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Considering that one of his collections was titled Angry Candy, I'm sure he went to be angry and arrived in hell (or god-help-him, heaven) angry.

Harlan Ellison started life as Jewish, but was an atheist.

https://infidels.org/kiosk/aut...

That reasoning makes not sense, and again you are back to cherry picking the parts of the Bible you like and don't like (ex God is angry and kills people indiscriminately not liked thus ignored, God will send us a savior liked thus not ignored) Besides the New Testament is also loaded with inconsistencies and erroneous scientific information. http://infidels.org/library/mo...

Biblical scholars say that Dec 25 was the date of conception.

No, they don't.

Examples? [of contradictions in the bible]

Sure

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus_on_Jesus [given as example of contemporaneous witness]

Non-contemporaneous. Josephus, AKA Yosef Ben Matityahu A.D. (37 ~100+). Not at all contemporaneous with the time Christ was reported (by the bible) to have lived. There's no overlap at all. Christ would have died before Josephus was even born. So he won't do -- he's in the exact same position of someone born after the Heaven's Gate UFO cult had come and gone, attesting to the reality of the UFO itself, even though he never could have seen it himself, even to the extent that the UFO probably never existed at all, just as there is no actual evidence for Christ -- so far -- except the existence of the cult itself.

Of course religion can be misused by evil men, there is nothing in the world that can't be.

Agreed. However, my point is that the vast majority of religion, and particularly Christianity, is inherently evil. Christianity espouses (and worse, imposes) many harmful ideas in the name of a constipated, selfish morality. I have said many times, and will repeat here for the benefit of this conversation, that if Christians kept their craziness out of the legal system and out of government, I'd have no particular objection to any adult practicing/believing. Or, if they eschewed the craziness entirely and simply quietly worshipped with no attempts to enforce those ideas on others. However, that's not the case. From blue laws to sex to words we can or can't say to bibles in the courtroom and 6000-year old planet myths as (supposedly) science in schools, Christianity is highly active as an invasive, harmful force. It is in that role that I object to it most strongly. It has a terrible, dark history of interfering with other people's lives; I take that as a strong cautionary note, one that can be seen still echoing and taking root in modern society.

I can't wait for easy, lifelike CGI so we can post Wholesome Biblical Anecdotes to Facebook.

Let's see how parents try to censor these:

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/donald_morgan/atrocity.html

Here - Bill Nye can help you with that.

And here is a list of contradictions. http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/jim_meritt/bible-contradictions.html

You obviously haven't read much of it if you didn't realize it contradicts itself. The Gospels don't even agree on details and most of the stories of Jesus you hear around Christmas and Easter are actually picking and choosing from the different Gospels to make a somewhat coherent fable.

i think most people would pity materialists who think objects are the the meaning to their life. The religious are materialists as well as anyone else might be, just look how many of them are in the Republican party wanting to deny poor people help as it will affect their own income.

Not sure if you're joking... have you studied philosophy? He means this materialism, not this materialism.

Yes, it is often confusingly lumped in to atheism. It doesn't matter if some people, identifying as atheists, then tack-on additional things - such as world views.

Atheism itself is pretty clearly defined and doesn't necessarily lead to any worldview beyond not believing in gods.

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mathew/sn-definitions.html

O'Hair, known for being a bit of an "interesting" character, was demonstrably wrong. How exactly does disbelief in gods translate in to what she's describing? Do all atheists eschew supernatural junk in favour of rationalism? Hell no. I'd guess that most atheists in Western Europe don't even give this much thought.

What O'Hair describes seems closer to secular humanism than atheism per se. This misnomer is why we've seen movements like "Atheism+" springing up. People in atheist groups quite rightly wonder why the group is getting involved in activities that have no direct origin in atheism? It's reasonable to expect that an atheist group would not espouse belief in God, but anything beyond that is outside the scope of the word.

Consider ichthyophobia. At it's core level it's a phobia of fish. Okay, now how about if a bunch of people form American Ichthyophobia, and say that their goal is to eliminate fish from the menus of all restaurants and ensure the government doesn't support the fishing industry. Are those goals a necessary part of ichthyophobia, or built on top of ichthyophobia? Same thing with atheism. This is why I'd imagine we would agree that precision makes way more sense, and to attach single word descriptions to complex things is not a great idea.

"moses wrote"...

huh?

why would you believe that? why even believe in this fairy story?

ok, lets look at the high points. gods 'chosen people' suffer under slavery. for an *extended period of time*, no less.

god seems to put up with this. is he thinking things over? takes a bit of time to 'see' how bad it is to be a slave?

