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Creationist Bets $10k In Proposed Literal Interpretation of Genesis Debate
HungWeiLo writes "A California man who believes the literal interpretation of the Bible is real is offering $10,000 to anyone who can successfully debunk claims made in the book of Genesis in front of a judge. Joseph Mastropaolo, the man behind this challenge, is to put $10,000 of his own money into an escrow account. His debate opponent would be asked to do the same. They would then jointly agree on a judge based on a list of possible candidates. Mastropaolo said that any evidence presented in the trial must be 'scientific, objective, valid, reliable and calibrated.' For his part, Mastropaolo has a Ph.D. in kinesiology and writes for the Creation Hall of Fame website, which is helping to organize the minitrial. It's also not the first such trial he's tried to arrange. A previous effort, known as the 'Life Science Prize,' proposed a similar scenario. Mastropaolo includes a list of possible circuit court judges to oversee the trial and a list of those he challenged to take part on the evolutionary side of the debate."
Chapter 1 - Male and Female are created simultaneously.
Chapter 2 - Adam and Eve are created in that order.
One of the two accounts must be false - they are mutually exclusive factual statements.
Genesis is a collection of myths with no more truth to them then the parables.
What is this supposed to prove? Plenty of idiots have money in our society, money only has a tenuous correlation with intelligence.
Mostly random stuff.
Article needs more Satan!
Most people complain about the earth, universe etc being created in six days. If you read the actual Bible account you will see it says in the VERY FIRST sentence that the earth got created. Only AFTER that, the six creative "days" occurred to prepare the surface of the earth for inhabitation, not for the creation of the earth which was already in existence.
he should save himself the trouble, go get a library card, and then move onto more productive things to do with one's precious time here on earth.
doesn't the biblical god, and every interpretation of it, in some way deem wasting away one's life with pointless endeavors a sin?
It can't be proved or disproved. That's why believers call it "faith".
Why just don't these people get a life.
The earth is flat too!
God created man, and he said "caveat emptor".
someone should point him at Kitzmiller v. Dover.
There are three kinds of people in the world. Those that can count, and those that can't.
We will find out who was Cain's wife...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Just found soft tissue in 60 mya bones... Again.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0065128113000020
If the argument can be predicated on God's infinite power, then.. ?
For someone who's not too familiar with the Bible, what are the claims up for grabs in this challenge, aside from creating the earth in 7 days and 7 nights, Adam & Eve, and the talking serpent?
How can anything be disproved if one must first accept that Genesis is the inspired word of an omnipotent deity? And if that's not an accepted fact, then isn't the "disproof" the fact that it was written by man?
CMB. That's it. I love that three small letters (well, and and enter key I suppose) typed into google can debunk most of this.
But seriously, its actually quite hard to debunk that there were talking snakes/donkeys/gods etc. Its like trying to debunk an invisible pink unicorn is standing behind you.. (But how can it be invisible and pink at the same time?.. ahhh thats beyond scientific understanding!)
If nobody shows up for this nonsense and bets $ 10,000, it's proof that this religious believe system is true...
This is just another religious person responding to science "Prove my god doesn't exist". That's the thing, we can't "prove" any of this is real of not because this all supposedly in the past, we would need to go back in time but at the same time no one can prove what's in the bible is true either. Only thing we can prove is how the earth is much older than what the bible claims and somewhat prove we come from evolution and not just popping out of thin air like the bible seems to make us believe. But even when facing with those proof, religious fanatics don't believe in them, so I don't see the point of this, no one can win.
The universe came into being 6 seconds ago, in exactly the state we see now, with all of our memories intact.
Prove me wrong.
Hint - it can't be done. You can always reintroduce the possibility of some omnipotent force. By carefully framing the question, proving it wrong becomes impossible. Instead, you have to unask the question. Western philosophy spent then entire last century trying to unask the premises Descartes set forth for exactly that reason.
This isn't a scientific question, it isn't in a scientific arena, and any scientist thinking they can 'win' the debate/bet is on shaky ground. Not because the science is bad, but because it isn't about science at all...
-V-
Who can decide a priori? Nobody.
-Sartre
honestly it wouldnt be too difficult to debunk a ton of the stuff in the bible... as long as you are talking to a SANE judge, and not a bible thumping lunatic
Theist: Here is the bible. Here is what it says. Prove me wrong.
Atheist: I see you have a claim to make about a magical imaginary sky wizard. Care to show any proof that it exists?
The difference is that theists start inside of the mind trap and try to work their way out.
For a moment there I thought we might be dealing with a pseudoscientist.
First, there are two not-entirely-congruent Creation stories, right there in Genesis. Second, creationists are known to be wily about fudging their interpretations of Scripture and data: "Did I say literal days? Well, literal days were different back then." "Oh, sure, there's a fossil record, but that's God testing us." "The mention of 'behemoth' in the Old Testament proves man coexisted with dinosaurs." "Who were Cain and Abel's wives? Uhh... er..." Third, I can't imagine who they would find to arbitrate such a bet.
On the off chance I've missed any, please pick up where I left off...
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
Thanks for volunteering the ad space, Slashdot.
carbon dating, enough said?
What on earth is "calibrated" supposed to mean?
First he has to show that it happened at all.
Until then it is, was and will always already be debunked.
End of story.
I'm getting me those $10,000!
And you guys are attacking the Muslims? How about cleaning up your own scum first?
Earth created two days (or two time periods) before the sun presents numerous physical and geological problems. Let's list a few of the top of my head:
No heat
No seasons
No weather patterns
No tides (along with moon)
No solar system (planets would fly away)
Earth would slow down and stop (no spin)
No moon (it would fly away)
No gravitational effect from the sun causing many problems
and many more other problems...
So who wants to present this to the judge? :)
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
Hector Avalos comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BP5LdELd_0o
"How archaeology killed the Bible" from a former child evangelist.
Or James Randi, for that matter... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxEJHO8KIXY
...do not give this guy more publicity.
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There are lots of ways to prove objectively that the universe is much older than the Bible would suggest and that life, planets and galaxies did indeed evolve. However, there's still no law that requires judges to be scientifically literate, and you can bet that a fair number of them are even creationists. So seeing as Mastropaolo would select the judges himself, he obviously plans to stack the deck in his own favor. He may be ignorant, but he's probably not stupid either.
10,000$ could be much better off helping the poor. People starve to death with what $0.33 of food would nourish them. So 365days/year *.33food/day so approximately 100$ would keep someone from starving to death for a year. He could have saved 10 kid's lives for 10 years if he spent his money there. When talking of giving, Jesus doesn't want you to grandstand and boast about it though, and maybe that is all this guy wants to do.
The modern Christian's life involves working at a moral job, living frugally and giving one's excess to the poor. Jesus says we'll always have poor, but he didn't say they'll always be starving to death. Outside of horribly corrupt regimes, world hunger could be something that this generation could solve if enough of us helped out some.
God spoke to me
Where do I collect the money?
I am being serious. He has already lost this 10.000$. Unless it is just a trickery and he is never going to accept any proof at all. But that might well be the case. Since the creationist types are crazy assholes to begin with and never accept any proof at all. No matter how well documented it is.
By the way. Book of genesis is a really, really big pile of crap. It is actually more then that. It is a big pile of useless crap from start to end. There is nothing else to it.
Wikipedia entry on this bible chapter, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Genesis
There's a church near where I work that has a sign in the window: "Come in and learn the latest scientific evidence for Biblical truth!"
I always smile when I see it, because they don't seem to realize they've already surrendered the epistemological war -- by admitting that weighing scientific evidence is the proper way to ascertain the truth (or falsity) of a claim.
Sure, they can fight a rear-guard action for a while by looking for scraps of evidence that appear to support Scripture (or whatever their take on Scripture is), but unless God starts making public appearances is an independently verifiable, repeatable manner, then the church has already laid the groundwork for their own logical impeachment.
The whole bedrock of religion is faith -- to believe that some things are true regardless of whether there is evidence for them or not. Once you've tacitly admitted that evidence is required, then faith is superfluous, and the church becomes just a group of extremely amateur scientists whose theories can't hold up under examination.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
it's better than evolution.
-Ultimate Stickman Game Developer Infinite World Puzzler
There are clear discrepancies between the creation myth at Genesis 1:1-2:3 and the second one starting at Genesis 2:4, but that's not one of them. Simultaneity between the creation of male and female humans isn't stated explicitly in Genesis 1:26-27.
OTOH, it is explicitly stated in the first creation story that the plants and animals were created before humans -- vegetation on the third day (Gen 1:11-13), sea creatures and flying creatures on the fifth day (Gen 1:20-23), and land creatures on the sixth day (Gen 1:24-25) before humans.
Which is problematic, because the second creation story has man created first (Gen 2:7) before plants (Gen 2:5), then plants are created (Gen 2:8-9), followed by animals (Gen 2:19-20), and then woman (Gen 2:21-23).
There is belief in the unproven at work here. Some people look around and decide that there must be a higher power of some kind involved. Some people look around and decide that there is only randomness and blind chance. Some people decide in a mixture of beliefs. Nobody can say for an absolute fact which belief system is correct. Maybe they all are - maybe none of them are.
Why do a lot of people get their panties in a knot when somebody doesn't believe what they believe? Seriously, it's like 12 year-old kids bickering about Ford vs. Chevy.
Really we need to ignore this hard enough and it will go away. Either that or pray it away.
i don't know karate, but i know ca-razy
Second of all, couldn't I just win by bringing in any other religious text and claiming that it, not the Bible, is false?
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
This whole thing is easily winnable for "science" because he is not asking you to prove God or no God, just the events in Genesis true or not -
"God created the evolutionary process on purpose"
Genesis debunked and the truth of the bible is revealed as a story meant to control the masses. The same actually goes for all modern religions that are based on a book. :)
Then put $10K in escrow, debate him, and get an easy $10K for your efforts. Seriously. Heck, get a group of your friends to help you.
Or raise the money on Kickstarter. For every $1 a person puts in, they get $2 back, up to the funding limit.
For the "that's easy" crowd, there really isn't any reason to NOT do this...after all, it' an "easy" $10K! Right...?
