rgb's comments (member since May 19, 2009)

rgb's comments from the Evolution vs. Intelligent Design group.

Your book sounds interesting. I will have to check it out sometime. I am skeptical, of course for people have been philosphizing for thousands of years and each philosopher is so convinced they have the answers, only to find out later that... no there is another way.

A thing that the book points out, ad nauseam, in its first few chapters. However, it explains why this is the case. The question isn't "what are the answers", because the answers can only be made in terms of premises, and premises are arbitrary choices that cannot be proven within the theory -- any theory, even mathematics and logic. The question is: What is the best set of premises, given that we cannot "prove" them. Not "what is truth", just "what is it best to believe, given the evidence".

For what it's worth, answering this question in a quantitatively reasonable way leads one to a worldview that is very close kin to scientific realism, but which allows a bit more strongly for doubt and mistake and also for beliefs that go beyond the strict evidence, extrapolatory beliefs. If I had to describe it, what I'm attempting is to axiomatize "common sense". Believe what you can doubt the least, given all the evidence and all of your least doubtable beliefs, while maintaining an open mind about possibly being wrong. Not terribly outrageous, but more than sufficient to reject any system of beliefs that is internally inconsistent or in significant conflict with the belief set we call "scientific knowledge" or (to a lesser extent, as our knowledge is more doubtable) "historical knowledge).

The point being that a good theory of knowledge cannot be dogmatic, because historically as you note dogma has not only often proven false, it has almost always been proven false. One must subject one's system of beliefs to a critical process all the time, and never let it stand upon its laurels or believe it because some Authority supposedly came up with it or refuse to subject it to stringent tests of its truth or continue to believe it just as strongly even when it fails such tests.

Evidence, you see, needs to strengthen beliefs when it supports them, weaken beliefs when it contradicts them. Is that such a radical system?

As far as the way Joseph Smith interpreted the plates, he would look at the images and say the words that came to his mind while his scribe would write it down. So there are a lot of 18th century ameican culture tones in it, for it was how Joseph thought.

Or there were never any plates, Joseph Smith simply dictated a story that he made up, stealing whole chunks of words verbatim from the New Testament (which presumably hadn't been written at the time the nonexistent plates were supposedly written). Mark Twain wrote scathingly upon this. In a modern literature class, Smith would have just plain failed the class for plagiarism. This explains the science fiction in the story -- nonexistent rivers flowing into the Red Sea, nonexistent compasses, nonexistent steel swords, nonexistent old world crops and animals in the new world. It's implausible the way Jules Verne stories are implausible, only more so.

When you say it doesn't really matter it just makes me sad. The criterion for "truth" in the world isn't how something makes you feel; if only it were that easy! Smoking pot makes (well, at one time made) me feel just great! I felt very holy and connected, because it plugs into receptors in the brain that stimulate the kind of feeling you refer to. Was it "truth"?

It is pretty easy to come up with this feeling without drugs, because those receptors are receptors for things produced in the human body that can be released if you think the right thoughts, the same way that substances are released that cause you to have an erection if you think the right thoughts about sexual activity OR if you observe sexual stimulus OR if you have a sexual dream OR if you engage in actual sex -- sometimes. Similarly, thoughts can make you impotent.

Relying on feelings to gauge truth when you know that feelings in the brain are largely emotional responses to certain thought or experience patterns has bankrupted many a gambler, wrecked many a home, caused many a young person whose FEELINGS of invulnerability turned out not to be correct to die, and have caused untold misery and war in the past -- it doesn't seem to be terribly, well, wise.

Wisdom seems to be doubting your feelings and looking past them for some sort of defensible, objective basis of truth. You might feel that white people are superior to black people -- a common enough feeling for most of western history and one that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young both openly subscribed to -- but that feeling might not be correct, when subjected to an critical analysis and compared to objective, unbiased observations.

Even "your life being better" is not terribly good evidence. First of all, it is difficult to know what it would have been like if you had held completely different beliefs but acted in much the same way. One can choose to act in good ways without the Book of Mormon or any religious text at all telling you what they are. It's easy. Lots of people do it. Second, people who rely on (say) antidepressants such as Prozac will report that they feel better and are more functional on the drug. That is great, of course, and is a very good reason to take the drug. But that doesn't mean that the drug is "true" -- some sort of necessary thing that everybody needs in order to be content. At most it means that the brain of the person who needs it to get by is dysfunctional in some way that the drug treats, e.g. a serotonin imbalance that causes a mood disorder.

This is a very common reason people give for believing in some mythology. It makes them feel better, by stimulating the release of feel-good hormones associated with belonging, importance, empowerment, being loved by Jesus if by no other human on the planet. We need love, and being loved by a stuffed rabbit or imaginary friend is better than not being loved at all.

Also, believing in a theistic morality as divine revelation truth means that they don't have to think -- they can just follow its rules when confronted with moral choices instead of thinking things out for themselves and actually making a moral choice.

Unfortunately, many people do not like to think. It takes biological energy, and causes stress. It is so much easier to simply memorize a set of rules, especially fairly simple rules, and use that instead. It is much much easier to go to a church once a week to have the rules explained and exemplified in a sermon than to have to develop and think through a complicated morality capable of handling edge cases, exceptions, and so on -- a simplified morality that is often casually cruel, is often obviously wrong, and that ends up being justified by the extortionist hook buried in most theisms -- believe it even where it doesn't make sense or you will be tormented for an eternity.

rgb

Aharonsmith wrote: "I agree with you. When one tries to reason his way to truth or even use empiricism he cannot reach it per..."

Dear Aharonsmith,

Well said, for the most part. You misinterpret my statements about Berkely and/or Hume, but that is understandable as I'm sure you still have not read e.g. Probability Theory the Logic of Science and hence do not understand the systematic development of a rational theory of knowledge. I urge you to acquire it and to slog through it -- you can almost certainly manage the first five chapters where the algebra is pretty simple and there is little or no calculus.

Berkeley isn't wrong so much as he is irrelevant. The question of whether the Universe is mind or matter is obviously unanswerable, one of the stupidest questions imaginable. I dislike Berkeley because he invented an enormously complex metaphysical basis for observational reality by redefining it in something that was even less well understood -- "mind", awareness, God. This needlessly multiplied causes, needlessly introduced complexity, and based that complexity on an arbitrarily selected mythology and poorly understood psychology.

As for my accepting it simply because it can't be disproven: Surely you wouldn't argue that Solipsism, irrefutable as it might be (although I am fond of Johnson's thumping of the table with a `thus I refute it') is truth simply because it cannot be disproven? Berkeley's assertion could be read as: "we are all solipsistic imaginings in the mind of God". I prefer Johnson's argument to any other -- thump the table and roar "Thus I refute you!"

The question you see, is not "what harebrained scheme can I think up that cannot be refuted by any evidence". It is "what network of hypotheses seem to work to explain the evidence I can see". One path leads to unreason, to "truth" in the form of any assertion one cares to make, because who can prove you wrong? The other path leads to reason, to "probable truth" in the form of a mutually consistent network of assumptions that work to explain past observations and continue to work as we compare their predictions to the continually unfolding future.

There really is an enormous difference between the two. Berkeley is the first. Hume is also the first, because he failed to find the correct argument for how to decide what best to believe, given the evidence -- he never understood induction and inference.

We (the human species) really have made considerable progress since then. The only problem is that the progress we have made has been increasingly mathematical and precisely stated. Human language as a suitable language for philosophy all but died during the Enlightenment; it is far too easy to make ambiguous or self-referential statements that make logical analysis impossible or that guarantee inconsistency (and hence the ability to "derive" any conclusion as a theorem).

This creates a quandry, I admit, for the non-mathematician. You can either accept the fact that a sound axiomatic basis for human knowledge has been discovered and quantified, one that justifies inference as a means of discovery subject to some very broad axiomatic priors, on my word for it, or you can roll up your metaphorical sleeves, obtain the readily available works where this is all laid out, and work through them until you understand them and can judge for yourself. I really cannot offer you any third alternative. You can reject it all you want otherwise, but you are rejecting it in ignorance of just what it says and why it says it and thus are reduced to making statements like:

I think you are pretty bold to believe that you have the know all answer to the philosophical questions of the ages. From my experience convinced surety is the path to a dangerous place.

Let's think about this for a moment. First of all, the answer that I "know" is that most of the "philosophical questions of the ages" have no answer, at least no answer that we can point to and claim "this is absolute truth and cannot be reasonably doubted". This is anti-arrogant; it is the fundamental definition of humility. Yet you all but accuse me of intellectual pride and hubris for daring to think that I know why I know what I know, including the limitations on that knowledge.

Curiously, the rest of your reply I agree with in detail (not that I agree with your personal beliefs -- I'm referring to the part about imperfect knowledge and the importance of tolerance of other viewpoints as a consequence. This is a meta-axiom of my poor effort to build an axiomatic basis for the building of worldviews in my book-in-progress Axioms; if you would care to read the first two parts of the book (which are finished) you can grab them here:

http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/axioms.pdf

Note especially the list of meta-axioms on page 114, but by all means read through the rest of it. You tell me where some aspect of the basis of reason laid out in it is wrong. It is a book in which I am developing the algebra of imperfect reason -- which turns out to be Bayesian probability theory, with axiomatic priors. If you read it carefully, you can come to understand the basis for the worldview of many individuals, including yourself, including worldviews that are commonly associated with particular superorganisms or groups. You can also -- I hope -- come to understand how one worldview may not be as good as another in quite objective terms. A worldview can be openly contradictory, for example, or a worldview can assert its own completeness and consistency.

