Somasleep, you continue to avoid directly addressing any of the points myself or anyone else has raised. Simply continuing to assert as absolute fact that the supernatural not only exists but is necessary for human qualities leads to a conclusion that you're either ignoring what everyone else has to say, that you have no relevant response to it or that you don't understand it well enough to respond meaningfully.

Quote from somasleep :

The claim, "I have no free will" is self-contradictory.

Noone made that claim. Shotglass basically said "if free will exists it must be natural" ... since it would exist in beings which are natural and who can only perceive by natural means, his statement makes perfect sense.

Quote :

I don't have a scientific proof but rather a logical proof.

Since when are logic and science exclusive? Proof that's grounded in science is basically by definition logical. Proof is any evidence shows an argument to be true. The sub-category is irrelevant. You can either prove something or you can't.

Quote :

My argument is a logical argument and not a Biblical one. I argue that a supernatural aspect is needed to explain human qualities.

Spock would call "fail" on that train of logic. To attempt to argue logically that a supernatural aspect is necessary is oxymoronical. Anything supernatural is, logically, unavailable to human perception because we can only perceive that which exists naturally. Logically, using logic to explain that which, logically, we can't even perceive, is the very height of illogical thinking.

As for this argument that the supernatural is a necessary requirement for being human, I've yet to see anything approaching any substance. At this point the very core of your argument is itself insubstantial, etheric, invisible...supernatural, if you will.

And if this allegedly logical argument for the supernatural isn't Biblical, I'd be interested to hear where your concept of the supernatural come from in the first place.

Last edited by Hankstar, Wed 2 Apr 2008, 04:34.

You Germans also have the most Schumachers per square km, but it proves nothing - only one of them was any bloody good.

Love those crafty Belgian monks. It always seems to be monks who make the best booze - I wonder where New Year's Eve would be without dear brother Dom Perignon, for example ...

True, agreed.

Hypothetically, even if free will did have a supernatural source, there's no way any of us mere carbon-based mortals could ever know, or even be reasonably sure. We might read about it in a book, and the book might assert the book itself is the truth - but since the book was written on paper, with pens and ink, by mortal humans, all within the boundaries of natural laws - well I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this ...

Chimay, that's the one for me :yummy: Sublime flavours and brilliant bang for your buck

Kev, that pocket-ham (whosever it was) might well have been a weapon, but it sure didn't look dangerous...

1976 here. Out in the sticks we had an outside sodding toilet until about 1983. B&W TV until 1985 (used to go across the road and watch nana's - no point watching Batman or The Hulk in b&w). No VCR until about 1991. Got a second hand C64 in 1986 with several hundred hacked games (Fast Hack'em II FTW), which started everything Hot water & cooking via wood-stove primarily. No mains water or gas, basically existed 100% on rain water unless there was a drought (which was often) and we bought bore-water from the orchardists next door. Brothers and I made dozens of home made karts and bikes from old bits. Lost loads of skin but learned valuable engineering principles which I shall pass on to my own little Spartans.
BTW - loved every minute of it

What we're arguing about: absolute certainty of something that, by definition, is uncertain. The core issue of this argument is the believers' claim of knowledge of something which basically cannot be known.

That which is supernatural is, by definition, undetectable, unobservable and unknowable by any natural means. Since all we humans have at our disposal are natural means of observation & detection, all a supernatural believer can ever do is think, speculate, feel or just plain wish that the supernatural exists. He can't know.

On the flip side, a rational person can't know absolutely that the supernatural doesn't exist. He can, however, maintain that if it did exist he still wouldn't be able to detect it, purely because he can only observe things via his natural senses. The rationalist can also demand to know how it is that believers presume to know it exists when they are as bound by natural law as anyone else. How indeed do you prove the existence of the unobservable?

The rational person will always leave a door open in his mind to be proven wrong (otherwise he wouldn't be very rational), but since he, like any human, only has his natural senses to go on, anything supernatural wishing to prove its existence would have to employ natural means in order to be observed.

Great work Bob, that's a masterpiece :up: Nice to see your heavy drinking being put to some constructive use (other than standing outside No. 10 Downing St brandishing your pocket-ham and demanding an audience with Prime Minister Churchill - or was it Kev that did that? My memory's hazy - shit, it could've been me).

Or: everyone's an atheist with regard to Zeus, Thor, Baal & The Great Galactic Squid - atheists just go one god further

Quote from Racer X NZ :

I chose Buddhism personally as there's -
A: No preaching, all religions/views are fine and where ever people are is where their meant to be.
B: Being happy is the goal.
c: Life really is a joke !

