How is this to be interpreted if it isn’t “protesting anything”?

As far as filters, see my post above.

If all the gods of men supposedly do things and therefore should be detectable, then what other gods are there bedsides philosophical ones which hide their presence and are not detectable?

Take the germ theory. One doesn’t need to understand microorganisms to understand contagion. Yet there is more attention paid to washing feet than to washing hands. Both may have been important, but hand washing most certainly was.

To think men of the time the Bible was written couldn’t comprehend the Earth moving around the Sun but they could comprehend the Sun moving across the sky seems a stretch. How hard would it be to look at light shining on a ball and showing that was the same thing happening with the Moon? To acknowledge people in distant lands shouldn’t have been hard.

The claim it must have been a god telling people something they weren’t ready to understand sounds good until you look more closely at the actual details.

Perhaps I do, but I doubt I’m the only one, given that people seem to mean different things by that word. For instance, does omnipotence include the power to violate logical impossibilities – the old “could God make a rock so large he couldn’t move it?” argument.

>An omnipotent entity could walk on water simply because it wills it – quantum states and intermolecular cohesion notwithstanding. The process by which it happens would be undiscoverable because there would be no process.

I see my example was misleading. Skeptigirl saw my point. Whatever actions God takes in the world are discernable in the world. If God cures and amputee by growing a limb back, then there’s a limb on a person where there previously wasn’t one. We may not be able to discern the process, there may not be a process we can understand, but the changed condition of the world is present for study.

Evolving Squid Said:
>First and foremost, if god is omnipotent, he’d already know the strength of the faith of the sacrificer, so at best this is a wasteful act.

I think you mean “omniscient”. All knowing is different from all powerful.

Christian Burnham said:
>Not sure that you’re right. A truly omnipotent God could do all sorts of things to make herself untestable. She could make you suddenly want to eat ice-cream instead of investigating her actions. She could make any scientist fall down a mine-shaft- or change the data in their notebooks etc. etc.

I did explicitly state that the God had to be willing to stand around and perform on cue. There are plenty of ways the God could prevent testing. My example was intended to look at how to measure effects in the world. Perhaps it wasn’t a great example.

As a rather poor taste joke I once heard goes :

Moses comes back down from the Mountain and talks with Aaron .. Aaron hears him out, pauses a bit, knocks back some wine then says :

“Okay Moses, tell me again, the Arabs get all the oil and we have to cut the ends off our *WHAT*!!??”

Actually the most repulsive things in the Bible seem to come in the Old Testament with all this “Chosen People” and “Promised land” stuff ..very convenient. Worst of all as faras I’m concerned is that God actually commands the Israelites to committ genocide against the Canaanites, Amalekites and others. Perhaps that’s where modern Israel gets its ideas on what to do with the Palestineans?

Not to mention the story of internal Jewish warfare against the tribe of Benjamin sparked by a gang rape and murder of a young slave girl, theJewish warrior Jeptah sacrificing his own daughter -yes, human sacrifice to to Yahwah – and the apparently condoned incest of Lot with his daughters .. (Most of that is in ‘The Book of Judges’ somewhere if you want to check on me.)

Then there are the nice little commands of love, tolerance and impossibility to get right like : “Thall Shalt Not Suffer a Witch to Live” which when you combine it with ‘Thall Shalt Not Kill” means Divine Catch-22 : Killing a witch violates the commandmant, not killing her does the same and so .. AARGGH!!!

When you actually think and read the Bible its really a pretty sick book – Focused on a “Good and Merciful” God that deliberately selects ten tribes over everyone else, orders them to commit genocide, punishes people left right and centre for the smallest offences (Lot’s Wife, Jepath) describes Himself as jealous and on at least one occassion decides to kill everyone except one small family of fanatics (Noah akla Utnaptishtim) Oh and to top it off and save everything, he deliberately subjects his only son to torture, humiliation and the most brutal form of capital punishment.

Well excuse me for being objective & rational about beloved mythology but if God really is that Merciful and Good you’d think He’d find a better way and do things a bit differently wouldn’t you?