In any event, I do rather think that the meta-axioms so listed permit one to both understand the nature of worldviews and to comparatively judge them and ordinally rank them in terms of a somewhat fuzzy degree of plausibility.

Using this sort of ranking, I think one can fairly easily analyze e.g. The Book of Mormon and demonstrate that as the basis of a worldview, it is almost certainly false, almost certainly pure fiction in fact, and of absolutely no value in understanding the real world historically, scientifically, or morally. The events it portrays never happened. The science it portrays generally contradicts what we know of science today, and is anachronistic besides for the time in which the book was supposedly written. The morality it portrays, with God "darkening the skin" of unbelievers and rebels, and "whitening the skin" of the pure and saved, is abhorrent. It impossibly quotes whole chunks of the New Testament word for word, and sprinkles "biblical sounding" phrases like "it came to pass" all over the place to where it is a bit of a joke, almost a satire of the actual Bible. It is quite obviously a complete piece of fiction made up on the spot by Joseph Smith and hence (as a pack of lies, a story, a myth, as falsehood) it is heretical and anathema to the very Bible it seeks to reinforce with a modern myth.

I'm really surprised that you can even stand to call yourself a LDS, given that you must know perfectly well that it is implausible in the extreme that a "lost tribe" of Jews made their way to the New World using a compass that hadn't been invented yet, carrying steel swords to the New World that hadn't been invented yet (pre-Columbian America was still in the stone age, bringing old world plants and animals to the new world that "thrived" according to TBOM, but mysteriously were entirely vanished without a trace when Columbus arrived. But Mormon brainwashing is among the best on the planet...

rgb

Eric_W wrote: 1. God is not a liar. He would not leave extraordinary evidence for how we evolved over millions of years unless He were.
2. Evolution says absolutely nothing about creation.

Evolution says nothing at all. What we have is the evidence of the real world, all of it. It tells us that the visible part of the space-time continuum is between 13 and 14 billion years old. It tells us that our Sun is a second generation star, built out of the remnants of a prior supernova that assembled the heavy elements out of the primordial light elements that were all that burned in the first sun. It tells us that our planet is roughly 5 billion years old or a bit less, that life appeared between 3 and 4 billion years ago, and that the original highly primitive lifeforms systematically evolved following an undirected process of mutation followed by natural selection in an environment that was highly chaotic, as random as anything one can imagine being random in a deterministic Universe that evolves according to fixed natural laws. It tells us that around a billion years ago life forms achieved a notable degree of complexity, and that a bit over half a billion years ago they evolved a backbone and vertebrates appeared. We can then trace the evolution of vertebrate fishes into amphibians into reptiles into mammals into primates into us.

At no point in the fossil record is there any evidence of anything other than an impersonal, mechanical, statistical process at work. There is not a single step that one can point to and say -- this is evidence of God (violating the laws of nature) as opposed to the laws of nature working themselves out. The history of the natural world offers no evidence whatsoever for either "creation" or the supernatural (defined to be a clear violation of natural law).

3. To suggest that we humans "know" how God does things is the height of arrogance. For an entity supposedly without beginning or end, time is irrelevant and billions of years of evolution would be as a fleeting second (maybe even seven days?)

Or seven seconds. Or seventeen point six four two years. Or pi over 6 irrational years. To write an entire Bible (a book that from cover to cover purports to record "how God does things" is the height of arrogance; to believe ex post facto that it is all correct is the height of stupidity. So if your point is that the Bible is a mythical work written by ignorant Bronze Age shamans seeking to explain things they were clueless about, I agree. If you seek to argue that what they wrote is correct -- if one applies an arbitrary, unknown, scaling factor to their time references (made, one should point out, in plain and straightforward language) -- well hell, why bother reading it in the first place if you're just going to redefine the meanings of all the words in ways that suit you and your prior decision to find them true no matter what?

4. There are two views of God: as a magician who snaps His fingers and bingo everything is done, or the artist who builds a painting slowly and lovingly over time, gradually. Unfortunately most unthinking people adopt the magician view.

Perhaps because that's what the Bible clearly portrays him as, especially in Genesis but all the way down to Matthew and the dead hopping out of their graves and be-bopping all over Jerusalem the moment Jesus died.

Don't get me wrong -- if one is a deist (not a theist) and believes in a rational God that can be known through Nature (and not through scriptural mythologies with origins back in pre-history), then we obviously will never disagree about what Nature implies -- we use the same methodology to analyze it, and will arrive at the same results and natural history and laws of physics.

The sole difference will be that the atheist will see no reason that God is necessary, because the laws of physics are a sufficient explanation of everything that we observe. The atheist won't (usually) assert that God is impossible or logically contradictory, only that God is not a necessary or rational inference to be drawn from nature, because it is not reasonable to insist that the laws of physics, which describe "causality" in the observed world, must themselves have a cause. They are all that we can refer to as "cause" and they leave no room for anything else. A rational deist will then identify the laws of nature and the Universe, visible and invisible, with God, accepting that this cannot be proven, the atheist will simply refrain from this step, and otherwise they will be in perfect accord as to the way the world works; neither of them will believe in the supernatural, both of them will be properly skeptical of evidence for phenomena outside the apparent bounds of currently accepted physics, but will nevertheless be open to the notion that our understanding of physics could be (indeed, almost certainly is) bounded and incorrect in some places.

5. Evolution is God's creation, to be admired and understood. The evidence for it as a process is overwhelming. To deny it, is to deny God.

To deny that evolution occurred isn't to "deny God" -- but it definitely shows that one is irrational and perhaps a bit stupid. As you say, the evidence for it is overwhelming. However, as noted above, there is no logically necessary or even weakly plausible connection between the process observed through the data and God. One can assert "Evolution happened and God exists" without contradiction. One can assert "Evolution happened and no God exists" without contradiction. And to be quite frank, neither of these statements can be proven or disproven (made more or less plausible) by means of evidence, and there are esthetic reasons outside of the consideration of evidence to favor either one. No God is the simpler explanation, and so wins the Ockham's Razor award; God is arguably prettier, implying an overarching observer that can serve as a source of entropy on a Universal scale and hence define time. However, Ockham's razor is not a necessary condition for a true theory, and neither is prettiness. So in truth, the most accurate statement is at all times -- "We have no idea if God (as we envision It) exists or does not exist; we only know what we cannot answer this question by any finite series of observations, any more than we can prove that the Universe is infinite in extent from our finite vantage point and given our finite range of vision."

6. ID and "creationists" (a misnomer because they deny that evolution is God's creation) are engaged in a battle to promote a particular religious view which they have designed, misplaced loyalty at best, heretical most likely.

The word "heresy" means "choice" (little known fact). Granting that the meaning of intellectual freedom is "freedom to choose what to believe", our natural state is one of heresy and critical thought as we sift through the infinite set of possibilities in search of the things we can doubt the least because they are the most consistent with observation.

I prefer the word "stupid" to "heretic". ID and Creationism are stupid, because they directly contradict what we know best and can doubt the least.

7. The Bible was never intended as a natural science textbook.

How can you claim to know the intention of its many authors? It certainly has lots of (incorrect) natural science in it. It is certainly true that for most of recorded history it was considered blasphemy to deny the literal truth of Genesis. It is clear from reading the New Testament that Paul and Jesus both believed in the literal truth of Genesis (contradicting anything like perfect knowledge of the real world).

8. Evolution "implies" randomness; it does not exclude direction, but it remains a fact."

It does not support direction. So why assert it?

rgb

I do believe that the Earth is billions of years old. Scientific evidence shows such, and the Bible gives no contrary: I believe God is timeless, so there is no reason billions of years couldn't be described as mere days.

Or rather, the Bible contradicts it dozens of times and places, from Genesis on down, but you are willing to blind your eyes to these contradictions.


rgb

Aharonsmith wrote: "to Dan:
That is a good question, and the answer is no I have not. I don't feel a need to. However, for the couple of years that I did not believe in God, I did look into other ways of belief tha..."

Scary. The Celestine Prophecy is a very, very scary thing to be influenced by. Again, you sound very much like a lost soul seeking any sort of anchor in a spiritual storm, easy meat for all the charlatans and hucksters and sects out there that make a living from exploiting people just like you.

TCP is, after all, pure and unadulterated bullshit. I have read it, and it is trash from cover to cover. Serious, evil trash. And just perfect for ex-heads! I can just see Redfield sitting there and writing it: "Wow, man, <toke>, like, everything is connected, y'know? <exhale a big puff of smoke> Nothing happens by accident, man, it's all part of a plan. <toke> I mean, y'see, um. <three minutes pass> Oh, wow, man! Was that cool, or what? I was watching the wall and it was flickering, and I just realized that it was the fan, man. The fan was making the light flicker! Far out! Feel the energy, man. <two more minutes> Hey, are you going to keep bogarting that bong or what?"

So you can buy into Redfield's spiritual "energy", or you can actually study the real thing. You can imagine that everything has a "cosmic purpose", or you can look at a picture of the Universe with its trillion or so galaxies, each with a trillion or so stars, most with a handful of planets and lots of other trash, and with a tiny, tiny, tiny dot -- a dot the relative size of an atom in your thumbnail to the size of your thumbnail -- on which you are a tiny, tiny dot (where a flea on the ass of an elephant would be enormous by comparison) -- labelled "you are here".

Cosmic, man.

I am reminded of the following story. Once there was an flea who thought he was real hot stuff. He had read somewhere that the flea has the largest schlong of the entire animal kingdom and was so excited by this discovery that he failed to finish the rest of the sentence and read relative to its tiny size!

