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Saturday, November 1, 2008

This Reminded Me of Ray's Message.



I'd really like Ray's response to this video or any other Christian's who frequents here or at Ray's for that matter. However, I doubt any Christian will take the time to make a meaningful rebuttal to this video, so to all my friends at the Raytractors, I hope you enjoy this video.

17 comments:

  1. A meaningful rebuttal to this video?
    I'm sorry Kaitlyn
    Pat didn't say anything meaningful at all here.
    It is our duty to obey our lord. If Pat doesn't like being obedient to god and just wants "freedom" to do what he likes, well I guess he will have to tell the judge that on judgement day.

    "belief without evidence"
    puhhleeeze
    Theists have provided lots of arguments and evidence for the existence of god over the years and showed that Christianity can be rationally justified.
    For Pat to dismiss all this evidence with his cavalier attitude is just offensive to Christians in general.

    Pat didn't say anything meaningful.He accused us of causing fear, he expressed disdain for obeying God's law, expressed his opinion that God didn't exist and brushed aside the arguments for god and then asserted that there was no evidence.It's a waste of time.

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  2. Thanks for posting that Kaitlyn. I always enjoy Pat Condell's videos. He manages to cut through a lot of the BS.

    mrfreethinker said:

    "Theists have provided lots of arguments and evidence for the existence of god over the years and showed that Christianity can be rationally justified."


    Unfortunately infinite variations of "God did it" and "because the Bible says so" still aren't terribly convincing to people who aren't willing to push aside all rational thought. Or do you have some other form of rational justification in mind?

    In the spirit of exploring the nature of evidence I'd like to ask you a question: do you conclude, based on the available evidence, that the Big Bang occurred?

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  3. Hi Kaitlyn

    I agree with a lot of the video.

    The 'arguments and evidence' that our mrFree is alluding to have been debunked for years but fundies ignore this & scream back that the scientists et al are just being dogmatic &/or lying.

    Witness for example the fundie reaction to evolution. Fundies have falsified evidence, lied in court, and continued to use evidence that may have been credible in the 19th century but has well & truely been debunked now.

    As regards religion generating fear - yes it does. And very efficiently too. Most especially the abrahamic religions.

    But all religions are NOT dealers in fear.

    Religions [or more accurately religious philosophies] such as Buddhism & Zoroastrianism, for example, don't threaten anyone with with hell or eternal damnation. Their only demand is that their folloers think.

    Quite different to the fundy cry of 'Believe & obey or be damned!'

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  4. Oh yes, by the way mrfreethinker. If Christianity isn't interested in fearmongering, how would you characterise the story in the tract that Revenant posted just below?

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  5. Thank you for posting this, Kaitlyn, I really love that guy.

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  6. MrFreeThinker, instead of thinking in terms of Christianity, pretend Pat Condell was only talking about Islam.

    What would be your thoughts then?

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  7. "Theists have provided lots of arguments and evidence for the existence of god over the years and showed that Christianity can be rationally justified."

    Please, do tell me of this empirical or logical evidence for the existence of the Christian God who is the intelligent creator of the Universe and humanity who also plays an active role in watching over and intervening in human affairs.

    "For Pat to dismiss all this evidence with his cavalier attitude is just offensive to Christians in general."

    Why is that offensive?

    "Pat didn't say anything meaningful at all here."

    "Pat didn't say anything meaningful."

    So your rebuttal is "nuh-uh?" Okay. :)

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  8. @alphageek
    "Unfortunately infinite variations of "God did it" and "because the Bible says so" still aren't terribly convincing to people"
    How about using logic to deduce that the universe had a cause and using deduction to find out the nature had that cause, or pointing out complexity and order and inferring design,or showing morality must have a transcendant source, or realising that the only way we can account for immaterial absolutes like the laws of logic is the Christian worlldview.

    "do you conclude, based on the available evidence, that the Big Bang occurred?"
    Yeah (I am always open to new evidence though)

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  9. "MrFreeThinker, instead of thinking in terms of Christianity, pretend Pat Condell was only talking about Islam.

