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The pot here is having a delightful conversation with the kettle. You see, when I disagree with you, it's because of my sh-t-colored bias. But when I agree it's because I've opened my mind to the possibilities of what Scripture really means underneath those pesky little words it actually uses. I'm curious to know what color glasses you wear when you approach the Book of Mormon and the Q'uran. Since you've established in this post and several that precede it that this kind of tone is fair game, I would like to point out that this one sentence (well, comma splice, anyway) may well be the stupidest, most refutable piece of dung you've ever written on this site, and that's saying a lot. [Sorry: YOU brought dung into the conversation as an acceptable reference to my point of view, so it's only fair]. Of course, there IS a cosmology in Genesis 1 that is actually laid out in Genesis 1. Had you taken a deeper look into the history of the Semitic people and the ancient Canaanites, you would see quite clearly that Genesis 1 reflects an actual ancient belief about what people once thought the universe looked like. Of course, you can't DO that without some degree of humility and acknowledgment of the possibility that you MIGHT be WRONG about something, so I wouldn't expect you to undertake this honest kind of inquiry that you have labeled "poop" to absolve yourself of the responsibility to read a f-ing book or two. The ONLY reason those elements are considered symbolic today is that they have been disproven literally. There is no indication that the writers [plural: there was more than one and likely none of them were named Moses] meant anything other than what they said: that the sky is a giant glass wall holding back an ocean above us, and that there are windows in that wall that were opened to create the flood in Noah's day. It would be delusional to say he was mentally abusing children. But to say someone made up all the stories? Of COURSE someone made up those stories! They're preposterous. But if YOU want to say the stories are TRUE, then it is incumbent on you to document the historicity of each account. You can't even tell me who wrote which gospel! Now, you can call it "delusional" to believe the stories are all made up, but you do that while at the same time dismissing all the miracles of the Q'uran and the Book of Mormon as delusional, and you do so without even making room for the faintest of possibilities that they might be a "record" of something that actually happened. Funny how that works. It's okay to be dismissive of the miracle stories of other holy books, but not of your own. It's almost like, what's the word Jesus [allegedly] used all the time? Hypocrisy? That is LITERALLY what you are doing. You say these stories are true unless we prove them wrong, absolving yourself again of the responsibility in dialectics to prove the affirmative claims you are making. Meanwhile, again, you ignore "probabilities of any kind" that you are wrong to dismiss the miracle claims of other religions. Why is it okay for you to do that to every other religion but it's not okay for us to do that to yours? Yes, but the Epic of Gilgamesh does not hold itself to be the Word of God, and its history is not put forth as a real accounting of events. Also, Spider-Man does not live, even though his comics say he lives in New York City. The fact that a story is placed in a real place, even at a real time, and its characters interact with real people, does not make the story true. Gilgamesh is fiction and never intended to be treated otherwise. Genesis didn't become symbolism until skepticism exposed it as ahistorical. Ok,, number one, the f'ing namecalling has to stop. I let you get away with it before and I regret it. Second, we LITERALLY do not believe we are the center of the universe. You have us confused with Christians, who actually believe the purpose of the universe is earth, the purpose of the earth is life, the purpose of life is man and the purpose of man is God. Actual Chrisitan dogma. The flipping NERVE to accuse us of that which you do! The second stupidest thing you've written in this post, but probably only fourth or fifth stupidest overall on GSC. So it's my responsibility to accept that you are right, period, shut up. Right? Because that's what you are actually saying. "Shut up and accept my views or, if you don't, YOU'RE arrogant." GET YOURSELF I refer you to the previous thread: Religion has a vaccine for the Reason virus. This is magical thinking, not reason. The whole POINT of using WORDS as the means of communication is reason, our ability to discern meaning from words. The ARROGANCE to suggest that because YOU have a proper attitude toward a Creator while the rest of us have a "bias to tear down everything!" The GALL. I have news for you. It's not your humility to the Creator that allows you to excuse away any honest examination of scripture. It's your gullibility. The amount of projecting going on with that statement... there isn't that much projecting at Cannes. Literally not my problem. And you’re the only one having trouble following logic here. Reported as namecalling. Knock it the hell off. Jesus called out the hypocrisy of people who had a surface understanding of scripture but refused to look deeper. I'm just saying, if there are Pharisees in this conversation, it's not the people saying "do what Jesus did: look closer." To me there is absolute gullibility and a nearly psychopathic desire to accept any explanation under the sun as long as it means not having to admit that you are wrong in how you are presenting your arguments for taking Scripture at your word instead of reading it in context and learning a bit more about the history of the people who produced it. You seem to have us confused with Christians again. I think the scripture intends to say what it actually says. God may not have a purpose for every adjective, but writers do. And when you eliminate “perfection” as a goal of the writer, the bottom line is that they choose words for reasons. Had they meant to say the sky was an “expanse,” they would have. They said it’s a firmament because that’s what they thought. They were wrong. End of story, unless you think God was the Author and He meant something deeper. He wasn’t and He didn’t. There is such a thing as an "anti-fundamentalist bias," a rejection of a thought or idea because that thought or idea is held by fundamentalists. The idea that the Bible is anti-gay is a fundamentalist bias. It’s also pretty dead-on accurate, isn’t it. That the scripture can be read and understood because of the words it uses, that's fundamentalist. It's also completely consistent with reason and scripture. But the idea that "I don't like what this says so I'm going to pretend it doesn't really mean that even though it says that quite clearly and historical analysis of what the people of that time believed and taught bears it out. Because I am humble" is indefensible. You have rejected the claims of every one of those groups, and I would bet good money that you did so without giving them a FRACTION of the deference that Charity and I have given your views. Now, I'm going to take a break from this thread so I am not tempted to put the modhat on and treat this obnoxious post of yours with the respect it so truly deserves. This is the Atheism subforum. Christian scripture gets no special treatment here, and that is what you are explicitly demanding of us, under penalty of being subjected to juvenile namecalling and a level of hypocrisy that is astonishing in its lack of self-awareness. If you cannot handle this forum, you are welcome to stay off it. But post this kind of bulls hit again and the response will be, within the rules of this site, appropriate. [Moderator edit to correct formatting issues]