(otoh, the bible has NO PROBLEM with slavery. as long as you're on the 'right side' of things).

and so, god finally decides that its not cool. does he just fix the problem? no, he goes into a vaudeville style act where he pulls out a clown car and a bunch of things happen, in series, and god is still surprised he has not 'fixed' the problem.

this is so laughable I don't even know where to start!

the only reason anyone would believe this is if they were 'taught' this crap very young and it latched onto their brain and won't let go. keep repeating this over and over and young minds will accept it and stop fighting its illogic. kids can see the illogic in it but when a 'helpful adult' tells them 'don't worry, god can do this and that!' they just trust that the adult has their best interest at heart. of course, nothing could be further from the truth. this BS is taught to continue the society of control and domination.

Just because you can disprove one interpretation doesn't mean that all interpretations are false.

there are so many holes in the bible, its worse than a sieve. why anyone would trust something so internally inconsistent is beyond me.

do yourself a favor and visit this site:

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/donald_morgan/absurd.html

give it a half hour, read it and then come back and argue that your 'good book' is worth trusting.

Pascal's Wager has been completely destroyed in many, many different ways.

No, it hasn't.

I'm well aware of how the gospels were produced, and how long it was from Jesus's death. The problem is they are just not believable, we don't know which books should have been canonized if any, etc. If that really was God's idea of the best way to give a message to his world, he's an idiot.

There's a number of different ways Jesus and the Bible could be extraordinary, but they fail to be. That's not a flaw in my argument, it's just the nature of the myth of the culture you grew up in. It is clear to everyone in every other culture that there's nothing special about the myths of yours.

Yes, I know of the excuses given for why things must be that way, but it is clear to 2/3 of the world that they are just that: excuses. If there was a way to know, the world would long ago have converged on the true religion.

How can I tell the difference between Jesus, Vishnu, Osirus, Thor, etc? I can't, and it's not for lack of trying.

I read your link. It is a poor rehashing of "Evidence that demands a verdict" and similar books. I've read both them and their critics, and their logic comes up quite short by comparison. To start with, the gospels are all anonymous and there is no good reason for believing eyewitness wrote the gospels.

As to his "Coup de grace", he's a poor scholar. It is clear that the women fit Mark's narrative quite well.
Quoting Ehrman on the issue, in a debate with William Lane Craig:

I should point out, Paul never mentions the women at the tomb, only the later Gospels, Mark and following. But here the problem is one that's typical of much of Bill's position. His claim does not take seriously the nature of our sources. Anyone who's intimate with Mark's Gospel would have no difficulty at all seeing why, 35 years after the event, he or someone in his community might have invented the story. Mark's Gospel is filled with theological reflections on the meaning of the life of Jesus; this is Mark's Gospel. It's not a datasheet; it's a Gospel. It's a proclamation of the good news, as Mark saw it, of Christ's death and resurrection.

One of Mark's overarching themes is that virtually no one during the ministry of Jesus could understand who he was. His family didn't understand. His townspeople didn't understand. The leaders of his own people didn't understand. Not even the disciples understood in Mark -- especially not the disciples! For Mark, only outsiders have an inkling of who Jesus was: the unnamed woman who anointed him, the centurion at the cross. Who understands at the end? Not the family of Jesus! Not the disciples! It's a group of previously unknown women. The women at the tomb fit in perfectly with Mark's literary purposes otherwise. So they can't simply be taken as some kind of objective historical statement of fact. They too neatly fit the literary agenda of the Gospel. The same can be said of Joseph of Arimathea. Anyone who cannot think why Christians might invent the idea that Jesus had a secret follower among the Jewish leaders is simply lacking in historical imagination.

For more on why Christianity succeeding without a resurrection is not as improbable as people think see this or the book treatment linked from that page.

I'm well aware of how the gospels were produced, and how long it was from Jesus's death. The problem is they are just not believable, we don't know which books should have been canonized if any, etc. If that really was God's idea of the best way to give a message to his world, he's an idiot.

There's a number of different ways Jesus and the Bible could be extraordinary, but they fail to be. That's not a flaw in my argument, it's just the nature of the myth of the culture you grew up in. It is clear to everyone in every other culture that there's nothing special about the myths of yours.

Yes, I know of the excuses given for why things must be that way, but it is clear to 2/3 of the world that they are just that: excuses. If there was a way to know, the world would long ago have converged on the true religion.

How can I tell the difference between Jesus, Vishnu, Osirus, Thor, etc? I can't, and it's not for lack of trying.

I read your link. It is a poor rehashing of "Evidence that demands a verdict" and similar books. I've read both them and their critics, and their logic comes up quite short by comparison. To start with, the gospels are all anonymous and there is no good reason for believing eyewitness wrote the gospels.

