jag writes:
God is subject to science. Example: Prayer can be scientifically tested. So can many other aspects of religion.
Jag, your entire premise is flawed. It has been pointed out to you many times that prayer is not God. People praying for money, a promotion, or other “worldly” goods, and not getting it, does not prove that there is no God. When people pray for comfort, they often get it (this could be a placebo effect, but you can’t actually prove that). Also, I know people who claim to have been given money, job opportunities, or other physical needs, after praying for it. I don’t see how you could prove that their prayers were not involved in that.
When I broke my arm, my father prayed that it would be healed properly. My arm healed properly. I’m not superstitious enough to say that God was actively mending my arm, but nobody actually examined and tested my body’s repair systems directly, so, technically, scientifically, I can’t say that it was actually my immune system, and not God, that sutured my bones back together. Only parsimony allows me to do this.
Incidentally, I think it was just my body’s normal healing response, but that’s not the point, is it?
You should also acknowledge that your statement, "there is no evidence that any deity has been exerting any effect upon this world" is based upon the unsupportable premise that God's acts will appear as anomalies in an otherwise empirically-testable continuum of “normal” events. Keep in mind that insinuating that God has to act outside the laws of physics indicates that He didn't make the laws good enough in the first place.
Jag writes:
Witness: They claim the right to tell me I cannot buy a beer in many counties. When asked why, effectively, because they said so.
There can be reasons for restricting beer, jag. Don’t thousands of people get killed every year because some people had too much beer? Granted, the beer itself isn’t the problem, but rather, the people who weren’t responsible enough to designate a driver or not play with guns when their blood-alcohol level reached 0.08%. If your county (population: 27,891) had 223 beer-related deaths last year (approximately one death for every 150 people), and you wanted to stop it, what would you do? You could give mandatory “responsibleness” tests that determined how many beers each individual would be allowed to drink. Or, you could post a police officer at each bar to make sure no drunk people were driving or playing with guns. What county has those kind of resources? It’s much easier to just outlaw beer. If you set the bar low, you don’t have to try to tailor the law to individuals*. That will probably cut down on the amount of drunk drivers and drunk gunners, and, consequently, cut down on the number of people killed by drunk people. Isn’t that a good thing? Doesn’t it make sense to try to cut down on the number of people who get killed? This is a matter of priorities: the counties have determined that the right to buy beer does not supercede in importance the 223 lives they could statistically save.
Now, if they were to say you can't buy strawberry-flavored ice cream or hershey bars with almonds in them, I would be a bit suspicious of ulterior, irrational motives in the decision-making process.
*
I dislike this concept as much as you probably do, but you can’t seriously argue that it doesn't make sense.
Darwin loves you.
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