Anti-theist

ANY version? Note how you have concluded that anything supernatural, if "it" exists, is a monster. Spoken like a true antitheist. What if, on the other hand, it was a superior race of aliens? What if it was simply a giant asteroid on its journey to end life on earth? I could see the rationale in regard to the asteroid. It would be neither good nor evil...it would simply be "universe science".But about the hypothetical aliens:

what would be their intent? Consuming humans? Taking over authoritatively despite our pleas and warnings? Assuming they demonstrated power beyond our capabilities, would they de-facto be classified as evil if we could not reason with them?

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"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." ~Mark Twain "
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“…far from science having buried God, not only do the results of science point towards his existence, but the scientific enterprise itself is validated by his existence.”- Dr.John Lennox

“A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.”
H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America

“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of a doubt, what is laid before him.” — Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You
(1894).

WTF you talking about? What if what was a superior race of aliens? Are you having a stroke? What?If it does evil it is evil. Your god does evil. It is evil. If superior aliens do evil then they are evil and we will classify them so.No brainer.So, what's the point, Phat?

The "authority" from the sky. In fact, what if Jesus was actually one of these same aliens? What if the legends were true and He communicated with His Father? It would be like Princess Leia in Star Wars sending a message to Obi-Wan Kenobi. "Help us, Obi-Wan. You're our only hope". So what if these sky aliens were of unknown intent? What if Obi-Wan represented the good or noble side of "the Force". (which some geeks believe in much more readily than Jesus! ) To get you to talk for one thing. You are the one who insisted that any "Being" from the sky that was majical was evil. First off, I would submit that you dont know "my god". Neither does ringo. All that you two have done is read a book. Note that you admit that the hypothetical aliens are superior. What if they have an evolved definition of evil? What if they claim that by smiting us, they are saving the universe from our eventual attempt at exploration, politics, and spreading our germs and memes through the cosmos?
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Wow. Reading comprehension, Phat.Try re-reading that post again. Message 810Not in specifics, like what's its eye color or the cologne it favors, but the fact you assign it the status of god is enough. It's evil. What shit? I did no such thing. What if your what if's are BS and I don't care?

then you need sleep. Take a nap and come back when rested. You seem to care enough about the train wreck that is climate change, yet you say that you are too old to care. People have no idea what's coming. We can't even get along now....it will be worse later. Humans failed with God. They are now failing without god.Time for a smart world leader to take over. Or not.

I watched parts of jojo rabbit thanks to you. It was a very good movie.Now, here's the scary part. If Trump were smart, he would pretend to get saved and change his whole demeanor. They would elect him in a landslide! The Beast would be back at the helm, just in time to take on Russia and China.I don't think he is that bright, however. Bring on the next contender.

OK. Are you concluding that if humans worship anyone or anything that demands worship, it makes that person evil? If so, I might actually agree.

What does this tell you, Phat?The very idea of gods poisoned the species leading to much blood but since the gods are fake your two observations should tell you something significant.

Phat's favorite apologist, Mr. Deity, asks a very puzzling question. If god resurrected himself then walked and performed miracles on earth for hundreds of people to see for 40 days before ascending back to his sky mansion, then why does the bible cover it up?

Are you having trouble getting AZPaul to talk? That doesn't sound plausible to me. All you should have to do is sit back and wait a minute. I have said it before: I know your God better than you do.Discuss. Their definition is irrelevant. Their definition is bound to be self-serving, like the mosquito's definition of evil or the parasitic worm's definition of evil. The only definition of evil that matters to us is our self-serving definition. That what-if doesn't work with an almighty God. He should be able to stop our depredations without smiting us.

If God exists, the fact that He doesn't save every baby, sick person, or hurt person causes some people to declare Him evil.I suppose that is self-serving in that we humans expect a God who will take care of us.Some believe in a Deistic God who lets us grow up and make mistakes while He is busy playing poker with lesser gods in some corner of the universe. Both you and I grew up believing that Jesus was God. You don't believe that He ever existed as marketed, but you hint that He is evil also based on Matthew 25.You DO realize that death is just another part of life, don't you?God is under no obligation to do anything for ringo or Phat.No wonder you stopped believing. You expected God to be nicer. And yet you berate me for making up a nicer version of Jesus. Sheesh.