Incorrect. Adam and Eve had three sons mentioned by name (Cain, Abel, and Seth), and, additionally, "After Seth was born, Adam lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters." (Gen 5:4)
Abel is never identified as having a mate before being killed by Cain. Cain expressly has his own wife, though its not entirely clear where she came from, and following the chronology implied by the order of verses in Gen 4, by the time Seth is born, Cain has five generations of descendants. Though, arguably, the similar names in Gen 5 (which only traces Seth's line) suggest a slightly different chronology (or maybe just name-sharing), because some of the descendants of Cain that appear to precede Seth in Gen 4 appear to also be descendants of Seth in Gen 5, which might suggest that the discussion of Seth after the discussion of Cain's line in Gen 4 isn't chronological.
"One time about 6000 years ago, a magical unicorn from a different dimension farted the universe into existence"
Prove me wrong!
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
The fossil record including the complete history of human evolution.
Carbon dating.
Proven....Give me the money.
Of all creatures, the snake/serpent is somehow able to converse in spoken (or telepathic) language and convinces Eve to share the apple with Adam.
It's all fine and dandy if you look at the Snake as being a metaphor for something, but how could you prove this with factual information? The absence of evidence is not necessarily the evidence of absence here; the bible also claims that prehistoric humans lived hundreds of years and when compared to the average life spans even today, we don't even rank close.
Unfortunately the onus is on everyone else to prove that it can't be taken literally, not on them to prove it's legitimacy.
IF I had $10,000 I'd make a bet. I'd pay $10,000 if you could prove absolutely that aliens do not exist or have not come to Earth. so pffffttttt His and mine are equally true. One is no better than the other. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. :D
I'm old, not dead. Well that's my 2 cents worth, your mileage may vary. I say what I think, not what you want to hear.
It does no good to debate these people; any evidence against their position is considered inadmissible.
You can point out that chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis tell different and incompatible creation stories: they'll claim that you must read them with the guidance of the holy spirit to truly understand them. Been there, done that.
Genesis says we're all descended from Adam in about 4kBC, and we're also all descended from Noah in about 3kBC (since the rest of mankind was destroyed in the world-wide Genesis flood.) You can bring in the roughly 10k years of Egyptian genealogies which make no mention of Adam, or Noah: they'll claim (without the slightest sense of irony) that the Egyptian genealogies are merely ancient writings of suspect provenance and uncertain accuracy. Been there, done that too.
You can bring in the entire science of geology, which gives zero evidence for and an entire scientific discipline worth of evidence against a world-wide Genesis-type flood: they'll bring in some mouth-breathing "geologist" who got a degree from one of the all-too-numerous fundamentalist "universities" to argue that the question isn't really settled yet, there's still scientific debate. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.
You can point out that Genesis 1 is a poem. Instead of rhyme in sound, it rhymes in idea --- just like most other ancient poetry --- with day 1 corresponding to day 4, day 2 corresponding to day 5, 3 to 6, and then day 7 as a finale. You can point out that nobody takes Shakespeare's sonnets literally: "Ah," they say, "But this poem comes from God!" Yes, BTDT too.
Arguments from biology abound, of course: 5k years is insufficient time for one man's genes to diverge into the breadth of human genetic diversity seen today; you can't fit two of every species of insect in an ark, let alone the rest of the fauna; analysis of mitochrondrial DNA puts "Eve" at orders of magnitude before 4kBC; and then there's the whole fossil record of course. All the evidence in the world makes no difference: evidence does not change non-evidential belief.
And you're supposed to convince a JUDGE? That's the trap. Judges are pretty good at determining legal questions; they're about as good as a coin-flip when it comes to scientific questions. We bring in scientific evidence, this nincompoop argues legal blather, which will the judge best understand? If he was serious about the bet being fact-based, he'd offer to have the bet be settled by someone trained in determining the truth or falsity of factual claims. There are such people: they're called "scientists".
When I say "been there, done that", I mean just that. I was raised in a fundamentalist sect, and had most of my education in church schools. I spent 25 years being indoctrinated (it didn't stick, apparently) then 15 years trying to bring the church into the 20th century, and the last 5 years taking what is apparently the only productive approach. Here's the approach, for those who haven't figured it out yet: JUST LEAVE THE POOR IDIOTS ALONE.
Snake talks. Pay me.
The man has a Ph.D. in kinesiology. According to the Chart of Woo, that's at the corner of Quackery Bol. and Pseudoscientific Bol.
If opportunity came disguised as temptation, one knock would be enough.
3^2 * 67^1 * 977^1
Mastropaolo said that any evidence presented in the trial must be 'scientific, objective, valid, reliable and calibrated.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Ill add another $10,000 for anyone that can definitively prove that there is not a teapot orating the Earth somewhere between Earth and Mars.
I had this conversation with my mom. I granted her the first 6chapters of genesis were true then when to Cain killing Abel. Why did god mark him (whosoever may come across) and he walked east of Eden found a land called Nod and married someone and had kids. Where did all these people come from all of sudden? What was Caine wife's name? If its call Nod that means it has established borders to Eden. Who name it thusly?
some people are a "glass half empty" some are "glass half full" i'm a "there is something in the glass be happy" person
I spent the last 45 years checking, there isn't a teapot there. Unless it is smaller a micron. But is a micron sized teapot really a teapot?
I would say these are the last throws of creationism. It is a case of, please pick a fight with me, I am important. Science has credibility, so if they give creationism some attention, some of that credibility rubs off on them. It is sad state for them.
All you have to do is look up bible inconsistencies and off you go. Next you can simply ask to use creationism as a means to predict stuff ... and you are stuffed as it has no predicting ability. I can make an imaginary consitant story and ask that it is disproven ... The fact that nobody can come forth and disprove it, does not mean that it is true.
fibs are often hard to string together...thats how you know they are fibs.
Well, I believe in a benevolent God now, since he seems to have smited that insufferable MyCleanPC whackjob.
Smote? Smoted? Smat?
The story has devil in form of the talking snake. A lot of talking animals are also present in cartoons and are purely fake.
If, god was a being that created the humans, then how can devil be a shape-shifting being that can talk in a language of Adam and Eve that did not have their own language to learn in the first place.
Why would god want to teach them the language of gods, if he had prohibited them from eating the wisdom apple, so that they do not learn anything that the gods know. The genesis book contradicted itself in this, god has given knowledge before they even ate the apple and therefore he just behaved like a very spoiled child for throwing them out of the house for learning something new !
If the super intelligent creationist god does behave like a 9 year old child, than the whole story is rather fishy.
~ Best man at your service.
"Cain expressly has his own wife, though its not entirely clear where she came from,"
I am from the deep south and this is what my great aunt told me years ago, about Cain's wife. After Cain killed Abel, he was exiled to Ur. The only thing in Ur to mate with was monkeys. Black people came from Cain & a monkey. No lie. That's what my great aunt believed, which is not to say I believe it.
fable - noun - 1. A usually short narrative making an edifying or cautionary point and often employing as characters animals that speak and act like humans. (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/fable)
Genesis 3:1 Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?
NOTE TO BELIEVERS: You can't argue this, unless you care to argue against the dictionary.
So basically this guy is just giving away free money since the majority of biblical references have already been scientifically proven to be false, an exaggeration of the truth, or misunderstandings due to the lack of intellect in that era. Someone should revoke this fools Ph.D.
Had he expressed hatred or prejudice based on their religion, like the AC above did with Islam...
Fuck Christianity. The only thing it has going for it is that it's not quite as evil as Islam.
...that would be bigotry.
You know... picking A religion as being "more evil" based on current political situation, when every single flavor of Abrahamic religion has uncountable crimes to answer for, and those others aren't much different either.
Pointing out that all brands of Christianity are the same fairytale (only told a bit differently) is just telling the truth.
Just like pointing out that all religions are evil as they teach the people to build their view of reality based on a delusion - basically, inducing billions with cognitive dissonance bordering on insanity.
Meanwhile, staying politically correct and letting them carry on with their delusion without at least pointing out the most glaring flaws in it - that would be hypocrisy.
Also, infliction of harm through inaction.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I just wanted to ask a question. What does God need with a title?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Abel is never identified as having a mate before being killed by Cain. Cain expressly has his own wife, though its not entirely clear where she came from, and following the chronology implied by the order of verses in Gen 4, by the time Seth is born, Cain has five generations of descendants.
The second most likely explanation is that Cain's wife was from the "Other People", the Humans "created" on the 6th day of the Genesis 1 creation myth. This would have been before Yahweh decided to try the Eden experiment and make his own line of pet Humans at the end of the second creation myth.
Of course, the first most likely explanation is that it is all USDA Grade A bullshit that never happened, and was just an attempt by primitive people to explain the world around them.
This space unintentionally left blank.
Anyone care to argue against that?
See luke and leia were not the first to be tempted :P.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Can I get an AAAAAAAAA-men!
Brother I feel you. But I propose a plan:
step 1: JUST LEAVE THE POOR IDIOTS ALONE
steb b: ?????
result: PROFIT!!!!!
It's disappointing how many self-proclaimed Christians ignore what Jesus said in favor of what's in the Old Testament, which was written before Jesus Christ. It's like they don't want to be Christians at all.
Any way you look at it if there were only two people to begin with then the next couple of generations are all incest. Talk about dancing on the head of a pin.
The fact that no human being could live 800 years also disproves this account, unless the guy expects "god-level magic" to be an acceptable explanation.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Motherfucking!
Ahhh, the sweetest sin!
Gay marriage is so early-21st century. Up with incest!
ironic captcha: rename
You can't expect to be able to reason with these people with logic. If they had logic and reason there would be no reason to argue with them in the first place.
How the hell is this insightful?
As long as there is population growth and a limit of how many people can live in an area, how can we solve world hunger?
The reason no one takes this idiot up, is because the odds are in the houses favor, and he knows it.
Never wrestle with a pig. You will end up covered in mud and the pig will enjoy it.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The only thing in Ur to mate with was monkeys. Black people came from Cain & a monkey.
That's easy to test, if you can find a cooperative monkey. Any volunteers?
If he claims creationism to be a science, then it's HIS job to disprove creationism. Not mine.
He's the one that should be looking for contradicting evidence.
Privacy is terrorism.
You guys sound like chickens pecking at the ground trying to discern the finer nuances of higher mathematics. For the AC a couple days ago who posted that atheists aren't vocal or bigoted: read this thread.
It's impossible to prove anything, when the counter argument is: "It's magic!".
