The God Argument

[Burgundy&GoldForever]

The Bible was NOT written by God. It was written by men.

Correct. Therefore, it proves nothing about the existence of a god.

On the topic of empirical evidence:
You still haven't explained your irrational faith in the existence of evolution of life on this planet, absent empirical evidence of how the first single-celled organism burst forth from the primordial ooze, or how it miraculously transformed to such various and complex forms.

Scientific method doesn't require faith. There's proof of evolution. Evolution doesn't claim that single-celled organisms evolved into homo sapiens. That's a red herring.

Many scientific studies have been done in recent years that show the healing power of prayer/meditation by the individual. Did you know that religious people live, on average, seven years longer than those that don't believe in God? They are healthier, happier, less stressed, and have a much lower suicide rate than do atheists? This doesn't prove the existence of God, but it is certainly food for thought, no?

Citations needed. Those aren't scientific. Correlation doesn't equal causation. Science requires that a test be repeatable and falsifiable. Science requires peer review. You'll not find a published scientific journal anywhere making any such claims.

[Deadskins]

The Bible was NOT written by God. It was written by men.

Correct. Therefore, it proves nothing about the existence of a god.

Never said it did. I was responding to your ridiculous claim that the Bible can't be included as an historical record.

On the topic of empirical evidence:
You still haven't explained your irrational faith in the existence of evolution of life on this planet, absent empirical evidence of how the first single-celled organism burst forth from the primordial ooze, or how it miraculously transformed to such various and complex forms.

Scientific method doesn't require faith. There's proof of evolution. Evolution doesn't claim that single-celled organisms evolved into homo sapiens. That's a red herring.

My use of the words "faith" and "miraculous" were not-so-subtle jabs at your obvious willingness to overlook lack of empirical evidence in your belief of secular theories. And evolution absolutely does claim that homo sapiens evolved from single-celled organisms. Or are you arguing that the earliest life forms were multi-celled? Not that the distinction matters to the point I was making, either way.

Many scientific studies have been done in recent years that show the healing power of prayer/meditation by the individual. Did you know that religious people live, on average, seven years longer than those that don't believe in God? They are healthier, happier, less stressed, and have a much lower suicide rate than do atheists? This doesn't prove the existence of God, but it is certainly food for thought, no?

Citations needed. Those aren't scientific. Correlation doesn't equal causation. Science requires that a test be repeatable and falsifiable. Science requires peer review. You'll not find a published scientific journal anywhere making any such claims.

Oh really? How about this from the US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health (each set of brackets is a citation of a scientific study):

MECHANISMS OF HEALING THROUGH PRAYER

Prayer is a special form of meditation and may therefore convey all the health benefits that have been associated with meditation

Different types of meditation have been shown to result in psychological and biological changes that are actually or potentially associated with improved health. Meditation has been found to produce a clinically significant reduction in resting as well as ambulatory blood pressure,[2,3] to reduce heart rate,[4] to result in cardiorespiratory synchronization,[5] to alter levels of melatonin and serotonin,[6] to suppress corticostriatal glutamatergic neurotransmission,[7] to boost the immune response,[8] to decrease the levels of reactive oxygen species as measured by ultraweak photon emission,[9] to reduce stress and promote positive mood states,[10] to reduce anxiety and pain and enhance self-esteem[11] and to have a favorable influence on overall and spiritual quality of life in late-stage disease.[12] Interestingly, spiritual meditation has been found to be superior to secular meditation and relaxation in terms of decrease in anxiety and improvement in positive mood, spiritual health, spiritual experiences and tolerance to pain.[13]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2802370/
I found the last one particularly ironic, given your denials.

[Burgundy&GoldForever]

Holy strawman argument, Batman. First of all, the source is not a science journal. It's a medical journal. Secondly, it's the Indian Psychiatric Journal. Thirdly, and this is important, your quote entirely ignored the following:

Prayer may be supported by varying degrees of faith and may therefore be associated with all the benefits that have been associated with the placebo response

Clinically significant treatment gains have been observed with placebo in numerous disorders, including anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, tardive dyskinesia, ischemic heart disease, cardiac failure, Parkinson's disease and even cancer, among a host of other conditions.[14–20] Relevant to the context of prayer and healing, the placebo response is influenced by personality traits and behaviors such as optimism,[21,22] response expectancy,[23] motivational concordance (i.e., the degree to which the behavioral rituals of the therapy are congruent with the motivational system of the subject)[24] and degree of engagement with a ritual.[25]

So, more or less, he conclusion is that if a person believes the sugar pill was magic fairy dust then it was magic fairy dust and it therefore had a positive effect. Prayer is being compared with that sugar pill turned magic fairy dust.

placebo - a harmless pill, medicine, or procedure prescribed more for the psychological benefit to the patient than for any physiological effect.