Yet you have people praying in the name of that sort of God or their belief of that sort of God and finding themselves and their beliefs “moral” and thinking they’re so superior to those who say worship nature or nothing at all ..

Just like in US politics where a consensual sexual affair by one President is considered grounds for impeachment but lying the nation’s way into a needless, bloody war that destroys a nation and kills hundreds of thousands of innocent people is all a-ok….

Its the same mob of people each time folks and they’re the ones praying here and running your country -and, pretty much, the rest of the world. Like it or not. I don’t care if people pray but I sure do hope enough sane people VOTE to change the course we’re headed in.

Funny world, funny species, funny beliefs.
———
“We’re just bright, pink-faced baboons
Inside we’re all dark
MWah-haa
But we can reach for the Moon!”
-Sabotaged song lyrics to the tune of & with apologies to ‘Roxette’s ‘Fine June Afternoon’ song.

As a ratherpoor taste joke I once heard goes :

Moses comes back down from the Mountain and talks withAaron .. Aaron heras him out, pauses a bit, knocks back some wine then says : “Okay Moses, tell me again the Arabs get all the oil and we have to cut the ends off our *What*!!??”

Actually the most repulsive things in the Bible seem to come in the Old Testament with all this “Chosen People” and “Promised land” stuff ..very convenient and God actuallys commands the Isrealites to committ genocide against the Canaanites and others. Not tomentionthestory of interanl Jewish warfare against tehtribe of Benjamina sparke dbya gangrape and murde of ayoung slave girl and the apparently condoned incest of Lotwith his daughters ..

Then there are the nice little commands of love, tolerance and impossibility to get right like : “Thall Shalt Not Suffer a Witch to Live” which when youccombine it with ‘Thall Shalt NotKill” means you’re prettymuch stuffed – kiling a witch violates the commandmant, not killing her doe stehsame and so .. AARGGH!!!

When you actually think and read the Bible its really a pretty sick book – Focused on a “Good and Merciful” God that deliberately selects ten tribes over everyone else, orders them to commit genocide, punishes people left right and centre for the smallest offences (Lot’s Wife, Jepath) describe sHimself as jealous and onatleast one occassion decides tokill everyone except one small family of fanatics (Noah akla Utnaptishtim) Yet you have people praying in the name of that sort of God or their belief of that sort of God and finding themselves “moral” and thinking they’re so superior to those who say worship nature or nothing at all .. Funnyworld, funny species
———
“We’re just fine pink-faced baboons
Inside we’re all dark MWah-haa
But we can reach for the Moon!”

-Sabotaged song lyrics to the tune of & with apologies to ‘Roxette’s ‘Fine June Afternoon’ song.

I get in my time machine, pop on down to 5000 BC, and show it to Akhmed the Semitic Sheep Watcher. Poor Akhmed boggles, and the conversation goes thusly:

“Look at my time machine. Isn’t it awesome?”

“Indeed. You must be a very powerful demon… I know what time is, what’s a machine?”

Remember Clarke’s rule of technology; anything sufficiently advanced /in relation to the observer/ is indistinguishable from magic. Cellphones today would be magic talking boxes to poor old smart-but-nontechnological Akhmed because the most complex ‘mechanism’ he’s ever been exposed to is a cart. And that’s only a mechanism because a wheel-axle system necessarily has four major parts (two wheels, an axle, and the joints connecting it to the static cart). In that way, the fancy burning wheels-within-wheels in the occasional Biblical story may actually be energy-based re-entry pods of time travelers of the future, or the vamanas of the Vedas may actually be atomic rocketships or whatever.

Or it could be a bunch of pseudospiritual hooey, or hallucinations, or an outright lie. As it stands, the only evidence for any of it happens to be what was written down, and a lot of what /is/ written down doesn’t make a lot of sense either through translation error, bad fiction, or exactly what you were trying to point out wasn’t there–things that the writers had no real conception of. Neolithic cultures have no time for philosophy if they’re sheepherders and therefore the /logical/ consistency portion sorta gets dropped for the base attempt at oral history–they didn’t sit around and figure “hey, our mountain god really has to cover His tracks or else that’ll disprove our arguments that He is omnipotent and omnsicient.”