He was hopping around the jungle, looking for some big animal to pork to prove his maniliness, er, flealiness upon, when who should come along but a female elephant! Well, this was just what the doctor ordered, so up hopped Mr. Flea, and proceded to make his way up to Ms. Elephant's enormous pachydermic ass.

Well, eventually he finds a pore in the Elephant's skin in about the right place and "hops" on and starts to do the dirty deed, and just as he is humping as only a flea can hump, the elephant steps on sharp rock and stumbles a bit and gives out a big, elephantine moan.

"Suffer, bitch..." cried the flea.

rgb

As I thought these things,I saw my face light up. The room seemed filled with light. At that moment, I knew that Jesus was real, I knew that there is a God, and I knew that Book of Mormon was what it claims to be.

My friends from college who ended up as born again Christians had a very strong association with the use of LSD. People who drop acid burn religious grooves in their brains. This is (I'm certain) why many religions incorporate hallucinogens -- God is an irrational, mind-altering trip, after all, especially the "experiencing" of God as you describe. Even pot can potentiate this sort of experience; it is a hallucinogen, after all, if only a mild one. If you eat it, use it mixed with other drugs or alcohol, or smoke particularly potent modern hybrids it can lead to a state that is very close to that of "religious experience". I speak from moderate experience, although I stayed a million miles away from LSD because it was and remains a pretty scary thing, carving permanent new channels through all those synapses.

So your story surprises me not at all, especially when you add a heavy layer of guilt courtesy of your parents, society, religious upbringing. And hey, drugs can cause you to waste your life -- that's why they call it "wasted". So it's not a bad thing to move on. Just remember, it is entirely possible to go completely cold turkey on the drug experience, and give up the self-induced euphoria you are calling religious experience too. Or at least scale it back so that it isn't an actual rush.

When you read this, analyze your own experiences before you reject it because I'm threatening the monkey on your back (even the one that helped you throw off the five hundred pound gorilla that was there before). The rush, that feeling of oneness with the Universe, the feeling that everything has meaning, everything is part of a pattern, nothing is accidental -- where did you feel that before? Guilt or not, why were drugs attractive? Why is listening to music, watching a light show, when stoned a near-religious experience?

If you really, truly need your monkey to keep off the gorilla, then by all means keep it, imaginary or not. If you're ready to take the next step to personal freedom (a step that as you get older will get easier and more natural) consider learning to meditate. Consider taking real charge of your own brain, by learning to acknowledge your own feelings as feelings -- states of your own mind -- that have causes and consequences.

Meditation, for whatever it is worth, its an areligious experience and practice. Christians meditate. Buddhists meditate. Muslims meditate. Atheists meditate. Deists meditate. It simply helps one regulate one's own mind, centers you, so that you can experience the now of your own existence without all the filters carefully installed by your parents, your church, your society, your goals, your past, your desires, your lusts, your fears.

Be. Right here, and right now.

Only with your feet solidly planted in the moment can you see clearly. Otherwise, you are trying to see through a fog that, when you wake up to it, turns out to be pure illusion, myth, imagination, and certainly not "the best you can do" in terms of a state of knowledge about all things.

In the meantime, try to grasp the mere possibility that your "experience" of Jesus was entirely self-induced hallucination, enabled by the fact that you'd altered the sensitivity of your brain to certain neurotransmitters by basically flooding them with artificial analogues to produce a state very similar to the state you experienced.

rgb

to Rgb
You state that Berkely is wrong and Hume is right. Why is Hume right over Berkely? Is it because he gets rid of God? I personally like Hume's view over Berkeley's, but I don't think it can be verified any more than Berkeley's can.

Sigh. C'mon, don't fun with me.

Hume in a nutshell: "We cannot be certain of anything we assert about the real world using pure logic because we cannot deduce anything about it without unprovable assumptions that cannot themselves be deduced. We cannot prove anything about it with inference because inference itself cannot be proven (and is often mistaken, at least in the short run). Therefore the stated goal of philosophy to this point -- to provide us with certain knowledge of the real world -- is impossible, and philosophy itself is basically bullshit."

Berkeley in a nutshell: "Everything in the Universe must be mind, not material. Furthermore, its material aspects are sustained by the one mind, the mind of God."

rgb in a nutshell (concerning Berkeley): "Bullshit!"

Q.E.D.

What, do I have to address each and every bullshit theory advanced by philosophers from the beginning of time and point out the explicit places where their reasoning depends on unprovable assumptions that precisely beg the question in each and every case and lead to the conclusion desired by the philosopher in question.

Hume is the "seal of the philosophers" -- the death of old-school "pure reason" Aristotelian philosophy. Post Hume there is precisely one sort of philosophy that survives -- the philosophy of uncertainty. No, we cannot prove any certain truths about the real world beyond the ongoing empirical observation of our own existences (I grant Descartes this one single point -- I find it just as difficult to doubt my own existence as he did).

So perfect truth is beyond our grasp. What is left? How about imperfect truth? How about choosing to believe the most that which -- given the evidence -- we can doubt the least? How about assembling not a "perfect truth" or "divinely revealed" or "logically necessary" worldview, but rather a worldview that satisfies the sloppy, gritty, real-world requirements of global consistency (as best as we can achieve it), of agreement with reproducible experience, of sheer common sense?

So Berkeley isn't just wrong, he is badly wrong. He's right down there with Hegel, proving that a planetoid that had already been empirically discovered could not exist using "pure reason" (those nasty time delays in the days before fast communications). With Bellarmine, lecturing Galileo on how the evidence of his own eyes were injurious to the church fathers and offensive to all of the philosophers of the day because they were in conflict with the clear statements in the infallible Bible. With Aristotle, asserting that women have a different number of teeth in their mouths then men do when he was married!

I've gotta finish my book. This all drives me mad. Aharonsmith, you are clearly a fairly bright guy. You are not stupid. So why do you not use your mind at its full capacity? Stop believing what you "want" to be true, what you were taught to be true when growing up, and take a long, hard look at why you should believe anything at all, and what you should best believe, and on what basis that belief should rest. Try to develop at least as much cynicism about what you are taught as is clearly justified by common sense.

If you get an email offering you $7,128,000.000 if help a slightly corrupt bank manager in Nairobi steal the intestate funds left by an oil magnate known to have died in a plane crash without heirs, are you going to jump right on it and send them your SSN and bank information? If not, why in the world would you jump right on the Book of Mormon, on Christianity in general? Is it just a matter of the hook not being big enough? If you got an email offering eternal life, but only if you send somebody your life savings in small bills, are you going to jump on that?

Look, buddy, you are spending far, far more on a much bigger scam than "just" your life savings. Open your eyes! Apply at least as much common sense to the problem as you would to Nigerian scam email!

rgb

Aharonsmith wrote: "Rgb, I agree with you that it is wrong for someone to lie, but it is not wrong for a person to tell others what they believe in. It is not wrong from muslims to go out and convert other muslims or for christians to do the same."

I disagree, to at least some extent. I very much disagree when the "conversion" comes at the end of a Kalishnikov, or when a woman is stoned to death for being raped just in case she willingly indulged in "adultery". Both of which are everyday occurrences in the Middle East these days. I disagree more mildly when Jehovah's Witnesses show up at my door and annoy me, or when "Christians" threaten to shove oars up the ass of the guy who made up the church of the flying spaghetti monster and pushed the Kansas School Board to accept and teach its particular version of creation myth (his noodly appendage!).

What I really think is that when people invite philosophical discussion in forums such as this, it is fine to express your view. It is fine to stand up on a soapbox in a public but easily avoidable location. And otherwise, I think it is polite to leave proselytizing any brand of mythologized crap at home, however "legal" it may be to annoy people with it.

One of the things I admire about my church, the LDS religion, is that the missionaries share the beliefs and then invite the investigator to ask God if it is true. No force involved.

One of the things I find incredible about the LDS is that you seriously believe that Joseph Smith found these plates with a supposedly unknown language on them, translated them using divine inspiration, and told a story that involves Bronze Age people using a compass to navigate halfway around the globe, fight New World wars with steel swords (Bronze age, Bronze age), take Old World plants and crops and animals with them that "did exceedingly well" (no trace of which remained at the time of Columbus, and which just happened to word for word copy all sorts of lines from the New Testament, written some 600 years later than its purported date.

And then there is the open racism, both of the text (where "light skinned" good guys battle "dark skinned" bad guys) and of e.g. Brigham Young and other elders.

So hey, at your convenience, why not analyze the following hypothesis:

"Hmm, maybe -- just maybe -- Joseph Smith just made up the entire Book of Mormon on the spot, and it is nothing more than a bad, racist piece of science fiction".

One derived, I should add, from the even more racist and ethically flawed works known as the Old and New Testaments.

"What is wrong though is when a person is forced to believe. It is also wrong for a person who does not believe to lie and try to convince others that it is true."

So why do you persist in acknowledging that science contradicts the story of creation in Genesis and yet continue to assert that the Bible is "true"? Is this not a lie? If you read your own posts, are you not engaging in sophist evasions and trying to assert that truth is somehow a matter of opinion or personal philosophy instead of an objective state of the Universe that attempt to discover by examining that Universe? You speak out against "moral relativism", but you engage in physical relativism and historical relativism routinely to avoid the physical and historical evidence that the Bible is fictional and filled with indifferent philosophy mixed with myths, legends, and lies.

The physical Universe is what it is. It doesn't give a rodent's furry behind whether or not some Bronze Age "thinkers" imagined the world to have been created by some omnipotent being what somehow existed outside of the Universe (where the word "Universe" means "everything that exists", making this an openly oxymoronic belief that cannot be true by pure logic. It is not relative. Our beliefs about it are either mistake or not. We need to do our best to ensure that our beliefs are not mistaken, and therefore have to engage in a systematic process to determine the most probable, mutually consistent worldview.