This prize has been 'offered' for over a decade, but for some reason has recently made the news. Occasionally someone bites, just to see what reaction they get, but trying to find mutually acceptable terms for a 'trial' is like arguing with the Timecube guy:
http://ncse.com/rncse/25/5-6/life-science-prize
Here's the prize page on Mastropaolo's site:
http://www.josephmastropaolo.com/prize.html
("All of these experiences confirm that evolution is the inverted fantasy based on the ancient Greek Gaea vitalism religion of 2,500 years ago that was disproven by the experiments, never overturned, of Dr. Francesco Redi in 1668.")
I'm wondering which version of which rewrite in which language Mr Mastropaolo believes is the "true" version of events.
-- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.
"Mastropaolo said that any evidence presented in the trial must be 'scientific, objective, valid, reliable and calibrated.'"
That just tips the scales to start with if our argument has to be scientific and valid then he should have to as well but that's not the deal.
An applicant might methodically go through the copious evidence demonstrating the geological age of the earth is billions of years old. Or expound on the multiple plausible ways that abiogenisis (life) may have occured. Or how evolution is both a fact and theory supported by multiple strands of evidence. Or that there is no evidence supporting the biblical creation story. Or that there are many similar creation myths of which the Bible is just one.
And after this exhaustive presentation they still would not have proven biblical creation did not happen. They might have demonstrated beyond all doubt to a reasonable person that it was extremely implausible and unlikely, but they haven't proven it didn't happen. And if this "judge" is biased or following exact letter of the challenge, then the money will not be won.
Carl Sagan's "The Dragon In My Garage" essay demonstrates this point with a deliberately absurd example just to hilight the point. And contrast this challenge James Randi's $1 million challenge where applicants are not required to employ tortured logic - they perform a paranormal feat in a self evident way under agreed controlled conditions and they win.
There already was a series of trials about the interpretation of Genesis in the town of Stellenbosch in South Africa, about 100 years ago. The literalists lost of course.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I love tearing down these people just as much as the next book-readin' heathen but please, my fellow freethinking friends, do not think that for a second this has anything to do with an actual debate on the subject.
/. posting this it does nothing but drive pageviews and traffic and keep this and other kinds of similar stories in the spotlight.
It's meant to be a rallying cry for easily-led, mis/uneducated people and nothing more.
It's meant to show the Creation Museum as the stalwart fighter for the cause of Intelligent Design, which, I suppose it is.
By
We have more important things to be debating.
The enemy of my enemy is quite possibly also my enemy. I've made a lot of enemies.
That would explain that first inconsistency, but then we have another problem - there could conceivably be humans descended from the Other People who are not from Cain's family. As such, we don't all have original sin.
This is always a problem with fixing flaws in a complex narrative. the explanation always uncover new issues.
This is just a dumb publicitiy stunt. I hope nobody will be stupid enough to fall for it and take him on.
It's bullshit. Again, I hope nobody falls for it.
Dude you are just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The bottom line is that the Genisis story can't be true without the main actors buggering each other. In other words, the whole deal is incest which is a sin. I didn't make up the rules, they did. And ultimately it makes those that believe in the Old Testament and sin are hypocrites unless of course the actors of the Genisis story get a "free pass". Which somehow there are a lot of free passes issued by so called Christians.
Ya, well, maybe he could prove in front of a judge that Elves from a different dimension didn't shit him into existence and them alter reality to hide the fact.
Life needs more saving throws.
Near where I live is a small 'creationist' museum (for want of a better word):
Genesis Expo
Surprisingly, it is a fasinating place (well worth a visit), with 100's of fossils and whatnot - which the place tries to debunk.
When I asked the guy behind the counter how these items, millions of years old, fit the bible story, he said; "God created those and made them look old for the benefit of man to wonder".
As Brian said in MP's 'life of Brian', "What fucking chance do I have!".
I have a similar, although more elaborate, idea for 'testing' global warming/anthropomorphic climate change. Alas, I don't have the millions of dollars it would cost.
It is basically a combination of a trial, a university degree course and a reality TV show. We recruit bunch (say 50) scientifically literate recent graduates who are not committed to one view or the other on climate change. We offer them a graduate level salary to participate. First we train them up with uncontroversial background knowledge related to climate (mathematical modelling, meteorology, physical chemistry etc.) Then the pro and anti climate change people get to send their best scientists and try to convince the students of their case. Some oversight committee acts as judge to ensure fairness. All lectures and course material are made available online.
Both sides believe the science favours them and an unbiased observer, given full information, will agree with them. Therefore both sides should be eager to have this opportunity. The economic cost of humanity being wrong about whether climate change is happening will be in the trillions. Spending this much to aid in coming to a consensus would, I feel, be money very well spent.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Genesis is a logical mess and we need to balance between reality and omnipotence hypothesis to read it,
We don't know what is ultimately possible in our reality, is there time travel, invisibility, teleportation, other dimensions, other liferforms ?
For me the Genesis is a filter at the begining of the bible that acknowledges that we are like a creator, at least we are like the authors of the bible.
We have this vulnerabilty of devising means to check if an invisible pink unicorn may be standing BEHIND us, we need to imagine the situation as it was real and then draw a debunk. I think that the Genesis doesn't give proofs of it claims, it is not its purpose. The Genesis is an historical patch for this vulnerabilty, it uses three forms of the same deity : elohim, adonai, yahve. The Genesis rules that we are like a creator but under the patronage of authority, love and creation (I guess).
I think we can win the 10k$ bet because the Genesis is precisely literally false, to show that we always struggle when we have to rule out a future possibility.
The bible is about prophetic power and the Genesis shows that we have to leave the door open because we struggle to judge even simple statements.
I would argue for the bet that the bible is about how to manage prophecy, and for this purpose the Genesis is literally false or incoherent to filter wisdom as a begining.
I'm pretty sure that you got that wrong. While I'm not an expert on the bible or anything, I've seen plenty of people who claim to be Christians talk a lot about 'pulling one up by their own bootstraps' and 'those lazy bums'. Isn't that the philosophy taught by Jesus?
I haven't known any real uber bright bulbs with Kinesiology degrees. Might as well call it a master's degree in gym. Yup, I got me my master's in Gym! I be so proud! pfft.
You just explained your question. Adam and Eve had had other sons and daughters. The mistake is to assume everything is exactly chronological.
You are not helpful. I want to know precisely who much motherfucking and/or incest happened in biblical times. I once asked my religion professor the exact thing (dressed as "wouldn't they have deformities and genetic diseases") and he brushed it of by saying God allowed inbreeding for a limited time to allow populating the earth.
"After Seth was born, Adam lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters." (Gen 5:4)
Seth made Adam a host. Later they escaped from the minions of Apophis with a pyramid ship.
Just get this guy to present his witness, God himself. Anyone with $10k to spare?
The summary states:
A California man who believes the literal interpretation of the Bible is real is offering $10,000 to anyone who can successfully debunk claims made in the book of Genesis
So are you amused at this person who is putting $10,000 up? No, apparently you're "amused" at the person doing what the above idiot demands and treat it as literal and prove it cannot be.
Mastropaolo includes a list of possible circuit court judges to oversee the trial and a list of those he challenged to take part on the evolutionary side of the debate
"They [evolutionists] are not stupid people; they are bright, but they are bright enough to know there is no scientific evidence they can give in a minitrial," Mastropaolo said.
Does he think that the only theory that runs contrary to the Genesis is evolution? How about we also bring some geologists, physicists and astronomers in to testify about the origins of earth too?
Ergo, that cannot be the literal word of god.
Even if it was mistranslated, that is another way of saying it isn't the literal word of god, it was a transcription error.
Rather tough as to prove something is not there one must first create it and then argue it away.
A conundrum, and of course a complete set up.
Example: Accepting a debate with a proponent of the south african apartheid state would simply bring legitimacy to that same state.
Arrive at the door and say goodbye to the cash,
This is always a problem with fixing flaws in a complex narrative. the explanation always uncover new issues.
And, if you carry on down that kind of line, you end up with this.
They know that God didn't write out their personal copy by hand and that there was a long chain of writers and translators but they'd rather die than admit it.
That's a nice fairy tale, too.
Actually, for most of them, they either haven't actually read large parts of the Bible, or they actually do believe that it's literally true, but you have to interpret it right. So in that case, they would almost certainly believe the "executive summary" explanation someone upthread gave.
It may be fun to believe that every single fundamentalist is actually a hypocrite and knows that the things they profess are untrue, but it's really about as stupid a belief as the one that the Bible is literally true in every detail.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Then the genesis is no longer LITERAL.
TBH, this may be the only way to get the 10k. If it's down as "you have to read it in the original hebrew" or "No, it's not a literal day", the account is not a literal word of god.
I'll do the same for Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and last I checked Mr. Mastropaolo was the one claiming that a bunch of Iron Age shepherds had accurately documented the creation of the entire universe by an invisible man in the sky (who's VERY CONCERNED about sexytime, btw). Let's see HIS evidence...
There are a lot of unstable people that would go off the handle without the allure of heaven or the fear of hell.
The remarkable thing is that this simply pits one set of beliefs against another. He believes in "creation", you believe in "science". It seems to me to be no different than the reaction of some Muslims to the cartoons of Mohammed. This fellow has come up behind you and pulled you pants down, and you respond in outrage and bigotry. Now there are some comments above that are thoughtful but the reasoned argument would be that you cede his beliefs and hold on to yours.
The culture of science became a religion onto itself once it accepted the belief as fact that man has the capacity to understand all and explain all. I have been following the creationist v. evolution arguments for 30 years and it is remarkable and saddening to see science giving up the openness to discussion and debate, particularly of a civil nature.
Finally: If I were arguing about evolution, I would concede the odds that somewhere in the primordial soup, a strand of DNA would come together. No easier, RNA, would form. But the odds that it would reproduce or spontaneously come together again? I've given up thinking I will ever know, because the Church of Science says it is "settled science", whatever that means, and Genesis does not stand up to rational scrutiny.
Contrary to the /. wisdom, the creationists have come up with scientifically based counter-arguments to a lot of the evidence that might tend to disprove Genesis. They don't rely exclusively on the "magic" explanation.
I think radiocarbon dating is fairly compelling evidence against the biblical narrative of creation occurring ~6k years ago, but they have an explanation for that too:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/does-c14-disprove-the-bible
The whole "prove something isn't true" thing...it doesn't work that way.
