Jesterballz thread – point by point rebuttals and partial methodology for determining Truth

Jesterballz, I’ve migrated the thread to my site for readability/loading time.
Taken from this post for readability.

I honestly can’t see how you can seriously say “I welcome civilised argument in the comments” when your name is “jesterballz”.

In any case, we can do this the easy way (testing for coherency, universality, and uniqueness of claim to truth) or the polemic way (point by point rebuttal/back and forth until no conclusion is reached). Up to you.

You said:
There are a whole lot of people out there who believe in “God”. Billions of people are Christian, Muslim or Jewish, and are following their religion (most often blindly). But I strongly refute the claim that this particular “God” exists, and I have pretty good reason, too. So all those curious people out there, please read this and maybe you will realise your mistake. That said, I am not accusing anyone who believes in God of being stupid. Please make comments to explain your reasoning if you disagree with my theory.

Shadow thread 2 – addressing general criticisms

Hey again, Shadow –

Not meaning to be vindictive here – just critical, in the “Simon Cowell” sense. If you’re in any way offended, I’m sorry in advance (it’s just that there are a LOT of holes). Also, if you want an explanation of each point, I’ll be happy to give them to you:

From Comment #1:

The concept of a God or god-form is not necessarily an absolute, but a conjuration.

You’re already starting off on the wrong foot: God is the embodiment of the absolute.

Shadow thread – Garden of Eden theology

Shadow,

Sorry for the late response. The thread has clearly blown up, so I’m taking the liberty to move it to my blog for legibility.

I said (quoting jesterballz‘s logic):

If everyone is thinking alike, someone isn’t thinking. – George Patton. [ed: my quote]

I’ve addressed your topic in my For Atheists page under Junaman thread – Empiricism vs. Rationalism, but I’ll respond to your logic w/in the framework of Christianity:

1. Assume God exists.

Define “God”. You do that in 2, 3, 6, 7 and 8, not 1. The Old Testament, throughout the course of its 39 books, does it in a similar fashion, but comes up with a different conclusion.

October Site Updates (update 10)

10/30

A Defense of Absolute Truth post reformatted, minor changes to the intro [update: more minor changes. Sorry, it was late]. I realized, from a comment on Newsvine, that parts of it were hard to comprehend.

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10/28

I know I haven’t posted an article in nearly 3 weeks – hopefully I’ll be getting back to that soon. In the meantime, take a look at A Defense of Absolute Truth, a summary of Ravi Zacharias’ message given last year at the Mormon Tabernacle.

I would recommend him more if it weren’t for his recent delve into demagoguery and politics. Praise God, his talent in philosophy must be one of the best in the world.

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10/27

For Atheists: major addition in point 2 of Brett subheading.

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10/26

Global warming will cost world $9 trillion: report

If someone knows where I can find a copy of the Stern report they mention, please drop me a line.

Indeed, with reports like this coming out nearly every day, it’s hard not to be schizophrenic.

via ABC News Online Australia.

The world’s biggest economic evaluation of climate change says if countries do not act now the world will face a depression worse than that of the 1930s.

The report puts the global cost of global warming and its effects at $A9 trillion – a bill greater than the combined cost of the two world wars and the Great Depression. It represents a fifth of the global economy.

A Defense of Absolute Truth

4/30/2013 note: If you are coming here from Google, here is the update to this post. I tried to make use of some editing skills to make it more readable.

Reposted from what seems like a now-defunct Garage Scholars blog (argh!). A very good recap of a Ravi Zacharias message, “A Defense of Absolute Truth”, which details why secularism fails to provide a coherent set of answers to the problems of the world (part 1 | part 2).

An interesting anecdotal defense of this point is in the second result of this Google search.

Here’s a gem: Secularization = no shame. Relativism = no reason. Privatization = no meaning. [All three have occurred to varying degrees in Westernized civilizations.]

Original post has been reposted below.

[note: in case you missed it, this is a recap which has taken on a kind of bullet-point form. I’ve reformatted parts of it for readability. If you don’t get parts of it, feel free to comment.

note #2: thread available at Newsvine. I’m thinking about manually importing it.]

On Saturday, March 12, the Garage Scholars, named that day by Robert Grange, held their second meeting and listened to a talk by Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias. This talk was given the day before Ravi’s talk at the Mormon Tabernacle.