    What would be your thoughts then?"
    They would be basically the same . I guess it would be my and Pat condell's differing attitudes to law. I think there is honor in doing your duty and being obedient to god. And while there are muslims who have issued threats, I don't think I would accuse them of fearmongering.

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  10. "Please, do tell me of this empirical or logical evidence for the existence of the Christian God who is the intelligent creator of the Universe and humanity who also plays an active role in watching over and intervening in human affairs."
    I can't use all the arguments here
    but here's a bunch
    http://www.mb-soft.com/believe/text/argument.htm
    I would go into detail on a couple if you like.

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  11. MrFreeThinker, I'm reading the link you sent me right now. I'm really impressed by this page. Thank you.

    What do you think on this page is the strongest proof of God?

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  12. I think (as for a general creator) the cosmological argument (Aquinas' form) is very strong. It is good as it is also supported by cosmological evidence like the expansion of universe that supports the idea that the universe had a beginning.
    The moral agument s good when talking about a more involved god.

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  13. Okay, I'll start a new thread about this subject because I find it interesting.

    Thanks MrFreeThinker.

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  14. While Aquinas was certainly a great thinker, at least compared to the knowledge of his times, his proofs are designed to validate faith within a framework. They are not proofs of God in themselves, but a way to rationalize faith based on the presupposition of God as an uncaused cause.
    When you run into problems with infinite regresses and special pleading, the assumption of God's existence can't lead out of them without evidence. In other words, the prime mover is a postulate to solve an argument that was developed to argue for a prime mover. Aquinas demonstrated that God proves God if God exists.

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  15. Chris wrote:
    Religions [or more accurately religious philosophies] such as Buddhism & Zoroastrianism, for example, don't threaten anyone with with hell or eternal damnation. Their only demand is that their [followers] think.

    Philosophical Taoist here saying "Damn right!".

    I consider philosophical religons like these more 'evolved' versions of the religon meme: they reproduce by helping their 'host', and getting the host to spread the meme of their own free will.

    As opposed to forcing their host to evagelise, threaten others, and deny valid science.

    My hope is that relatively 'primitive' memes, such as the evangelical abrahamic religons, will eventually develop to a similar symbiotic status. "Liberal" christianity has already taken the first stop on this road by accepting science for what it is. There's hope yet.

    I elaborated on this here, for those who weren't around at the time.

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  16. I'll tell Pat this - if he keeps his mouth shut around me, I'll keep mine shut around him.

    Other than that, he'd be just as bad as those he criticizes (evangelical Christians).

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  17. Skilled speaker. Not gonna lie, he's pretty good at what he's doing.

    This was well thought out, pretty intelligent, and even a little rousing.
    Of course, it rouses me to something different than he intends, but I think that he does intend to stir something in people none the less.

    If I were to take the time to REALLY look at this guy, I would look through all of his videos in search of an operant definition for Religion. Does he ever actually say what he means by "religion?" Does he mean religious beliefs completely outside of the social and personal practice and application of them? Does he distinguish between people who hold strongly to their beliefs and people who go along with whatever the Numa videos say? In my social psychology class, we were told that religiosity was positively correlated with different forms of prejudice. When I asked the teacher after class, though, how they defined religiosity, he told me that they actually had three different levels of religiosity, and that people who actively lived out their faith and truly believed that they had a relationship with Jesus were found to have a LOW correlation with prejudice that was pretty negligible, and there are probably other factors that play into that prejudice such as social conditioning, viewing other people groups as a threat, the self esteem hypothesis theory of prejudice, and other things. People who were there simply because they don't want to be in Hell were the ones who had a high correlation with prejudice, and people who were in the church for personal gain (A man with political ambition goes to the same church as the governor to get on his good side) had a MAJOR positive correlation with prejudice.

    So far, he talks of clergy as con men, and fear mongering people. And for those who are actually con men and fear mongers, his descriptions of religion are some times accurate.

    So, what's this guy mean by "religion?"

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