[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]bigflamer wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]Headhunter wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
If you want to discuss the bible, then read it, study it and understand the contexts, audience, purpose and motivation for each book and passage. [/quote]
Um…okay…
Wouldn’t reading Dawkin’s God Delusion be more enlightening and less torturous?[/quote]
Enlightening? LOL! The parts I read of that book were horrifically, face-palm stupid. Therefore it’s right up your ally.
EDIT: Chapter 3 is particularly hysterical. His counter arguments to all the things the Cosmological Argument are not, are just plain bad. So of the worse counter arguments I have ever seen.
His process follows a basic script. “Let’s take a valid argument and say a bunch of things that aren’t true about it then we will knock the things that it doesn’t say and counter argue that.”
I can only imagine his cowardice of attacking the argument based on what it actually says stems from the fact that he knows he cannot knock the actual argument down.
So let’s look at some of these comical assertions Dawkin’s makes, I am going to try to do this without laughing…
Okay so here we go…
Chapter 3 page 77:
“3 The Cosmological Argument. There must have been a time
when no physical things existed. But, since physical things exist
now, there must have been something non-physical to bring
them into existence, and that something we call God.”
LOL! Uh, no. That’s not even a terribly bastardized version of the argument. Not even the badly constructed “Kalam Cosmological Argument” makes such a claim. No form of the cosmological argument asserts that at all. But let’s see what he says about it, shall we…
“All three of these arguments rely upon the idea of a regress and
invoke God to terminate it. They make the entirely unwarranted
assumption that God himself is immune to the regress.”
Wow, this is so bad I wouldn’t know where to begin. Since he didn’t actually properly state the argument to begin with, he is attempting to debunk the phantoms of his imagination. That’s not what the argument states and it’s not reliant upon “God to terminate it”.
Let’s see, what else…
"To return to the infinite regress and the futility of invoking God
to terminate it, it is more parsimonious to conjure up, say, a ‘big
bang singularity’, or some other physical concept as yet unknown.
Calling it God is at best unhelpful and at worst perniciously misleading.
What in the flying fuck is he talking about? No form of the cosmological argument even remotely asserts this. I mean the butcher job is flat painful, but funny, damn funny. And people BELIEVE this shit! LOL!
Okay let’s move forward, I am having fun…
[i]"The Argument from Degree. We notice that things in the world
differ. There are degrees of, say, goodness or perfection. But
we judge these degrees only by comparison with a maximum.
A Humans can be both good and bad, so the maximum goodness
cannot rest in us. Therefore there must be some other maximum
to set the standard for perfection, and we call that
maximum God.
That’s an argument?[/i]
No idiot, it’s not. It’s not even remotely close. The butchery of Kant’s ‘Moral Imperative’ is just sad. It was so bad I barely recognized it. It’s certainly NOT what Kant said.
Moving forward…
“The Teleological Argument, or Argument from Design. Things
in the world, especially living things, look as though they
have been designed. Nothing that we know looks designed
unless it is designed. Therefore there must have been a designer,
and we call him God.* Aquinas himself used the analogy of an
arrow moving towards a target, but a modern heat-seeking
anti-aircraft missile would have suited his purpose better.”
What horseshit. It’s not even close to the argument from design, which actually in reality resembles cosmology, just using order as it’s initial muse. But this hack job doesn’t even come close. Design arguments are not my favorite, but what they aren’t are what he just said.
That’s really all I can take right now. My dog has shit more profound things than this. I can only hope that he doesn’t take himself very seriously because if he really believe it, then he’s the delusional one.
He takes arguments theists do not make and he tries to debunk them. If you have to resort to tactics such as this, you really must not have a point. He is only preying on the weakest of minds here. I cannot imagine anybody with a half baked, high school drop-out level education falling for this crap.
I guess people will fall for anything, but this is titanic stupidity. There really aren’t sufficient adjectives to describe how bad this is.
I really hope this was not his opus magnum, if so I feel bad for him. He’s some kinda special stupid.
You think this garbage is enlightening? It’d be far more productive to find out what the arguments really actually are and what they really actually say, because if you try to present this crap as your counter arguments, you are going to get embarrassed hard core.
Like I said, this being painfully stupid, is right up your ally…This enlightenment couldn’t illuminate a match box…
[/quote]
Imagine the hypocrisy of a man who gets offended at atheists who post scripture and criticize the bible, while not having read the bible in it’s entirety, and then posts bits and pieces of Richard Dawkins book calling it “horrifically face-palm stupid”, while not having actually read it.
[/quote]
Hell, I don’t think I could sit through it. Those above parts are so painfully stupid, I couldn’t sit through the rest. The parts I have read of the book make it not worth my time. It’s clearly designed for people with weak minds.[/quote]
If you’d prefer, I could send you my copy of Hitchens’ “The Portable Atheist; Essential Readings For The Non-Believer”. LOL…seriously though, it’s a good read with selection from many different authors; Kant, Lucretius, Dennet, Twain, Bertrand Russel, etc. Good stuff.
Perfect for ADD riddled atheists such as myself. lol