Causes thinking people to conclude that He is evil.Evil is as evil does - and also as evil doesn't do. If He stands and watches somebody drown when He has the power to pull them out, He is evil. God said He creates evil in Isaiah 45:7. Matthew 25 just confirms that Jesus endorses sending people to eternal fire. That's totally irrelevant to this discussion. He certainly is. If anybody has the power to prevent evil from happening and they just stand by and watch it happen, they are eivil. If He's not part of the solution, He's part of the problem. I stopped believing because of arguments like yours. Well, DUH!You pretend to believe in a god but you have to make up a sunshine-and-lollipops god that even YOU can swallow. You no more of a believer than I am. You cherry-pick Bible verses when it suits you but you can't stomach the Biblical God either.

NOTE (2022 Oct 01):
Ben Shapiro reminds me of a very heavily caffeinated chipmuck overdosing on meth cut with steroids. A constant torrent of words (word salad actually) which is meant to overwhelm any opposition and to keep anyone from responding effectively or even being able to get a word in edgewise.Basically it's the old college student dictum: "If you can't dazzle them with your brilliance, then baffle them with your bullshit." A corollary practice is "snowing" (AKA "a snow job") in which you try to bluff your way through not knowing the answer by giving a long response having very little to do with the question -- name seems derived from being in a blizzard unable to see anything because of all the snow falling (I've been in a North Dakota blizzard: no wind, almost complete silence (in part due to the muffling effects of the mass quantity of snow floating down), near-zero visibility because of the mass quantity of snow floating down) and the most common use is in an essay exam.Now where have we seen that before? Eg:

1. Trump people (eg, spokespeople and supporters in Congress). For example, some had been on Bill Maher, like Kellyanne Conway and several others. On Bill Maher, they would invariably "respond" to a question by releasing a firehose ("Drink from the fire hose!" UHF) of voluminous verbiage under high pressure that changes the subject and diverts off into their bullshit accusations (eg, "But what about Hillary's email server?"). Despite Maher's repeated attempts to get them to answer the actual question, they would just keep going on and on streaming bullshit.
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   Once they get started, you cannot stop them. Nor can you ever clean up the mess that they just created. And the discussion was sabotaged, so "Mission Completed" (MC). They achieved their disinformation goal (Putin would be so proud).
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   For fun, watch again the photo-shopped take-down sequence from Daredevil in which Trump's and his hencemen's faces are photoshopped onto the characters being arrested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhD3I_AZJMY (would not embed)
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   When the crooked journalist working for Kingpin is arrested, they replace her face with Kellyanne Conway's whose mouth never stops moving -- that is the reason for mention this video here.
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   The original (eg, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lO61TCgbMas ) is also worth watching, in part for the music which was Puccini's Nessun Dorma ("None shall sleep!"). Daredevil's greatest superpower: the law.
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2. Proselytizers, con-men, grifters, used-car salesmen. Rapid patter (always well-rehearsed, of course, though Shapiro may be a natural (but do not reject any preparation) ) . "Them fast-talkin' city slickers!" For examples refer to innumerable such characters being portrayed in movies and on TV. Phil Silvers is perhaps the best known example (for my generation and before, at least) always playing a fast-talking salesman or someone trying to pull a con; think "Sgt Bilko."
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   Cultural note: When I worked in Villingen-Schwenningen, W. Germany, in 1973, there was a discount department store in the town center called "Bilko". I'm sure there was no connection with Sgt Bilko, but it did strike me as strange.
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3. Creationist debates. While such events should be an opportunity for presenting one's own side and getting answers to your questions to the opposition, creationists use them to further their own agenda of disinformation and deception:
   • The most effective exchange of information and ideas would be regarding a specific subject (eg, radiometric dating, fossil evidence for a specific transition), but every single time such a debate topic is requested, the creationist refuses it, especially if it's an experienced creationist (a rank amateur might make the mistake of accepting it, but will very quickly learn better). The creationist knows that his best tool is the ability to change the subject immediately so that he can dodge and avoid all direct questions, basically the same deflect-and-divert tactics used by Republicans.
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     Keeping the topic vague also allows creationists to place unreasonable demands on their opponents who must become experts in everything while the creationist doesn't have to know anything. Their opponent is honor bound to be truthful and to present accurate information to the audience while the creationist can just make up whatever lies he wants to on the spur of the moment and he knows he will get away with it.
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   • Creationists exploit the debate format in order to prevent their opponents from responding effectively to their claims and to respond unchallenged to their opponents with BS.
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   • The time limits in the debate format also enables the Gish Gallop, named after its most notable practitioner, Dr. Duane Gish of the ICR.
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     The basic strategy of the Gish Gallop is to wait for the 5-10 minute segments towards the end of the debate and use all your time to rapidly make a series of claims and "raised questions" that your opponent cannot possibly respond to in his own 5-10 minute allotment, even if he knew how to respond:
     1. Each gallop question could be rattled off in 5 seconds, some maybe as long as 10 seconds. That means that in just two minutes you could bombard your opponent with 12 to 24 questions, each of which would require far more than 10 minutes to respond to (that figure being extremely optimistic). Therefore, your opponent had little hope of being able to respond to just one of your questions, leaving 11 to 23 more that he couldn't even address in any manner. That presents to the audience the false impression that scientists have no answers to these questions (a false claim that I have frequently seen creationists make elsewhere).
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     2. The other aspect of the Gish Gallop is that the opponent has to know how to respond, which he might not know. The primary reason is that creationist claims are all false with many of them claiming to refer to "scientific sources" which either do not exist or else actually say the opposite of what creationists claim. As Fred Edwords pointed out (quoting from memory):

