Letters to the Editor
-
A true intellectual would NEVER say what you just said.
There are NO gods, or "God" - never was, never will be.
Unprovable at best. Honest to goodness intellectuals today are positing that we all may live inside a Matrix, among other things. Prove them wrong. You cannot.
As a convenient label, calling the Matrix creators 'god' is fair at that point.
We are orphans in a purposeless cosmos and there are no cosmic sugar daddies or "Santas" to hold your hand.
On this I agree. I go with the Deists, Washington, Jefferson, who posited that something (not necessarily a Bible charicatured God) created all this, then took off and left us to fend for ourselves.
As researcher Michael Persinger has shown, all of these arrive via micro-seizures in the temporal lobes of brains. Hence, people like you mistake brain aberrations for revealing reality.
Seizures? C'mon, just say you're an Atheist and be done with it. Just because someone may have a seuzure and see brighter colors, does not mean they can only be caused by seizures. You should know that if you understand basic logic.
Look, I am not here to defend Goddists. Only to explain that we do not know a smidgeon of what REALLY is going on, only our small viewpoint and only through the filters of certain theories, certain instruments, certain prejudices. Things a true intellectual would comprehend, then become HUMBLE about.
Evolution, meanwhile is a FACT - and we fully have the evidence in toto for macro-evolution. If you are able to understand it, you would do yourself a favor by consulting:
I understand evolution and read science voraciously. I understand rocks show history of life in a SOMEWHAT logical progression. I am awed that it was just discovered that the life die off 65 million years ago is indicated in increased distribution of certain land plant life proteins in the rocks under the Mediterranean, meaning those dead plants rolled into the sea.
I also see big gaps in the knowledge and big holes and exceptions. Why do we not have any written or oral history from further back than 6000 years, though we have been Homo Sapiens Sapiens for 30,000 years plus?
What you fail to understand in your shuttered way is that life elsewhere has had BILLIONS of more years to develop. This is a STRICTLY intellectual and logical supposition based on looking out at the history of the universe as SCIENTISTS see it. No faith needed. This billions-of-years-older, and thus billions-of-years-more-intelligent life may have impacted our own planetary history in ways we cannot begin to comprehend.
Your view is that if we cannot measure it or theorize it based on what we know, it does not exist. This is the failure of science. Until a valid accepted model exists, the reality does not exist to you.
Perfect example. Science said there is no life anywhere but on Earth, yet we find other worlds now with ample amounts of organic molecules.
Mars has a replenishing supply of a variety of methane that can ONLY be formed by life-- a supply that should have died out in mere centuries if it was caused by a momentary hit of that methane from elsewhere.
-
Good Question
Azdirk:
"Why aren't more questions asked?"
Because someone who thinks they know all there is to know about a subject no longer asks questions about that subject.
Because someone who has decided that their opinion about a subject is the only correct opinion will refuse to ask questions that may lead to a challenge of that opinion.
Because when you ask a question it shows that you don't know everything there is to know about a topic, and you never know to what dangerous conclusions the answer to those questions might lead.
-
zoetrope1, for me at least
When it comes to Obama it is policy and style.
I oppose Hillary's stances on censorship and her style on foreign policy. I also prefered Obama's reasoned approach to if America gets attacked in the early debates (Basically, he would keep calm, investigate who did it, and then strike back. Hillary's approach was more hit back right away.)
Between the two on healthcare, well I don't think either plan will really work so I side with Obama, his costs less.
And then there is Iraq. Obama was right on the money with it, Hillary wasn't.
-
G-O-D
The God we know today is an impostor.
-
brightstar65
So you agree that there is no God.
After all, about the only thing which can never, ever be proven is a negative - and thus seen as we will never be able to disprove god, he doesn't exist.
Joking aside:
To say there is not god is to adopt a hypothesis which one then seeks to disprove. One does this via reading the various holy books, examining the testimony of witnesses, and seeking physical evidence.
To take the opposite hypothesis, would be intellectually inconsistent, as we cannot prove the non-existance of fire breathing dragons either. It is simply a less useful hypothesis.
-
No Gods
Brightstar65 wrote:
Unprovable at best. Honest to goodness intellectuals today are positing that we all may live inside a Matrix, among other things. Prove them wrong. You cannot.
Proving them wrong is not on, for the reason that it is impossible to prove a negative anyway. This is 'Logic 101', in case you missed the notice. For the same reason neither I nor other atheists are obliged to disprove there is a deity.
As for "unprovable" maybe, but then it is not the onus of the atheist to prove anything one way or the other. It is the person who would ADD to existent, confirmed reality who makes the claim - that is obliged to prove it.
Thus, if my neighbor rushes over to me and insists that alien ghosts are in his attic, I may nod my head and tell him 'fine, that is what YOU believe' but I am under no obligation to incorporate his report into reality. I may make a mental note that he is possibly schizophrenic or delusional in some way.
Nor do I retain his alien entity in the back of my mind as some possibly "unprovable" existent in which I must invest some modicum of intellectual energy, emotion or conviction.
In like manner, I am under no compulsion to accept godists' claim of their God any more than my neighbor's for alien ghosts. And "unprovability" is neither here nor there, for the same reason that "unprovability" of my neighbor's claimed "ghost" is neither here nor there.
And the bottom line here is that a true intellectual does not pursue phantasmagorias. He insists that those who make the extraordinary claims validate them.