Total Biscuit's - Atheism does not make you clever

a reply to: chr0naut

I didn't "surmise" anything. I looked you up. See, I cant stand people who act condescending towards others with an over arching sense of superiority. It's a pet peeve of mine because in the long run those are the people that hold us back.

In fact that's the whole reason that I replied to this thread in the first place. John Bain (TB) wrote the blog post that was included in the OP back in 2007. Notice his "holier than thou" attitude and his crazy high IQ of 155 being "better than you" demeanor throughout the text. Those things are what prompted me to tell people who didn't know him, who he was. Here is that crazy high IQ showing last year:

Total Biscuit Tells Somebody to get Cancer and Die

Suddenly John went from a religious genius on a high horse, to a religious idiot. Last month he came up with cancer himself. Look, life is actually pretty short. You should enjoy it while you have it. Instead of thinking you're better than others, try thinking of ways you can better others.

You argument on atheists/theists hinges on the word believe. That in itself is a fallacy. If we put it into broader terms you can think of it this way: If you don't believe in monsters under your bed, I don't have to believe there are. For atheists that is the difference. They just know there are no monsters under the bed and move on.

One last thing I want to share with you and every other person that posts: As you post think about how you represent your religion. Are you doing right by your god? Your religion? If you are doing a bad job of representing religion as it was taught to you, are you as religious as you thought you were? Or does all of that go out the window when you're on the internet and you can make yourself appear as high and mighty. I don't want to leave out the athiests here so the same holds true if you swap the word religion with the word morals.

Have fun Dave.

originally posted by: EnPassant
a reply to: blupblup


But you are using the word "provable" in scientific terms, as if the only standard is scientific method. What I am saying is that there are other ways to knowledge that are valid and the real question here is whether these ways are valid. If George Bush said God told him to invade Iraq he was wrong but that does not invalidate everyone who says they can hear God. A million counterfeit dollar bills do not invalidate one real one.

If I met an old friend, or a complete stranger for that matter, and they told me that god speaks to them, I think I would stay faaaar away.
There is no telling what a person who claims the 'omnipotent one' will do, for all you know you could be due to have your throat slit or some other horrible thing because god told them it was their god given duty to cleanse the Earth of certain people.
Look at good ole' Abe and that woman who thought god was talking to her and killed that kid, would you consider a person normal if they told you god speaks to them?

No they are freaking NUTS man!

originally posted by: EnPassant

originally posted by: AfterInfinity

originally posted by: EnPassant
a reply to: Toadmund

And how does one identify an experience as being one from god?

Only by living a moral life and developing awareness of God.

What is God?

God is being, life.

Any better explanation than that?

My creator is the Universe, hence:
Universe is being, life.

Is that satisfactory to you? Does that explain the Universe, our creator?

a reply to: blupblup

Which is logically unsound.
The default position should not be "There is no god.".
It should be, "I don't know.".

The fact that many claim this proves just how badly we're prone to largely irrational black and white thinking.

a reply to: rockn82


Nice long argumentum ad hominem you have there sir.

originally posted by: HarbingerOfShadows
a reply to: blupblup

Which is logically unsound.
The default position should not be "There is no god.".
It should be, "I don't know.".

The fact that many claim this proves just how badly we're prone to largely irrational black and white thinking.

I disagree. For billions of years before humans happened, the default position was "God? What the hell is that?" We've been around for less than a millenia and we've already got all the answers. Yeah, okay.

a reply to: AfterInfinity

Considering we are the first sentient creature that we know of to walk this planet.
I am not sure why you think you can speak for the default position of billions of years......
And, animals may have some rough concept of a diety or hell for all we know a incredibly complex one.
We don't know, we cannot ask them.

Notice the logically unsound part?
As in logic.
Yea.
Logic is not subject to opinion.
False Dilemma *either/or, black/white* is a fallacy.
Thus logically unsound.

originally posted by: HarbingerOfShadows
a reply to: Telos

It can be used as such, yes.
Created and used solely for?
I rather doubt it.

And I must ask, has anyone actually read the admittingly wordy OP?
That is really what I am interested in discussing is that.

I did; and I thought the puzzle game precept was: NAME THIS QUOTE "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". That would be Robert Hienlein.

a reply to: vethumanbeing

Wrong.
It's one of Arthur C. Clarke's three laws.

The first Clarke's Law was proposed by Arthur C. Clarke in the essay "Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination", in Profiles of the Future (1962).[1]

The second law is offered as a simple observation in the same essay. Status as Clarke's Second Law was conferred by others. In a 1973 revision of his compendium of essays, Profiles of the Future, Clarke acknowledged the Second Law and proposed the Third. "As three laws were good enough for Newton, I have modestly decided to stop there".