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        You not only have to know your science well, but you need to know your creationism better! ... You can see that their claim is ridiculous, but you can't just say, "But that's ridiculous!" You have to be able be able to explain why it's ridiculous! And you need to be able to do that while engaging the audience.

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        Again, while the opponent is bound to hold to the truth and honesty and to help the audience understand the subject, the creationist is operating under no such restrictions and is free to lie and make up stuff (especially since the audience understanding the subject is the very last thing that the creationist would want). So when the creationist has just made up some new lie, especially claiming a "scientific source" (which he has also just made up), the opponent has no hope of responding effectively with the severe lack of sufficient time making matters even worse.
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        A prime example is what happened when Gish pulled that trick in the wrong place, on national TV (a PBS documentary) where he claimed that there's a protein that shows humans to be more closely related to bullfrogs than to chimpanzees. His mistake was that he allowed his opponents plenty of time to research his claim. In follow-up questions to him asking him to identify that protein, he "didn't have it on hand, but he definitely has documentation of it that he will provide" -- which he never did because it didn't exist. That became the infamous Bullfrog Affair scandal.

Therefore, your accusations against ringo in another topic (see Message 886) that he's "gishing you" are completely false and ungrounded since his replies to you do not fit the requirements for a Gish Gallop.From Wikipedia:

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The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm their opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments. In essence, it is prioritizing quantity of one's arguments at the expense of quality of said arguments. The term was coined in 1994 by anthropologist Eugenie Scott, who named it after American creationist Duane Gish and argued that Gish used the technique frequently when challenging the scientific fact of evolution. It is similar to another debating method called spreading, in which one person speaks extremely fast in an attempt to cause their opponent to fail to respond to all the arguments that have been raised.

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During a Gish gallop, a debater confronts an opponent with a rapid series of many specious arguments, half-truths, misrepresentations, and outright lies in a short space of time, which makes it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them within the format of a formal debate. Each point raised by the Gish galloper takes considerably more time to refute or fact-check than it did to state in the first place, which is known online as Brandolini's law. The technique wastes an opponent's time and may cast doubt on the opponent's debating ability for an audience unfamiliar with the technique, especially if no independent fact-checking is involved or if the audience has limited knowledge of the topics.

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Generally, it is more difficult to use the Gish gallop in a structured debate than a free-form one. If a debater is familiar with an opponent who is known to use the Gish gallop, the technique may be countered by pre-empting and refuting the opponent's commonly used arguments before the opponent has an opportunity to launch into a Gish gallop.

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That is clearly not what ringo do with you.But what Ben Shapiro (and the Trump Republican s in particular and Republican spokesfools in general) do is much more akin to the Gish Gallop. Who could possibly have a conversation with a Gish Galloping firehose of BS?Has a written debate been attempted? Though then Brandolini's Law would likely come into play:

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Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage that emphasizes the effort of debunking misinformation, in comparison to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. It states that "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."

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In Economic Sophisms (1845, 1867), Bastiat expresses an early notion of this law:

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We must confess that our adversaries have a marked advantage over us in the discussion. In very few words they can announce a half-truth; and in order to demonstrate that it is incomplete, we are obliged to have recourse to long and dry dissertations.

