the Bible are dedicated to Prophecy. So far the Prophecies, the one that have been fulfilled are 100% correct. These prophecies spans both OT and NT (" what is concealed in the OT is Revealed in the NT). Yes, you can prove that God exist, by reading the Bible alone It is a supernatural Book and each word in it is linked to another. Even our science tells us that there is a separate reality because all the constants including the speed of light (it is slowing down) are changing. The Bible also spoke of Aliens. As I said, the Bible is supernatural and God is definitely Extraterrestrial. By that I mean we live in a bubble, confirmed by our science. The Outside universe is FINITE...(it may be expanding but it is finite) and this author likes to state and I paraphrase: '10to the (-43) power is the smallest anything can get without losing it locality, thereby being everywhere in the universe at the same time.' This has been again confirmed by our science there by placing us in a bubble or a Hologram.

BY our calculations the universe is 15 billion years old. yet when you place the formulas of our scientist on this number and allow for the speed of light and a few other factors that are necessary for space travel, the Time line of creation comes down to guess what......6 days. Oh, me.....The exact number touted in the Bible that it took to created the heavens and the earth.

The bottom line, is I have given you a man who read and interprets the Bible, while giving solid foundations for his findings that even you DOC would find amazing. The You-tube video not only gives you the one I wanted you to see(at least the first two hours) but it also gives numerous other videos ( in the side bars) by this fellow that has a world of information. I urge you and others to watch them. Where you spend eternity could depend on them. Of course there are some like CAT.....????/ that do not care where they spend eternity.

Are you aware that we live in 10 dimensions??????The Bible tells you and a Rabbi in the 12th century tells us we live in 4 dimensions with 6 other dimensions still unknown. Are these not what scientist are chasing with the
Hadron Collider??????

Now I know several of you do not want to hear this but it is a fact.

Here is another video the might just might shake even your beliefs DOC, at least just a little.

Happens to you when you die......
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJygHgJk6rk

Have a good day Doc

.

Blade

 

[nanscombe]

I'd rather watch a two hour long science fiction film about a being who visits Earth and inspires awe in the people with their advanced technology.

All sorts of tricks can be achieved by film makers and magicians.

 

[spikepl]

"Happens to you when you die"....

For reasons unknown, this reminds me of an interview I once saw, ages ago, obviously, with the late Dr. Kevorkian (you might want to google him, if you do not recognize the name). He was asked "What happens when you die?" and his answer was "You rot"

 

[Frothingslosh]

Blade, Blade, Blade.

Just because someone pulled a doctorate out of a Cracker Jack box doesn't mean they're educated.

That whole 'speed of light is slowing down' thing is, like all the rest of your 'evidence', based on an egregious, willful misunderstanding of quantum theory. A debunking of this hypothesis can be found HERE, but in a nutshell, your man Setterfield alternated between faking data, grossly misstating results, and twisting data to fit his already-existing preconception - that the universe is less than 7000 years old, and that all observations must be FORCED to fit that framework.

I'd say it's bad science, but it's not even science; it's religion masquerading as science.

Next up, there is not one single prophecy in the Bible that has come true. In fact, the Antichrist written of in Revelations is quite blatantly meant to be Nero, but the end of the world never came. Nor did it when you religious types claimed it would happen in 1000, then again in 2000. I believe there was supposed to be another end of the world just last month - I must have slept through it.

And please, show me where the Bible speaks of aliens, because I don't see ET mentioned even a single time.

Yes, any 5th grade mathematician can create a formula to turn 15 billion into 6 days. That's nothing to be amazed by unless you find division to be mystical and awe-inspiring.

Again, nowhere in the Bible does it state we live in a 10-dimensional universe. In fact, even in quantum theory that's just one possibility.

And for the record, there is no point at which something shrinks from 'insanely small' to 'covers the entire universe'. That doesn't even make logical sense. The smallest observable length is the Planck Length of 1.61622837 × 10-35 meters, which is due to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Your 1 * e ^ -45 value is TIME, not length - it is the smallest amount of time we are capable of measuring, as it is amount of time a photon requires to travel the Planck Length in a vacuum. So chalk another one up to your religious quack lying.