One common way to prove that an assertion is false is to prove that assuming it would lead to a contradiction.
... why aren't men sporting one less rib from women?
Richard Dawkins needs to Kickstart a project to debate this doofus.
God gave us two lights, one for day and one for night. Wrong one light and it's reflection. The first line should indicate it is just a story
There are a few issues with this, the first is that just because a judge rules doesn't mean he rules the right way, lots of innocent people end up in jail.
The second major issue is that he can't prove anything from the first chapter of the bible actually happened. In order to prove it he would have to throw out all evidence or scientific reasoning behind the big bang as well as all the proof of evolution and the million of fossil records. If he manages to get that far we should still be taxed with the overwhelming task of proving or at least demonstrating that the universe appeared out of nothing and at the EXACT same point and time the earth appeared full of animals.
He's put forth a game he can never win, he can never put together reasonable evidence to back his side up. In fact to disprove Genesis all you need to do is to prove that the earth didn't exist at the exact moment the universe came into existence. I would actually be willing to take this challenge on because in an attempt to prove a literal interpretation Genesis he'll actually be giving the evolutionists a hand!
I believe a higher power might exist but as for the bible, it's toilet paper.
-- Louis CK
Not only is the Bible false, but it contradicts itself from front to back. It is not even consistent on its most basic assertions. For example, how long was Jesus in the tomb? Matthew 12:40 says three days and three nights, but Mark 16:2 and verses in other gospels indicate that it was actually only Friday night and Saturday night with Jesus rising on Sunday morning, so only two nights. Clearly this is a contradiction, but the Bible is also chalk full of logical impossibilities. For example, in the Bible, the day and night were created before the sun. At faithisfraud.com, I am working through every chapter of the Bible, pointing out the inconsistencies for your amusement. Visit http://www.faithisfraud.com/ for more information.
I you think the troll religion vs science is not fun enough, add a judge.
> The fact that no human being could live 800 years also disproves this account, unless the guy expects "god-level magic" to be an acceptable explanation.
If you accept the premise 'god creates the universe from nothing', 'god enables a human to live 800 years' is not really that far-fetched, is it?
Go further. God kills children, it is god will that somebody dies. But the DEVIL is the one who PUNISHES evil doers.
So who do we worship? The child killer or the warden overseeing the punishing of killers?
Religion makes no sense, never has never will. Arguing religion leads only to insanity. Pity the faithful for they already lost their mind or never had one but don't debate them.
You can't prove that nothing existed the previous second and all was created in this one in the shape/way it is now, including your memory, just because putting "something almighty is trying to fool you" into the hypotesis enables a lot of dirty tricks (like planting fossils and put there the amount right of C14). All you have is a lot of data that makes very consistant the idea of reality that we have. But putting that hypotesis into the game means that you couldn't prove or disprove anything,
Simple - just look for the words that say "Written by Robert Munsch".
Ok let's do this simply. In the argument:
1. Show that Life has cells.
2. Show humans are made of cells.
3. Show evidence that DNA is responsible for hereditary traits.
4. Show rate of mutation for humans per generation.
5. Show how many generations are required for the observed genetic variance in humans; say between african and asian? (I assume it will be greater than the biblical interpretation)
6. If needed, compare the incidents of inbreeding diseases from such a small starting group of humans.
Flaws of argument: Possibility of more rapid evolution after adam and eve? Unlikely to advocate any form evolution.
More worryingly, they might jump to the conclusion that the different races of the world are not human, which is dangerous and ridiculous.
The bible makes no claim to Earth's actual age, and it's minimum age would seem to be less than 6000 yrs. But there is this little tidbit which goes as follows: Psalms 90:4 For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, and like a watch in the night. Using the key of Psalms 90 we get the following: 6000years*365days*1000years=2,190,000,000year "days". Further we know that a watch in the night is three or four hours: 24/3=8 24/4=6 2,190,000,000*8=17,520,000,000 2,190,000,000*6=13,140,000,000 As far as I'm concerned, the Old Testament where Genesis is written was initially composed by the Jewish people. They say these are stories for the most part. So who knows? Maybe this is what this dude will bring in court..
I wonder what part he believe his or bible's arguments are "scientific, objective, valid, reliable and calibrated".
This guy isn't a Christian, he's a huckster pretending to be a Christian, as so many modern leaders of the religious right (e.g. Ted Haggard) are.
Jesus was very clear that bragging about your giving or your faith was not only missing the point but counterproductive spiritually: He praises the poor widow giving a couple of pennies, denounces the rich guy giving huge sums of money to the temple, and tells anyone who wants to pray that the right way to do it is to go into the closet in your house and lock the door first so that no one but God could hear. And of course that whole "Love thy neighbor" bit.
I am officially gone from
There is a reason that guilt must be proven rather than innocence. It is logically impossible to prove the absence of evidence, or the absence of an event, or the negative assertion of anything.
It is impossible for me to PROVE that I did not do something. It is impossible for me to PROVE that something _didn't_ happen.
The burden of proof is on "believers" to prove the existence of God, not for atheists to prove the absence of God.
So far, there is no proof that God exists - not one shred of evidence at all.
We take it as a matter of faith that the unicorn is pink. And since you can't see him, you cannot prove me wrong.
This is why nobody wants to debate this fellow. People who argue from a faith-based viewpoint have different definitions of logical debate. A scientist trying to debate one of the faithful would be very much like showing up for a game of golf armed with a cricket bat. The two sets of rules are not compatible.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
you can get a million for proving the value of monster cables
http://gizmodo.com/305549/james-randi-offers-1-million-if-audiophiles-can-prove-7250-speaker-cables-are-better
go for the gusto!
Some of the most severe problems with Genesis are the idea that there are a literal Adam and Eve, and that the Earth was created before the stars.
The scientific evidence for these being incorrect is very strong.
Both creationists and evolutionists are batshit insane and neither can prove their theories. Neither is backed up by physical evidence. This is a taboo subject for many paleontologists, but something they can't ignore (they do anyway, but scientists tend to do that with uncomfortable subjects or holes in their theories).
The book of Genesis is a very complex work, with elements of poetry, prose, and history, all co-mingled together, and is a compendium of oral traditions, to boot . It is not an easy book to "pull" quotes from, because everything really needs to be understood in context.
One context is that the book is clearly not meant to be comprehensive. It includes only some details, but leaves most others out. You can clearly see this by the fact that some people mentioned only as individuals in an early part of the book are later mentioned as having a family, or even belonging to an entire nation of people previously unmentioned. It doesn't mean that the Bible is contradictory, it just means it doesn't include all details. Because of this, any hard arguments along the lines of "the sequence of chapter 1 is different from chapter 2" are impossible to resolve. Again, that doesn't mean it is automatically false. There's simply not enough information to reach a hard conclusion one way or another. Does the "day" mentioned in Genesis mean 24 hours, or a thousand 24 hours? The Bible doesn't say. It doesn't say because apparently, it's not important to what it is trying to say.
Another context is that the book makes claims that are literally extra-terrestrial, even extra-universe. The primary claim of Genesis is that God created both the heavens and the earth, and everything in it. This is a claim that science can never prove nor disprove, it is out of the reach of the scientific method altogether. That doesn't make it automatically false. There are entire branches of knowledge that lie outside the realm of the scientific method.
These are just two contextual reasons why having a mock trial to "disprove" Genesis would be doomed to failure. Some of the claims of Genesis are equally outside the realm of the legal method as they are of the scientific method. Is Genesis faulty? You can't prove it or disprove it using those mental tools. You need to reach further, into the area of human judgment. Does it make sense to believe Genesis when it says that God created everything, or not? Now, that is a very good question, but it's not one that science or law can help you answer completely, though they may help inform your decision.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Really. Only over there is such an initiative even possible. Gosh.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Behold! The first retcon!
The Pentateuch appears to have been compiled from four documents under the guidance of holy spirit: J (Jehovist), E (Elohist), P (Priestly), and D (prologue and epilogue of Deuteronomy). I'm under the impression that J and E were based on manuscripts by Moses, possibly at different points in his life, P by Aaron, and D by Joshua. Genesis 1 comes from P and 2-11 from J. You can recognize P by the arc number seven and J by its use of YHWH before Exodus 3.
Longevity prior to the Flood is easy to explain away: there hadn't been much time for imperfections to accumulate in the human genome. About sixteen and a half centuries in, there was a huge population bottleneck, allowing harmful recessive mutations to fix themselves in the genome.
You missed the word "some".
If Adam and Eve were the first two people, and they had only one surviving son, then where did the city of people, the wife, and the land of Nod come from?
I'm more than tempted to believe the literal truth of the texts, including the later Christian,Islamic, Mormon and other spin off religions addenda. That reveals a god that can't make its mind up, can't stick to its promises to us, can't be trusted not to change the rules before it's followers collect their rewards. A god that cannot and should not be trusted or worshipped.
But turns out it's just easier to remember it's all made up crap.
God I love America sometimes...
Did you miss the whole lack of female part in the original creation?
Or do did the first three guys have the ability to pull women out of their ass?
Sit down, let me tell you how reproduction occurs...
10k huh? I'm sure someone would bite if it were 100k. It's a moronic challenge even if it was $10. Can't debunk the bible in a scientific way. If the challenger knew anything about science he'd know not to do this. And, of course, when no one bites he'll say 'told ya so.'
I'd like to see him use genesis to debunk science. I'm not talking evolution, but everything. Biological, physical, etc...
The bottom line is that the Genisis story can't be true without the main actors buggering each other.
I don't think you've quite got the hang of this reproduction lark...
A good programmer designs his program first, even writes down some documentation. Then he implements, frequently needing to change the order of implementation from that of conception all the while doing some debugging along the way.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
I'm sure someone's already mentioned it, but this will never be a win for the challenger: religion is not a science. Why? Because it cannot be disproven. One cannot ask for scientific evidence because there is none: therefore, religion cannot be measured in terms of science.
For example, it is common knowledge that stars are made mostly of hydrogen and helium, which they then fuse to make heavier elements. We can disprove that. If we suddenly find a star that is made mostly of, say, neon, then we rewrite the science books and say that stars are now made of either H and He or just a bunch of Ne. We can't do that about a religion. We can't test it. Therefore, there will never be a scientific answer. It is scientifically null.