Or ... did Buddhism choose you? Interestingly enough, I stopped by Buddhism on my way out of religion altogether, as I'd always had respect for its concept and its respect for other faiths - or the absence of faith. I still have more respect for Buddhism than any theistic religion. That A, B & C is pretty much how I try to live anyway. Sadly though, I think it's a three-part Golden Rule that a lot of organised religions and their followers completely miss. Blinded by centuries of brutal competition for souls, maybe ...

Last edited by Hankstar, Tue 1 Apr 2008, 11:02.

Hmmm...(resists temptation to google & gives up).
Stumped

What's wrong with harsh (yet loving) abuse when it comes to discouraging idiotic threads? Give me a flaming bananna any day.

/me thinks "Re-Animator" (but not with any great confidence) ... is that Peter Weller on the right there?

But what if I miss the one cult that actually has the Truth? What if one of those religions has a clause damning anyone for covering their bases? Can't risk it.

Here's the plan: I'll disbelieve everything in equal measure. They can't all send me to hell or reincarnate me as a dung beetle if I'm wrong ... can they?

Duh, binary heaven.

Quote from me :

If I woke up in heaven...

Just because I'm a non-believing rationalist, doesn't mean I'm not open to being proven wrong - and if I did turn out to be wrong I wouldn't be waking up anywhere near heaven

Permisson granted retroactively.

Quote from Shotglass :

i always figured if there is an afterlife it would have to necessarily be outside of this universes space time and thus not influenced by it which means you wouldnt need one
also luckily time machines tend to be invented simultaneously in all times

Fair point! If I had to exist for eternity I'd be very disappointed if that existence wasn't in at least four dimensions. If I woke up in heaven and found I couldn't go back and make dinosaur home movies, I'd ask for the manager and demand to be reincarnated immediately.

Quote from Polyracer :

If you were born in a different part of the world - you would have a different belief, so what makes you think that yours is the right one?

A small but important question that started my own questioning process, many years ago. As a kid, I thought to myself: "if some little kid in a village in Africa hasn't heard of Jesus, is he going to hell? If so, why would god set it up so that innocent kids could end up in hell through no fault of their own? If god wanted everyone to know his words and love him and be with him in heaven, why did he only appear to a bunch of shepherds in the desert thousands of years ago and give them all different messages?" and it went on from there.

Mazz, good work on the calculations - you went to more effort than the writers of the bible did, clearly. If people kept relying on "biblical reasoning" as you put it (the supreme oxymoron) and never actually investigated the world for themselves, we'd still believe that pi was exactly 3 (!), goats mating in the presence of stripes would produce striped baby goats and the earth was the centre of the universe, all surrounded by tiny stars hung up like christmas ornaments Leaving aside the mythology, even as a reference book the bible provides more information about the ignorance of bronze-age shepherds than the actualities of the world. One would think a book inspired by the universe's creator would be a little more accurate in describing that creation.

Quote from Shotglass :

i think watching dinosaurs would cater better to a few childhood dreams

That would so rule. I'd have to spend a little while inventing a time machine though.

Fair cop, astronomy's not my strong point. I do believe supernovae can happen with or without a binary system though - ol' man wiki states that one kind occurs when one star of a binary pair accumulates matter from its mate to the extent that its core temperature raises high enough to ignite carbon fusion, while the other kind of supernova happens when an ageing massive star's core ceases to produce energy through fusion and collapses, forming a neutron star or a black hole.

Our sun might not be a supernova candidate but if I had an eternal afterlife to look forward to, I could go find a massive star and watch that implode. Who wouldn't want to spend eternity watching stuff like black holes being born?

Dude, no psychedelic progressive? No classical? No country & six-toed moonshine-swillin' sister-marryin' western? No post-grawk keca-grunge tribalism?

No freakin' jazz?

Being honest, I ticked everything

Nice one Liz.

I dig your frustration. Just because so-called "materialists" believe we're evolved animals and not divinely blessed god-pets, many religionists take this as some kind of admission that we're mere slaves to our biochemistry and try to use it as a weapon in debates. As I see it, "free will" is just a convenient linguistic term to describe the ability to make an informed decision within the limits of nature (i.e. an ape can't simply choose to instantly be able to speak Dog, breathe underwater or fly to Mars unassisted) or their learned personal moral values (i.e. I won't kill you because I don't think it's right, not because of "thou shalt not..." carved in stone). Humans have evolved this ability to make informed decisions to a higher degree than their fellow creatures because of our greater ability to receive, analyse and act upon information. There's nothing to suggest we are the pinnacle of Earthly evolution either, we could merely be a sub-branch of an evolutionary path that could deviate and follow many, many tangents for another billion years or so until our beloved sun goes nova and vaporises this planet. That may sound awfully fatalistic and even nihilistic but I think it's completely awesome, and I only wish I could depend on an afterlife because watching a sun implode in real-time would be the most awesome thing in the universe ever.