As to his "Coup de grace", he's a poor scholar. It is clear that the women fit Mark's narrative quite well.
Quoting Ehrman on the issue, in a debate with William Lane Craig:

I should point out, Paul never mentions the women at the tomb, only the later Gospels, Mark and following. But here the problem is one that's typical of much of Bill's position. His claim does not take seriously the nature of our sources. Anyone who's intimate with Mark's Gospel would have no difficulty at all seeing why, 35 years after the event, he or someone in his community might have invented the story. Mark's Gospel is filled with theological reflections on the meaning of the life of Jesus; this is Mark's Gospel. It's not a datasheet; it's a Gospel. It's a proclamation of the good news, as Mark saw it, of Christ's death and resurrection.

One of Mark's overarching themes is that virtually no one during the ministry of Jesus could understand who he was. His family didn't understand. His townspeople didn't understand. The leaders of his own people didn't understand. Not even the disciples understood in Mark -- especially not the disciples! For Mark, only outsiders have an inkling of who Jesus was: the unnamed woman who anointed him, the centurion at the cross. Who understands at the end? Not the family of Jesus! Not the disciples! It's a group of previously unknown women. The women at the tomb fit in perfectly with Mark's literary purposes otherwise. So they can't simply be taken as some kind of objective historical statement of fact. They too neatly fit the literary agenda of the Gospel. The same can be said of Joseph of Arimathea. Anyone who cannot think why Christians might invent the idea that Jesus had a secret follower among the Jewish leaders is simply lacking in historical imagination.

For more on why Christianity succeeding without a resurrection is not as improbable as people think see this or the book treatment linked from that page.

I find that this informative article:

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/meta/getalife/index.html

is a great way to grasp evolution, without needing to understand the biology. When people hear about evolution it sounds incredible- people just feel like intricate things must have been designed. There aren't convenient things that people understand that you can make analogies to. But this article shows several instances of evolution occurring in other places besides biological history. It makes it clear that when you have an environment with agents that imperfectly reproduce based on their fitness for that environment, evolution is inevitable. It doesn't matter if it's DNA or computer code or anything else.

I'm nor sure if the article is any good at educating people who don't know evolution well, but it certainly seems like it would be. It's very interesting, anyway.

Actually atheism [merriam-webster.com] means that you disbelieve there is a god.

Look at definition 2a. And should I take them seriously when they still list (even as archaic) "wickedness" as a synonym?

Agnosticism [merriam-webster.com] means that you can find no justification for either belief or disbelief in a god.

Look at definition 1 there -- that's the "unknowable" definition I was talking about. Do you actually believe the only rational approach is to say that the question of a god's existence is unknowable? I certainly wouldn't be bold enough to commit to that without at least having a working definition of whichever god we're talking about.

My turn: Check Wikipedia, especially the first four sentences. Or better yet, look at the people who actually define themselves as atheists are saying about it.

By contrast, I know very few who positively assert that there is no God, or there are no gods, and they don't seem to have a problem with the word "atheist" describing those who just don't believe, rather than actively disbelieving. The only people who seem to have a problem are religious people who want to strawman us, or atheists who don't like the negative connotation and want some sort of a middle ground, so they self-identify as agnostics.

Actually, that's not groupthink but a religious commandment.

No, it's actually quite possible to believe that "murder is bad" for better reasons than "because an all-powerful dude who lives in the sky said so, and is going to punish you if you don't obey."

One thing with those ten commandments, though. Of those that deal with human-human relationships and not the human-god relationship, they sure have stood the test of time.

But that's only 50-60% of those 10 (different Judeo-Christian sects list them differently); and those prohibitions are hardly original to Moses, they're found in other ancient legal texts such as the Code of Hammurabi.

And they're not that good -- one would do better with the Ten Commandments of Solon or the basic Five Precepts of Buddhism.

The Ten Commandments were primarily a source of power for the priestly class, and secondarily a list of basic social prohibitions. As a source of ethical guidance, they fail it.

Which implies that you DID read a lot of Ayn Rand as a lonely insecure teenager.

No, actually, it doesn't. I came rapidly to the assessment that she was full of shit the first time I cracked one of her books. And that was several years after I'd gone from lonely insecure teenager to lonely insecure college student -- this is /., after all. (I'm feeling much better now, thanks -- young geeks out there, it does get better.)

Considering your Teabagger/Randroid comments...

I tell you that I loathe Rand, and you call me a Randroid. I not only criticize teabaggers on my blog but go out counter-protest them in person, but you call me a teabagger.

You classification system is broken. The world does not work the way you think it does. Please try actually listening to what people are saying before you start labeling them. Thank you.