I can’t deny that there’s nothing in any holy text that couldn’t have been written by some ancient peon; probably because they were probably written by ancient peons. However, coming to any sort of value judgement beyond that (i.e. nothing at all happened except for some mad ramblings) is likewise somewhat quick to come to judgement because the evidence (said incomplete and badly translated potentially trying to describe what Banks would call Outside Context Problems) is decidedly insufficient. Even the Aztecs, for all their civilization, considered those crazy white Spaniards /big-G-Gods/ for a short time.

Oh, and you brought up the flying spaghetti monster! LOL!!1!1eleven!! I guess that effectively shuts down all discourse…you win the Internets!

Irishman understood what I said and you did not.

You are just describing the philosophical argument why science doesn’t test the god concept. There is always some round about way of claiming a god could exist that hides its tracks. It’s a thought exercise and nothing else. Is there a religion which has clear tenants claiming that particular god hides its existence?

There are none I’m aware of. The religion of the Bible may contain a claim of omnipotence in its god, but it doesn’t claim its omnipotent god hides its tracks. Quite the opposite, the religion claims its god’s presence can be seen all around. All you are saying is you can describe a scenario where science cannot detect the invisible flying spaghetti monster. I acknowledged that. Its meaningless unless philosophy is your thing.

If you take the god of the Bible or the god of any other religion you can make some determination what the religion claims the god does. Unless it does nothing, you can test for what it supposedly does.

There is nothing in the Bible (since that is the religion I would guess those of you protesting the fact there is no evidence of gods and there is sufficient evidence gods are a man-made construct) that indicates any origin other than it was written by the people in a specific area of the world a few thousand years ago. The writers had no idea the rest of the Earth was populated. They didn’t understand the germ theory. They had no concept of the Moon reflecting the light of the Sun. They didn’t recognize evolution. They had no idea about the Universe beyond their personal experience. Had the Bible truly been some magically inspired text, one would expect to see something in it which could not have been known by the writers at the time it was written.

The evidence is overwhelming the Bible was written by men who were no more inspired by a god than the Greeks were when they wrote about Zeus and Aphrodite. Everyone is entitled to their beliefs, but the facts are what they are.

Not sure that you’re right. A truly omnipotent God could do all sorts of things to make herself untestable. She could make you suddenly want to eat ice-cream instead of investigating her actions. She could make any scientist fall down a mine-shaft- or change the data in their notebooks etc. etc.

If you assume that a God is constantly messing with our reality in such ways- then it would truly be impossible to prove/disprove her existence.

She could also have made the universe 6000 years ago- but craftily made it look indistinguishable from a universe billions of years old.

Of course, such arguments are particularly useless. It’s also possible that the universe is resting on the back of a giant invisible turtle. It just doesn’t seem very probable.

non-flippantly, I agree that this is what the sacrifice is about. However there are a few problems with this…

First and foremost, if god is omnipotent, he’d already know the strength of the faith of the sacrificer, so at best this is a wasteful act. Depending the specific god and sacrifice terms, it might even be a murderous act. An omnipotent god that “tests” its followers is really just taunting its followers, since with omnipotence would come the ability to know the outcome of the test.

If we assume, then, that a god is not omnipotent (certainly this is the position of most religions, in particular multi-theistic religions), then there is room for this type of testing… but it’s still rather wasteful, almost sadistic. It’s the kind of thing a tyrant dictator does to his followers to weed out the disloyal. That doesn’t speak highly of such a god.

On a more flippant note, why do gods always want virgin sacrifices. Why not sacrifice some skanks? God would have an awesome opportunity to do some “cleaning” with some well timed, well selected sacrifices.

If said definition is the more literal form, then no matter how slutty, a first incarnation being would by definition be a virgin.

Yeah, that’s what I was thinking as I wrote the previous message. I suppose it’s more of a linguistic trick than anything else, but it’s intereting nevertheless.

I’m sorry you feel that way.

You are wrong to think that questioning religious beliefs is done out of some need to ‘bash’ other people’s deeply held convictions.

