Posts by flamegrilled

2596

The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

by cofty in

yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

flamegrilled

I would love to believe that physical death is not the end of personal existence. However there is no evidence to support belief if continued existence after death nor in the idea of a resurrection. I am 99.9...% convinced this is nothing but wishful thinking and superstition. However if any evidence to the contrary exists then I have an open mind to examine it. Cofty

Fair enough. So we are down to probabilities not certainties. I am 96.7% convinced that abiogenesis of carbon based life is not possible.

There are a bunch of other probabilities that i could bring into the discussion but again this is not about that. You have no more certainty than I do. I completely respect your right to form strong opinions based upon your assessment of those, but your OP depends on certainty. It's not there.

2596

The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

by cofty in

yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

flamegrilled

P.S. Try to respond without too much bluster to mask the answer.

2596

The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

by cofty in

yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

flamegrilled

@Cofty

Those who died in the Tsunami - do you KNOW beyond any possibility of error where they (as conscious beings) are now, and/or where they may be in the future?

If so, how do you know?

Remember, we are NOT talking about probability here. We are ONLY talking about what we know for a certainty.

[I will just add that this is in no way a subtle attempt to preach. In fact I don't have a firm opinion of the answer. I just want to see how you logically respond, and whether you allow any room for error in your response. If not, then the "how do you know" portion becomes very important.]

2596

The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

by cofty in

yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

flamegrilled

Then forever after I will refer to your alleged god. jgnat

Absolutely you should do that. In fact you will see that I qualified quite a few of my early comments in this thread by "if he exists". I just dropped it after a while when I saw that few were interested in the strict logic of the argument, and more interested in blasting other peoples' world view based upon an incomplete set of information.

2596

The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

by cofty in

yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

flamegrilled

...if one person appears to be betrayed by God then it raises a question about whether God truly betrays people... [emphasis mine, jg] - flame

You have a bias to maintain your belief in an all-powerful, all-loving God. jgnat

This whole thread has been about what God is alleged to have done if he were to exist.

My whole argument is that there is no logical reason to reach the conclusion that Cofty is promoting based upon appearances. I therefore phrased my reply accordingly.

It's perfectly reasonable when a person's guilt has not been proven to refer to his or her crime as "alleged".

I have also firmly stated my position about turning this into a full discussion of the existence of God. Cofty initially insisted that it wasn't about that. Now he wants it. But only on his terms. I have absolutely no desire to go down that road. Cofty and others may pretend to be indignant about that now, but I engaged in this discussion based upon Cofty's rules. The OP is flawed. I have no need to justify my entire belief system, in order to further that point.

2596

The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

by cofty in

yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

flamegrilled

Disappointed at FG accusations.

They haven't come out of the blue Cofty. I've pointed out every time you've done it. And it's been with remarkable frequency.

You have spent 50 pages saying "its a mystery" while studiously avoiding the word.

Acknowledging that there are missing pieces to a puzzle does not make the entire thing a mystery. If it did we would have to write-off some very important areas of human knowledge.

2596

The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

by cofty in

yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

flamegrilled

So if one person is betrayed by God, we can challenge His existence or His compassion? (If quantity does not matter). jgnat

If zero people are betrayed by God, you can challenge His existence or His compassion. That's up to you.

But if one person appears to be betrayed by God then it raises a question about whether God truly betrays people, the same as if it appears to happen to two or more people.

2596

The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

by cofty in

yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

flamegrilled

@flamegrilled - you are giving God a free pass on natural disasters because 0.1% potential disconfirmation* of your worldview is an acceptable cost to you

atheists (me, us, cofty, whoever) have used a different scale in our observation. Massive scale death of the innocents are yet more evidence 'He' probably doesn't exist.

Well this is part of the problem. Using 250K, as if the quantity multiplies up the evidence, is not logical given the matter under consideration. As I have stated many times whether it 1 person or 250K, it's still one question.

2596

The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

by cofty in

yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

flamegrilled

besty - If a good friend told you the truth 999 times, but then said said something that appeared to be untruthful, would you forget about the big picture or immediately conclude your friend was a liar?

Of course if the person in question is not someone known to you and you simply hear the one out of place statement then you would think that the friend who believes is just gullible.

Obviously atheists have a completely different perspective to theists. But from my perspective it is not "without evidence" by a long shot.

Please don't bother asking me to make the entire case for God as Cofty keeps doing. I don't ask anyone in this discussion to believe, and I'm not about to preach.

The discussion was about whether Cofty's conclusion is logical and whether Christian theism is fatally flawed. The answer to both of those is no. That is not in itself any argument towards the existence of God, which is a separate and much larger conversation. I can completely understand why people are happy to take Cofty's superficial argument and keep repeating that it proves something (their preferred world view). But it simply doesn't.

2596

The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

by cofty in

yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

flamegrilled

Without evidence you have the hope, the faith to believe in a god who has not acted love and power.

You value love? You are trusting that God will indeed restore with tenderness the poor sufferers who had no relief in this life--and no knowledge of Jesus as Christ.

That is a faith in a theodicythat the NT has never supported,as far as I know. humbled

I'm not sure I follow, so there is a chance that I'm going to answer your point incorrectly, but due to misunderstanding.

Are you saying that from my point of view you think I don't believe that God has given evidence of love and power?

If so then that would be a wrong understanding. I believe that my existence and the existence of the universe give evidence of God's love and power.

Then you seemed to say that the NT doesn't support the idea that those who have suffered or never had a chance will be restored. According to the way I read the NT it does.