"The Courts are stupid! I KNOW more about the LAW than they do!" Hate to tell you this, but, no, you DON'T know more than the Courts.

I didn't say I knew more about the law than the courts; but I will say that there are areas of the law where the courts are not part of the reality-based community. For example I know that denying people the right to have their vote counted, as the court decided in Bush v. Gore, is not an application of the principle of equal protection. I know that corporations are not citizens and that corporate personhood is a steaming crock of shit, despite the Citizens United decision. I'll go out on a limb and guess that there is at least one case decided by the Roberts court that you think they got completely wrong.

Teabagger/Randroid conflates the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans during WWII with a question about the number of toilets in a home.

As I said, I am neither a teabagger nor a Randroid; and further, you have just committed the fallacy of the extended analogy

You continue to dig yourself into a deeper hole. It's time to be quiet now before you make a greater fool of yourself.

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mathew/sn-definitions.html

If they are wrong, and there turns out to be a judgement day they will spend eternity burning in hell.

The standard Christian thing, believe or burn in hell for ever. Such a good argument it has been used by the Mafia ever since.

Now others have pointed out that you are also invoking Pascal's Wager, something that relies on your god being so stupid he doesn't realise that you are only believing in the hope of a reward. A reward you will never get since only non-theists go to heaven.

As the parent suggests there have been plenty of instances that man thought he had the answer only to discover that he wasn't just a little wrong, but flat out completely incorrect (see flat earth).

You do know that the bible implies that the earth is flat (ends of the earth? That doesn't work on a sphere very well.). The religious people were the last to give up the flat earth beliefs.

Carbon dating the same artifact can return results that vary by 100,000's of years. That's not exactly a solid science, and if we're going to use those methods to say things like the earth is billions of years old

Ok, so the finding of the article is that radio decay is slightly variable. So instead of an artifact being 3 million years old plus or minus 100,000 years, it is 3 million years old plus or minus 150,000 years. That's not nearly as drastic a change to any dating as you seem to imply. The earth is still more than 4 billion years old, sorry if that goes against what may be suggested in some books (Bible anyone?).

ergo the Bible is factually incorrect I'm going to stand up and call bs.

See: biblical contradictions

Biblical truth has been handed down for over 2000 years.

You are begging the question

In the last 2000 years how many times have scientists changed their mind about what they know to be true?

If analyzing our claims, admitting when we have a better claim because of new proof (for or against the previous claim), and learning is a fault; then so be it. Scientists are faulty because the learn instead of clinging unwaveringly to unfounded beliefs. (that was sarcasm)

But then I don't have a vested interest in disproving His existence.

Neither do scientists. Scientists do not try to prove or disprove god. They try to stick to verifiable claims. You do seem to have a vested interest in proving god's existence though. Why is that?

Try here for starters.

No, our founders clearly did want to separate church and state:
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/ed_buckner/quotations.html#II

I'd like to ask you, since you're obviously a quack. How exactly would you combine church and state while having the state not endorse a particular religion? Seems to me that a combination is exactly an endorsement.

Your first choice of example is odd, considering that appealing specifically to Catholics and crusading against the "godless movement" were key tactics used used by the Nazis to consolidate power in the early 1930s. They most certainly did use religion (and more specifically anti-atheist sentiment) to consolidate power over their rival radical group, the communists.

Oh, please. Every single Christian argument I've ever read (and trust me, I've read a few), boils down to some variation on the following:

1. We don't know there isn't a god, so there must be one (of course, that may be true, but why must it be a Christian god?).

2. We can't explain everything yet, so there must be a god to explain the unknown (same problem as the last one).

3. Jesus seems like a pretty good guy. Why would he lie (too easy)?

4. My piece of toast looks like the face of Jesus.

None of these claims constitute evidence. I also see several websites out there dedicated to debunking the book you quote, including this one which seems to suggest that the book you reference is drivel on the same order as Lewis' Mere Christianity. If your champion's best work is claiming that psychic's predicted Jesus, then perhaps you should try reading up on the James Randy foundation before making claims about reliable evidence.

It is a hobby if you go around talking about how great it is to not collect stamps, and join not collecting stamp clubs, and read Not Collecting Stamps Monthly. I get where that sentiment is coming from, I really do, and have to say I agree with it, but I don't think that it is always the case anymore.

Lee Strobel is a creationist. That book is trash. Now, please answer my question. I would like one single specific example. Thanks.

I have given you a few pieces of EVIDENCE of why I believe in the message of the Bible and in Jesus Christ.

Hmm... this time, the best you've given me is a link to a short web summary, which I then refuted. Is there anything else? Maybe this book:

There are others who have written thick books on the subject. Here is one of the better ones:

Sounds great! Can you quote a passage here, and save us both some time? I mean, it's obviously convincing to you...