The Third Law is the best known and most widely cited. Also appearing in Clarke's Essay "Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination", it may be an echo of a statement in a 1942 story by Leigh Brackett: "Witchcraft to the ignorant, .... Simple science to the learned".[2] Even earlier examples of this sentiment may be found in Wild Talents by author Charles Fort where he makes the statement: "...a performance that may some day be considered understandable, but that, in these primitive times, so transcends what is said to be the known; that it is what I mean by magic."

Invoking his own Third Law, Clarke postulates advanced technologies without resorting to flawed engineering concepts or explanations grounded in incorrect science or engineering, or taking cues from trends in research and engineering. Powers of any future superintelligence would otherwise seem astonishing. One of the characters in Ben Bova's novel Orion and King Arthur credits the saying to "a very wise man".[3] On page 687 of Angie Sage's last novel of the Septimus Heap series, Fyre, this law is stated as "Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magyk."

In novels (The City and the Stars) and short stories ("The Sentinel" upon which 2001: A Space Odyssey was based), Clarke presents ultra-advanced technologies. In Against the Fall of Night, the human race regresses after a full billion years of civilization, and faces remnants of past glories such as roadways. Physical possibilities are inexplicable from their perspective.

A fourth law has been added to the canon, despite Sir Arthur Clarke's declared intention of not going one better than Sir Isaac Newton. Geoff Holder quotes: "For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert" in his book 101 Things to Do with a Stone Circle (The History Press, 2009), and offers as his source, Arthur C. Clarke's Profiles of the Future (new edition, 1999).

And really, if you're going to distract via nitpicking.
Make sure you're at least picking nits.....

a reply to: rockn82

Look, I a appreciate that you had such a need to troll this thread with an attack on my credibility, that you spent time doing a search but I just did the same search on myself and can't see how you drew your conclusions. Did you read anything in depth or just make assumptions from a few headers and titles?

But this, like your troll, is getting off topic. I digress, so I apologize to the readers for this.

a reply to: HarbingerOfShadows
The problem with logic in this situation is the complexity of the issue we are discussing. Take the matter of logic in the court system and despite the state of the art, innocent people still go to prison.

Again the issue that in relation to understanding everything you are suggesting. That we should treat what is understood of logic today as an ideal.

Consider that mankind is successful and continues to exist for countless billions of years. How will Philosophy, Science, Religion and even Logic be different?

Don't get me wrong I am strong proponent that we should ease off each other, on the issue of individual belief systems.

Beyond that I feel it is important to understand. That we have been on Earth for about 250,000 years wherein cave drawings appeared 30,000 years ago. Historically mankind has in one way or another always asserted that they in theirtime they were at the cusp, which has consistently never been the case.

That is not the fault of Religion or a belief in the possibility in faith of Gods existence.

All wars are resource wars whatever excuses that have been implied in history, related to religion? The simple matter is this behavior, if evolution is correct, can be the result of the fact that we evolved from predators.

Religions for the most part contradict that potential and in so much as the most pious of its adherents?

There is documentation related to what they did.

That documentation was offered to the masses in different forms but essentially. What religion did was offer a counter weight to the value of living in an organized society, as opposed to the forests.

By the same token Science is the technology that made that possible throughout history.

Any thoughts?

originally posted by: HarbingerOfShadows
a reply to: blupblup

Which is logically unsound.
The default position should not be "There is no god.".
It should be, "I don't know.".

The fact that many claim this proves just how badly we're prone to largely irrational black and white thinking.

i like the rest of this quote but that last sentence begs the question: if there is no dark and light reality, why are you posing in a dark cloak, personifying the dark horus? i keep going back to your projected persona, mr. medivh, the harbinger of destruction who thinks he's doing everyone a favor by wiping them all out. so they don't talk to or rely on guardians anymore. doh. it's like leto the worm god of the dune series, who is working towards a strange sort of mass atheism while himself being a god and completely aware of the god like abilities each person is capable of. it's totally illogical and counterproductive, not to mention cruel in a way not much else could be.

originally posted by: chr0naut
a reply to: rockn82

Look, I a appreciate that you had such a need to troll this thread with an attack on my credibility, that you spent time doing a search but I just did the same search on myself and can't see how you drew your conclusions. Did you read anything in depth or just make assumptions from a few headers and titles?

