Slashdot Mirror

the old gods were ...were fallible, they were petty, they were vain, they were spiteful cruel, loving and warm. Humanity's foibles at their most extreme. :)

Don't sell current religions short. I mean, God allowed Satan to destroy Job's life for what pretty much amounted to a bet. And then, of course, there's all of the killing God does (including killing people for complaining that people are being killed) :
http://commonsenseatheism.com/...

> luckily the Norse religion died out ages ago

Jesus promised the end of all wicked people.
Odin promised the end of all ice giants.
I don't see many ice giants around...
http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/odin-vs.-jesus.jpg

However, significance is only accurate if you propose a hypothesis BEFORE you collect data, or you account for the number of hypotheses that you COULD have tested when you started hunting for correlations.

Wagenmakers et al (2011) make a similar but slightly different point. The important thing is to distinguish between exploratory studies and confirmatory studies. In an exploratory study, hypotheses are based on correlations found after gathering data, while in a confirmatory study, the examined hypotheses are planned in advance. Both are important. Without confirmatory studies, exactly your point criticism applies, but, without exploratory studies, non-intuitive insights are difficult to come by.

This is why replications of previous studies, with new data, are so important. Research is messy enough that the first examination of a hypothesis is at least partly exploratory, and it's up to the next five research papers to replicate the original instantiation of the hypothesis on the way to exploring the next elaboration of it.

Even the information age can't save us. Time for another set of religious dark ages: http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/timeline.png

In fact there's a bit of an obsession out in Atheist-land at beating one guy: William Lane Craig, who is considered technically by many to be the top Christian debater... and arguably has never "lost" (sorry I really have to put that last word in quotes), as the linked Atheist site describes, despite going up against some serious popular intellectual heavyweights such as Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. Famously, Dawkins recently backed out of a debate with him.

It's worth noting here, for anyone interested, this blog which does a pretty nice job of reviewing and rating many of these debates from an Agnostic perspective.

These debates generally are not specifically on evolution, but virtually all of them include it to greater and lesser degrees.

In fact there's a bit of an obsession out in Atheist-land at beating one guy: William Lane Craig, who is considered technically by many to be the top Christian debater... and arguably has never "lost" (sorry I really have to put that last word in quotes), as the linked Atheist site describes, despite going up against some serious popular intellectual heavyweights such as Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. Famously, Dawkins recently backed out of a debate with him.

It's worth noting here, for anyone interested, this blog which does a pretty nice job of reviewing and rating many of these debates from an Agnostic perspective.

These debates generally are not specifically on evolution, but virtually all of them include it to greater and lesser degrees.

the Gospels of the new Testament were written thirty-five to sixty-five years after the life of Jesus

From The Lost Gospel of Judas

I don't know where you're getting your info, but it sounds like it's some kind of fringe pseudoskepticism. I'd encourage you to read this post from an atheist, and be more careful with your sources.

Mind you, this was a roomful of atheists. Critical, skeptical people, right? Not so! Nearly half of them were willing to be instantly persuaded by a single talk without checking any sources or reading any rebuttals. Many of them were totally unaware of how historical scholarship was even done. I feel like I could have made up a bunch of stuff, claimed that it was held by the majority of historians, and then persuaded half the audience to believe that Jesus was a Persian myth.
[...]
Anyway, this is one of a thousand events that lead me to think atheists are not generally more rational or careful than belivers. Thus, my plea to all people is: Do not be quickly persuaded. Investigate. Challenge. Doubt.