Since it would take considerable investment on my part, I should like to know it would be worth the investment. A quick Google shows several critiques -- the most complete being Jeff Lowder's The Jury Is In -- The Ruling on McDowell's "Evidence". Interestingly, this book is available in its complete form on that very site I've linked, while the original book is only available (as far as I can tell) in printed form, even though Josh McDowell has other books available for free.

Skimming this, I see no obvious flaws, and I see several patterns which have been common to your own arguments here. For example:

As he habitually does throughout this book, McDowell relies here upon the fallacy of appeal to authority, calling in supposed experts whose opinions we are to accept just because McDowell tells us they know what they are talking about. This is something no careful student in any field of study ever does.

Emphasis mine.

While it's a nice diversion, I see no reason I would want to pay money to read an entire book of it, in a format I don't enjoy (I prefer electronic texts), without the opportunity to immediately respond; rather, I would likely end up writing a book myself, one very much like "Jury".

A quick excerpt from Jury:

It will come as no surprise when I confess to having pursued the apologetics racket for some years, both as an eager reader of Inter-Varsity Press books and as a student at a major evangelical Seminary. My experience is not at all unusual. It is repeated again and again. Virtually every radical New Testament scholar one meets turns out to have rejected his or her evangelical past long ago, often after having seen through the same arguments McDowell and company keep retreading and daring the heathen to refute. Why do all those "bigoted" religion professors on secular campuses or liberal seminaries persist in ignoring McDowell and his allies? Simply because they have all been there before. They used to play on the same team McDowell coaches, only, unlike him, they realized long ago it was an unwinnable game.

Again, emphasis mine.

As I said before, the Bible is like a deposition taken from eyewitnesses. The fact that these eyewitnesses lived almost 2000 years ago is immaterial.

On the contrary, the fact that these eyewitnesses lived so long ago is directly relevant -- a lot can happen in two thousand years.

In all your replies, you have stated that you do not believe these witnesses,

I have stated that I am skeptical of the account, for many reasons, among them that I doubt the witnesses themselves existed.

mainly because you do not believe in anything your senses cannot tell you.

Please stop.

If I have ever ascribed to you a view which you do not hold, I apologize, but I certainly don't think I've done so in this exchange. Yet you've done so in virtually every message.

I think I am being extremely polite given how consistently you lie about me.

If I am to be generous, I could say that you are correct, in that I don't tend to believe things which never pass through my senses. That is, I don't tend to believe things which are only fabrications of my own mind. But there are certainly things I believe for which the evidence is indirect.

I also reject the way religion is being taught in churches: it's one-way communication with endless repetition of a very small set of events that supposedly took place and that would NOT pass scrutiny in this day and age. Immaculate conception, uh-huh. How about a DNA test first? :-)

Because I'm sure someone's probably mentioned this already, the idea of linguistic drift through time and translation gives rise to this particular debate. Does our current version of Jesus' birth mean that he was born from a woman that had never had sex before (our definition of virgin) or that he was born of a maiden (the older definitions of the words used in previous translations).

An interesting summary of the argument here.

Note: I'm not religious, I just like the analysis and history that seems to be completely ignored.

written documentation, as in written by men meant to control other men?

is that what you submit as proof?

wow.

'documents' that have internal inconsistencies? like these, perhaps?

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/theism/christianity/errancy.html

now that we are a bit more advanced than we were a few thousand years ago, we can STUDY the bible and realize it for what it is- a flawed document created by a team of MEN, over centuries, to control and scare fellow primitive man.

there are sections in 'the bible' that the committees (yes!) decided to not include in the canon.

is this indicative of a 'god inspired' set of words? some words would be omitted??

flaws all over the friggin place. bible is full of contradictions and blatant errors.

only a clouded mind would be able to ignore such blatant errors once they are shown. go read the bible errancy pages and see if you can still 'believe' after being SHOWN overwhelming evidence that the 'word of god' is just the word of a bunch of power-hungry men, thousands of years ago.

Yep, the old slippery slope argument takes some beating.

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mathew/logic.html#slope

I believe that this resolution is aimed at least in part at secular attacks on religion. As Gandhi said, "first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

We atheists have been given the short shrift for a very long time now. First we were burned at the stake, then persecuted, and now we're gradually gaining mainstream acceptance now. We've gone from Bush the Elder claiming that atheists should be considered neither citizens nor patriots to Obama including non-believers in his inauguration speech. Perhaps in my lifetime, it'll be politically feasible for an atheist to hold an elected office.

It's no wonder that the religious old guard is running scared.