~Jarmihi
Protestants however must frantically fight to prove the book entirely correct
How quickly I found a counterexample: me. I'm a Protestant who doesn't believe Genesis is factual (a talking snake? give me a break).
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
That would explain that first inconsistency, but then we have another problem - there could conceivably be humans descended from the Other People who are not from Cain's family. As such, we don't all have original sin.
I'm not Christian, but wasn't the "original sin" committed by Adam and Eve? If it were committed by Cain, then the descendants of Seth also wouldn't have original sin.
Just send him the transcripts from the McLean v. Arkansas trial. Done.
Cheque please.
You could say the same about the other direction though. Genesis is a lot shorter than pretty much any book by Stephen Jay Gould. "God created one couple that had some kids which bred and reproduced" sounds simpler (and more plausible given my experiences in Missouri) than "some chemicals from lightning combined to form organic molecules which formed self-reproducing RNA some of which formed single cell organisms, some of which became multi-cellular, some of which became vertebrates, some of which became homonids, and then some of those became humans."
And that's even dramatically oversimplifying abiogenesis, taxonomies, and natural selection. Start going into speciation events, endosybiant origins of organelles, punctuated equalibrium, multiple levels of selection, and evolution of complex features, and you'll see that it takes a whole hell of a lot more effort to string together evolutionary theory.
Of course, this is because evolutionary theory adheres to the real world while creationism rejects reality specifically because it's too hard for some people to bother understanding and adapting their beliefs to. Much easier to make a theory when you ignore all the evidence.
More specifically, cherry-picked parts of the old and new testament as well. Jesus specifically spoke out against divorce (Mat 19:8), Eh minor thing there. Jesus specifically stated all of old testament law still applied (Mat 5:18). Somehow they consider all of irrelevant, except randomly pick the one verse on homosexuality in there as valid, yet ignore everything it is clumped in with (no shellfish, no touching the skin of a pig, no mixed fabrics, don't go near women on their periods etc...). I don't get the selection process that many Fundamentalist Christians use to determine what is supposed to be opposed.
Oh... and as far as a good scientific debate on the accuracy of Genesis, a pretty scientifically sound argument, that is 3 words long. "Snakes can't talk".
He's mentally insane. He may really have the money, but nobody can ever win the argument.
It's like debating that Time Cube guy who also offers a cash prize. You can't debate with somebody who is nuts and expect to sway their views with logic and reason.
He's already discarded logic and reason by pulling off a huge stunt to "prove" something he can't even prove himself. There's nothing in the Bible that can't be explained through natural phenomena. So clearly he's irrational.
You'd have a better chance winning money by playing the lottery. We shouldn't make news stories about the mentally ill because I think it just bolsters their misguided ideas and cements their distorted reality. We're just helping a nut stay nuts.
The bible can't be literally true because it has been copied (manually by scribes) so many times and each copy introduced random mutations. If you add translation into the mix all bets are off. This is why we now have thousands of versions of the "same" texts and verses and different versions can have meaning that is quite different from other instances in the same language, let alone if you add multiple languages into the mix. So, which exact version/copy are we disproving? And why that version and not some other?
This is also a good argument that god is quite stupid and incompetent (and therefore not omniscient), first to leave it to chance which religion you get indoctrinated into (strongly correlated with where you were born), and second all you have is fallible text about him, so fallible that it is meaningless and open to contradictory interpretations.
But all this is quite consistent with idea that religion and gods are man made.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
He is probably tenured too.
When god punished Cain for killing Able he placed a mark upon Cain as a warning to "others". The nature of the mark is never described in detail and is the subject of much speculation - was it a scar, skin color, etc...?
The more interesting question is who are the "others"? At this point in Genesis there are only supposed to be Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Seth and some unnamed wives and children. What "Others?"
Fundamentalists don't like having that one pointed out.
"Well, maybe god went out and created more men from dirt and took their ribs too..."
Hey, Bible Guy, if I don't get to read between the lines in Genesis you don't get to either.
Do "It's in the Bible, therefore it's true" literalists do with passages like Mark 16:9-20 and other verses where scholars disagree about whether the text is "in" or "out"?
What happens when two Bible literalists who disagree about whether a given passage is "in" or "out" debate? Do they call each other heretics?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Well, essentially incest's biggest moral problem is the creation of children that are genetically inferior. That wouldn't be the only rule given in the old testament that was for the health and safety of their society as a whole. The restrictions on pig meat and certain other foods and rituals made perfect sense with the level of sanitation they were able to handle.
In fact, there's a lot of evidence of wisdom beyond their ability. And another interesting statement going all the way back to the time of The Flood that man's days shall be 120 years. When it was actually written down, what was the average lifespan - maybe 40 years? Even in that written record it showed ages above 120 and gradually winding down again after The Flood. The oldest people that have lived on written record are around 115-122. 122 years is basically a rounding error to this rule that was put into writing so long ago.
I'm just saying - there's a lot of intrigue in those pages to a scientific mind. You can't disprove or prove any historical events beyond all doubt so this competition is silly.
I realised that was unclear after I posted it.
Eve did commit original sin, but descendants of Cain are also descendants of Eve.
Also I was wrong in my objection. Noah was descended from Seth, and anyone not killed in the flood was descended from Noah.
I can't prove that Aliens weren't at the first Thanksgiving, therefore they might/must have been there.
I think I'm being to understand religious arguments much better now thanks to the History Channel.
"Cain expressly has his own wife, though its not entirely clear where she came from,"
I am from the deep south and this is what my great aunt told me years ago, about Cain's wife. After Cain killed Abel, he was exiled to Ur. The only thing in Ur to mate with was monkeys. Black people came from Cain & a monkey. No lie. That's what my great aunt believed, which is not to say I believe it.
I'm not saying your grandmother was any more wrong than anyone else citing the bible for their beliefs, but a much more widespread belief is that black people were the descendents of Ham. Since Ham was cursed for the misfortune of having seen his father Noah naked, his offspring were also all cursed, which was used as an excuse for treating black people as second-class citizens or excusing slavery. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_Ham
Another competing theory for the wives of the sons of Adam was angels or other semi-divine creatures.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
I just feel bad for this guy that he feels the need to bet money on the truth of creationism as told by the old testament. It's it enough for him to drink the cool-aid? Why does he require that others believe in his insane world view?
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
... Mastropaolo's opponent's evidence must be "objective, valid, reliable and calibrated" whilst his evidence must ... what ... written in the bronze age by a bearly literate society?
Yep - that sound fair.
Starvation is primarily a problem of politics, not one of funding. Otherwise, Bill Gates could have solved world hunger - and I bet he would have loved to. Instead, he's finding himself wasting money on education - which is similarly hampered by politics.
Funny thing - he didn't actually spend his money, 'cause no one took him up on his bet. Even if it's sitting in an escrow account, he's free to spend it on the poor later, I'm sure he has no intention of paying out on his bet. Don't judge his entire character based on one foolish bet ...
That's easy to test, if you can find a cooperative monkey. Any volunteers?
No thanks. Although someone thought is was a good idea - how else do you think HIV crossed from simians to humans?
First off this guy is an idiot who believes in an invisible avenger in the sky so he is not going to accept when he is beaten and must pay up.
That being said, the easiest start is the whole erroneous assumption that Adam named all the animals.
That being the case there is no freaking way that Adam named all the animals because he did not have access to all of the animals because most of the animals that have ever existed (dinosaurs etc etc.. ) were dead and buried millions (and some billions) of years before humans existed. Science knows this and this is not really up for debate. This being the case no Dinosaur, (which is an animal) could possibly have been named by Adam, a human. No way that this could even be debated.
to Misquote David, "Genesis doesn't work" (David from Star Trek 3, the search for spock, not the bible.)
Good luck collecting though because these creationists are going to say something like "That argument doesnt work because , prove Adam didn't name the Tyrannosaurus Rex something that ended up on the bible cutting room floor" and then use that lame ass argument as an argument that "those dumb ass Evil-utionists couldnt come up with an argument that beat this challenge, therefore Genesis is the literal fact of how creation went down" which is , as we all know bullshit.
Let's prove Lord of The Rings isn't an actual historical document.
What are the rules about what is considered proof in this debate? If religious text are accepted, then I guess you could pick any creation myth and say it proves that the literal interpretation of Genesis is wrong.
There is no debate, evolution has major problems:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/03/neutral-biodiversity/
Evolution is still evolving? Translation, we have a serious problem with our theory, so we need to inject more theory to keep the house of cards together.
Ken Ham can enlighten all of us. Denial of God places blinders on science, not the other way around.
Add to that they worship Undead and the state of Undeath, also they worship the process of eating the literal flesh of their undead, zombie Messiah.
Also, in the end of days, it is said that they all (the believers) will become, literally, undead.
Creepy, creepy cult once you cull out the bullshit.
I have nothing to lose but my bindings.
fibs are often hard to string together...thats how you know they are fibs.
It's not that hard to string together fibs into a sequence of fibs. When it's correctly, we call it a Fibonacci sequence.
He probably doesn't even have the money to hand, or it's been raised from the suckers that listen to him.
Besides, if he was genuinely about helping people, he'd prove his supernatural crap was real and take $1,000,000 from James Randii.
I'd also like to know where you can get food for 33cents/day.
Well, aside from the whole extrabiblical monkey invention (which, as all the Bible says about her is that she was Cain's wife -- not, say, a monkey which you might think would be notable -- would, if accepted as true, seem to indicate that the "traditional", "biblical" concept of marriage, as well as include polygamy, also includes man-monkey partnerships), this is inconsistent with Biblical literalism.
First, for the nitpicky reason that Cain was exiled to Nod, not Ur.
Second, for the more substantial reason that the Flood wiped out everyone other than Noah, his wife, and his children -- meaning that no one now living is, if one takes the Bible literally, descended from Cain, no matter who or what he mated with.
Well, no, because of the Flood (I mean, there would be humans descended from the Other People who are not Cain's family, but they'd all be from his youngest-named-brother Seth's family by way of Noah, and thus still have original sin.)
Of course, the Other People hypothesis doesn't actually address the Gen 1 - Gen 2 inconsistency, since its inconsistent with both creation stories.
Life's hard. It's even harder when you're stupid. Maybe if you weren't intellectually bankrupt you'd be better able to understand.