Ravi Zacharias
A Defense of Absolute Truth
11/13/05
The University of Utah

Sexuality, marriage, stem-cell research, genetics—“these things are getting very, very complex.” It’s hard to know “how to address this tangled subject with meaning and coherence.”

Junaman thread – Empiricism vs. Rationalism – Pt 5

The formatting always gets lost in translation… even with html. Bleh.

The tags are a good indicator of what this thread’s about (maybe will work on a summary later).

A: It’s fine, I suppose. But the longer it takes, the more disingenuous your pursuit of “exposing incompetence”, as it were, will look (recent post(s) nonwithstanding).

J: You put a bit much weight on a tagline…

That’s not just a tagline… it’s also the title of your blog.

…How is this conversation exposing incompetence.

Well, that one should be obvious. The incompetence comes in the form of dogmaticism regarding the “ultimate truth” of science, which is implied from your For Christians page.

The real incompetence is not whether you believe in a god [or not], but what you use that belief for, what objective you try to achieve with that belief.

I can agree if you’re referring to “amoralism”, e.g. in the case of Hitler and Bush. I don’t think proselytising necessarily bring you to the same conclusion.

Junaman thread – Empiricism vs. Rationalism – Pt 4

A continuation of part 3 (reposted for readability, loading time, and the fact I knew it would be intially filtered by akismet). Topics include the probability of mass hallucination (ref: 1st century Christianity | apologetics), Junaman’ s atheistic generalization of rationalism, the scientific method, the fallacy of “rational knowledge”, and reasons why “objectivism” is a fallacy (with brief mention of why the Nobel Prize exists).

Sorry for taking so long to reply…

It’s fine, I suppose. But the longer it takes, the more disingenuous your pursuit of “exposing incompetence”, as it were, will look (recent post(s) nonwithstanding).

First of all, not all religious people claim they have “seen” or “experienced” god,

This is true, but…

secondly the ones who have can all claim they saw different things,

…this is a generalization, which leads you to inaccurately conclude…

no one’s belief is truly identical to another’s, hence is it really a “mass hallucination”, or just different people hallucinating different things.

Cy thread – on dogmaticism, religious indoctrination, and politicized religion

Had a good feeling it would’ve been caught by akismet (whoops, I’ve been calling it azkimet) and, most likely, not undeleted by Vance. Thread has been continued here.

It is not needful for me to defend my unbelief in a deity. It is up to the theists to defend their belief in a deity. They do this to their own satisfaction but not to mine.

This is dogmaticism at its finest. I hope you recognize that, and are secretly joking.

The God Delusion (criticism of atheist Dawkins) [VIDEO]

Update [3/1/07]: also check out UK apologist and Oxford Professor Alister McGrath’s book The Dawkins Delusion for a scientifically-inclined rebuttal to Dawkin’s arguments negating God.

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Excellent post from Alternet‘s Evan Derkacz discussing the merit (and lack thereof) of Dawkins. Of course, it probably just wouldn’t be right not to link it to my atheistic humanist acquaintance Brett Keller’s blog, where he undoubtedly supports some of his main points of contention.

I’d respond to Dawkins’ assertions myself if I had more time. In all likelihood, though, I probably already have, albeit indirectly.

Sorry, haven’t had much time to post due to increasingly busy schedule. Of course, there have been plenty of blogworthy world events (will do a quick post maybe later).

Oh, and note that I tagged “the Antichrist” not necessarily because I believe Dawkins is the Antichrist… one of them, maybe – but far from “uniting an army” against God as it were. I’d leave it up to the politicians to do that.

via Alternet (video also available at link).
tagline: ‘Darwin’s Rottweiler’ Richard Dawkins disses faith, Bush base

In a BBC interview on Friday, Evolutionary Biologist and sharp religion critic, Richard Dawkins, talks about his new book, The God Delusion (I”m just ecstatic that he referenced the Flying Spaghetti Monster).

He claims to want to speak to the middle ground; to people who haven’t really thought too much about faith and God in order to challenge their belief. An uphill battle, to be sure. He employs all the usual suspects: “people need to believe in fairy tales” “just look at organized religion” but fails to see where every method for assessing reality is hopelessly mired in its own methodology. Or: the scientific method may be positively divine for assessing the physical world, it has built-in limitations w/r/t [FC ed. note: with respect to] the spiritual one.