To get some more science literacy, check out http://www.calacademy.org/. To test your already existing scientific literacy, take this Richard Carrier literacy test. If you're already confident in your knowledge, here's what other people do not know:

* Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.
* Only 59% of adults know that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time.
* Only 47% of adults can roughly approximate the percent of the Earth's surface that is covered with water .(*)
* Only 21% of adults answered all three questions correctly.

The linked scientific literacy test is a series of true/false questions dealing with the scientific method and no questions about random scientific facts. So the article itself proves it doesn't know the difference between scientific fact trivia and scientific literacy.

So I took the "Science Literacy Test"

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/SciLit.html

A T/F test, including questions like:

Science has one uniform way of conducting research called "the scientific method."

This turns out to be "false" (according to the Author of the test) because when you study different things (say Microbiology and History), you have to use different methods.

Well DUH! Of course you do. But that doesn't mean that you don't form theories and test your theories. You do that with historical research as well, even if you can't culture the Ottoman Empire!

Obviously there are people out there that think the Scientific Method actually refers to a literal method every scientist follows, checking off each step of The Method. Those of us that actually do research understand there is no such thing, but we all believe we use the Scientific Method.

So BLAH!

I haven't that much faith in a test intended to test my understanding of Science when the Author doesn't know how to avoid subjective wording in their questions.

And one of the best known stories ever, in the bible, was Egypt falling to it's slaves.

"In Exodus we have an account of the manner in which Jehovah delivered the Jews from Egyptian bondage. We now know that the Jews were never enslaved by the Egyptians; that the entire story is a fiction. We know this, because there is not found in Hebrew a word of Egyptian origin, and there is not found in the language of the Egyptians a word of Hebrew origin. This being so, we know that the Hebrews and Egyptians could not have lived together for hundreds of years." -- Ingersoll.

That's exactly what Thomas Paine said in The Age of Reason.

The tale of the resurrection follows that of the crucifixion; and in this as well as in that, the writers, whoever they were, disagree so much as to make it evident that none of them were there.

The book of Matthew states, that when Christ was put in the sepulchre the Jews applied to Pilate for a watch or a guard to be placed over the septilchre, to prevent the body being stolen by the disciples; and that in consequence of this request the sepulchre was made sure, sealing the stone that covered the mouth, and setting a watch. But the other books say nothing about this application, nor about the sealing, nor the guard, nor the watch; and according to their accounts, there were none. Matthew, however, follows up this part of the story of the guard or the watch with a second part, that I shall notice in the conclusion, as it serves to detect the fallacy of those books.

The book of Matthew continues its account, and says, (xxviii. 1,) that at the end of the Sabbath, as it began to dawn, towards the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, to see the sepulchre. Mark says it was sun-rising, and John says it was dark. Luke says it was Mary Magdalene and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other women, that came to the sepulchre; and John states that Mary Magdalene came alone. So well do they agree about their first evidence! They all, however, appear to have known most about Mary Magdalene; she was a woman of large acquaintance, and it was not an ill conjecture that she might be upon the stroll. [The Bishop of Llandaff, in his famous "Apology," censured Paine severely for this insinuation against Mary Magdalene, but the censure really falls on our English version, which, by a chapter-heading (Luke vii.), has unwarrantably identified her as the sinful woman who anointed Jesus, and irrevocably branded her.--Editor.]

The book of Matthew goes on to say (ver. 2): "And behold there was a great earthquake, for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it" But the other books say nothing about any earthquake, nor about the angel rolling back the stone, and sitting upon it and, according to their account, there was no angel sitting there. Mark says the angel [Mark says "a young man," and Luke "two men." --Editor.] was within the sepulchre, sitting on the right side. Luke says there were two, and they were both standing up; and John says they were both sitting down, one at the head and the other at the feet.

Matthew says, that the angel that was sitting upon the stone on the outside of the sepulchre told the two Marys that Christ was risen, and that the women went away quickly. Mark says, that the women, upon seeing the stone rolled away, and wondering at it, went into the sepulchre, and that it was the angel that was sitting within on the right side, that told them so. Luke says, it was the two angels that were Standing up; and John says, it was Jesus Christ himself that told it to Mary Magdalene; and that she did not go into the sepulchre, but only stooped down and looked in.

Now, if the writers of these four books had gone into a court of justice to prove an alibi, (for it is of the nature of an alibi that is here attempted to be proved, namely, the absence of a dead body by supernatural means,) and had they given their evidence in the same contradictory manner as it is here given, they would have been in danger of having their ears cropt for perjury, and would have justly deserved it. Yet this is the evidence, and these are the books, that have been imposed upon the world as being given by divine inspiration, and as the unchangeable word of God.