The worldview pushed by the Bible is simply, and obviously, incorrect. That's all there is to it. Once that is accepted, one can start to figure out what might be true. In the meantime, knowing that it is false and still supporting it on the basis that some people gain "value" from its lies is ethically and philosophically dishonest in the very worst of senses. It is morally reprehensible. IMO, we all have a moral obligation to do our best and not be lazy or accept a known error in our search for truth.

Can you honestly say that the point of view you are advancing meets this standard, based on your entire empirical knowledge of the Universe?

rgb

Aharonsmith wrote: "Rgb, the problem I see with the phrase "no good excuse to believe the bible to be true" is the fact that their is philosophical truth in the bible."

There is philosophical truth in The Simpsons. There's rather a lot of it in Terry Pratchett's Diskworld series. The book Siddhartha is sodden with it. Even Lord of the Rings has a dollop or two. In fact the veritable definition of literature vs trash fiction is that the former has some philsophical truth to it, a message that illustrates some human aspect of life, some lesson, something beyond the merely banal or adventurous.

The difference, my friend, is that we know The Simpsons to be a work of fiction! Nobody asserts that we should "Believe in Homer" simply because he once visited 3d land and learned about higher dimensional spaces. Nobody asserts that Marge has transcendental goodness because she had Bart without actually having sex. Nobody worships the baby even though it is capable of solving complex problems in human dynamics while sucking a pacifier preverbally.

Do you see the difference? If you want to assert "the Biblew is a worthwhile work of fiction because it contains some very good philosophy mixed in with a whole lot of bad philosophy and crap" our argument would be over. We could then debate in perfect reason whether this or that particular piece of it is worthy of consideration not as perfect truth given to us by God but as ideas advanced by mere humans (like the writers of The Simpsons) that we happen to agree with, and whether
or not the really bad pieces are as bad as they seem to be. You could say "the `Jesus' character likes' the Golden Rule and so do I", I could say that I don't dislike it but I prefer the inverse Golden Rule, refrain from doing unto others what you don't want them to do unto you, as it better preserves privacy (the regular Golden Rule "require" that you try to save everybody's soul even if it annoys them, the inverse rule says don't bug people with your personal beliefs if you don't want to be bugged by theirs).

such a relative term? For example we have Berkeleys way of viewing the universe which is very contradictory to Hume's view. Both of them are true from certain perspective.

No, Berkeley is simply wrong, and Hume is correct. Berkeley is worse than wrong, he is irrelevant. His assertions are all lovely sounding -- and absolutely impossible to verify, because Hume is right. One cannot use pure reason to arrive at definite truths about the real Universe. What Hume didn't get right (although he was quite correct as far as he went) is that -- as Richard Cox and E. T. Jaynes have shown -- is that the best that we can do can be shown to be empirical scientific reasoning: Bayes/Boole probability-valued logic. References available on request, especially if you'll actually read them and work through their content. Both physicists, and if/when you take statistical mechanics you will learn that this same mathematics and logic is the basis for all statistical mechanics including the laws of thermodynamics.

I don't think that you are referring to the philosophy of the bible as being not good to believe in. From what you have said, it is the belief in the miracles and divinity of the Christ that you have a problem with.

I have a problem with both. For one thing, I know a hell of a lot more philosophy than Jefferson ever did, if only by virtue of coming later and devoting a lifetime to its study without having to e.g. be a gentleman farmer, father children with my slave women, and found a country. I love Jefferson (more than I love Jesus, truth be told, as a philosopher) but I love Newton too for similar reasons and Newton was wrong as well. Don't both name dropping with me. I don't care who said or did what; I only care what was said or done, and I assess it with reason.

Here is a short list of some of the moral imperfections of Jesus as evidenced by the mix of myth, legend and possible history in the New Testament (where the exact mix is both unknown and unknowable at this point):

* Jesus believed in the Old Testament, including Genesis. Genesis was wrong. The morality, the ethical basis for human behavior as a once perfect species that fell from grace through original sin, of Genesis is an evil, horrible, completely backwards mistake that has caused untold misery in humans without number for well over two thousand years. If Jesus were a morally perfect or even reasonably intelligent young man, he would have realized this and corrected the error by denying Genesis. Instead he directly endorsed it (possibly because it emphasized his own importance as a possible Messiah). Whether he was lying for personal gain (utterly reprehensible and entirely possible) or simply locked into the prevailing myths of his culture and unable to rise above him, this is not the mark of a brilliant moral philosopher.

* The doctrine Jesus preached was one of personal redemption (from this nonexistent original sin) by acceptance of a lie -- Jesus's own divinity. I will leave it to you to work out the ethical virtue in accepting somebody's alleged divinity instead of behaving like a good person with a slide rule. I will also refrain from pointing out the horrible, atrocious, evil historical consequences, consequences we continue to suffer today as they are available to anyone who opens a newspaper or reads a history book.

* Jesus was a racist. He called at least one gentile woman a dog, telling her that he was here only for the Jews but he might deign to help her with her troubles.

* Jesus supported slavery, or at the very least he failed to speak out against it on the many occasions he could have. Paul endorsed slavery and told slaves to be good little slaveys and obey their masters. If they hadn't, I'm certain the Roman government wouldn't have endorsed Christianity, but two wrongs don't make a right and good ends do not justify evil means.

* In fact, Jesus openly -- and I do mean openly, with a clear Commandment -- endorsed his followers to obey Old Testament Law. This law endorses slavery and beating slaves ALMOST to death. This law requires us to stone Wal Mart employees who work on Sunday and preachers who have divorced and remarried to death. This law prohibits the eating of Barbecue, fried catfish, shrimp etouffe. This law prohibits us from eating cheeseburgers, as it was generally interpreted in Jesus's day. It requires you to get your foreskin removed, if it hasn't already been. It permits "marriage by rape" with certain conditions. Its punishments are excessive, and its rules are abhorrent. If Jesus had been morally admirable (to me), he would have explicitly rejected Old Testament law in favor of a far more human and tolerant approach.

* If Jesus didn't endorse the idea of a punitive hell to which sinners are condemned, his followers (claiming to communicate what he told them) certainly did. Jesus basically threatened people with eternal punishment if they refused to accept his pronouncements without any doubt or consideration. This is not the mark of a great man or admirable moral theoligan. It is the mark of a swindler, of a weak and pusilanimous man whose arguments lack force to the point where they must be backed up the the threat of violence. If there is one single thing that makes Jesus far less admirable than say, Buddha, it is this. Buddha did not demand believe or threaten retribution. He merely pointed out a path for people to try for themselves. Jesus passed on secret knowledge, deliberately obscured, and demanded compliance or else.

Yuk.

rgb

Rgb said there was no good excuse to believe the bible to be true.

I say there is since it has benefitted people.

The returning argument is no, because it is not true. There may be benefits from believing it to be true, but since it is not true there is no good excuse to it being true.

My response is that with the bible it is different. The bible teaches a philosophy and in my opinion, philosophy is relative. We all have our own versions of it, we all have our beliefs that we cling to. The philosophy a person follows could be true or not.

Well, since physics is nothing but natural philosophy and since a great deal of the errors in the Bible derive from their direct conflict with the non-relative truths inferred from nature, I foresee a great deal of schizophrenia in your future, trying to juggle a sense in which Genesis is true, somehow, sort of, as you take courses in cosmology that directly conflict with its account line by line, word by word. But suit yourself.

We still disagree on something very fundamental. I personally consider deliberately lying to be one of the most unethical acts a sentient being can perform. I'm not talking about telling the minor social lies -- I see no particular reason to tell a person who is fat and ugly for reasons that are utterly beyond their control and who is unhappy about it "Hey, you are fat and ugly" or any of the other things Twain (IIRC) satirized. I'm talking about big lies, lies about the way everything works, lies about fundamentals.

I see no particular reason for you to consistently argue with this position. After all, is not Satan known as the "father of lies"? Does not evil live in the dark, ashamed, hiding behind a web of lies? Is not truth a bright light that cleanses the soul, even when it is a painful truth (it isn't completely clear that even social lies are justified ethically, but that is too trivial to argue about here)? Do we not become angry when people lie to us "for our own good" and we later discover the truth; didn't you feel just a little bit of anger on the day you finally realized that Santa was a complex lie, even as a child?

So honestly, and this isn't name calling (hating the sin and not the sinner and all that) I find your continued assertions that it is OK, somehow to lie about the truth of the Bible when we know it is false, to lie about its degree of reliability and the degree to which we should doubt the simple factualness of even its bare historical accounts, to lie about the massive empirical evidence that contradict entire blocks of it, to lie about the moral reprehensibility of e.g. the entire Old Testament and to pretend somehow that Jesus, who explicitly endorsed the Old Testament did not commit a morally reprehensible act in so doing that in and of itself disqualifies him by the very arguments of the Christian apologists as any sort of deity, all of that is simply despicable if you indeed know the truth, know better, but continue to promote this pack of lies.

Truth is not relative. Our understanding of truth may be imperfect and subject to constant correction, but truth itself is not a matter of personal belief, it is the objective reality to which personal belief is directed.

Here's your ultimate problem, and how you solve it is up to you up to and including the deliberate schizophrenia you are inducing in yourself.

In your studies of science you have learned and continue to learn a standard criterion for discerning truth, given the sum totality of your knowledge and experience (which includes all of the evidence and reason accumulated over the entire period of recorded history). That standard is the basis for everything you learn in physics. There are reasons for every single thing you are taught in a physics class to be considered probable truth.