https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html Where does it come from? The Russian propaganda model of Firehose of Falsehoods.

Back to baseball. This is a fairly rare occurrence in baseball, although it has happened three times already this year. Some interesting occurrences: On August 27, 1977, Texas Rangers teammates Toby Harrah and Bump Wills did this back-to-back. Ichiro Suzuki is the only player to have done this in an All-Star game. On April 6, 2009, Emilio Bonifacio of the Florida Marlins became the first player in 41 years to do this on Opening Day, On July 18, 2010, Jhonny Peralta of the Cleveland Indians took 16.74 seconds to accomplish this. Only 18 players have done this twice in one game. What is this occurrence? George

It was.

What makes you think that an atheist did not do “in-depth analysis of scripture” (sometimes for years) or have a positive outlook when they did believe in God and in the bible? More than likely, some believed in many things then that you still believe today. As it often happens, people begin deconstructing their “beliefs” because of what their continued study begins to point out to them, inconsistencies being only one of them. I can’t speak for Penworks personally, but it seems to have been that way for her. And it definitely happened that way for Julia Sweeney according to her story. What you wrote above is what people did concerning vpw's and other twi's teachings, usually beginning to question while still being involved and even more so after leaving. You were okay with the process then. It’s only now when some apply the same process to God and the bible that you seem to take issue with it. Perhaps it's not the process you're objecting to but the results of it because with atheists, their results disagree with what you believe. Then, it becomes all about their egos. I'm pretty sure twi followers said the same thing about the people who posted here on the "About the Way" forum.