In concluding the interview, Dr. Wilson said "I have diligently perused every line that Washington ever gave to the public, and I do not find one expression in which he pledges him self as a believer in Christianity. I think anyone who will candidly do as I have done, will come to the conclusion that he was a Deist and nothing more" (Remsberg, pp. 121-122, emphasis added).

In February 1800, after Washington's death, Thomas Jefferson wrote this statement in his personal journal

Dr. Rush told me (he had it from Asa Green) that when the clergy addressed General Washington, on his departure from the government, it was observed in their consultation that he had never, on any occasion, said a word to the public which showed a belief in the Christian religion, and they thought they should so pen their address as to force him at length to disclose publicly whether he was a Christian or not. However, he observed, the old fox was too cunning for them. He answered every article of their address particularly, except that, which he passed over without notice....

I know that Gouverneur Morris [principal drafter of the constitution], who claimed to be in his secrets, and believed him self to be so, has often told me that General Washington believed no more in that system [Christianity] than he did" (quoted in Remsberg, p. 123 from Jefferson's Works, Vol. 4, p. 572, emphasis added).

I'm enjoying this =)

Scientifically speaking, there are many times you can prove a negative; philosophically/mathematically speaking this is not true.

It is similarly impossible, philosophically speaking, to prove existence as to prove inexistence. I look in my yard and see an elephant, thus I declare there is an elephant in my yard. But I could have been mistaken, it could have been a giraffe and I had my nomenclature wrong, or it could have been an animatronic elephant, or it could have been entirely a delusion. Perhaps by all available objective measures it really is a living breathing elephant; but it turns out to not actually be an elephant, except we do not yet possess the knowledge required to distinguish it from an elephant.

So I suppose the question is where you define the threshold of proof. Philosophers will argue that all evidence, either for or against, and no matter how concrete or arguably irrefutable, is suspect and may not be absolutely trusted; human error and similar conditions alone provide all the support they need to make this case.

Mathematicians place their mark just on the other side of this line, and say that positive proof is possible, but negative proof is not fundamentally possible except to demonstrate that it would be absurd to accept otherwise (and indeed, you may yet some day be proven wrong), as you pointed out.

Science accepts that observations are dependable when not misinterpreted; and closed fixed scope systems with members whose observability we are sufficiently familiar with to be certain of observing them when attempting to do so. In such situations the scientist can hold up an empty test tube and positively declare that it contains no marbles.

Paraphrasing Richard Carrier: Difficulty in disproving a negative is not the negativity of it, it is the breadth of the assertion which makes it difficult ("There are no martians" means we have to search the entire universe quickly enough that a martian could not move into a previously observed area during the span of the observation).

The Trust Buster was Teddy Roosevelt and even he had dickkish moments by classifying Sir Thomas Paine as an Atheist--clearly the dumbest comment I ever read from him.

There's a debate on whether Thomas Paine was an atheist. Some like Teddy Roosevelt said he was while others say he wasn't. I guess in a sense it depends on what the speaker means, Thomas Jefferson for instance was a Diest and while he believed Jesus was a great teacher he didn't believe he was the "Son of God", savior. He actually took the Christian Bible and cut out all the stuff about miracles and such to create the Jeffersonian Bible.

Falcon

There you go again, using logical fallacies about how you can't 'prove a negative'. That does not help your cause.

I often have people cite how Scripture is contradictory. Would you be so kind as to provide some specific examples that I may review and address?

I suspect that such a discourse would devolve into a meaningless test of your ability to rationalize versus my recollection of the Bible. I'm not really interested in that as such an argument would become tiresome and honestly beside my original point. If you are truly interested in some of these specific contradictions, however, there are plenty of websites and books which document them.

If you examine my quote, I do not claim that the "modern, accepted form" of the Bible is a "perfect, divine work".

Sorry if I wasn't clear on this, I wasn't trying to put words into your mouth. The way I see it, there can be two logical rationales for believing that canonization was divine:

1. The modern, accepted form of the bible is, as a work, perfect and clearly divine in its content.
2. The human institutions which were responsible for canonization demonstrated infallibility at other times.

The purpose of my first paragraph was to dispute (1). In my view, the content of the Bible as work of literature fails to demonstrate its divinity in its content. In short, it does not transcend the primitive people and culture of the time periods in which it was written in either knowledge or moral philosophy. Take the morally indefensible institution of slavery, for example. Why is it that the Bible does not clearly condemn it? One could resort to a "God works in mysterious ways" brand of argument but the most reasonable explanation is that the Bible is a reflection of the people which produced it and that those people saw nothing wrong with slavery.

