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 – 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.

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.

Anti-Muslim video sparks new outrage against Denmark

I love this ridiculous secular notion of “equal mockery” for all religions. It’s pretty clear that these cartoons are meant to “ease” the underlying tensions perceived within the Danes’ own society as well as from the proximity of Denmark to the Middle East.

It’s farcical. Some reasons why include:

• gross cultural insensivity. By extension of the Quran, Muslim identity lies directly in Muhammad. “There is one God, Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.” Putting his head on a stick, or a camel for that matter, is NOT going to be funny to them – not to say that they lack self-deprecation, but it comes out in arguably far less intellectual ways and arguably far more emotional ones.
• “equal mockery” is essentially a thinly-veiled pretense for mocking religions “of the Book”. Eastern religions are subject to close to nonexistant gainsay simply because a lot of people in the west don’t understand how their own senses of identity within one might relate.
• it tends to spawn more xenophobia.

In short, it’s a double standard that reveals some of the baser elements of secular humor – that of both narcissicm and self-preservation. In fact, FindLaw’s Julie Hilden has a good article articulating these points and more. Read it here.

So if you’re going to mock religions, do it on equal terms. Then maybe you’ll find out that, in fact, your underlying basis for why you find cultural insensitivity to be humorous will be changed.
via the Independent.

By Stephen Castle, Europe Correspondent

Published: 10 October 2006

Danes have been warned against travelling to a number of Muslim countries after the release of a video showing young members of an anti-immigrant party mocking the Prophet Mohamed.

Images drawn by members of the youth wing of the Danish People’s Party, and shown on television and the internet, were condemned by Islamic leaders in Egypt and Indonesia, threatening to reawaken the furore over cartoons published last year in Denmark.

video: Fox News with Bill Clinton (Chris Wallace Interview)

US Conservatives really need to be educated on spin. It’s too bad for liberals, too, that lack of representation in the Senate and House has led to such sycophancy.

In any case, let’s hope the video stays for awhile before Fox takes it down:

Part I:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-649761639290777197&q=clinton+fox

Part II:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6620818158935418334&q=clinton+fox

[update: Google took it down. Probably due to Fox hounds (pun intended). Download the torrent here.]

Also at Crooks and Liars. Firefox users, I suggest DownloadHelper to rip the video.

Comments (on Part II) by the timestamp of this post included:

I love the smell of Fox napalmed in the morning.
posted 10 hours ago by Hillaryious

Clinton whipped Chris Wallace’s a**ssss!!!! Yeee haw!
posted 10 hours ago by Billdiggity