 

[Bladerunner]

Blade, Blade, Blade.

Just because someone pulled a doctorate out of a Cracker Jack box doesn't mean they're educated.

That whole 'speed of light is slowing down' thing is, like all the rest of your 'evidence', based on an egregious, willful misunderstanding of quantum theory. A debunking of this hypothesis can be found HERE, but in a nutshell, your man Setterfield alternated between faking data, grossly misstating results, and twisting data to fit his already-existing preconception - that the universe is less than 7000 years old, and that all observations must be FORCED to fit that framework.

My, My Forthingslosh, it did not take you long to try to take a bit out of my cake. Here is an article full of references about the slow down of light.
Keep in mind that any transition of the speed of light (high or low) is significant in the overall picture.


"The issue of light-speed in the early cosmos is one which has received some attention recently in several peer-reviewed journals. Starting in December 1987, the Russian physicist V. S. Troitskii from the Radiophysical Research Institute in Gorky published a twenty-two page analysis in Astrophysics and Space Science regarding the problems cosmologists faced with the early universe. He looked at a possible solution if it was accepted that light-speed continuously decreased over the lifetime of the cosmos, and the associated atomic constants varied synchronously. He suggested that, at the origin of the cosmos, light may have traveled at 1010 times its current speed. He concluded that the cosmos was static and not expanding.

In 1993, J. W. Moffat of the University of Toronto, Canada, had two articles published in the International Journal of Modern Physics D (see also [75]). He suggested that there was a high value for 'c' during the earliest moments of the formation of the cosmos, following which it rapidly dropped to its present value. Then, in January 1999, a paper in Physical Review D by Andreas Albrecht and Joao Magueijo, entitled "A Time Varying Speed Of Light As A Solution To Cosmological Puzzles" received a great deal of attention. These authors demonstrated that a number of serious problems facing cosmologists could be solved by a very high initial speed of light.
Like Moffat before them, Albrecht and Magueijo isolated their high initial light-speed and its proposed dramatic drop to the current speed to a very limited time during the formation of the cosmos. However, in the same issue of Physical Review D there appeared a paper by John D. Barrow, Professor of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He took this concept one step further by proposing that the speed of light has dropped from the value proposed by Albrecht and Magueijo down to its current value over the lifetime of the universe.
An article in New Scientist for July 24, 1999, summarised these proposals in the first sentence. "Call it heresy, but all the big cosmological problems will simply melt away, if you break one rule, says John D. Barrow - the rule that says the speed of light never varies." Interestingly, the initial speed of light proposed by Albrecht, Magueijo and Barrow is 1060 times its current speed. In contrast, the redshift data give a far less dramatic result. The most distant object seen in the Hubble Space Telescope has a redshift, 'z', of 14. This indicates light-speed was about 9 ( 108 greater than now. At the origin of the cosmos this rises to about 2.5 ( 1010 times the current value of c, more in line with Troitskii's proposal, and considerably more conservative than the Barrow, Albrecht and Magueijo estimate. This lower, more conservative estimate is also in line with the 1987 Norman-Setterfield Report. (Barry Setterfield, January 24, 2000)



I'll even give you a little more,,,,just for you.
http://www.ldolphin.org/setterfield/earlycosmos.html

you said:"Just because someone pulled a doctorate out of a Cracker Jack box doesn't mean they're educated."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Missler


Of, course it tells me you did not look at the first url I offered...Your Loss

Have a good day and may God be with you.


Blade

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Blade, with due respect to you as a person, I have to say that I have seen enough folks use the "Bible is full of true prophecies" claim that I have stopped laughing and started shaking my head in pity at the sheer STUPIDITY of such a statement.

For the Bible to be a valid source of prophecy, it must make a definite and (relatively) precise statement about an event that DOES NOT happen inside the OT, NT, or Apocrypha, but that is independently verifiable through scientific measurement and/or reliable observation. Otherwise, the Bible and the Harry Potter series are exactly the same - two literary works that include a prophetic but cryptic statement that could be interpreted in more than one way and that comes true inside that work.