In no case are you taught things that are supposedly true "because Newton said so". We accord nobody the status of "divinely inspired source of truth" because the very same reason we use to figure out what best to believe tells us there is no such thing. If you do not accept these precepts of knowledge, you will be an appallingly poor physicist, prone to believe wacko theories without evidence just because the theorist is persuasive or convinces you that they have "special" knowledge about The Universe, or because their theory seems somehow to tie in with your prior ideas of God or the like.

On the other hand, you are giving special prior divinely inspired preternatural holy ghost given status to the writings of certain humans. You hold those writings to be exempt from the rules you use to address matters of fact about the real world. You don't apply rules at all to determine their truth or falsehood; you accept them as a priori truth. This is perfectly inconsistent with the scientific criterion that there is nothing that can be accepted a priori as truth about the real Universe.

As is always true in axiomatic reasoning, an inconsistent worldview can be used to "prove" anything you like. Once you admit an open contradiction into any theory, you can prove any assertion as a "theorem" of your premises. All this means, of course, is that the worldview is false and utterly useless as knowledge, because you can (of course) prove the opposite of any assertion as a theorem of the same premises.

For example, resurrection of a truly dead body is thermodynamically impossible in modern physics. You can do the computation yourself, when you learn statistical mechanics, except that you won't have to -- it takes around five seconds to go "Wow, that would never happen" once you understand why e.g. all the air molecules in a room don't go over into a corner and form a blob of liquid air and leave you gasping in a vacuum.

Ultimately, you will have to face the choice. Either you believe the laws of physics and mathematics govern the time evolution of the Universe (which is then an ordered place, subject to natural law) or else that visible Universe is whimsical, apt to be altered without warning in unpredictable ways that violate natural law and common sense. And you have to believe the latter in spite of all evidence to the contrary -- the absence of one single reproducible exception to the rule of law.

Anecdotal evidence is not acceptable in a court of law. It is doubly unacceptable in science, where if a truth is not reproducible and accessible to everyone, if a truth is in any sense "special knowledge" available only to the privileged few or secret knowledge passed on to trusted disciples, it isn't considered truth at all. Physics is taught and understood in the plain light of day, as truth always should be.

So which will it be in your life? Truth that you can count on, truth that can be verified, truth that doesn't depend on who is telling the tale, truth that is in no sense secret -- or lies?

You choose. I already have.

rgb

Well said, Dan!

But "Blintork"? I thought the god's name was Zul, and he is due to manifest as the Stay-Puf Marshmellow man...

Otherwise I have very little to add to your concise and precise deconstruction. Oh, well, maybe ONE little thing, more as a comment -- remember in Religulous, Bill Maher's remark when he is interviewing the Jewish Christian shopkeeper that sells the magnetic Jesus's that will ride on the dashboard of your car (for a price)? Asked why he converted and became Christian, it's because he went to a party and was thirsty and wanted a glass of water, and there wasn't any. Somebody told him to stick his cup out of the window and pray to Jesus for rain, so sort of as a joke he did, and it started raining! Raining hard! Why, it would have filled his cup right up in half an hour or so!

Bill's comment was something like: "Are you kidding? This was a miracle? Hey, you know, sometimes IT RAINS. You look outside and it is raining, or starts raining. You don't think that it maybe, just possibly, was just raining? You know, this is one thing that I find really astounding. Christians have a remarkably low threshold for miracles. A burnt piece of toast. Rain."

In the meantime, the guy he's roasting is looking more and more uncomfortable, as he realizes that it really was pretty silly to believe that Jesus rearranged the ENTIRE UNIVERSE -- ahead of time, using his preternatural knowledge -- just so that it would start raining right as he stuck that cup out of the window, a rain that couldn't possibly have filled his cup with enough water to actually drink unless he stood there, getting soaked, for thirty minutes or an hour or a day or a week. An inch an hour is a hard rain, an inch a half hour is a deluge downpour that only happens in e.g. hurricanes or tropical storms, and it would probably require 2-3 inches of rain to fill your average drinking cup to not-quite full. Do the math.

The same math nobody ever does for Noah's flood. 30000 feet x 12 inches = 360,000 inches. 40x1440 = 57,600 minutes in forty days. 360,000/60,000 = 6, take a way a bit for land mass projection and it has to rain roughly 5 inches PER MINUTE on EVERY SQUARE FOOT OF THE PLANET to lift sea level over Mount Everest.

Now that's a miracle! What is a bigger miracle that a God that could make this happen, could create all of the water out of nothingness and make it all disappear again (as it damn sure isn't around today) couldn't find a better solution to the "human" problem and all of those son's of God that were misbehaving than to use brute force and mass extinction and death of innocent animals and a truly absurd method of preserving species.

Of course, this God is repeatedly described as just loving it when people killed and burned not kittens but sheep, lambs, doves, cattle, and possibly even humans in sacrifice to Him. Sacrifice well, he indeed did give you what you want. Keys miraculously are found (this NEVER happens without God's help). Rain miraculously occurs one night when you've been drinking heavily. Just don't want your relatives to be cured of terminal cancer, or want to regrow a limb, because that kind of miracle -- or any other "miracle" that couldn't have entirely plausibly happened naturally -- is every seen to occur.

Or (kid's, don't try this at home!) go find a lamb. Yeah, a nice, cute, stumblefooted newborn lamb, all cute and everything. Build an altar. Cut the cute little lamb's throat, and ritually splatter the blood on and about the altar (instructions on request courtesy of the Old Testament, and don't omit any key rituals, see Indiana Jones!). Then split the lamb up the middle and hack out its ribcage. Finally (and I am not making this up) wave the ribcage, in ritual fashion, at the sky.

This is called a "wave sacrifice" and God loves it! And the best part is you get to roast the ribs afterwards and eat them! Or rather, the priest does. You don't. The other approved method is to throw the whole lamb carcass onto a big fire burning on your (hopefully stone) blood spattered altar so that the smell of burning meat goes up to heaven. God simply adores overdone immolated lamb chop smoke, the way some of his neighboring competing Gods liked the smell of tasty roast Baby. He'd make covenants with you and everything, if only you burn or wave enough recently and ritually slaughtered small clean sacrificial mammals in the general direction of the sky (because everybody knows that God is OVERHEAD even though the earth is a ball, so overhead for Abraham is pretty much underneath my feet as I sit here typing this.

I personally would rather spill a libation. It's just as likely to lead to a truly miraculous reward, like finding a parking place right next to the store even though it is a busy shopping day and the entire lot is jammed full or slowing down right before you round the curve and see the speed trap on the far side. It's definitely a lot easier on small furry mammals and turtledoves, doesn't require a burning permit, keeps PETA picketers off of your front yard, and gives you a religious excuse to wander around with a class of wine in your hand.

Evoe!

rgb

Aharonsmith wrote: "There is irrefutable evidence to show that people who believe in the bible have benefitted much to society. I can't believe that RGB, one who claims to be a scientist makes the claim that there is..."

Ah, so much to comment on, so little time. I'll really try to be terse, although I'll probably fail.

During the dark ages common people were not reading the bible. The break off from the church happened because people began to read the bible.

During the dark ages and most of the middle ages and quite a bit of "modern times", the common people of the world could not read. So yeah, I guess that is true. It took the invention of the printing press -- an Enlightenment invention -- for there to be Bibles out there for them to read. Before that, all Bibles were handwritten, error-spattered copies of handwritten, error-spattered copies of handwritten...(iterate for 1200 or so years) and because they were handmade, they cost a fortune in human time in an era where one had to work from sunup to sundown just to stay alive.

All that "the common people" knew about the Bible is what they were taught or told by their "betters", which they had to believe and affirm on pain of torture or death should they question it.

The enlightenment era was sparked because people began reading the bible.

You must be living in a fantasy world, not the one whose history I have studied. This is categorically false. Have you ever actually studied the Enlightenment? Do you even understand who we are talking about here? Let me help:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Bacon

A monk who advocated the use of mathematics and empiricism, and (sigh) was imprisoned and persecuted by his own Church as a consequence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bac...

Very probably a closet homosexual (homosexuality being a capital crime at the time), inventor of the scientific method, and one of the people that might have written Shakespeare's plays (if Shakespeare did not write them). He was not an atheist, but neither was he a theist, and in any event both of these Bacon's merely ushered in the Enlightenment, setting the stage for the great discoveries by:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Co...

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Gal...

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Ke...

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newto...

In no case was the work of these people inspired by the Bible; in every case their conclusions and methodology systematically contradicted it. Most of them were persecuted to a greater or lesser extent because of this conflict.

If you prefer the non-scientific part of this era, Hobbes, Hume, Locke, Jefferson -- all of them except for Locke were in more or less continual conflict with theistic religion (and Locke advocated the separation of Church and State!). Descartes also deserves honorable mention for his non-Biblically inspired invention of rationalism, which failed in its goal of proving God's existence and in the way that it failed inspired Hume to prove that God's existence cannot be proven either with pure reason or empirically.

People were inspired by its words, and sought for a better society. People came to the new world, to start this new way of life. Pilgrims came to america, to try something different, something better, and used the bible as their guide.

Or rather, they came to America to avoid being tortured and executed for heresy by the Church, and when they arrived in short order tortured and persecuted people for heresy according to their own believes. Have you actually got a clue about the history of protestantism? Cromwell? William of Orange? Martin Luther? Europe was wall to wall war, much of it religious war between the Catholic Church and countries that subscribed to Catholicism and the various Protestant heresies and the kings and countries that subscribed to them. A small sect viewed as heretics by both either fled or burned. Alive, more often than not.

