Sushi_Biker:Damon, you should understand that accuracy in communication is a vital part of getting your point across and making a persuasive arguement. You make sweeping generalizations, criticize others for quote mining, but then fight back when people do it to you, you are fundamentally incapable of admitting an error while just telling everyone else that their opinions are wrong, or that the facts they present are false.
I rephrased it for you earlier, and you're accusing me of saying things I didn't say. You're lying while attempting to take the high ground. It's not working.
Sushi_Biker:
I beat this point into your skull because you are proveably WRONG when you made the statement "The bible isn't meaningless gobbledygook. It just makes many claims we now know to be completely wrong, and advocates a moral system that isn't compatible with civilized people." That, and the statement that followed implied that the majority of the population accepts that and studies prove that they don't.
I've explained that I wasn't trying to imply that my use of "we" was not to imply a majority agreement, but rather a representation of demonstrable knowledge freely available for anyone to access. I don't know why you insist on pretending I meant something else. You're quibbling over a single word, after I've clarified my meaning to you several times.
Also, the majority of the human population is not Christian, so your argument wouldn't stand even if you weren't debating a non-existent point.
Sushi_Biker:
You later backpeddled and agreed that most of the global population believes in some kind of faith, or magic, or astrology or whatever while claiming that you never made any such statement and asked what my point was. You aboslutely did make that important implication, it was intentional and you refuse to take responsibility for it. You attempted to marginalize my attempt to call you out on it by questioning the relevance. So it was important when you implied it, but not important when I told you that you were wrong?
I'm not trying to marginalize you or backpedal. Your assessment of my statement is just not correct. I don't know what else to tell you. I would never imply that the majority of people don't subscribe to some sort of magical thinking. The fact that most people have some sort of religious belief is just another one of those things that "we" know. It would be silly to imply otherwise, as this is common knowledge.
It seems as though you really want me to think that religious people are the minority, but I cannot appease you on this. Sorry.
Sushi_Biker:
In past threads you repeatedly make subtle statements that imply that devout spiritual beliefs are an aberration that few normal people adhere to (although later in this thread you reversed and admitted that people of faith outnumber people of non-faith so as not to give the appearance of making an obvious BS statement). My non-professional opinion is that you do this because you aggressively seek validation of your choice of non-belief after your admitted failed attempts to believe or belong to multiple faiths. Nothing else you've ever believed in has worked for you, so non-belief had damnded-well better.
You're lying again. I've explicitly stated that I find much of the contents of religious books to be incompatible with modern civilization, and I definitely think that religious extremists are aberrations. Only a small minority of muslims are suicide bombers, for example, so one could safely call suicide bombing an aberrant behavior, while Islam itself is fairly mainstream. Likewise, only a small minority of Christians are young-Earth creationists, so while Christianty is mainstream, young-Earth creationism is aberrant. Do you see the distinction?
Why are you trying to make this about validation? I'm not kicking and screaming, insisting that you believe me accept my views. I just happen to enjoy this topic. If I were seeking validation, I would join back up with a popular religion.
Where did you get the idea that nothing I ever believed in worked for me? Religion worked out great for me, and leaving it was very difficult. It may be comforting to you to think that people like me must have had some sort of bad experiences that chased us away from religion, but just because it's comforting doesn't mean it's true.
Sushi_Biker:
Why am I so bent out of shape about "we"? Because I'm not part of your "we", dude. Meatball is, and that's cool but I'm not and neither are many others here. Meatball teases us about the "Flying spaghetti monster" but he doesn't quite jam his non-faith down our throats the way you do. At least not as often. He also doesn't seem to care if anyone agrees with him the way you do.
I'm not going to explain this again.
Sushi_Biker:
Also, I'm afraid that, "it is widely known" is not accurate either. "Some people believe...." or "I believe..." will do nicely though, until you can provide some sort of scientific proof that no diety exists, that there is no afterlife, and that no higher intelligence had anything to do with the creation of life, the universe and everything. Until you can, then by the scientific method currently in use by most scientists, faith is a theory that is neither proven nor disproven just as dark matter that scientists are currently searching for.
Who's talking about a deity or the afterlife? I was talking about the bible. There's plenty of scientific proof that the Earth wasn't created in six days a few thousand years ago, humanity wasn't destroyed by a global flood, there were never thousands of Hebrew slaves in Egypt, there's no canopy of water over the Earth, the Earth isn't flat, bats aren't birds, whales aren't fish, living things don't appear spontaneously out of nothing, humans weren't magically created from dust, etc.
Regardless of whether or not there's a deity, an afterlife, or a higher intelligence out there somewhere, the bible makes many claims which are now widely known to be false.
You clearly don't understand what a theory is, otherwise you wouldn't imply that "proving a theory" is ever a scientist's goal. You don't prove theories - you only disprove them. A theory is a model used to explain a set of data or facts. As such, it is demonstrable, testable, and can be used to make falsifiable predictions. A good theory stands until it is disproven, but it is never proven. Hence, we still have the Theory of Gravity and the Theory of Evolution. Both are models used to explain observable facts, and both have withstood rigorous scrutiny for over a hundred years.
Faith, on the other hand, isn't testable or demonstrable, and it certainly can't be used to make falsifiable predictions. Calling it a theory doesn't make it a theory - it just demonstrates that you don't know what a theory is, and I'm afraid that's not a very solid argument.
Sushi_Biker:
Dude, I'm actually not here to argue the validity of faith or non-faith with you. All I want you to do is stop making thinly veiled, unsubstantiated implications that most people agree with you. In many of your posts, I feel as if you're lumping me into a category or slapping a label on me and I won't silently sit here and accept it.
My non-professional opinion is that you might be just a little bit paranoid.
Shall I give a disclaimer? I do not think most people agree with me, and I have no desire to label you. Okay?
Damon Allen - Las Vegas, NV - 2008 H-D V-Rod
