If you defile the monkeys name. May you not be able to throw feces or get 489 virgins.

Yes the monkey also promises pussy, but even more in the afterlife so please jump on board before it's too late.

Not that that has anything to do with what I said...but how so? There are many resurrections in the bible, why does it hinge on this one? And even if he was really resurrected (not just waking up from coma or unconsciousness), maybe someone else ressurected him, maybe it was Thor.

Yeah that's what I tried to explain to you, a simple "I agree" would have sufficed, you know. My point though was, why then do you make such an effort to find unexplained things and then go around and say, it must have been god? Please try to stay on topic, please try to understand my point here.

Irrelevant, pick any other misconception that has since been proven wrong to the religious. Oh and don't forget to understand the point.

Why would you write these sentences, that is literally not relevant to what I said to you. I was still explaining to you that using god to fill the gaps is pointless.
Which btw you have not touched on at all.

logically lol lol lol, have you actually looked at what Sir Thomas Dumbass Aquinas wrote? First of all he assumes there can't be an endless regression of cause and effect. And then he immediatly jumps to the conclusion that the first cause must have been god.
Plus he basically just copied what Aristoteles said and planted god on top.

No, I think you should take a look into some religious books, because the monkey actually only took on physical form so he can die for our sins, sound familiar?

You have not demonstrated that you even understand the meaning of logic.

Uhmm wait a minute, aren't you supposed to be the guy arguing in favour of religion.

My mistake. I don't mind if you want to joke around just so long as you don't pretend that you're making a relevant point.

Do I need to show you evidence of human nature? Evidence that power corrupts people to a point, people in power, abuse their power? Yes, I agree that finding all the texts from that time period and rewriting them would require too much effort. So most likely, there was simply no evidence to support the existence of Jesus, his miracles and 90% of the stuff in the bible so the Christians created fake evidence. And look at what the Christians did to non Christians, non Christian holidays and practices etc... It only makes sense that they are capable of creating fake evidence too. They were willing to do anything to convert everyone and make sure people never worship the old gods again.

Ok three things:
1.Dawkins isn't even the speaker in that video you replied this to
2.The lecture is not about philosophy
3.That text in your quotes mentions nothing specific, it's just ad hominem by this guy not only against Dawkins, but "all the others in that group",what a useless quote, you feel this is smart stuff worth posting again and again?

Of course there have been corrupt people throughout history, but it does not follow from that that any conspiracy theory that you can think of is true. You still need to show your evidence for it. If you were create a story that used the names of over 100 people and took place 100 years ago in France, would you be able to pick names that were historically accurate and matched the right frequency of the overall population? It's doubtful anyone could do that writing story in modern times about their own country because the names we know are an extremely small sample size. The pattern of names of 1st century Jews in Palestine is very different from the pattern of names of 1st century Jews in Egypt. This is a pattern of names is a minor detail that would have been very easy to get wrong and very difficult to fake, so the fact that the names used in the Bible have the correct pattern suggests very strongly that what we have are people living in the land who are reporting events and interactions with other people that they witnessed happening.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5Ylt1pBMm8 If you read Augustine's City of God, he spends the first volume extensively citing pagan sources.

http://jameshannam.com/literature.htm

Indiscriminate destruction of ancient literature by institutional Christianity never occurred;
There was no attempt to suppress pagan writing per se;
On a few occasions, pagan tracts specifically attacking Christianity were condemned but others have been preserved;
Suppression of heretical Christian writing was widespread;
Magical and esoteric works were treated in exactly the same way as they were under the pagan Emperors, who had not been very sympathetic;
With some exceptions, respect for pagan learning was widespread among Christians;
The survival of the classical literature we have was almost entirely due to the efforts of Christian monks laboriously copying out texts by hand.

I saw Dawkins and assumed he was the speaker rather than the person giving the intro, my mistake. An ad hominem would be saying something like the arguments Dawkins and the other in that group give are wrong because they are stupid. Saying that he finds that they use poor arguments is not part of argument itself so it's not a logical fallacy. In the same way, if you think I use poor arguments and you say so, you haven't committed an ad hominem, you've only given your opinion.

Like Christian philosophers, atheist philosophers are capable of criticizing poor arguments even when they agree with the conclusion.

Pimpmonkey: Given your lack of response to my last post, shall I conclude that you have no arguments? (or at least no arguments that don't revolve around angry monkeys?). Fair enough, I thought that much at least was agreeable. Now I can draw my own conclusions.

You were going to draw you own conclusions anyway. As if any believer will drop their beliefs in the face of logic.

If I had said we should just go with what science says, then that would bring about stagnation, but I said we should go with what science says until better evidence suggests something else, which implies that it is being challenged by new interpretations. I completely agree that we should always be willing to challenge our interpretations, especially our most important ones, but that doesn't mean that we can't hold anything to be true until we have a complete understanding of the universe. I just finished watching the linked video of Lawrence Krauss where he said that we have a very high degree of certainty of the age of the universe because of what he interpreted from cosmic expansion. Yes, we should try to challenge that interpretation moving forward, but we can also build from what it implies about the universe until there is a better interpretation, at which point we should reevaluate that we built from it. The problem here is that science is always open to interpretation. More observations and experiments can greatly increase our confidence that our interpretation is correct, but it can always be wrong, so it only reduces doubt rather than removes it. That should not prevent us from going with what science says until better evidence suggests something else. A flat earth was never a widely accepted belief and the resistance to geocentrism wasn't philosophical or religious, but on scientific grounds. Parallax in stars should have been observable if helocentrism was true and a telescope powerful enough to prove that didn't exist in Galileo's time. Learning is a constant process where were bound to make mistakes, but we still need to move forward by working with what reason has discovered to us. For example? I'll agree that there is a lot more that we don't know than what we do know, but I don't think that means that we can't have a high degree of certainty about many of the things we do know. If worse comes to worst and we later find out we were wrong, then we can live and learn. Can you agree that to the best of our current knowledge, the universe was intentionally created by a sentient being? The argument can have true premises independently of how much information we have, so perhaps you meant to say we can't possibly have confidence that the premises are true until we have sufficient information. Both the scientific and philosophical reasons for the beginning of the universe are solid and nothing has been known to come from non-being, so I'd say we have sufficient information.