The Challenging Counterfeit, by Raphael Gasson, if memory serves

That's Clark, nice. Anyone wondering what a Gish Gallop looks like, there's a prime example.

Well, I don't know about that. Heh Burton was the first limb leader for Ohio and the first Ohio FellowLaborers director. I read some sort of thing he wrote about it that was kind of like a high school term paper, complete with scripture references. If I remember correctly (and I'm not certain I do) I think he presented it at some HQ function, such as AC or Summer School or something along those lines.

Since there doesn't seem to be a way of knowing what these probable inaccuracies were, how is anyone supposed to know what the original account, if there was one, even said? Is calling certain people delusional because of their conclusions about the bible not your own way of bringing "bias for the scriptures" to the analysis? I think the account of Jesus casting out that demon from a child is fictional for a number of reasons, one being that if there is no god, then there would also be no devil spirits. Another reason is given at the end of this post. I’ll repeat what I said before except to add "causing physical abuse" to Jesus' actions when he cast out the devil spirit in such a way that the demon “rent him sore (mangled, convulsed), and came out of him: and he was as one dead.” I’ll also repeat my reason for saying this - if Jesus had the authority over devil spirits, why did he not add the command to leave the child without causing harm when he said, “Thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee, come out of him, and enter no more into him.” Jesus was obviously the one in control, yet he allowed the spirit to come out in such a violent way as to cause physical harm to the child. (Nothing to be concerned about though, we'll just overlook that part since Jesus then simply took him by the hand and lifted up the boy.) Now, compare this to another account in Mark 5. This demon named Legion (because there were many devil spirits present) was strong enough to repeatedly break the chains which bound the man. When Jesus granted Legion's request to be sent into the swine, this specifically strong demon just came out of the man after Jesus gave them leave. I guess it's "probable" that they were so thankful that Jesus agreed to the swine thing that they decided not to leave violently - but didn't feel the same way when entering the swine. IMO, these accounts were written by men in a way to emphasize the evil and power of demons to make the story more gripping with the additional benefit of likely putting fear of them in the reader.

I suspect he means natural, physical, mammalian death. What was it like before I was were born? I don’t know. I don’t remember. So, I am not afraid of death. I won’t even know that I’m dead.

I totally understand what you are saying. If the scriptures are true, there is a certain comfort in believing one has eternal life over eternal death. I think a "once saved, always saved" doctrine is needed though because without it, many Christians continue to strive to keep in God's graces. I would see that as having both a fear of life, as well as a fear of death, which makes it a kind of hell on earth to live that way. If the scriptures were written by men alone, eternal life is the biggest of all carrots on a stick churches can rely on to get people to believe and act a certain way.

Didn’t he have something to do with that “spiritual” Ghost Busters book? All that ectoplasm and other such pseudo-scientific bullshonta?

Thanks for clarifying what Turek definitely appeared to be doing. It would be very time consuming to read up on his SPURGE theory to see its flaws and as tempting as that is, there are other priorities in life at the moment.

John Quincy Adams was the first President elected in the House of Representatives, as no one had a majority in the Electoral College, so I'm guessing it was he. George

The giant wall/bubble idea is something Earl Burton brought into the mix. I don't remember any specifics. I know. I know. It was only 50 years ago. I should remember this stuff. It was in a class or an AC teaching or a paper or something.

