Note from my friend Julian Haydon who is sending me these excepts: "This was written 133 years ago; for a public beginning to receive "explanations" for absurdities; but still when many, as now, believed every word in the bible true. Ingersoll relentlessly drives home the full implications of what they believe -- but some of the learned doctors he quotes are in no way embarrassed."
Randal Rauser repeatedly tells us that "Faith consists of assent to a proposition that is conceivably false." I have repeatedly said that faith is an irrational leap over the probabilities, and as such, we should think exclusively in terms of probabilities. He claims I'm ignorant. Okay then, let's see. Rauser's definition is a Christian language game utterly irrelevant to whether Christianity is true, because it forces him to choose between being a skeptic, a non-believer, and beyond this an epistemological solipsist, or he is forced to admit we should think exclusively in terms of probabilities after all.
Spray-on skin, made-to-order muscle, and print-out kidneys aren't just science fiction anymore. Dr. Anthony Atala and Dr. Stephen Badylak, two pioneers of regenerative medicine, talk about the latest methods for building new body parts, and the challenge of growing complex organs like the heart, liver or brain.
Audio @ NPR:
What the Doctor Ordered: Building New Body
Note from my friend Julian Haydon who sends me these posts every week: "This was written 133 years ago; for a public beginning to receive "explanations" for absurdities; but still when many, as now, believed every word in the bible true. Ingersoll relentlessly drives home the full implications of what they beleive -- but some of the learned doctors he quotes are in no way embarrassed."
BOSTON (Reuters) - A previously unknown scrap of ancient papyrus written in ancient Egyptian Coptic includes the words "Jesus said to them, my wife," -- a discovery likely to renew a fierce debate in the Christian world over whether Jesus was married.
The existence of the fourth-century fragment -- not much bigger than a business card --was revealed at a conference in Rome on Tuesday by Karen King, Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
I'm available for speaking engagements, debates, weddings, funerals, and other stuff like that. To learn what I can offer and how to contact me, read below.
This was written 133 years ago for a mainly hostile public, and in a time when the Bible was regarded as "every word true and inspired by God". Ingersoll uses the Bible against itself. [Provided by Julian Haydon]
THE NECESSITY FOR A GOOD MEMORY by Robert Ingersoll.
It must not be forgotten that there are two accounts of the creation in Genesis. The first account stops with the third verse of the second chapter. The chapters have been improperly divided. In the original Hebrew the Pentateuch was neither divided into chapters nor verses. There was not even any system of punctuation. It was written wholly with consonants, without vowels, and without any marks, dots, or lines to indicate them.
These accounts are materially different, and both cannot be true. Let us see wherein they differ.
The second account of the creation begins with the fourth verse of the second chapter, and is as follows:
Each segment is 51 minutes long. If you don’t have time, please just watch the summation in video 4:
The Book (I would love to see WL Craig try debate either Israel Finkelstein or Neil Silberman over the truth of the Bible! These videos will be a foundation for my forthcoming post.) "In God We Trust" . . . Like Hell!
The Bible Unearthed 1.The Patriarchs
The Bible Unearthed 2.The Exodus
The Bible Unearthed 3.The Kings
The Bible Unearthed 4.The Book
I have said that Dr. Randal Rauser is not being intellectually honest when it comes to his faith. This does not mean I think he's doing anything unethical or immoral. It means his faith blinds him from being honest with the arguments to the contrary. Let me try, yet once again, to persuade him to throw off his blinders with what I consider one of the dumbest rejoinders to my arguments I think I have ever heard. I do so in hopes he will see it for what it is, and then take seriously that this same blindness affects how he treats other arguments against his faith. I hope in vain though. Dr. Victor Reppert endorses what Rauser wrote, so hey, he's no different. Faith makes otherwise brilliant people stupid, and I mean this. They must hand out PhD's to almost anyone, is all I can say. Let me show you this stupidity from a post Rauser wrote titled, "Is John W. Loftus 'dumber than a box of rocks'?" Warning, this is going to get ugly.