Furthermore the internal contradictions aside, the Bible is also very unclear on many important aspects of both its meaning and message to the point where it lends itself to limitless interpretations on what should be fundamentally basic points of the human experience. The sheer number of denominations and divisions that are included under the banner of "Christianity" and the extremes which encompass their views demonstrate the Bible's lack of clarity, which would, otherwise, be expected of a perfect, divine work.

I don't think you believe (2), so I won't address it any more than I did in my previous post.

I simply state that I believe God preserved the writings he intended to preserve--writings that may help us understand his character, and his plan of salvation. Had he not wanted the teaching of the cross to go forth, he could have allowed for the teaching to be diluted, for the early manuscripts to have been lost, or that the early sect of the Christians had been eliminated.

This is self-justifying, circular logic. You're suggesting that the Bible is a divine work simply by the nature of its existence. Similar arguments could be made for any ancient (or even modern) text.

-Grym

I saw a couple of posts suggesting that people should be left to believe what they want. This is an incredibly dangerous proposition, and the reason that it must be rejected, even if said people don't try to push their false beliefs onto others, has been covered in depth in this classic piece that is, unfortunately, as much needed reading today as it was in the distant past when it was written: http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/w_k_clifford/ethics_of_belief.html

"Post hoc ergo propter hoc"

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mathew/logic.html#posthoc

eg: "The Soviet Union collapsed after instituting state atheism. Therefore we must avoid atheism for the same reasons."

It encouraged "god's followers" to enslave those around them, kill the men and rape the women.

Nowhere does the Bible even hint that God commanded people to rape women; that is total rubbish.

Here's just one link to the crap that the bible exhorts.

There is no god, and if there were, it wouldn't be THAT stupid.

Just google "contradictions in the bible" and you can find tons of them.

One site in the first list of results is:
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/jim_meritt/bible-contradictions.html#contradictions

That page mentions contradictions in Genesis 1 & 2. I thought that there are also multiple contradictory Adam & Eve stories, but I may be mistaken.

prophecies which have been so accurate that in many cases it's been accused of being written after the fact which is wrong considering that Daniel had the book of Isaiah before the fall of Babylon

The Book of Daniel is a fiction, written hundreds of years after the events it claims to portray. It's easy to make prophecies come out correctly in fiction.

Archeology backs up most of the Bible

Uh, no. For starters, remember the whole captivity in Egypt thing? Big part of the Old Testiment? Archaeological evidence - none. Herod's slaughter of young boys around Bethlehem? No evidence outside the Gospels.

As literature and myth, some parts of the Bible have some merit. As history or as a sensible guide to ethics or philosophy, it's badly wanting.

Yes, those phenomena -- "causality, chaos, and random interactions" -- are often used as arguments against the existence of God; but they are insufficient to disprove it, and depending on how one looks at them, can be viewed equally easily as manifestations of God's will.

GP prefaced his statement with "I believe", not "I have proved". Faith is the decision to believe. GP has decided to believe that God directs such phenomena; you have (I'm guessing) not decided to believe so. But either decision is a judgment call. GP is not trying to convince you. Please accord him, and others like him (like myself), the same courtesy.

Your other point -- the argument from evil -- is one that is hotly debated, and decidedly troubling. But counter-arguments have been made by finer minds than mine, if you're really interested in the question.

Actually, Helium 4 (and especially Helium 3) escape out of Earth's atmosphere continuously into space. (As well as Hydrogen)
It is not merely that it is too expensive to extract Helium from the upper atmosphere, but it is also that the atmosphere is leaking Helium into space, lost forever.

http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=247
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/dave_matson/young-earth/specific_arguments/helium.html
http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v8/i2/helium.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium

A typical "no true roman" argument.

http://www.infidels.org/misc/humor.archive/fundies.html

No, if you hold that the tale of Genesis is literally true, you get a contradiction

Just because it has contradictions doesn't mean it can't be wrong in other ways too. :-)

No. This is me avoiding the same old argument about contradictions in the bible. You don't even understand the subject, and you I don't think you really care to. And yeah, the vast majority of church laity supports young-earth creationism. The majority of church laity doesn't read, and that's a problem in and of itself. YEC's certainly don't represent the forefront of theological thought in the church (not in mine, or any I know of).

Six days? What's a day when the earth and sun don't even exist yet? A core component to Christian theology is that God is boundless; he is therefore not temporal. What is a day to a non-temporal entity? The bible uses terminology that a Jew of thousands of years ago can understand readily without a course in philosophy.

This discussion is fruitless because you think you know what you don't. How am I supposed to argue with that?

At the very least, you could have faked having a grasp of the bible and its "contradictions" with a Google search.