As someone who studied history I have to reply to this

This is simply not true. While a lot of roman and greek scripts survived since they had a special status with the Roman empire and so with the early church, most of the "foreign" literature, religious or not, was deliberately destroyed. Libraries were burned, temples destroyed.
Some of it may have survived in the vaults of the Vatican, but is inaccessible even today except to very highranking catholics.

Also with the spreading of the christian belief around the world vast amount of non-written literature (oral traditions) were suppressed and so willfully destroyed. Were it not for Iceland (were the ruler formally became christian to please the king in Norway while telling his people that at home they can do what they want) what we have of the Edda would only be a few fragments.

We have in central europe (from written accounts of christian monks) a lot of references to oral traditions of germanic and celtic origins but we have lost the "texts" since spreading them was heresy and dangerous and so the bards and skalds with them their most of the old stores simply died out.

Some of it transformed and survived in fairytales (as for instance later written down by the Grimm brothers - and they still had to change and censor the stories). Some was written down by monks that tried to preserve them, but they also changed parts, eradicated references to the old gods and heroes and included christian elements - heavy refactoring to a) bypass censorship and b) remake the old tales that were hard to root out with a christian flavour.

That is not true. See the destruction of the oral traditions above. An early exception were the roman and greek writings since it was not possible to suppress them in the early christian roman empire since that would have been an affront to the educated and rich and would have led to a palace revolt.
Outside italy and greece "pagan" writings were heavily censored - just by the fact that the christian church held a monopoly on education and you had to be christian to become literate.

As I said, that is true only for roman and greek writings that were widely spread among the educated romans and greek nobles.

That depends on the time. In the early days there was no "heretical" writing since there was no "official" canon. Over the course of some church convents the high priests decided that official canon - for instance which accounts on Jesus would be included into the "New Testament" and which would not. That was necessary since the accounts were in parts highly contradictive - ie. Jesus living happily thereafter here on earth and having a bunch of children with Maria Magdalena, and also - very importantly - different accounts on prophecies regarding the end of the world.

These different accounts on Jesus lead to numerous different sects of early christianity that threatened the power monopoly of the roman church and many of those sects were (quite naturally, since their followers were no jews) not very close to the Abrahamic god but incorporated Jesus into their own local/traditional pantheon.

So what christians believe today about Jesus was deliberately chosen from a range of accounts by a bunch of powerful people. They chose what suited them best and contradicted their intentions and in itself the least. Everything else was declared heresy and rooted out with (literally) fire and sword. Some of the early sects survived in secluded areas up until the late middle ages.

No. The Pax Romana stated that under roman rule people were free to practise their religios traditions - as long as they didn't threaten the said Pax Romana. That included of course a lot of magic practise - magic was closely intertwined with religions and medical care.
Black magic was of course forbidden - like harming other people, be it fraud, bodily harm or murder, is today.

No, the other way round. With the exception of roman and greek writings everything else was deliberately destroyed. Even a lot of that is lost. Works of literature like Homers writing were allowed to survive since they were seen as that - literature, not religious texts. Also the works of the greek philosophers and roman scholars survived since they were studied by the roman elite.
Most of the real religious texts (As not dramatized like Homers writing) were rooted out.

Yes and no. First of all, they copied only what they were allowed to copy. A lot of texts were destroyed or got lost because they were not deemed worthy preserving. Also a lot of rare texts got destroyed by accident like fire, when monasteries (that held a monopoly on certain scripts) burned down due to lightning or civil unrest.

Very often texts were deliberately changed when they were copied, ancient heroes and were replaced with christian saints, gods of old were demonized or replaced with the christian god.

I don't necessarily see the Bible as "fake evidence." It was written in a way to make sense of things to the people at that time, full of stories, parables, etc. It's not like they had a 24-hour news channel. Personally I think part of the problem is that some people only see the words on the page and they don't put any thought into it; to them it's no different than "assembly instructions". Anything can get distorted after thousands of years.

ROFL - I meant conclusions about you. In that you're behaving like the typical forum 'expert' atheist - when faced with a real argument, you'd rather turn to mockery and jump on the points you can argue, while ignoring the points/posts you can't. As though by agreeing that one of the theists was right about something would put you in danger of admitting that they might be right about other things too.

In the end though, we must all draw our own conclusions, after sincerely looking at all sides of the story, not just one, n'est pas?

I won't drop my beliefs in the face of duff-logic, no matter how cleverly copy-pasted. Nonetheless, I can and do reevaluate my beliefs based on compelling arguments appropriately backed up.

You have to have a real argument first. I've not yet seen one.

What logical fallacy, why would you bring this in here. If you tell me my arguments are poor, without saying what you mean, it is just ad hominem. It is not the same as me telling you your arguments are poor, because I have written long essays on why they are poor.

But you see, he did not criticize any arguments, it was just a useless blanket statement.

Now on to trollum, I think this is what he is waiting for:


Yes

Sure
Maybe, who knows

What point?