Pennsylvania became a haven for quakers, a pacifist group of people who using the teachings of Jesus as their guide, to love and help each other, built a society that was hundreds of years ahead of its time.

They used some of the teachings of Jesus. They were actually one of the first religious groups to reject the Bible as an inerrant religious scripture. According to the Quakers, God speaks to everybody, and you don't need no stinkin' Bible or to be a Christian to hear Him. They have no ministers -- all Quakers are equal and no one is more qualified to speak for God than anyone else. They use reason, not a paper bag, to work out God's message. Quakers refuse to bow to any man, be they Pope or King. I like Quakers. You can be an atheist Quaker or a deist Quaker, and other Quakers don't care. I don't feel called to attend meetings of Friends or I'd call myself a deist Quaker, but labels like this really don't mean much either way.

They denounced slavery, because of the bible.

No, they denounced slavery because they knew in their hearts that slavery was bad. The denounced it in spite of the Bible which openly endorses it in both the Old Testament and the New.

They lived in harmony with the natives, because of the bible.

Again, you don't understand Quakers -- it wasn't because of the Bible. The Bible provides nothing but examples of conquering tribes of heathens and enslaving the ones you leave alive, preferrably young female virgins. The proper model for Biblical conquest of the New World was that of Spain: Good Catholics, they enslaved all the local Indians, burning alive the ones that failed to convert to Catholicism, taking their wealth, taking their land, destroying their culture. That's Biblical conquest. The Quaker model is anti-Biblical, based on personal revelation (a.k.a. secular compassion and common sense).

Another obvious and awe inspiring great thing that the bible has brought to us is the idea of liberty. The founding fathers of this nation, believed that we are endowed with inalienable rights, given to us from God. We have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the very foundation of these rights is based on the idea that there is a God to give them to us.

Again, this displays only proof positive that you haven't actually read any of the writings of Hobbes, Locke, Jefferson (espe.cially Jefferson!) or Hume. None of these ideas are based on the Bible. Show me one word in the Bible about "liberty", or the right to do as you please as long as you don't hurt anyone. The Bible is, from the beginning to the end, a diatribe justifying the removal of liberty and choice from its adherents.

In the Old Testament this is so obvious as to be inescapable. Would you care to practice "hermeneutics" for me to show how stoning people for breaking the Sabbath, how raping young female virginal captives, how dashing babies brains out happily, how ripping babies from their mother's slashed open bellies is all about "liberty"?

In fact, the words of the atheist/deist Jefferson about Life, Liberty and Happiness were not from the Bible, and God was invoked only to give them weight, to trigger that part of the brain that judges "rightness". They conflicted with the Bible then, and do now. And they are pure inventions -- not reality. They define what we want to accept as right, not because it is divinely inspired, but because it makes sense.

You might want to read:

http://www.beliefnet.com/resourcelib/doc...

It's free online. Note well that Jefferson cut out all the miracles and assertion of Jesus's divinity. What's left is the story of a moderately good, mortal, non-divine man and curiously, is remarkably close to what is in the earliest manuscripts.

rgb

Abby wrote: "Here is a story I heard once that I'd like you all to read.

Susie was in science class one day. The teacher stood up and said, "Billy, do you see the desks?"...

Just what is the point of this story?

In the Bible it is asserted that disease was caused by some mix of evil spirits, God's will, demonic possession, retribution for sin, and bad luck.

That is of course incorrect (one of the many, many flaws in the Bible). The reason the silly men who wrote the Bible without any sort of divine inspiration whatsoever got it wrong is because they (like all the equally silly people in your equally silly story) could not see the cause, any more than you can see galaxies with your naked eyes.

If the Bible had been divinely inspired, Genesis might have mentioned the trillion trillion stars we cannot see with the naked eye. If the Bible had been divinely inspired, Leviticus might have indicated that the cause of disease is microbes, not curses or devils. If the Bible had been divinely inspired, it might have pointed out that slavery is a horrible evil, instead of giving you rules for beating your slaves almost to death, instead of (in the New Testament) advising slaves to faithfully serve their masters no matter how horrible and cruel those masters are. If the Bible had been divinely inspired, Moses would have been told by God that no matter what the Midianite adults did that merited death, the children were innocent and must be spared. If the Bible had been divinely inspired, it wouldn't have said that the Earth is fixed and immobile in the center of the Universe. If the Bible had been divinely inspired, it wouldn't have changed over time as the same Author of its supposedly inspired words would have taken the trouble to insure that those words were accurately preserved (or what's the point?). If the Bible had been divinely inspired, Jesus wouldn't have endorsed the Law of the Old Testament. If the Bible had been divinely inspired, it wouldn't have commanded people to put witches and sorcerors to death, it would have pointed out that there is no such thing. If the Bible had been divinely inspired, it wouldn't have forbidden the consumption of shrimp, pork, catfish, oysters, lobster, and it definitely wouldn't have commanded men to cut off their foreskins. If the Bible had been divinely inspired, it would have established the equality of women instead of their subjugation and inferiority. If the Bible had been divinely inspired, it wouldn't have started out with an evil myth that claims that humans were created perfect and then fell from grace by committing a completely inane "sin", when in truth they evolved, a process that starts with a very imperfect and primitive life form and ends up with still-improving humans, where death isn't a punishment, it is a crucial and natural part of the evolutionary process.

If the Bible had been divinely inspired so that humans could write down God's words, God could speak to each human directly, making the Bible unnecessary. If the Bible had been divinely inspired, it wouldn't have implied that pi is 3 or the world was flat or the sky was a solid bowl with windows through which the rain was poured. If the Bible was divinely inspired it wouldn't mention hell one single time, as hell is incompatible with a loving God. Parents don't throw their children into a vat of boiling acid that will burn them forever if they love them -- that is called child abuse and is a crime whether committed by parents or by God.

Fortunately, the Bible is not divinely inspired. Humans wrote it, badly, preserving myths and legends that helped shape a particular primitive society. For strictly political reasons it was adopted by the dominant worldly empire 1700 years ago as the state religion, and that very empire forced it to be rewritten to better serve its needs, doing such a good job that while that Empire has long since crumbled, the imperial institution it created chugs right along, preserving wealth and political power over a staggering 1700 year stretch of human history.

In the future, if you want to tell allegorical tales, think about their moral. The moral of your story is that there are things that we cannot directly see that are nevertheless real. Like cholera, malaria, diptheria, HIV, and a trillion trillion stars. Like atoms, molecules, protons, electrons, neutrons, quarks. Like (as you point out) you, as far as I'm concerned.

The way we come to believe in the invisible things in the list above as because there is evidence that they exist. If you build microscopes and telescopes and accelerators and so on, you can see them after all. Even in your silly example, the way students know that the teacher has a mind is empirical -- the teacher behaves and speaks like she has a mind. You can "see" the mind by its action.

You cannot do this with God. There is no reasonable alternative to explain the teacher's actions and speech but a mind behind them. There is not one single thing you can point to in the entire natural world and use it to definitively infer God. "No God" is always a completely consisten alternative.

rgb

A more extreme version of this experiment would be to tell them you are converting to say Hindu. What would their reaction be to this?

A process you could give an honest shot to, instead of just pretend. You are self-admittedly only thirteen, and this means that you haven't ever read the sacred scriptures of, well, dare I guess any faith including your own self-professed one. What you know even of Christianity I have no doubt comes from what you've been told, not what you yourself have read and pondered.

For example, what do you think about the dashing of baby brains, the ripping of children from their mother's bellies, the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent women and children by Moses, the taking of all of the virgin women in that encounter to give to his men (and keep for himself) as playtoys? Doesn't that sound more like the Taliban (who actually strongly resemble Mosaic Israelites culturally and behaviorally, albeit with modern weapons and cell phones) that you admire so much?

And yet Jesus just loved Moses. He commanded you to obey Mosaic law (which you don't do, of course, because your minister never preaches a sermon on why we should all go out and stone Wal Mart employees for working on Sunday just because Jesus ordered us to keep the Law that says that we should, and that minister himself should probably be stoned to death because like as not he's on his second or third marriage, which Jesus explicitly describes as adultery and deserving of the standard Mosaic punishment for adulterers, that is to say, stoning). Jesus hung out with Moses (genocidal baby killer extraordinaire) and David (homocidal adulterous wife stealer) on a mountaintop in full view of his Apostles just to prove that he (as God) fully approved of their actions.

No doubt today he'd include Hitler.

What you are taught in Sunday School and what is preached in church by priests and ministers isn't what the Bible says. It is selected portions of what the Bible says, ones that appeal to the modern secular view of morality that is not derived from the Bible -- it generally replaces it. Fortunately some relatively decent and philosophically enlightened people have contributed to the Bible so it does contain some good stuff that can be cherrypicked and taught, as long as you hold your nose and close your eyes to the rest. Doing the latter while trumpeting the Bible's inerrancy and moral perfection is rather hypocritical, however, but hypocrisy is what Christianity, in particular, is all about (see comment about all those divorced and remarried ministers above).

So please, if you're going to defend the Bible, start by reading it. Cover to cover. Possibly several times. Sure, most of it is uber-boring and I'm certain you're a busy young lady, but what do you think God is going to think of a person who is too lazy to actually read His Word.