It may hurt, but we need to discuss these things. Religion has a large effect on our lives (whether we believe or not) and it’s necessary to ask questions.

But not the results of those interactions! If the results are indetectable, then they are indistinguishable from no action. What you appear to be arguing over is the “fingerprints” aspect. Is it a miracle if a mechanism can be determined? A true miracle would be exactly as you say – no fingerprints, no explanation possible, a true *poof* out of nowhere event.

However, let’s consider this thought experiment. Let’s take the hypothetical case of a person walking on water. In our modern scientific mindset, we see a person-presumed-God walking on water. We ask him for an explanation of how he accomplished said task. He responds that he locally increased the intermolecular cohesion to raise the surface tension sufficiently to support his weight. That’s something we could test, if he’s willing to stand around and perform on cue. Okay, the next scientific question is how did he change the intermolecular cohesion. Suppose he states that he shifted the intensity of the electron charge. That may also be something testable. But then the next question is how did he do that. His next response might be by tweaking the vapizzle on the schnooktering. Okay, he could say something about fiddling with the quantum signatures and/or string harmonics, or something equally bizarre and fairly meaningless. But 500 years from now humanity might increase our scientific knowledge enough to know what that means and how to do it. Does that make it less miraculous?

The point is that it is a condition that it highly improbable to occur without outside intervention – i.e. it won’t happen no matter how many tries you make. Okay, so that’s the premise behind ID. ID has a lot of flaws, many of them in misrepresenting what Evolution actually states. The concept I’m illustrating is the question, if the mechanism is knowable, does that make the event non-miraculous? What if we discover what “tweaking the vapizzle on the schnooktering” means but have no theoretical or physical means by which to duplicate said effect, such as the case with traveling faster than light speed? Does that reduce the miraculous nature of said event?

Amusing observation. A not-so-flippant response: it isn’t necessarily the object itself that God wants, but the act of sacrifice. The surrender or giving up of something meaningful/valuable to you as a tribute is a sign of your obedience and submission. Just like the story of Abraham and Isaac, where God supposedly asks Abraham to sacrifice his son. The premise of the story is it is a test of Abraham’s faith in the Lord. Thus, the sacrifice is something most dear to Abraham, to see how far he’s willing to go. If God had only asked Abraham to sacrifice the leftovers from a mutton dinner, that wouldn’t have been much of a test. It takes something truly important for you to demonstrate deep commitment. (I have a lot of issues against that particular story, but understanding the point of sacrifice isn’t one of them.)

> (aside… is it even POSSIBLE to manifest non-virgins, live or dead? Think about it… there’s a test of omnipotence).

Depends on your definition of “virgin”. If said definition involves the physical condition of “hymen intact”, then a non-virgin could be manifested. If said definition is the more literal form, then no matter how slutty, a first incarnation being would by definition be a virgin.

Of course now you have to argue over what is meant by “omnipotent”.

This is a false assumption. If an entity is truly omnipotent it could certainly make its interactions undetectable.

/2 cents…

Richard Dawkins does the greatest dis-service to the study of Evolution of anyone I know. Many in the anti-evolution communitty are not necessarily anti-evolution, they are anti-Dawkins-conclusions-on-religion. I wish that evangelists like Richard Dawkins and Franklin Graham would stop preaching trying to make others draw the same conclusions that they have drawn.

Sceptics are good. Most of the ideas on this page are not written from a sceptical point of view– they are written based on the assumption that there is a final absolute truth that God does not exist. This is bashing people who have some belief in God. This is not sceptical.

Not to mention all the logical and philosophical inconsistencies *within* the religion.

As we all know, Christianity (and probably others too) have loads of contradictions within itself, without needing to compare it to other religions (or reality). And despite 2ka of apologetics, the religious philosophers still haven’t come up with rationalisations that don’t sound like, well, rationalisations!

Laguna 2 said: Besides that it focusses you on something, it reminds you of it. And if done with others together it aligns all these people to work together for the same thing…In these ways a prayer is very effective. It makes them not to forget to vote and for whom to vote.