But it's no surprise that some religious people have problems surrounding the origin of free will - look at what happened to Adam & Eve when they used theirs and ate the fruit that the talking snake offered them - they got expelled from Paradise & sentenced to death, and (apparently) everyone since then has been born a sinner, destined for hell after a life of murder & rape & depravity unless we accept that God decided to be born, via virgin, as a human and have himself executed to save us all ... from his righteous anger - anger which was brought about by his creation using their god-given free will. If free will is indeed a divine gift, then God, being omni-everything, should have known he was handing his beloved creation the one thing that would damn them all, until such time as he chose to have himself killed to fix it. Why didn't he tell Adam & Eve the power of what he'd given them or what the full consequences of using it would be? Well, perhaps he's not as all-loving and all-forgiving as people think, and merely wanted humanity to be totally dependent on him & his whims forever. Sounds more like a supergalactic attention-seeking emo kid to me.

Last edited by Hankstar, Mon 31 Mar 2008, 03:14.

I'm a heterosexual male who enjoys the company of heterosexual women, so I do care

To an extent anyway - I went with the middle option.

Quote from Racer Y :

Reading this thread... ok Skimming through it... I've come to a profound conclusion: Atheists are more hung up about religion than what most zealots are. It's kind of amusing.
one poster contradicted himself in one post... something about not being able to believe in God, yet is perfectly fine with the concept of little green men.
I don't believe in Alien life. I know there are zillions of stars and planets and even a few that could not only sustain life, but sustain life as we know it, but when you look at things in evolutionary terms, at least when I do, the chances of something like that being duplicated elsewhere and succeeding much less getting as far as we have is very slim. It's really not that far of a reach to assume that we are the most advanced life form in the Universe.

Also, looking at things in evolutionary terms, with each passing day we, the human race, come that much closer to achieving a God-like status. So what happens to atheists when everyone is a God?
Even better, will that hot Jehova's Witness chick come by again?
Damn, the wife would be omnipotent too... Would get caught and LITERALLY put through Hell.

What is exactly so contradictory about not believing in gods while being fine with the concept of aliens? We exist because this planet spent four billion years developing appropriate conditions - there are billions of other suns & planets out there that have been evolving for as long if not longer than that, so to utterly discount even the possibility of alien life is really quite presumptuous. We only know what's going on in less than 1% of the entire freaking universe! To put something that could conceivably happen within all laws of nature in the same category as omnipotent, immortal, magical gods is a massive mis-categorisation. The fact that life already does exist is (living) proof that life can exist in this universe. No rational person would say that life does exist outside Earth as there's no evidence, but any rational person would say that it's at least possible. The conditions for life exist here on this planet in this galaxy, and since noone has taken a complete census of every planet in the universe, it would be very premature to assert absolutely that those conditions aren't present elsewhere or that life couldn't take hold in some form somewhere else.

You asked what happens when everyone evolves into a god? Well, first describe how it is that you know we're evolving toward some kind of "end-point" at all, like some big pink Pokemons evolving into the ultimate expressions of our species (how do you know we haven't reached it and this is the best we get?). After you've done that, please tell me how you know we're evoling towards god-hood specifically. Then you'll need describe this god-hood. It'd be nice to know what to look out for.

Personally, I don't think the human race has progressed a great deal since we began writing our thoughts down. Technological & social advancement I will leave aside because those things are highly localised to certain areas of the planet, while vast areas of the world populated by hundreds of millions of people are stricken by poverty, war & oppression and are still ruled by corrupt, immoral people with medieval attitudes to power & wealth. This selfish, greedy, violent species of ours has a very long way to go before we can dare presume to call ourselves gods.

Last edited by Hankstar, Sat 29 Mar 2008, 14:00.

Quote from somasleep :

People mock those who believe in God but in truth it's very rational to believe that human beings come from something that very much like them--God.

That's a very circular argument. It starts with the unquestioning assumption that the bible is absolutely true when it says we were made in god's image, then goes from there.

Quote :

People just accept atheistic materialism without really questioning it

The irony of that statement is glaring. How is that different to accepting a statement that we "look like god" without questioning it? Who's seen god? Noone, so I've read. So you must take it on faith that the bible is being truthful when it says we're made in god's image. Why would god choose the form of a bipedal ape when something with ten tentacles would be much more efficient for creating worlds and designing galaxies?