While you're doing this, do a bit of research into how reliable our Bibles are -- are the words we read today even close to what was originally written? Can't follow the word of God if that word has been lost or altered by mistranslation, by the dropping of words, by the additions of some redactor in 197 CE. Remember, this book was preserved only in the form of manuscript copies -- hand copied by people who were often functionally illiterate in the language they were copying -- for well over a thousand years before printing presses were invented and a particularly corrupt manuscript was accidentally selected (because it was handy) and transformed into our "inerrant Bible". If you do this with zeal and energy, reading Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus for example, I think you'll conclude that we have no bloomin' idea what the Apostles originally wrote, or when. Their original manuscripts did not survive. 1st generation copies of those manuscripts did not survive. The earliest fragments of manscripts we have (which already fairly clearly demonstrate that whole sections of e.g. Mark were added by later redactors -- Jesus never said anything about speaking in tongues or handling serpents, for example) were written well over one hundred years later than the originals and omit a whole lot of the "miraculous" ornamentation that was added later by zealous copyists to reinforce that Jesus wasn't just a man wandering around and preaching.

Then give the sacred texts of Hinduism -- especially the Upanishads -- a try. Read the Quran, but be warned, it says that it is perfect truth and if you think the NT threatens hell for unbelievers, you should try the Quran. I think fiery torture is threatened an average of every ten to fifteen verses. If Islam turns out to be the one true faith we are all SO screwed...;-)

Don't forget Buddhism. Buddhism, mind you, isn't a religion. It is a philosophy. Buddha taught his followers to not argue about God, the soul, creation, or any other stuff of that sort, as it is nothing but an irrelevant distraction in his prescribed process for discovering truth and becoming Enlightened. Buddha's process wasn't perfect or correct, but it was empirical and hence self-correcting, and (along with the Upanishads) IMO is one of the few works of genuine ancient wisdom.

And Siddhartha was at least consistent. Buddhism is truly a nonviolent faith, not "sometimes" the way Christianity, Judaism, Islam are, not when one is not struggling against evil the way Hinduism does, but all the time. Conflict is unimportant, and violent conflict to defend possession is the antithesis of Buddhism. Christianity very likely borrowed a lot of its morality -- badly -- from Buddhism (the badly part being its inability to break free from the execrable Old Testament and the worthless and excessive ten commandments).

Good luck with that. Come back in (say) five or ten years when you've had time to complete a serious study that most of the "ignorant" people on this list have long since completed and let us know what your conclusions are. That is, if you aren't in jail for throwing rocks at hapless Wal Mart employees or the divorced and remarried woman who lives next door.

rgb

Given the choice between helping people by lying to them and helping people by telling them the truth, why should we ever choose the lie?

Because Paul tells us to, and Paul is a saint and therefore was inspired by the Holy Ghost and must be right!

Sometimes you just have to make stuff up to convince people to believe in Jesus, but it's OK if it is in such a good cause.

rgb

Aharonsmith wrote: "RGB, the thread of your argument is that for there to be good reason to believe in something, then it has to exist.

Forget about any type of benefit that is received to the person for believin..."

Well, it certainly does help, doesn't it?

I suspect that this is a situation where we are using words at cross-purposes and may not disagree at all. To me, a "reason to believe" in something has nothing to do with the benefit, real or imagined, derived from the belief. It has to do with whether or not there is objective evidence that the "something" is in a positive correspondance with what we quaintly call "reality".

You, on the other hand, seem to be asserting that it is OK to believe in something that evidence shows to be quite false, and to encourage others to believe in this falsehood as well, if they derive some social benefit (which could itself be equally imaginary) that appears to come from the false belief.

It's hardly worth going through all of the straw men in your argument -- somebody accepting Jesus and quitting drinking and beating his wife and kids is simply peachy with me, but it doesn't make Jesus real or the Bible true, and it doesn't strike me as being a particularly sensible solution to the problem or one that is particularly likely to work long term. After all, that same person was very likely raised Christian by their Christian drinking and child-abusing parents and may well have inherited genes that make them prone to alcoholism. Understanding the social conditions and genetic predispositions that lead to the behavior and then changing them through treatment and counselling (all secular) seems like it would work just as well.

Of course framing the question this way makes it accessible to the scientific method. Oh, wait:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/93754...

I guess somebody already had the idea and already did the study. Turns out that if anything, having relatives praying for you when you're trying to quit leads to more drinking at the end of six months than was observed in the control group, although there was a modest benefit around month two.

As for asserting that that we should all believe in the Bible, knowing it to be false, because that way we will act in a more moral way simply hasn't read the Bible. Numbers 31. Jill's delightful little number from Psalms above involving the dashing out of children's brains. Jesus describing how he's going to waste all sorts of pregnant women who are too far from the hills when he returns to wreak vengeance on the antichrist. I guess it is too much trouble for an infinitely powerful being to be selective -- nope, gotta wipe out everything, even all the animals, when a handful of individual humans piss you off.

But quite aside from the ignorance thus displayed -- you are actually referring to the "distilled and revised" view of the Bible that gets preached in church, which presents a completely different morality than what is actually stated in the book itself, especially nowadays -- I find it openly offensive that you think that Darwin's theory in any way suggests that we should all go around killing each other as if this makes us more fit to survive.

This isn't a straw man, this is a straw dinosaur. Evolution produces cooperative behavior -- even cross-species cooperative behavior. The Enlightenment (and its associated rejection of religion) has reduced global violence, not increased it. Hitler was a devout Catholic (little known fact that the Church would like everyone to forget) and had the support of the Church for a whole lot of what he did -- at first.

To quote Hobbes, life in a state of nature is ugly, nasty, brutish and short. So an evolved species -- one that really wants to maximize its evolutionary potential on an individual basis -- is one that lives as far away from the natural state as possible. War is bad for your survival and reproduction potential. So is murder. Even rape is bad.

Humans craft their own evolutionary rules at this point, and my deliberately evolved ex-wolf snoring gently off to my side as I type this is living evidence that we have been crafting the evolutionary rules for the whole planet for quite some time now. That is, "the fittest" is currently mostly what humans decide should be preserved, as we have the demonstrated capacity to cause the extinction or deliberate genetic alteration of just about any species.

Finally, you seem to think that I'm suggesting that we put away "all faith in things that inspire" and think that this somehow leads to a loveless, grey world where we live and then we die instead of preserving the fantasy that we live, die, and live again.

I'm not suggesting anything of the sort. The evidence suggests that we live and then we die. Every single living thing that we have ever seen is born of its parent(s), lives, reproduces (or not) and then sooner or later it dies. Nothing is observed to be born (or sprout, or hatch, or come from cell division), live, reproduce (or not) in turn, and then die as an organism to a state of true metabolic death and dissolution and then reverses the attendant entropy and comes back to life.

We even understand perfectly well why that happens. In fact, the one word "entropy" says it all. Life is a very special, highly unstable chemical state, a very strange sort of self-sustaining chemical reaction that requires very special structures to happen at all. Upon death, those structures immediately start to break down because that is simply the most probable thing they can do. It is therefore extremely improbable that those structures will arise out of a bunch of randomized molecules back into the state of organization required to sustain the life of an advanced organism.

That's what the evidence, and all of our knowledge of the world tells us. We live, we die, and that's that. Many, many attempts to prove that an afterlife of some sort exists (when performed under controlled circumstances that catch out charlatans) have been made, and all have failed. There isn't the slightest bit of hard physical evidence that life after death occurs, however much anecdotal evidence and wishful thinking there is otherwise.

Does that prove that there is no life after death? Of course not. The Universe could be far more complex than just what we see. What we see is nothing more than shadows cast on the walls of our personal Platonic caves, and may or may not correspond to an objective reality at all! Perhaps we are all power units in the Matrix, destined to live forever in an enormous machine (that's pretty much the theme of the Bible, after all, except that the head programmer is a sadistic megalomaniac). Or perhaps solipsism is the one truth and I'm making up the entire world inside my own, made up mind.

Ultimately, all we have to go on is our own experience and the evidence. All my personal experience is life -- it is very difficult for me to imagine not living. Yet all of my life I've been surrounded by and sustained by death. Dead trees make my house, dead plants make my clothes, dead animals and plants alike my shoes, my food. I kill things with every breath. I observe my own self constantly dying and sloughing off. I have wept when my own loved ones have died.

So sure, perhaps there is life after death. Why not? Perhaps the moon really is made out of green cheese, and the original "moon landing" that would have discovered this truth was faked. If so, sooner or later I'll find out, I suppose.

In the meantime, I plan to believe the most what I can doubt the least, based on all of the evidence of my senses and my reason. And my senses and reason tell me that there is no good reason to believe in the Bible!

rgb

Chris wrote: "Ashleigh wrote: "Did you know that Charles Darwin, the founder of evolution, renounced all his claims on his death bed? Even the founder could not justify his claims and in the end turned to the o..."

And even if true, it is irrelevant. Darwin had access to a tiny bit of evidence upon which to base his theory, and although all the new evidence discovered during his lifetime tended to confirm the theory, it is a drop in the bucket of evidence that is available today. Today forensic paleontology involves tracing genetic links between species using mathematical formulas and extrapolating backwards to common ancestors. Today we have excavated far, far more of the fossil record and filled in gap after gap. Today we have radiometric dating to positively date the ordered sequence of rock strata in which the fossils are found. Today there is no doubt in any sane, educated person's mind that evolution is correct, any more than there is doubt that the world is round and goes around the sun once a year, held in its orbit by gravity.

The exceptions -- people who refuse to accept all of this evidence -- are a) ignorant; b) stupid; c) brainwashed.

They are ignorant because with almost no exceptions they simply don't know what all of the evidence is. They think that "radiometric dating" has something to do with Carbon and they read on a BICC website somewhere that Carbon Dating has been mistaken before so it must be wrong.