In its intended context your quote may very well be accurate.

Lastly, and this is important as well, the comparison is between spiritual meditation and secular meditation. It is not between people who believe in the Abrahamic god and people who don't.

How many Indian people do you suppose believe in and meditate to the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Most people in India practice Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, or Sikhism. About 2.3% of the population is Christian.

That makes it a bit of a cognitive disconnect to correlate the paper to this discussion.

Do you have anything that doesn't compare meditation with meditation?

It seems more like you're trying to rationalize your own belief in god than to prove to me one exists.

[Deadskins]

Actually, it's you that's putting up the straw man. In fact, you are presenting many of them.

Straw man #1) These citations come from India, which makes them invalid.
Yes, the link goes to a webpage that references the Indian Psychiatric Journal, but the website is the National Center for Biotechnology Information, the US National Library of Medicine, and National Institutes of Health site on the .gov domain. And all of the studies cited were reputable studies done in the US.

Straw man #2) Because the studies were published in medical journals, the science is not valid.
How is it that medical science is not science in your book? Are medical trials' validity somehow lessened because of the subject matter? You said:

Science requires that a test be repeatable and falsifiable. Science requires peer review. You'll not find a published scientific journal anywhere making any such claims.

Please explain how what I posted doesn't meet your criteria.

Straw man #3) Because the author chose to give a supposition as to why studies show that prayer/meditation has positive effects on health, that invalidates those effects.
I did not miss the passage about the placebo effect, but I did notice that you bolded the word "may" (not once, but twice) in your quotation, meaning that you did not miss that word. So, either you don't know the definition of the word "may," or you are willfully trying to mislead anyone reading your post (or maybe just yourself) into believing that you have effectively refuted the citations.

Straw man #4) Because the prayers/meditations may have not been to a specific God, this invalidates their effectiveness.
Please show me where I said that the prayers had to be to the God of Abraham? And you conveniently leave out Islam, which is the second most popular religion in India, because it doesn't go along with straw man argument #4, which was built upon straw man argument #1.

P.S. I am not now, nor have I ever been, trying to prove God's existence to you.

[TexasCowboy]

John 1:1 in the beginning was the word and the word was with God so
explain again how man was created without some intelligent design
doing the designing???

[Burgundy&GoldForever]

John 1:1 in the beginning was the word and the word was with God so
explain again how man was created without some intelligent design
doing the designing???

For starters, the oldest book of the bible is only about 6,500 years old. That wasn't the beginning.

[TexasCowboy]

This was obviously going back to genesis 1:1

[Burgundy&GoldForever]

This was obviously going back to genesis 1:1

Which was 6,500 years ago and not the beginning of the universe. For the second time.

[Deadskins]

This was obviously going back to genesis 1:1

Which was 6,500 years ago and not the beginning of the universe. For the second time.

It wasn't even written down until well after that. So what? Can it not be that the story, passed down orally through many generations of primitive people, is based on the truth, but should not be taken literally?

[Burgundy&GoldForever]

This was obviously going back to genesis 1:1

Which was 6,500 years ago and not the beginning of the universe. For the second time.

It wasn't even written down until well after that. So what? Can it not be that the story, passed down orally through many generations of primitive people, is based on the truth, but should not be taken literally?

That's a discussion unto itself. Why do people get to pick and choose which parts of the bible to take literally and which parts to take figuratively?

The entire bible is fictional. All of it. It takes very little research to find that every myth in the bible has been debunked.

But if we're going to play the selective faith game then why did the church go to such great lengths to ban several books from the original bible? The content of those banned books is very telling.

[Deadskins]

The entire bible is fictional. All of it.

Really? I thought we went over this already. Was Augustus not Emperor of Rome from 27 BC until his death in 14 AD? Was Herod not Roman client king of Judea? Was Pilate not the fifth prefect of the Roman province of Judaea from AD 26–36? There are hundreds of events in the Bible that can be verified by other, secular, historical records. Will you at least admit that?

[Burgundy&GoldForever]

The entire bible is fictional. All of it.