But this, like your troll, is getting off topic. I digress, so I apologize to the readers for this.

hey, your byline is thrall. this thread just keeps getting more and more interesting. so do you agree with medivh's postion, mr. go'el? his position as an atheist, until he stipulates otherwise, is that "logical" atheism is for everyone else, god like powers are for him and his kin. seriously, that's pretty much what the op directs the reader into perceiving.

a reply to: Kashai

religion is science. it's just several different kinds of science, all tied into one big package. in fact, religion was also the law (political science) for thousands of years. some try to clarify that government and religion are separate entities, but frankly, this isn't true and never has been. laws are codified based on world view and world view is the actual definition of religion. you have faith in your perception and definition of the state of existence or world view, which unfortunately, is not a learned experience but a taught experience. this has also been true thru out history. you didn't discover the fossils, oversee the excavations, witness the events transpiring, so your giving your stamp of approval in good faith, that the scientists who presented the initial clues, did not fudge the information or massage it in anyway.

the problem with that is, they did massage it. and when evidence exists that they did, we go back to the question of how is it any different than its predecessors? it's not, it's an agreed upon consensus reality, rather than a personal subjective one.

originally posted by: undo

originally posted by: chr0naut
a reply to: rockn82

Look, I a appreciate that you had such a need to troll this thread with an attack on my credibility, that you spent time doing a search but I just did the same search on myself and can't see how you drew your conclusions. Did you read anything in depth or just make assumptions from a few headers and titles?

But this, like your troll, is getting off topic. I digress, so I apologize to the readers for this.

hey, your byline is thrall. this thread just keeps getting more and more interesting. so do you agree with medivh's postion, mr. go'el? his position as an atheist, until he stipulates otherwise, is that "logical" atheism is for everyone else, god like powers are for him and his kin. seriously, that's pretty much what the op directs the reader into perceiving.

Glad you're en'thrall'ed by my posts.

My position is not as an Atheist, it is as a Theist. I believe that there is sufficient evidence that observed complexity is not explainable through random processes shaped by physical laws. From this, I surmise that there must be alternate forces at work that are beyond known science. While there is a possibility of emergence directing variability, to happen so frequently and expressed in so many ways would appear to me to be extremely unlikely. The only framework of understanding that I have that could explain this is (as Dr Fred Hoyle surmised) that of a super-intelligence.

That being said, while humans have barely touched upon their potential capabilities, there are some things (godlike powers) that we are a long way from achieving (if at all). Perhaps if we get sufficient handle on changing our location in space-time we will be able to reach into our past from the future and perform actions that would appear godlike to our earlier selves. Why we would do this without revealing ourselves and manipulating reality so that our emergent selves are most likely, is unknown.

a reply to: Kashai
Yes, I have thoughts....

In a few billion years (barring self extinction) what will the human race think of gods then? We have eliminated Apollo, Zeus, Thor (all hail Thor) , Quetzquatl (did I actually spell that right?) and etc as humanity found a few things out with the world through discovery.
Zues was found out when someone actually scaled Mt.Olympus and there was Zues; GONE! Not there! What a collosal Zues worthy disappointment to many Greeks back in that time, the gods they put so much faith in, found out to be myth, not true, there is no Zues living at the peak of Mt. Olympus.

Geeez......

Now we have to eliminate Yahweh, Jesus, Muhammad or/and Allah.

I am not against the possibility of a god(s), but if I am to believe anything, at least I want it to be true and not a bunch of made up bull that started when Uncle Uggh started telling the little cave kids grouped around the fire (courtesy of Satan) about how lightning is made and where comets are from, he told them some uncouth bastard pissed off a god(s) and if you don't appease them, god(s) will use nature to smite thee. Then the kids grew up telling the same stories and adding their own, all of a sudden a bible manifests itself.

The greatest campfire story ever told.

a reply to: undo

Because fundamentally subjective reality could be objective.

Science needs to be separated from Religion because of the Dark Ages.

Any thoughts?

a reply to: HarbingerOfShadows

Listen up you; the fact you responded to my puzzle question says to me YOU FABRICATED this whole scenario. Who cares what the lawyer thinks. Not to "pick this to death" just DEFINE YOUR deceit as I percieve it. This FAMOUS phrase is not one of Arthur C. Clarkes; everyone knows who said it; he may have expanded upon it but it is Robert Heinleins original thought and if Clarke is taking this concept as his own is a plagiarist. SO fleshed you out AS YOU created this thread as a TROLLER inventing the being that is the Lawyer with/as the 155 IQ genius as your sock monkey shill. Your fake person takes the hits and you sit by watching the carnage and snickering about how you've fooled everyone.

originally posted by: Kashai
a reply to: undo

Because fundamentally subjective reality could be objective.

Science needs to be separated from Religion because of the Dark Ages.

Any thoughts?

the dark ages were a prime example of consensus reality. that's why subjective reality needs to be embraced, because without it, we keep getting borg infections.

a reply to: vethumanbeing

actually, total biscuit (who's real name i dunno) is an internet personality who got famous for his world of warcraft videos on youtube.