True, in the sense that prayer is meditative, it can help a person focus and perhaps resolve to do something, even if they believe it is God giving them the strength to do so. As an atheist I can do the same thing, take a quiet moment, but instead “pray” to myself in such a way as, “Please, Melusine, find the strength within yourself to do the right thing…” or whatever. I’m just cutting out the middleman. If I were to pray to a god, to say, help me through a rough patch of sickness, I might unconsciously start taking better care of myself, and then attribute it to the god’s grace. But it’s just a self-motivation mind game I’d be playing. Praying with a group of people is, in a way, making an unconscious and conscious committment to that group–as you say, they are more likely to carry out the desired task, which in this case is voting. The efficacy of prayer is only within oneself as a means of peace of mind and motivation, imho. It’s not going to make those cancer cells disappear, but it might motivate a person to get to a doctor.

However, I find this kind of political parading of religion and prayer to be “cheesy.” It doesn’t even annoy me anymore, I just shake my head and recall the movie Saved!. (Funny stuff that pokes at some of the excesses of organized religion, not religion itself.)

In order for that last statement to be true, one has to assume that religious believe has the same logical and rational value as scientific evidence.

Since it does not, your assertion is necessarily false. Religious belief cannot be held as equal to the weight of scientific evidence because religious belief requires that the believer uphold an irrational, untestable conjecture as the basis from which an entire system of thought grows. Science requires that the thinker weigh and analyze available evidence and form a conclusion.

Those things are not equivalent. Therefore, although religious belief may require faith, reaching a conclusion that mystical, invisible pink unicorns do not exist based on:

a) a complete lack of evidence that they do exist, after thousands of years of searching;
b) a complete failure of any test for such a being;
c) the complete failure of religious belief to put forward any testable or accurate prediction about anything; and
d) the logical and philosophical inconsistencies in all world religions when compared against each other, let alone against anything science can dream up;

is not faith by any measure. Such a conclusion may, however, be incorrect, and it is subject to reevaluation when new evidence is discovered that contradicts previous evidence. For some reason, faith never gets reevaluated when contradicting evidence rears its little head.

It is unfortunate that faith is the only frame of reference for so many believers. It is because of this frame of reference that it is so easy to mistakenly conclude that not believing in an IPU of some sort is just as much faith as believing in an IPU, in fact, it’s even somewhat excusable. However, that conclusion is simply and obviously an error in thought, and the error must be pointed out.

(Now I have Roger Waters’ “What God Wants…” in my head… nice…)

Indeed… have you ever noticed that what god wants always involves some incredible shaft: virgin sacrifices, some portion of your winter food store, etc. God never wants a bag of Doritos and a beer. God never pops in to watch the game and BBQ some ribs. God seems incapable of smiting the producers of “Survivor” no matter how much they appear to desperately deserve it for their ongoing assault on entertainment and good taste. I can go to some guy in robes and a hat and he’ll take my hard-earned cash in god’s name, but if I throw that cash in the air myself, god never takes any. Strangely enough, those hat-guys never seem to want a bull from the field burnt on their property.

In fact, if a god is omnipotent, why would it WANT anything at all? Kind of silly to want some virgins killed off when you can just manifest all the dead virgins your little perverted heart could possibly desire (aside… is it even POSSIBLE to manifest non-virgins, live or dead? Think about it… there’s a test of omnipotence).

Why do athletes from godless countries do just as well as the god-fearing athletes that pray all the time? Surely a god wouldn’t stand for being upstaged by heathens and would smite the infidels with some locusts or some such thing. Russian national anthem starts… whammo, lightning bolt to the head.

-Shooting doctors who practice abortion
-Killing homosexuals
-Parading at funerals with signs that say dead soldiers got what they deserved
-Petitioning the government to restrict more rights and freedoms in the name of family/the children
-Annoying people with door-to-door proseletyzing
-etc. you get the idea

Frankly, I think all the people who believe prayer works, and cannot be convinced otherwise by logic and reason should spend as much time as humanly possible praying. Eat, sleep, use the lav, go to work, come home and pray for the rest of your waking hours.