The entire point of atheism/materialism is that you can't accept anything until you question it and your questions are answered to your satisfaction. Your intellectual, reasonable satisfaction that is, not your emotional satisfaction (ie not choosing an answer that just makes you feel good - sometimes the truth can uncomfortable or even painful).

An atheistic materialist doesn't start with any assumption or assertion or claim to absolute truth, he looks at what is and what can be seen and asks questions about those things. When there aren't satisfactory answers, he doesn't invent them, he keeps looking and reserves judgement until the answers are found. I'm no expert on the universe's origins (and you could almost say noone is, really). However, when it comes to the age of the universe, the age of our planet, the differentiation of species and other questions of that nature (and many of different natures entirely), I know what I require to be convinced of any particular viewpoint and I know equally what doesn't satisfy me. It's not because I have a chip on my shoulder about the supernatural, I just have certain requirements when it comes to what I choose to believe. The entire point of science is to research and explain and verify what can be seen in our universe. Anything supernatural is by definition beyond our understanding or comprehension, therefore a matter of pure speculation at best. Which is why it blows my mind when people are absolutely certain of things they can have no possible knowledge or comprehension of.

Quote :

Aren't we a part of the universe? If the universe is unfeeling and unconscious then so are we.

Illogical to the extreme. Clearly we're not unconscious and unfeeling, otherwise we wouldn't be here. I don't see why a "materialist" view is seen as being so bleak. The godless are as capable of awe, love, inspiration, art, selflessness as any religious person. Just because I don't worship anything it doesn't mean I'm without care or appreciation or love for life. In fact, the reason I try and get what I can out of life is because I'm living for the present, not banking on an eternally blissful afterlife. I'm starting to get over this notion that the non-religious are joyless nihilists, fatalistic doomsayers who just sit around waiting for oblivion.

Quote :

Does anyone actually believe the materialist account of the universe? Unthinking, unfeeling, unconscious matter randomly accidently arranges itself into matter that writes poetry about beauty and debates the existence of God.

That's a very simplistic view of the big bang theory you have there (why do people think "random" = "bad" anyway? I think it's lucky ) - but when you think about it, it's no more far-fetched than the story of an immortal omnipotent being, who has always existed, watching us all, caring whether we worship it, answering our prayers and threatening us with hell for not worshipping it correctly. I have absolutely no problem with people believing what they choose to. I won't mock it because I know religion gives great comfort to people (like me, a while ago), but I don't see why the claims of religious people aren't permitted to face the same reasonable scrutiny as the claims of anyone else. I also won't stand for people assuming atheists don't care about anything because there's no point and we're all just stacks of molecules hurtling around a massive spherical nuclear explosion through cold, heartless space on a tiny rock in some unremarkable corner of a galaxy. If I really felt like that I wouldn't even bother writing these enormous, boring posts. What would be the point?

Well, I do it because I like it. It exercises my brain. It lets me blather on, self-indulgently for ages and focus my thoughts so that I know what I really think and am able to (hopefully) express it to others. I like this little rock of ours and I like being on it. Regardless of its origins and what lies beneath it's very interesting.

Last edited by Hankstar, Fri 28 Mar 2008, 05:19.

When I was a kid I wondered about that. Once Adam & Eve were punked out of the beer garden and had kids, how did their kids have kids? It was either incest or God magicked up some womenfolk for the brothers, but either way noone thought them significant enough to mention their names, origins etc despite them being the third & fourth women on the earth ever(after Lilith - written out of the story for standing up to Adam- and Eve, of course)...pretty much proves bronze-age men, without any clue regarding genetics, wrote the book

But that aint the stupidest thing ever - there's a Creation Museum (or, Massive Oxymoron) in Kentucky which has dioramas of fig-leafed humans riding frickin velociraptors. Yes, there are plenty of people who believe Genesis and it's a fair bet a lot of them are their own half-brothers. The most shameful part? It's the brainchild of Ken Ham, a child-brained halfwit Creo from Australia

Last edited by Hankstar, Fri 28 Mar 2008, 04:34.

This one speaks for itself. Short version: little girl gets sick, parents pray for a month instead of going to hospital, girl dies. Parents blame themselves - for not having enough faith.

Quote :

The mother believes the girl could still be resurrected, the police chief said.

Whatever your thoughts on religion, this is far beyond retarded wishful thinking, far beyond delusional abuse. It's simple murder. These people should have their children removed from them and they should spend the rest of their lives praying to be released from jail.