The strange part is that you are blind to the bias you are bringing to the analysis. its easy to be critical of everything and to adopt a critical bias. But even with humans if you approach them with a critical bias it completely affects how you perceive them. This produces a new type of sunglasses- the poop tinted ones. There is no “cosmology” of Genesis that is something you are reading into it. It is an origin story with a lot of symbolic elements. Likewise those who think that Jesus Christ was mentally abusing children he was healing or that somebody made up all those stories completely is delusional. They are ignoring probabilities of any kind discounting inaccuracies introduced by centuries of hand copying and just making up their own narrative completely and saying unless you “prove me wrong” what I say is true. I can read “The Epic of Gilgamesh” and get out of it what it has - the culture of a story passed down by bards, rhyming verse, some elements of the world they lived in, etc. It’s only with the inflated egos like I see on this thread that think they are all the center of the universe that every such literary work must be accompanied by their version of scientific proof. You’re not that important to require or demand any such thing. The scriptures say of themself they are not valuable without a positive outlook toward them. Your attitude towards a Creator really determines what unlocks for you in scripture. If He doesn’t exist then your bias is to tear down everything attached and pointing out inconsistencies to invalidate any value in His messages. So you yourself are the impediment to actually accomplishing an in depth analysis of scripture. And your confirmation bias will allow you to “prove” anything you want. Regarding censorship I believe you at your word it didn’t happen and the 3 dropped posts were something to do with either login issues or the forum database resetting or something. But between dropped posts and the in line responses within a quote it is too tedious to answer certain posts that are now stacking up with similar kind of illogic. You are being a dog in the manger. That is not my problem. Jesus provided exact guidance for these types of interactions in the gospels as he conversed with the Pharisees. They also did not believe in him and were trying to use their “in depth analysis” of scripture to catch him in his words. Conspiracy theory is not in depth analysis. VPWs Advanced Class is living proof of this. To me there absolutely is fundamentalist Way bias in how you are presenting your arguments for being an atheist. “The Word” does not fit with a mathematical exactness and scientific precision. God does not have a purpose for every adjective He inspired, and He doesn’t possess people and write with their hands like automatic writing. That is TWI BS and a symptom of an overly aggressive fundamentalist bias. I find the same hyper ventilation over adjectives in other cults - Mormons and JWs. Except they also use the fundamentalist approach to “prove” Joseph Smiths delusions or the GBs true position as the faithful and discreet slave.

In the short clip Mr. Hitchens refers to the fear of death. Does he mean 'eternal death'. If so, I would agree, it's there for me. The only comfort I see in eternal death if there's any at all is, it's not eternal fire and brimstone torture. Otherwise I think it's eternally tragic and something to be afraid about.

William Lane Craig is the master of the Gish Gallop, a form of debate in which you efficiently spout as much bulls hit in the time allotted as you possibly can. Since it takes more time to clean bulls hit than it does to defecate it, the opponent will leave some arguments unanswered strictly because there's not enough time in the world to answer it. Then Craig cites all the points he made that were not refuted and declares victory. Meanwhile ALL his arguments are bulls hit. All of them, without exception or distinction.

No problem.

I didn't remember. I should watch it again myself. It has been a few years.

I'll have to watch this debate a second time since so much was covered. Turek's religious arguments concerning God were basically "everything is man's fault" (which is nothing new) so he fell well short when opposing Hitchens' arguments. However, much of Turek's rapid science speak for the existence of God went over my head, so I'm wondering if from memory, you think Hitchens effectively debunked any of his assertions. Just a general yes or no is all I'm looking for since I plan to watch the video again.

I'm looking forward to watching the Turek one then.

I've only recently become aware of the "Christian" doctrine of purity culture from some of the people sharing their deconversion stories. Both males and females speak of the harmful impact it has on them as the topic of sexuality is very sin/shame based. It would be interesting to read Cait's story and see how she was able to heal from such an upbringing. Thanks for recommending it.

I'm guessing there weren't any Eagle fans (and will make a note of it) so, it was the second song on album "Hotel California". Another one then. It's an election year so without getting political I'm thinking were about to witness some shenanigans the like never before seen in this country, or possibly not. Which US president lost both the popular and the electoral vote and still won the election?

The Sharpton debate is my least favorite, because, well, Sharpton. If you can tolerate William Lane Craig's grating tone, that one is decent. Hitch always said Dinesh D'Souza was his most formidable opponent - those debates are good and lively. There are many more worth watching, but the one with Frank Turek is the most fun for me.