Sadly, the Bible's prophecies and fulfillments are all self-contained. Worse, they are often about the actions of a single person or a group whose actions cannot be tracked through history - which means we can never verify the validity of the prophecy. The best way to become a perfect prophet is to make untestable predictions that cannot possibly come true in your lifetime. Then nobody can call you a liar because your proof won't occur in time to vindicated you OR expose you for the charlatan that you are.

As a matter of fact, as a hobbyist writer working on fantasy novels (of the sword and sorcery variety), I can point to maybe about 25-30 prophetic visions/dreams that come true in my works. Does that mean that MY work is on par with the Bible? I'd give you chapter and paragraph references but the problem is that I so far have not found a publisher willing to purchase my work. But that's OK. It'll give me something to do in my retirement.

Blade, I have seen a thousand videos by people who claimed to be able to prove the validity of the Bible - but all they do is trot out the same old tired references that have already been discredited again and again. Watching one more is of no value to me.

As to your speaker who has "as many Doctorates" as I do - it means nothing if the degree is in a bull-dinky subject, or if the scholar got his paper from a "paper mill" college. I can name a dozen folks who have their PhD but never learned how to think analytically. Even Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling was sometimes a jerk when he started down the garden path on race issues. Having a doctorate doesn't make you smart. Being smart, however, can help you earn a doctorate. I will merely state that I believe I fall into the second category, but don't wish to make excessive claims.

As to the variability of the speed of light right after the Big Bang, we must remember that if Albert Einstein and Georges Lemaitre and a dozen other Cosmological physicists are right, it is a matter of the cart and the horse. The speed of light seems (and I chose that word carefully) to be a property of the "shape" of space-time. Right after the Big Bang, space-time was mutating a LOT. Its "shape" had not yet been stabilized. I have no problem with superluminal energy transfer if space-time is still in flux. You can make all sorts of claims about how that accounts for the age of the Earth being only 7000 years or so. But you CAN'T avoid the hard evidence from the Ganges River cultures that go back more than 10,000 years. You could mealy-mouth your way through a 3-year, or 30-year, or even a 300-year variance. But southern Asia cultures force you to face a 3000-year variation. And if you accept radioactive decay dating methods (not limited to Carbon-14), modern Man has been around for 30,000+ years in France alone.

Blade, it comes down to this: You can't face the reality of evolution or the long-term presence of Man on a planet if you can't first accept that the age of the planet is a lot higher than your primitively based religion claims. And there is where you should read up on cognitive dissonance. I am reminded of a line from A Few Good Men: You can't handle the truth.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

As to a comment made in passing about how declining to watch yet another "I can prove the truth of the Bible" video is a form of Cognitive Dissonance:

I don't know that it is a pure example of Cognitive Dissonance so much as it is a practical application of the Law of Diminishing Returns.

 

[Bladerunner]

As to a comment made in passing about how declining to watch yet another "I can prove the truth of the Bible" video is a form of Cognitive Dissonance:

I don't know that it is a pure example of Cognitive Dissonance so much as it is a practical application of the Law of Diminishing Returns.

not sure what you are talking about here but for the prior post, I would have expected nothing different from you Doc.

Have a Great Day and May in spite of yourself

, God be with you!.

Blade

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Blade, though I don't agree with you, I thank you for being civil and offering good wishes - good with respect to what you believe to be true. May your day bring you good luck with each roll of the cosmic dice that Einstein didn't like but that Robert Oppenheimer proved were in use.

 

[Bladerunner]

to Doc and the Others:

There will come a day when millions of people All Christians will leave this world at one time. (The Rapture).

At the time you see this think of me and these words because It Will happen in our lifetime.

You have waited too late to make the correct decision!

I wish you all well..

See you later on other post of the forum and may God bless each of you.

Blade

 

[Libre]

Sure Blade.
Catch up with you then.
Until then - watch out for Russell's teapot in space.
Ta-ta!