They are stupid because a smart person knows better than to believe what they are told, a smart person has learned to doubt and to think critically and to weigh actual evidence. They are often stupid because they cannot or will not do simple mathematics that would utterly refute their mistaken belief. They are stupid because they get terrible grades in science class because all that math and reasoning is too hard for them. It is easier to just read a bunch of stuff in a book that says right there that it is the truth and that makes no sense in the first place -- that way they can be just as "smart" as somebody that works hard and uses reason to decide what best to believe.

They are brainwashed because if they were raised without the Bible and simply looked at the natural world to answer the big questions about where the world came from, how life began, how the modern biosphere came to be, how the Universe all works, the answers they get would look nothing whatsoever like the answers given in the Bible! In fact, if one thinks objectively the Bible's answers are literally insane. The moon glowing with its own light? The world is flat and has corners? The sun goes around the earth (which is solid, fixed, and in the middle of the Universe) every day? The stars are there to provide a guide to the seasons? Ten million species (or more) were preserved from certain extinction in a wooden boat the size of a Wal Mart that survived a thermodynamically and physically impossible forty day rain, and then somehow redistributed from the point that it landed on by continent and species so that there are no cobras in the americas and there are no armadillos in Europe?

None of these things is suggested by the evidence (or common sense). There is a species of blind freshwater catfish that would die in salt water in a matter of hours (and hence had to have been preserved by Noah, according to the Bible) that lives only in caves in eastern Pennsylvania. Noah supposedly collected a breeding population of these fish, took them back to the middle east, loaded them onto the ark, and then took them back to the cave (after all of the salt somehow flushed out) and carefully reestablished a breeding population from the single pair he collected and preserved? And then did this several million more times for other species from every continet, plying the mighty Amazon, scaling the Himalayas, turning over rotting logs in Australia, collecting bugs, plants, species of fungus, pretty much every ecosystem (they'd all be permanently wrecked by a flood of the supposed propoportion) without electricity or refrigeration or jets or boats capable of surviving storms or compasses or a clue?

We couldn't do this today using all of modern science and a team of thousands of collectors. It is ignorant, stupid and openly insane to think that it could have been done back in the Bronze Age, and if you haven't been brainwashed with cute little playmobile Ark sets with its eight pairs of lovable African animals all trooping into a little play boat into being completely unable to think about the problem involved quantitatively, you would understand this.

rgb

Abby wrote: "And my parents did NOT brainwash me. They gave me a choice. I could believe that my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great(and as many as it takes) was a monk..."

That's a silly observation. And if they framed this "choice" in this particular way, it is pure brainwash.

Look, try "choosing" to believe that gravity doesn't work and that fairies will lift you up if you jump off a roof. It's such a delightful notion! Fairies, everywhere, fairies that love you and will keep you safe. Much more appealing than believing in hard, cruel, uncaring gravity.

Except that if you actually do try this, you will be evolution in action, naturally selected against as being too dumb to live to reproduce. Of course you don't believe that fairies will do any such thing. Why?

Well, could it be that:

a) You've never seen a fairy (or Jesus).

b) You've never seen a person fly as if invisible fairies were supporting them (or seen a person who is really and truly dead and rotted come back from death).

c) You've experience falling lots of times, some of them falling painfully. Fairies failed to keep you from falling these small distances. You've seen lots of pictures of other things falling, other people falling, and fairies never seem to save them either. Those people who fell from the top of the world trade center on 9/11 -- they died! Fairies failed to lift them up, and Jesus failed to prevent their deaths. Many people were made very sad as a result.

d) You are aware that gravity isn't just a name for something you observe casually working all the time without exception. It behaves systematically -- not only do things fall, they fall in a way precisely prescribed by a mathematical formula with geometric implications. This formula predicts the periods of all the planets and all the moons of the solar system in addition to predicting the rate at which you accelerate when you jump off of a building, a rate that would surely be modified if fairies lifted you with their little tiny wings. Jesus's own Bible, however, in Genesis, states that the moon in question glows with its own light and that the Sun goes around the Earth instead of the other way around, and utterly fails to mention gravity or the planets at all.

This is called "using your head" and a bit of common sense to decide what to believe. You don't say "I believe in fairies" (or Jesus) just because you read Peter Pan (or the Bible). You have to look at the world, look at actual evidence, weigh that evidence, and then decide what best to believe.

Unfortunately, you've been carefully taught not to engage in critical thinking. You believe in a fairy story, instead of the enormous pile of evidence that gives it the lie, simply because fairies are appealing to your vanity where the truth is as impersonal and inevitable and ubiquitous as gravity.

rgb

Aharonsmith wrote: "rgb wrote: There has never been a good excuse for believing the Bible to be true

There is plenty of 'good excuses' to believe the bible to be true. It has inspired and helped thousands of peop..."

Sure, and there are plenty of good reasons for children to believe in Santa Claus. He helps to inspire children to be good. He helps to teach us about giving. He helps us to find love and tolerance in our hearts for little people that remind us of toyshop elves.

Oh, wait! There actually ARE no good reasons to believe in Santa Claus because Santa Claus does not exist! There are reasons that seemed good to you at one time -- such as believing your parents, your grandparents, and your entire society, people you (briefly) trusted to tell you the truth. There is the half-eaten cookie next to the fireplace on Christmas day. There are all the toys!

Alas, the cookie was carefully half-eaten by your dad, the toys all came from Wal-Mart, and your parents, your grandparents, and the owners of every major shopping mall in America, each for their own reasons, conspired to lie to you and fake evidence. However, as you got older your reason began to rear its ugly head.

How does Santa Claus deliver toys to the entire world in one night? Wouldn't he have to travel at light-speed or something like that? How come reindeer don't fly when I see them in the zoo? Why am I forbidden to go into the closet in the hall starting around December 21st? How come presents I watched Mom and Dad buy end up under the tree as if they came from Santa? How come Santa pretty much never gives grownups anything good (if he gives them anything at all)? How come Dad groans about bills right after Christmas every year? And finally the kicker: Why do all the older kids snicker at me for being dumb enough to believe in a magical fat man who gives toys to kids all on one night all over the world, when it is perfectly clear that he doesn't exist?

So you see, I was being precise. There are reasons to believe, sure, but they are lies. Or to be more charitable, "myths", "legends", or "stories". They are fiction. Can fiction have a beneficial effect sometimes? Sure, we learn a lot from fiction. However, there is something rather frightening about people takikng e.g. Star Trek too seriously, losing the knowledge that it is just a story. There is something even more frightening about full-grown adult people believing in Santa Claus or a magical Jesus that walks on water, comes back from being dead, and who has set up absurd rules that "save" you from a horrible fate for which there is absolutely no evidence if and only if you perform a certain ritual invocation of His Name.

The reasons you gave are not good reasons to believe something. Reading something in a book isn't a good reason to believe anything. Believing something because somebody tells you that something and then tells you it is true is obviously a bad idea for any adult who is not an idiot (although 13 year old girls who still believe in Tinker Bell and the Tooth Fairy if not Santa may get special dispensation for about one, maybe two more years before their own peers conclude that yup, they are idiots).

Anyone who disagrees should send me all of their money, in small bills. I will then pray for them using my own special prayer technique and I'm almost certain that your special needs will be met by the God that answers ritual prayers, even though you may not recognize the way that your prayers are being granted. You might, for example, pray for the blemish on your face to go away, only to discover that it is melanoma and not exactly what you had in mind. Don't worry, all this means is that a horrible death by melanoma is what you need, once you stop being selfish about it.

rgb

Jessica wrote: "Some Christians also believe that a day in Genesis was not a literal 24 hour day. I wish to disprove this as well. Read through the first chapter of Genesis and you will see that it says "there was evening and there was morning: the first day." This statement is repeated throughout the days, "there was evening and there was morning: the second day" and etc. A day then, is defined in the Bible itself as an evening and a morning...a literal 24 hour day.

Also, I am getting sick of the "plants can't survive without light" argument. If you would just READ THROUGH GENESIS you will see that plants were never without light! The very first thing God says is "let there be light." LIGHT WAS CREATED BEFORE PLANTS."

Oh, Jessica, you have no idea how sick I get deconstructing Genesis. I've read through Genesis hundreds of times, and rarely in the course of human affairs has anything been so thoroughly been proven wrong as Genesis has. And I do not mean "evolution" -- that's just a sidelight.

How do you feel about radiometric dating, Jessica? How do you feel about parallax and the measured distances to the stars? What grade did you get in geometry in high school? What do you think of the view from the Hubble?

And how, exactly, do you work out that whole night and day thing without a Sun? Or haven't you realized that the Earth is a round ball that rotates, where "day" is the period when a part of the Earth happens to face the Sun, and "night" is the period when a part happens to face away from it?

How do you feel about the fact that the moon isn't a "light" but rather a ball illuminated only with reflected light?

How do you feel about the fact that when one examines the rocks of the earth and the fossil record they encapsulate, flowering plants lie far, far above the advent of plants and occurred billions of years after plants? Oh wait, you simply reject all of the evidence! It doesn't exist! It can't exist! If it exists it must be wrong! It's all part of the Great Satanic Conspiracy against Christianity, or would be if it weren't heresy to grant Satan the power to create.

There are none so blind as those who refuse to see. There has never been a good excuse for believing the Bible to be true -- it has never been well-supported by evidence, which is why even today only around 1/2 the world's population are Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. But today it is simply shameful to believe in the literal truth of the Bible. And you don't -- you think you do but you don't. If you did, you'd think that the Earth is fixed, immobile in the sky in the center of everything, and not even you can manage to make yourself think this in this day and age.

rgb