That chronology doesn't work, because Adam in the second myth was created before there were plants, birds, or land animals on Earth, and the humans in the Genesis 1 myth were created after that. If you are going to try to reconcile the two, at a minimum the "Other People" have to be created after Adam (but maybe not after Eve, since Eve is created after the plants, birds, and animals.)
fibs are often hard to string together...thats how you know they are fibs.
Of course! Oral history at the beginning of mankind should be so much more clear and written down in stone for us to peruse some 6-10k years later. But no, I'll just dismiss this to my conscience as fibs.
Then at the very least, Adams sons and daughters had incestuous relationships.
Well, this leaves out Noah's son's wives. Which could be descended from Cain, but necessarily also from Noah. So I suppose you could suppose that one of them was descended from Cain (given how little Genesis mentions about where most of the women come from, you can pretty much suppose anything you want about them), and that all black people came from her line, but then you've increased the amount by which the invention implies divine endorsement of the whole monkey-marriage thing, since two of the handful of people God protects from the Flood are a part-monkey and a part-monkey-lover.
From a strict interpretation of physics, with no semantic shortcuts, your car is *not* red at night. Or ever, for that matter.
Color is a property of light, not of objects. Your car reflects red light under common lighting conditions. That is the cold-hard reality of physics. When you shine dim light of a specific color on it (such as, in some weather conditions, moonlight) your car reflects dark purple or indigo light.
You say "my car is red" as a semantic shortcut. It is much more convenient and simple to think of physical objects as having colors as physical properties. And under most lighting conditions, the colors are constant enough for us to think of them as the same color (different shades of red are thought of as simply "red").
Such semantic shortcuts make our communication very simple. Everyone knows what you mean when you talk about a red car. If we had to qualify everything we said in a strict way, it would take hours to have a ten minute conversation. "My car tends to reflect red light under normal conditions" is egregiously prolix when you get the same idea across by saying "My car is red."
The problem is when we let our language fool us into thinking reality works differently than it does. The way reality works is: your car sometimes reflects red light, and sometimes reflects dark purple light, and sometimes reflects no light at all. A slight shift in our approach to summarizing would allow us to say "my car is dark purple at night, and red during the day," and that statement would be just as semantically valid as the equally-summarized statement "my car is red." But we don't do that, because there isn't much gain in it.
So anyway, your car is not still red at night, or ever. Its reflective properties remain constant, but the color it reflects varies with the color of light shined upon it.
Well, then why didn't the Old Testament just say "breeding within the family causes genetic problems" or "eating pig flesh can make you sick because there are worm larvae in it"? It's because they didn't know anything about genes or Trichinella spiralis. Funny how, for a book supposedly guided by divine wisdom, it doesn't contain any knowledge that wasn't accessible to nomadic desert dwellers in 4000 B.C.
Point to me where the Bible says anything about evolution by natural selection, or stellar nucleosynthesis, or whether neutrinos have mass, and then I'll give it some credit as divinely inspired.
Seeing as how these are actual judges, how does reasonable doubt factor into this? Hell, if I was a judge for this I'd give it to a guy who came in and put his certainty at 99% and had the numbers and statistical analysis to back it up.
you guys are so smart to have figured out all the errors in the bible. Good job.
You could flush the entire thing down the toilet and look at the night sky or at a single cell and see God.
And if God didn't exist, why wouldn't a God evolve?
Why do you tempt the Lord Your God? Do not be so ignorant...BOTH ARE RIGHT.. maybe you want to consider that for a change...instead of creating more war!!!
You worship the god of this world not me...I am supreme and I create as I please...
Be blessed and change your Perspective.
SELF
That argument of the many different versions of the Bible therefore you can not trust it is not a good one. No other ancient document has anywhere as close to as many copies as the New Testament. With so many early copies spread all over ther Roman world errors in the writings can be tracted. Scholars believe the Greek text used for the modern translations is very close to the original text. There is quite the science and research involved in this. The majority of of those different versions have simply typos. Being a religious text means the scribes were extra careful in copying. And because of the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls, it has been shown that even though there are not many old copies of the Old Testament in Hebrew, the Old Testament was accurately copied except for a few minor changes that crept in. So this "fallible text" is actually very likely close to the original text.
The bible was written by man. Because of this, without any specific scientific data and citations quoted in the bible in a bibliography of researched data, this automatically invalidates it as a factual and truthful document of the creation process. I would like my $10k, please.
Why is it that creationists love arguing without taking a course in Quantum Mechanics or Proabability, while evolutionists have participated or even practiced religion? Evolutionists will argue in the context of religion, but I've never seen a creationist argue in the context of science. Maybe math, but usually "funny" math.
I already see this argument going down the tubes--and history repeats itself, which I guess isn't evolution nor religion.
Somewhere there's gotta be a snake expert that can prove that it's anatomically impossible for a snake to talk.
I have always found it amusing to listen to Bible-thumping preachers "logically proving" something through "the word", or detailing the meaning of some particular passage, without considering which edition of which translation through however many languages their particular "word" went through. Aramaic, Hebrew, various levels of Greek, multiple levels of English - how can we argue about "the word" when we can't possibly be sure what the words are? Even the Hebrew Torah (five books of the Old Testament to you latecomers), copied letter for letter with extreme care, is always written by human hands and therefore a possibly fallible copy, even to the initial copy written by the hand of Moses - or the editorial committee that probably merged together multiple variants at some point.
Personally I believe there's a large grain of truth to the historical stuff (one-sided, of course, but valid as seen from that one side), some useful ethnographic information about animal husbandry and nomadic living, and - most important - the goal of having a literate, educated population even in a very-low-technology society. That's how you advance your family/tribe faster than your more numerous neighbors.
Its been tried
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Ivanovich_Ivanov_(biologist)
That is real common with Christians, and indeed people of all faiths. Go to a church and try to get people to donate money for good works, and you'll get some but not much. Try to get the same people to donate for something to make the church more beautiful? They'll toss money your way.
What is there before the creation? What is there before God (http://www.freedomwall.net/2011/01/what-is-before-god/)?
There have been Star Trek episodes like that too, where people are on a Holodeck with their memories suppressed. That's also why, even having been in a PhD program in ecology and evolution, I have to accept it is possible that our universe is a simulation started 6000 years ago from some old backup.
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
Or that everything in it may have been designed with tools that involve interactive design of selections from variations, like software I co-wrote about designing plants and tunes:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/
http://www.evojazz.com/
The problem of course is that, even if true and interesting to contemplate, those sorts of beliefs are not very practical, like in understanding how the flu virus mutates every year, or in figuring out where mineral resources are likely located based on geological processes, and so on. Or even in understanding how religion may have come about and persisted in the first place (a point I first saw in someone's comment on slashdot a year or two ago):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_origin_of_religions
http://evolution-of-religion.com/
https://www.google.com/search?q=evolution+of+religion
I also think many scientists overreach -- moving from scientific statements about material things to an unackowledged theology of "scientistic materialsm" like Charles Tart points out.
http://blog.paradigm-sys.com/about-dr-tart/the-end-of-materialism/
"Of course there are nonsensical elements mixed in with religion and spirituality: that's true for all areas of human life. But to totally deny our spiritual nature, as science apparently does, harms and inhibits people. Indeed, a deeper look shows that it's not science that denies our spirituality, it's scientism, a rigid philosophy of materialism, masquerading as science."
Some suggest we are not Earthly beings on a spiritual journey, but rather are instead Spiritual beings on an earthly journey. If so, it is hard to say for sure what difference is makes how long that journey is -- whether 15 hours or 15 decades?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Dreams_May_Come
People also find it worthwhile to play plenty of video games that may only last a short time. So a reasonable skeptic has to accept a lot of things are possible and that our knowledge of all the levels of reality is apparently limited as human beings. Still, then there is the issue of what is useful to believe in this current reality as far as dealing with the pains and pleasures and relationships and values and challenges and so on that it presents.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The contradiction that many people noticed in my religious school was this: Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel. Cain killed Abel, meaning one son was left...If Adam and Eve were the first two people, and they had only one surviving son, then where did the city of people, the wife, and the land of Nod come from?
This is yet another of the many arguments that a lot of atheists put forward as being a contradiction. Rather than studying the passages for themselves, they just pass around the same arguments that they hear from others. I'm not coming down on atheists here, I'm just stating a fact. Many Christians do the exact same thing. Whether you are an atheist or a Christian, if you do not do your research on something that you are arguing about, you just end up looking foolish.
In regards to your point specifically, the Bible clearly states that Adam (and assumably Eve) had many sons and daughters. For example, see the following from Genesis 5:
There isn't any conflict between the Bible and science. They are fundamentally different. The Bible states the absolute in 'children's words' as Jesus said, while science and scientists are about trying to understand the why/how of things comprehensively and thoroughly. Even a scientist would be explaining many concepts to his little girl/boy in simple terms as is in the Bible.
When I loved someone I just simply enjoyed it thoroughly. I understand that perhaps some would be curious to know, and in the future even test/check/predict/model (with the help of powerful GPUs) beforehand whether 'this' brain signal for 'this' girl is stronger and fitter, than 'that' signal for 'that' girl.
Even a hundred years ago at least some would have died of laughter when John states he sees a stone fall from the sky and destroys a third of the earth; today we know that just a 1.5 mile 'stone' could destroy half of the earth. Likewise when John says he sees a star falling from the sky; today we have even observed dying stars. John says about a bottomless pit which darkens/devours the sun and other stars; today at least theoretically we know about the black hole. Then there are the incomprehensible creatures; again today we believe at least theoretically but definitely, in abnormalities that could be created via cloning, or about alien worlds and creatures. John sees some events occurring at the same time; now, at least some scientists are theorising about six or more dimensions, each existing at the same time and place. Again John states about some invisible channel in, and between the skies/stars; today scientists are theorising that perhaps the only way to travel to another galaxy other than breaking the speed of light barrier would be a presently unknown but theoretically possible bridge/channel force between the galaxies.
And then more... perhaps all of which would be comprehensible to the next/future generations. Like the Amazon tribe, or a child in a remote part of the world who sees an aeroplane for the very first time and thinks it is a new kind of bird with a roaring voice and a fire/smoke-spitting tail John doesn't know what he saw, he just states it. It is for the future generations to comprehend.