{I’m working on a major post on the why the Bible
cannot be trusted as either history or theology (complete with footnotes) which I hope to post within the week.}
With just the simplest reading of the Bible, we find that both God and Jesus are depicted as kings. That is, while they maybe divine, they rule as earthly kings just as the pharaohs of Egypt or the emperors of Rome ruled with absolute power and fear. Since the professional scribes of the Biblical world did not know of any other rule, plus the fact that religion was used to support imperial dictatorships, all ancient rulers were appoint by some
King God (be it he Yahweh, Zeus, or Aten) to function as an extension of their
God King. So to it was for even Paul and his justification of the divine rule of the Roman Emperor in Romans 13. Likewise in the final book of the Christian Bible (Revelation), the kingship of God and the kingship of Satan clash in one final battle over who will rule humanity as the last and eternal dictator.
Today I was eating lunch and watching people. You know, it's fun. It keeps our minds occupied wondering about them. Where are they going next? How was their morning? What are their concerns today? Are they happy? Things like that. It's fun guessing based on our limited view of what we see ever so briefly. My wife and I play a game where we have some fun at their expense by doing so. But have you ever wondered what they think about the various issues of ethics, politics and religion, specific issues? Going even deeper have you ever wondered what it would like being them? Ever wonder what it would be like being a closeted gay person, or the opposite gender, a different race, or being older than you are? Ever wonder what it would be like to be someone else, to have all of the experiences another person had, having learned everything he or she did? Now take this beyond the shores of your particular country or continent. Ever imagine what it would be like being a person from Japan, or Africa, or South America, or France, or Greece? I know one thing. If we were raised in a different culture as a different person we would largely think like people who are different from us and who live in different cultures. The evidence is overwhelming.
Now let's back this up with a question: How is it possible to reasonably judge people, all people, based on what they believe happened in a lone part of the ancient world? The gospel "belief unto salvation" dogma dies on this rock. It's reminiscent of the ancient barbaric thought police. Even liberals of every religious persuasion are persuaded that one's beliefs cannot be the basis for pleasing any god, or being judged by him. And yet this "belief unto salvation" dogma is reflected in the New Testament over and over. It cannot possibly be true. The whole gospel is based on a lie.
I treat people more respectfully and graciously than most people do online, unless they violate one of these three rules: 1) tell me what I should or should not do (It's my life and it's my blog); 2) malign me in some demeaning way (I will not allow believers to dehumanize me); or 3) show a repeated lack of ignorance and unwillingness to learn from me (Unfortunately, the more I interact with a Christian then the more I can see whether this is the case). I'm saying don't do these things if you want a reasonable respectful civil discussion with me. If anyone violate these rules I'll tell them off, sometimes in a big bad mean way, and I don't care who you are either. Just don't do it. Ever. I would hope people know this by now. It's who I am and I'm not about to change. If you don't break these rules I will not verbally abuse you in any way, although I cannot guarantee others won't. They are not up for discussion or debate either. Repeated violations will get you banned and will cause a cessation of contact from me. And to any morons out there, how I respond to violators of these rules does not adversely affect the strength of my arguments, as Robert Ingersoll said when accused of lecturing for the money:
For 18 months, while undergoing treatment for esophageal cancer, Christopher Hitchens chronicled his year of "living dyingly" in a series of essays for Vanity Fair. Those essays, as well as never-before published notes from Hitchens' final days, are compiled in a new, posthumous book titled, Mortality. Carol Blue, Hitchens' wife of 20 years, wrote the afterward to the book.
She talks with NPR's Neal Conan about her husband's final days.
I'd like for you to be honest with your faith here. No delusional sidesteps, okay? Answer a question having to do with what came first, your faith or your understanding. As we know, Anselm argued that "faith seeks understanding." That's the same stance other believers view their own religions. First they believe, then they seek to justify it by understanding it. Did you reasonably examine your faith before you adopted it? Or, did you try to justify it post hoc, after believing it?
My claim is that justifying something post hoc is an unreasonable way to examine a religion. It's something the Outsider Test for Faith finds to be an inconsistent double standard. For we know from cognitive studies that the strong human propensity is to unreasonably justify what we believe after the fact. We do this in order to resolve the cognitive dissonance in our heads (that uncomfortable feeling we have from for holding two contrary propositions at the same time).
Here's how cognitive dissonance works. You made a public stance in a confession for Jesus. Then you come across disconfirming evidence. What do you do? You already stated publicly you believed. So you must make a choice, either recant and be embarrassed for making a rash commitment, or find some way to escape the force of that disconfirming evidence. Sometimes that escape hole is so small only an ant could crawl through it, but when it comes to faith that'll do just fine.