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In his 1786 Letters on Infidelity, George Horne writes that:

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Pertness and ignorance may ask a question in three lines, which it will cost learning and ingenuity thirty pages to answer. When this is done, the same question shall be triumphantly asked again the next year, as if nothing had ever been written upon the subject. And as people in general, for one reason or another, like short objections better than long answers, in this mode of disputation (if it can be styled such) the odds must ever be against us; and we must be content with those for our friends who have honesty and erudition, candor and patience, to study both sides of the question.

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In 2005, Russian physicist Sergey Lopatnikov anonymously published an essay in which he introduced the following definition:

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If the text of each phrase requires a paragraph (to disprove), each paragraph – a section, each section – a chapter, and each chapter – a book, the whole text becomes effectively irrefutable and, therefore, acquires features of truthfulness. I define such truthfulness as transcendental.

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The Gish gallop, a term coined in 1994 to refer to creationism debates, is a rhetorical technique that relies on overwhelming an opponent with specious arguments, half-truths, and misrepresentations that each require considerably more time to refute or fact-check than they did to state in the first place.

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The yoga scholar-practitioners Mark Singleton and Borayin Larios write that several of their colleagues have "privately" described their "aversion to public debate" with non-scholars because of Brandolini's law.

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A rhetorical trick that would be worthwhile to become familiar with in order to better defend against it. 

For your consideration this glorious christmas season.Phat, I know he's one of your favorites. A present for you and your fellow believers.

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28 “Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter, 29 but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.” -- Bible

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An old message, but it was small and I never replied. Apologies, but it still seems relevant and the thread is active.

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Good point, Rahvin. Can I count you as an anti-theist?

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Interestingly you can look at my post history on this very site to see my journey from Christian to Atheist.As far as anti-theist, I'm a rationalist. I want my beliefs to be based on rational, cogent arguments supported by enough evidence to make them convincingly likely. I'm anti-irrationality - I distrust and believe to be harmful all propositions based on insufficient evidence, based on logical fallacies, or which appear to directly contradict observed evidence.I want my internal map of reality to match reality's true territory as closely as possible. I want for others to similarly seek out more accurate models of reality, because we all live in the same world, and our beliefs affect our actions. I want people in my community to base their actions on reality. Believing something based on insufficient evidence, or based on logical fallacies, or based on false premises, or counter to observed evidence leads to wrong answers. If you honestly and truly believe that punching me in the face will deposit a billion dollars in my bank account, then I want you to do it if that is actually true, and I want you not to do it if it is not actually true.If that happens to make all present theistic arguments classified as wrong/bad/harmful because they are inherently irrational, then so be it.

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And did it ever occur to you that the things that Jesus was attacking were not people themselves but principalities,powers, and wickedness in high places? Or do you consider the whole idea absurd?

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What the character Jesus might have been intending to talk about is irrelevant. Only the effects on believers matter to me - Jesus isnt trying to legislate in my country, his followers are. If you can come up with a peaceful interpretation thats nice and all, but we can see the historical and contemporary effects of the non-peaceful interpretations very clearly.There are people who want to murder my friends and family members because I am related to and friends with trans people. These people want to murder my friends and family because of their direct interpretations of the bible. They want to do so "legally," by taking over the government until they can use state-sponsored murder (the death penalty) to attach due process top the murder, but the point is they want my loved ones to be dead and they justify and foment this violence based on the fiery passages of the bible.I simultaneously consider the whole thing to be absurd. I dont think you've ever been able to properly imagine the position of an Atheist, Phat - it's like living in the real world, except traditionally most of the world has believed the Lord of the Rings to be perfectly reliable historical information, and that challenging that belief makes you a pawn of Sauron. Wars have been fought and millions have died over different interpretations of the texts, or whether the Silmarilion should be counted as canon. People are leaving the Lord of the Rings "faith" more often now than in history, and I am among those who previously believed that Sauron and Gandalf were real but now believe it was all just fantasy. I still need to deal with people who honestly and deeply believe that the Elves have all gone into the West, but Sauron's power yet may rise again from the lost ruin of Mount Doom despite the destruction of the One Ring. Because boys sometimes fall in love with other boys, or something."Principalities, powers, and wickedness in high places" sounds like at best a general condemnation of very real human tyranny and oppression, and at worst nonsense about Balrogs and Smaug. And I know that Christians are a large and varied community (we arent even talking about non-Christians here, which is an odd sort of Christian privilege), and there are more than enough supporters of both interpretations.