The promise of the Bible as proved by Jesus is life for each and everyone... even a killer who repents at the last moment has that promise. This is perhaps the only concept which differs from science. Science may be able to promise something akin, to the future generations (perhaps wealthy), but can never cover, this, or the past generations. Everyone and everything is accounted for including the doggies and kitties... Revelation says about all living creatures on the earth, on the skies, and below the earth and waters, which has the promise of life.
The greatness of the Bible is its simplicity, perhaps too simple and derisive for some. Just two simple sentences states the place of nature and living things like animals, birds, fish etc. in the grand scheme of God; 1) Genesis says that God gave humans reign over nature (a time when humans didn't even know about the stone as a defensive weapon), and the other living things. What kind of a king and queen are we? Are we the loving, caring, caring kings and queens? 2) As for the future, Rev 5:13 says it all.
The power of the Bible can never be underestimated as evidenced throughout the world. Evolutionists/atheists/unbelievers, and (here in my country even other religions have been forced to kick karma, dharma and other concepts into the dustbin) doesn't even have the guts to hold on to their basic concepts like 'Survival of the fittest', 'natural selection' etc.; instead they are competing to ensure the 'survival of the unfittest'. Christians do it out of faith and love, whether a weak fellow human, or a living thing, or nature. Even when I take care of dogs or kittens, it is not because it is Napoleon the Great, or Cleopatra the Beauty, or my great grandmother recycled, but because it is a wonderful new pristine creation of God whatever the diversity
science as trying to better understand God through empirical observation of the natural world.
Everyone who believes in God, believes that the laws of physics were authored by God. Religious leaders therefore ought to recommend studying physics as a surefire way to gain insight into the mind of God.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
The two halves of the book are written from the perspective of two kinds of people. The first part is about people who are disobedient and actively practices acts of hatred and malice towards others. The second part is about obedient ones who share love with others. Both halves are about the same God, just different people.
I once had a signature.
There are many logical, reasoned arguments one can make against the existence of God.
But there are emotional ones, too, and ones that don't involve such arguments as "God doesn't exist, and atheists hate Him.", like some apologists pithily quote (I'm looking at you, Dinesh D'Souza).
For me, it's summed up in this (possibly NSFW) one picture. Kevin Carter, the photographer of this picture, has claimed that the child proceeded to get up and make their way to a UN famine relief centre, but the truth is no one knows for sure.
It's very, very hard to hear apologists argue about faith with that image in my mind, I find.
One can not debate bible thumpers. I grew up with them, and if it is in the bible, it must be the way it is.They do not debate, they only keep throwing doctrine at you.
Ridiculous. Why does anyone care? I don't think even Richard Dawkins would touch this.
Hm, telomeres would not allow for long age even if DNA was "pure".
This alleged challenge is nothing more than a troll by some fanatic who refuses to accept real science over a book written hundreds of years ago.
Here is what will happen if somebody is foolhardy enough to take the challenge:
1) All the judges from the "list of possible candidates" are NOT neutral at all, but rather all as fanatical as the challenger.
2) Despite evidence that would convince even God himself, the ruling will 100% go against the person presenting the actual science.
3) For every scientific proof made, the Creationist will make up a new fact to counter-act the proof despite it being 100% BS.
4) Even IF somebody won this rigged contest, it STILL won't shut this guy up and he'll STILL push this psudo-science.
TL;DR: This contest is rigged and is a blatant troll of the highest degree. Trying to convince these fanatics is a waste of time and brain cells.
The Fundamentalist Christians have it all backwards anyway. They need to scientifically prove that the earth is 6000 years old, not make science disprove it.
Because science has already debunked that silliensss and does it every day. The creationists just choose not to accept that proof, instead, believing whicever of the two creation myths suit them at the moment. Which of course is another debunkment of the absolute literal translation of the bible. So there is really no point ot the argument, they will simply end up claiming that you will die one day, and God will send you to hell because you believed in evolution.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The whole thing is really silly. It's like taking an old book on Phlogiston by J.J. Becher, and demanding that it be correlated to the Higgs boson - and if the Higgs doesn't Phlogistonate, the Higgs boson is not real.
I guess I really showed my nerd cred with a Phlogiston theory analogy......
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Christianity, per se, does not, different branches of Christianity disagree rather strongly with each other on both of these points.
I guess this link is very appropriate for this post: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/literally
Divine names: Two deity names are used here. God has hundreds of names, each associated with an attribute it highlights. The first name is associated with the attribute of strictness, as is appropriate when formulating the laws of physics. The second name starts to be used when man appears on the scene. It is associated with mercy. Fallible humanity could could not exist without divine mercy.
Six Days: According to Psalms, a thousand years for man are but a moment to God. Some rabbi a few hundred years ago did his arithmetic and came up with a universe age of about 1.3E10 years.
Light before the Sun and the Moon: Traditional commentary: The first light was the light of prophecy. Visible light came later. More recent explanation: The story is told from the Earth's surface point of view. As long as the sky was obscured by cloud cover and volcanic ash, or glaciation, the Sun, moon, planets, and stars were not visible.
Big Bang Theory: Right. The Talmud states that there exists a light left over from the moment of creation that permeates the universe. That sure sounds like Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation to me. It also says it is reasonable to think about and research back to the moment of creation, but not before. Would cosmologists disagree?
Male & Female: The Hebrew text says, "Male and female He created them." There is one ancient Jewish opinion that we were hermaphrodites, and the surgery split us into separate genders.
Tuesday: This is a problem. "And the earth brought forth grass, herb yielding seed after its kind, and tree bearing fruit, wherein is the seed thereof, after its kind;" This is a neat trick since the Sun, moon and stars were created and positioned on Wednesday. A modern rabbinic explanation: The story is told from the Earth's surface point of view. As long as the sky was obscured by cloud cover, volcanic ash, or glaciation, the Sun, moon, planets, and stars were not visible.
Dinosaurs: God produced dozens of "creations" before he came up with one he liked. How much of one he kept around or recycled into the next is unspecified.
Evolution: The tradition is that since creation the physical and biological world proceeds along its natural course. There is no traditional Jewish position that creation and evolution are mutually exclusive.
Genesis 6:2: "Sons of the Lords" and 6:4 "Nephilim" : The "Sons of the Lords" were invading humans who grabbed power and had their way as they wished with women. The word "Nephilim" means both "those who dropped down" and miscarried or aborted fetuses. A traditional view is that these lords caused their pretty wives to have abortions to keep their pretty figures, and it was this that God found despicable. [I wonder what He thinks about forced abortions in China.]
Non-Jewish possibilities: This is talking about interactions between Neanderthals and modern man. "Those who dropped down" were aliens who dropped down from the sky.
Just replace "God" with "Kim Il-sung" everywhere in the Genesis and prove its veracity then. Why would you get a different result given the change?
...and provable. Regardless of one's personal beliefs and inclinations. There are no "truths".
There is A truth and various levels of knowledge and understanding of it. And then there are delusions.
Like faith.
And regardless of the number of fans a particular delusion has, it can never become the truth.
BTW, which Gods where you speaking of in your signature....
Why, mythological ones. What other kind is there? Rhetorical question.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
"They would then jointly agree on a judge based on a list of possible candidates."
yeah, a list on it with names like "Judge Crackerbarrel."
here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_absence
No one should ever try to prove the Bible to be false. There is absolutely nothing to prove, as it is clearly the responsibility of those who believe in the miraculous to prove its possiblity.
...and maybe even distorting the truth, but I'm guessing you picked those "facts" from Christians running to the argument of "...but that's the OLD testament".
Which is bullshit.
New testament is ATTACHED to the old and based on it - it does not supersede it. They're in the same fucking book.
And just go ask any priest (or Christian you're not currently debating) if Adam, Moses, king David and the rest of the lot are a part of the teaching of Christianity.
They don't avoid a single thing. They embrace it.
Even this Slashdot topic is about a guy who's betting that everything in Genesis is true.
For fuck's sake, the entirety of Christianity is BASED on Jesus being of Davidic bloodline - through Joseph who (HA!) is not really his father.
Immaculate conception bitches! It means what WE WANT IT TO MEAN!
Maternal what now? Ancestral line who?
Which part of "bitches! It means what WE WANT IT TO MEAN!" did you not understand?
Maternal line is carried on through the father who is not his real father cause that makes Abraham his ancestor.
Are you retarded or something? Who the hell do you think he is? HE'S THE GOD DAMN MESSIAH!
And please don't give me that crap about Bible/Christianity being less violent, misogynist or pedophilic.
You don't need to go further than numbers 31:7-31:19 to fix that:
7They did battle against Midian, as the Lord had commanded Moses, and killed every male. 8They killed the kings of Midian: Evi, Rekem, Zur, Hur, and Reba, the five kings of Midian, in addition to others who were slain by them; and they also killed Balaam son of Beor with the sword. 9The Israelites took the women of Midian and their little ones captive; and they took all their cattle, their flocks, and all their goods as booty. 10All their towns where they had settled, and all their encampments, they burned, 11but they took all the spoil and all the booty, both people and animals. 12Then they brought the captives and the booty and the spoil to Moses, to Eleazar the priest, and to the congregation of the Israelites, at the camp on the plains of Moab by the Jordan at Jericho.
13 Moses, Eleazar the priest, and all the leaders of the congregation went to meet them outside the camp. 14Moses became angry with the officers of the army, the commanders of thousands and the commanders of hundreds, who had come from service in the war. 15Moses said to them, âHave you allowed all the women to live? 16These women here, on Balaamâ(TM)s advice, made the Israelites act treacherously against the Lord in the affair of Peor, so that the plague came among the congregation of the Lord. 17Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. 18But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves.
Kill ALL the men, take all their possessions and take their wives and children as slaves? Fuck THAT shit!
Moses says fuck slaves!
Kill ALL those women, and all the boys... but keep the virgin girls as sex slaves.
Voices told him that's what should be done... I mean God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.
And there's plenty more where that came from.
And while one COULD even argue that Islam is a more peaceful religion - that too would be bullshit as it accepts and builds on both the old and the new testament.
Same prophets, same stories, same god - they only wrap it in a new cover and add a chapter or two more.
Abraham 3.11 for Workgroups.
Though, you gotta give it to them for at least making all of those messiahs just mortal men instead of "sons of God", leaving the "Most Arrogant Religion Ever" medal for the Christians.