In any case, this question has two aspects to it. The first aspect is chronological, the second one is logical.
On or about August 14th I ceased linking to Christian blogs in my sidebar. I had done so for years in some cases under the rubric "Sites I Visit From Time to Time." What I didn't realize is that by doing so I was propping up their audiences. I made them more important than they were. And anyone who had anything nasty to say about me eventually congregated at them. The owners of those blogs reveled in their success and learned that by berating me they could get even more hits. So this played itself out over and over until those sites became cesspools of Loftus bashers. Two of them used to be ranked by Alexa at or about the 600,000th mark. Now look at their Alexa rankings, but before you do, let me crow a bit at my absolute power over them. *peep* *peep* ;-)
I recently received Howard Bloom's massive new book, The God Problem: How a Godless Universe Creates. It looks like a real intellectual feast, although I've only skim-read it at this point. You can look inside the book at Amazon to see for yourselves. Bloom's central question is how the cosmos creates without a creator. Even if you disagree with his thesis there are startling insights and gems for thought that will probably stun you. For everyone interested in such a question on both sides of our debates this is sure to be essential reading.
Christian apologists Drs. Randal Rauser and David Marshal seem to have conspired together to comment here as a tag team in a wrestling match against me at DC. Why? Because I have "a big audience," said Rauser in a comment, an audience of atheists, agnostics and skeptics. And so it seems with Marshall as well. Give them a big warm DC welcome. No, seriously, I welcome them. Now I don't want to be over-run with Christian apologists, but I suppose they will be met with more atheists who want to debate them over the issues that divide us. So I would welcome this too. Just be careful when it comes to my involvement. Don't assume that if they have the last word that I cannot answer them, and don't expect me to have the time to answer them either, since I now have a second job (I had told my readers this might be necessary for a long time, and the time has come. I'm tired of living on a meager income). I'd like to say some additional things about this development, if it's something that will continue into the future (and of this I don't know).
"Believing is easy, thinking is hard."
Here's the evidence. Are you ready? Christians have the argument from ignorance which is a known informal fallacy, that is, the as yet unexplainable mysteries of existence. Then you have private subjective anecdotal religious experiences, something every believer claims to have, which basically nullifies that subjective private evidence. Then you have historical evidence from the ancient pre-scientific superstitious past. Historical evidence is paltry evidence indeed, especially when it comes to the ancient superstitious past. Am I missing anything? Christians basically got nothing, nothing substantial that is. Not in comparison to science. All Christians do is attack science at this point which is a mark of a deluded person. Who in their right mind would not see this as it is? There is no parity between the "evidence" to believe and the evidence that causes me to disbelieve, at all.
How dare I demand that God gives me what I need to believe? How dare I tell him how he should reveal himself to me? How dare I question the reasonableness of revealing himself in the pre-scientific past such that I must accept what ancient people claimed to have seen in a remote part of the world, or be condemned to hell if I don't? How dare I disbelieve because of the so-called mysteries of an eternal three-in-one God, who became incarnate, and who died for my sins, even though none of these doctrines make any rational sense at all.
Well I do dare to demand better of God, if he exists. That's the point. How am I to know he exists when his lack of divine forethought led to massive slaughter among Christians themselves over the stupidest of doctrinal trifles that if he had foreseen them and had even average communication skills he could have averted? Or, he could have told us more important things than what to do with our penises and vaginas, by giving us the knowledge to make vaccines and anesthesia for surgeries?
Why do I demand better things? It's simple:
If God created me as a reasonable human being, then I can doubt the reasonableness of a God who fails to give me what I need to believe as a reasonable human being.
If God created me as human being who seeks sufficient evidence to believe, then I can demand that he gives me the sufficient evidence I need to believe.
Connect the dots.
Of course, maybe he doesn't want reasonable people? Who knew? ;-) But then, why am I who I am? Still, if that's the case then he could snap his omnipotent fingers and take away my critical thinking skills so I would believe as others do. I did at one time. Then I grew a brain, just as ex-Mormons, ex-Muslims, ex-Orthodox Jews, ex-Scientologists and others did. ;-)
