[quote]pat wrote:
First, HIV does not cause AIDS. It creates the condition for AIDS to manifest, but it does not cause for you can be HIV positive and never develop AIDS. [/quote]
If I have the time, I’m going to address the rest of what you’ve written. The attempt to compare scientific “knowledge” with religious “knowledge” is as old and tired as it is utterly impotent. It relies on a ludicrous equalization of all forms of evidence. I’ve been told many things in my life. One of them was that I was born in Westchester, NY. Another was that a man I met in Brownsville, Brooklyn, had been abducted by aliens (who were in collusion with the United States government) and experimented upon.
I have pure knowledge of neither of those two claims–I have a birth certificate that could be a forgery, and parents who could be liars–but I would be stupid to the point of deserving involuntary institutionalization if I were to treat both claims as equally believable or unbelievable. This voluntary diminution of the human skeptical apparatus to a playtoy with the computational capacity of an abacus–this is required if we are to accept the notion that a claim made by a scientist toting in his wake a mountain of verifiable and repeatable evidence is credible even on the same order of magnitude as is a collection of ancient testimonies to miracle.
You have also dodged the fact that I don’t claim to “know” black holes exist, and the fact that every criterion whereby you accept the New Testament is met in the writings of Herodotus–and if this isn’t true, do show me one criterion for which this isn’t the case.
But forget all that. I want to focus on the quoted portion above as a microcosm of this debate in general. Your claim is simple: HIV does not cause AIDS. These words are taken verbatim from you.
So, let’s take a look at your claim. Remember that it was highly straight forward: HIV does not cause AIDS. [Emphases will be added.]
Merriam Webster’s definition of AIDS:
A disease of the human immune system that is characterized cytologically especially by reduction in the numbers of CD4-bearing helper T cells to 20 percent or less of normal thereby rendering the subject highly vulnerable to life-threatening conditions (as Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia) and to some (as Kaposi’s sarcoma) that become life-threatening and that is caused by infection with HIV commonly transmitted in infected blood especially during illicit intravenous drug use and in bodily secretions (as semen) during sexual intercourse.
From Taber’s Medical Dictionary, one of the “big three” medical dictionaries in the United States:
An advanced stage (technically, the third stage) of infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) […] two human immunodeficiency viruses, HIV-1 and HIV-2, have been identified [as causes]. Both cause AIDS.
And here’s the NIH write-up of the evidence that HIV causes AIDS:
You have a terrifyingly difficult uphill battle against the NIH, Taber’s, and Merriam Webster’s before you can make the straight-faced claim that “HIV doesn’t cause AIDS.”
So, here we have a problem: the making of a claim that is easily and mechanically demonstrated as falsity. You could simply have looked into it and discovered that, yes, HIV absolutely causes AIDS, and that “elite suppression” has nothing to do with this fact. Instead, you didn’t. It’s this ability that people have–the ability to believe something, and believe it with enough conviction that they feel comfortable averring it in public, that simply isn’t so–that makes these religious debates impossible. [Of course, we all do this, myself very much included.]
You think that the evidence for resurrection is as sturdy as the evidence for general relativity, and yet it isn’t (and the claims aren’t comparable, anyway, the first being a simple [and historically commonplace to the point of banality] proposition while the latter is an attempt to explain observable phenomena). You think that you’ve got the “truth” when in fact Hindus have the same kind of truth and same kind of evidence for their truth, and yet you feel comfortable discounting them without having read their ancient writings, which are qualitatively identical to your own.
You think your people were telling the truth when they attested to miracle in the “Holy” Land, and yet you think that the many attestations to Zeus’ doings were lies–again, despite the fact of no qualitative difference between those attestations and your own.
In short, I think you’re deceiving yourself, not me.
Edit: By the way, I’m sure you know more than I do about black holes. You are absolutely correct re: atheists who have unshakable faith in science. But I’m not one of those, and, while I believe that black holes exist, I don’t know that they do, not even in the same way that I know that water freezes at 32 and boils at 212, or the way that I know that my girlfriend has ovaries despite never having seen them, etc.