Though there ARE contenders out there for
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I think that I agree completely with everything you said. Or at least, can't seem to find something I'd disagree with.
A rational being separates rational ethics from myth-based morality, and does not base entire systems of asserted "right action" on unverifiable post-mortem hypotheses born of some mix of imagination and con-artist greed way back in the most ignorant and brutal of times. In the end, that's what almost all of the world religions actually are.
I might only add that rationality itself is in fact... well... if not delusion then at least an illusion.
We're not perfect robots with a built in set of laws. We are faulty organic beings. Very faulty.
It's just that unlike other organic beings on this planet, we are in position to be aware of some of those faults. So that we can fix them or avoid them.
But we're still not "rational". No creature built around a reward system can be rational.
And if it could be it would be soooooooo boring.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
"CHRISTIAN, n. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin." - Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
I say, any moron can take the money and the facts will not change for gods’ or morons.
Not trying to be a dick, only pointing out that your statement about it being evidence-based isn't necessarily correct.
From Wikipedia:
The opposite of truth is falsehood, which, correspondingly, can also take on a logical, factual, or ethical meaning. The concept of truth is discussed and debated in several contexts, including philosophy and religion. Many human activities depend upon the concept, which is assumed rather than a subject of discussion, including science, law, and everyday life.
Just FWIW, I'm not exactly a religious person, but I do believe in tolerance of others beliefs, as long as their non-interfering...don't try to impose your beliefs upon me or others.
Just another day in Paradise
Indeed, if you accept a personal god who intervenes in human affairs, nothing should be surprising. There would be no 'miracles' since any given event that occurs in your daily life may be random or the result of divine intervention. There's simply no way to tell unless God speaks to you directly and takes credit himself.
Evolution is more impossible than the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, and the Headless Horseman. See http://www.lifescienceprize.org/ for a list of bluffing evolutionists.
It caused me to learn what a quine is.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Starvation is primarily a problem of politics, not one of funding. Otherwise, Bill Gates could have solved world hunger - and I bet he would have loved to. Instead, he's finding himself wasting money on education - which is similarly hampered by politics.
Unless its Education in America, then its hampered by politics AND religion.
Sorry, somebody had to.
...when animals were created - before or after man...
Rather a stupid bet.
Loading...
Note a couple of things about that quote.
The concept of truth is discussed and debated in several contexts, including philosophy and religion.
One - it's a weasel statement. One can "discuss and debate" gravity all day long - denying it or coming up with an alternative explanation on the other hand...
Two - it does not address the fact that truth is evidence-based at all. There's a lot of pseudo-intellectual smoke there, but nothing more.
Three - that's a line which serves only to give credibility to "philosophy and religion" - I.e. it's saying that BECAUSE philosophy and religion CAN discuss and debate truth, they are also qualified to determine what is and what isn't truth.
Which is like saying that everyone in the world should set their dietary habits according to mine, because I am known for my ability to eat food, often several times per day.
Four - philosophical and religious discussions on truth are no more valid than philosophical and religious discussions on floppy drives. Because...
Five - philosophy and religion tend not to be scientifically rigorous, and often they are mostly comprised of faulty reasoning. I.e. False dichotomy.
Every single school of philosophy is born from false dichotomy that said school is the "right one" while all others are false.
As for religion... Why even go there.
Note that both religion and philosophy tend not to be experimentally or mathematically provable or even describable - which is a strong indicator of use of faulty logic.
Also...
The opposite of truth is falsehood, which, correspondingly, can also take on a logical, factual, or ethical meaning.
That too is nonsense disguising as insight. Also, it is a (not so) cleverly disguised lie.
The line starts talking about truth, switches between it and falsehood, then "correspondingly", makes a claim that one or both can have "logical, factual, or ethical meaning".
It never sets that either truth or falsehood actually have "logical, factual, or ethical meaning(s)".
It's a forgone conclusion, which "correspondingly" equates truth and falsehood.
Truth is evidence-based because reality is evidence-based. That's it. Nothing else to it.
Just as there are no multiple versions of reality, there are no multiple versions of truth - there's only THE truth.
All the rest are either falsehoods, delusions or incomplete truths.
I'm not exactly a religious person, but I do believe in tolerance of others beliefs, as long as their non-interfering...
Well, I'm an atheist and to me "tolerating" someone's delusion is both dishonest and patronizing pandering on the level of treating them like small children who still believe in Santa AND it actually causes harm to others when those people try to shoehorn both themselves and everyone else into such a delusional vision of reality.
I.e. Both buying into hateful bullshit about "them" (every religion has them) and opening oneself to abuse through faith-based gullibility (miracles and miracle workers, curses, exorcisms etc.)
And that's all without the mention of what happens when such a delusional "reality" falls apart when it eventually collides with actual reality.
As for "non-interfering"...
It's not really non-interfering when religious holidays are treated like national ones, religious "education" is crammed down kids' throats in schools, when religious officials keep meddling in every single issue from politics to business, when political officials are being favored and determined by their religious affiliation and not their competence... etc. etc.
From my short experience on this planet, religious people are not interfering only if they are not around.
I.e. Never had an issue with Buddhists - as there are none around where I live.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Besides your entire post being a shotgun argument, (i.e. an informal fallacy), you also seem to think that a claim (i.e. threat to gays, women, jews etc.) is best supported by asking questions.
So... let me respond in kind.
Where in Canada? By whom? How many cases? Are those cases a majority? Citation needed. Was there an official claim by "authorities" that they allow or support such behavior? If so when, where, by whom? Citation needed. Was there an official claim by "authorities" that they allow or support such behavior for a single religion, and not others? Again, citation needed. Since when can an idea hang people? Where did you hear about that? Who, when, where? Citation needed. Since when can an idea crash a plane? Is the case you describe a position of the majority of religious people belonging to that religion? Are there enough tall buildings and planes in the world to facilitate such a position, considering the number of people practicing that religion? Whose troops? Why don't you know how to use Google? Have you been alive during the past two decades? How about conscious? Did you watch any news during that time? Did you understand any of it? Are you retarded? Are you sure? Are you mommy and daddy brother and sister? How about father and daughter? Mother and son? Which case of acid throwing are you talking about? Where? When? Is that an isolated issue, only happening in one culture or country? Why are you a cherry picking cocksucker? What cartoons? Who was killed? By whom? How many cases? Citation needed. For every case. Is that a majority position? How does the number of incidents compare to other ideological murders? Which terrorist organization? Please list all of them. What ideas are those organizations representing? Who is their financial backer? Which public officials have supported or cooperated with their financial backers? Do you like having your nuts felt up? Why? Why not? Are you gay? Do you hate gays? Do you like gays? How can you suck cocks and still claim that you are not gay? Are you aware that you are talking about a mythological figure that may have never existed? You know, like Santa Clause, Easter Bunny or Jesus. Last two being the same person. Are you insane? Do you see or hear little people who talk to you? How about big people? How about horses? Why do you want to fuck a horse? Why do you want to be fucked by a horse? Does that hurt? More than being fucked by a bear? Why are you seeking out bears to fuck you? Do you do it while they hibernate? Are you aware that an anecdote of your imaginary encounter is not an argument? Why are you eating with dudes that don't let you look at them? Is that like an S&M thing? Why do you like being beaten up in public while eating? Have you talked to a professional about that? Like someone who could beat you up really good? Why? Why not? Why again? Have you looked for a jew, sikh, budist, christian, atheist, gay, indian, negro, asian, etc, etc who would be willing to tear you a new one for looking at him? Why not? How can you be sure it's not about you being a hating piece of shit? Why did you fail to mention white people threatening to beat you up? Is it because you think that they are "your people"? How about little girls? Have you ever been beaten up by a little girl? Would you like to be beaten up by a little girl again? Have you ever tasted the sharp edge of a razor-blade? Why not? You may like it... Why are you afraid of trying new things? What other phobias, besides racial ones, do you have? Do you hate your relatives or only yourself? Have you ever wondered what the concrete tastes like when you jump at it from the tenth floor? Why don't you go and check that and let us know how it went?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Making atheism into a religion is something I see faithful people do all the time. We're not believing in atheism. Atheism is not a religion.
Having been accosted on multiple occasions by evangelical atheists (and your post sounds suspect...), I must point out that some atheists are true believers in their religion. (Yes, I realize I have just defamed your religion but, as an agnostic, I don't give a damn.)
But it is no more fair to condemn all atheists with the resulting assholery than it is to condemn all those who follow the philosophy of an illegitimate Jewish Heretic of such practices.
Argument 1: Define 'day' as observed by God. A day is the amount of time it takes a body to rotate 360 degrees. If God measured time in days, then he was on a planet that orbits a star, and therefor Genesis is wrong in the first line, because God couldn't create anything on the first day, because there was no day. Argument 2: Using the literal exegesis of Genesis as calculated by Bishop Ussher, God created the world on October 3, 4004 BCE at 9am. However, it wasn't taken into consideration that the Gregorian calendar wasn't used until 1582. Before that, the Julian calendar was used. But, due to the way it worked, 3 days were gained every 4 centuries, which threw off the equinoxes. As a result in the differences in the two calendars, January 1 in the Julian calendar is actually January 14 in the Gregorian. Also, calendars before Rome standardized them, varied by region, city or culture. Argument 3: Fossils. There are many examples of fossils from creatures that existed that genesis, or the rest of the Bible, makes no mention of. In the story of Noah, God commands Noah to collect 2 of every creature. Yet, there are thousands of creatures that we have physical fossil evidence of that were not mentioned. You would think something as large as an Apatosaurus would rate a mention, at least. And, if some sea creatures, like a Sperm Whale, survived, why didn't Trilobites? And, where is the fossil evidence of all the people that were killed in the flood? If not fossils of the people themselves, the trace remains of their settlements should have been found. Argument 4: Contradictions. Genesis is full of them. Example A, Genesis says that on the first day, God created light and separated it from the dark. But then it says God created the Sun on the fourth day. The Sun is what provides the light, so which is it? Example B, Birds. Genesis first says they were created out of the water, but then later in the chapter, it says they were created out of the ground. Example C, Animals. God first created animals and then created man. but later on, God created man and says it wasn't right that he walked alone, so God created animals. These are just 4 arguments I could make against genesis. Give me a week and I could write a book disproving it. Too bad I don't have 10 grand.