Really? I thought we went over this already. Was Augustus not Emperor of Rome from 27 BC until his death in 14 AD? Was Herod not Roman client king of Judea? Was Pilate not the fifth prefect of the Roman province of Judaea from AD 26–36? There are hundreds of events in the Bible that can be verified by other, secular, historical records. Will you at least admit that?

There are no BC and AD because there was no C. We've been over that, too. There is a BCE and a CE. I'll concede that much. Otherwise, I think you know what I mean when I say the entire bible is fictional. The Council Of Nicea, where many but not all Christian religions agreed on minor details like the trinity and the resurrection occurred in 325, almost three hundred years after the supposed existence of the biblical Jesus. The Church has taken it upon itself to reword the Nicene Creed multiple times, as evidence they really aren't sure what they believe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicene_Creed


The King James bible (the one with all the missing books) was authorized in 1611. Conspiracy theories aside, there are some important concerns about why the King Of England and the Catholic Church in particular intentionally removed, hid, and banned specific books which existed in previous versions of the bible.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-rel ... 0870/posts

So as not to confuse the issue, I am specifically referring to the religious history of the bible as being fictional, not the secular history, although much of that is either inaccurate or in dispute as well.

[Deadskins]

You do realize that those missing books also espouse Jesus as the son of God, right?

[Burgundy&GoldForever]

You do realize that those missing books also espouse Jesus as the son of God, right?

I do. I've read them in their entirety. They also espouse any number of other things, none of them good for the image of Jesus as the Christians would have people believe.

[Deadskins]

They also espouse any number of other things, none of them good for the image of Jesus

Like what? That he was a normal Jew of that time period, in that he had a wife, and possibly children? That he believed in women's rights? How would these things be bad for Jesus' image? Once again, you are confusing the Church as an establishment, with Christianity.

[Burgundy&GoldForever]

They also espouse any number of other things, none of them good for the image of Jesus

Like what? That he was a normal Jew of that time period, in that he had a wife, and possibly children? That he believed in women's rights? How would these things be bad for Jesus' image? Once again, you are confusing the Church as an establishment, with Christianity.

Unconfuse me. The meaning of "Christian" is to live as Jesus lived. For the sake of this argument only I'll concede Jesus lived. But how did Jesus live? Was it as the authorized bible says? Was it as the banned books say? Was it as the papal doctrine says? They don't even agree with each other. How does one live as Christ lived if no one knows how Christ lived?

[Deadskins]

They also espouse any number of other things, none of them good for the image of Jesus

Like what? That he was a normal Jew of that time period, in that he had a wife, and possibly children? That he believed in women's rights? How would these things be bad for Jesus' image? Once again, you are confusing the Church as an establishment, with Christianity.

Unconfuse me. The meaning of "Christian" is to live as Jesus lived. For the sake of this argument only I'll concede Jesus lived. But how did Jesus live? Was it as the authorized bible says? Was it as the banned books say? Was it as the papal doctrine says? They don't even agree with each other. How does one live as Christ lived if no one knows how Christ lived?

I wouldn't say you necessarily have to live as he lived. That's a tough task for even the most reverent, humble, giving, self-sacrificing person. But I don't agree that the books that are included in the Bible don't provide enough of his lessons that people can't strive to follow his teachings. But either way, your claim was that these books espouse "any number of things" that would be bad for Jesus' image. I was just wondering what just a single one of those things would be. I might agree with you if you had said they contain things that would be bad for the image of the "Church."

[Burgundy&GoldForever]

Like what? That he was a normal Jew of that time period, in that he had a wife, and possibly children? That he believed in women's rights? How would these things be bad for Jesus' image? Once again, you are confusing the Church as an establishment, with Christianity.

I wouldn't say you necessarily have to live as he lived. That's a tough task for even the most reverent, humble, giving, self-sacrificing person. But I don't agree that the books that are included in the Bible don't provide enough of his lessons that people can't strive to follow his teachings. But either way, your claim was that these books espouse "any number of things" that would be bad for Jesus' image. I was just wondering what just a single one of those things would be. I might agree with you if you had said they contain things that would be bad for the image of the "Church."

I'd say this is one of the books that might conflict with the notion that Jesus was without sin:

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas: The only book that deals with young Jesus, it indicates that Jesus was a strong-willed child who one historian describes as "Dennis the Menace as God." The book reveals that at age five, Jesus may have killed a boy by pushing push him off a roof and then resurrected him.

[Deadskins]

Like what? That he was a normal Jew of that time period, in that he had a wife, and possibly children? That he believed in women's rights? How would these things be bad for Jesus' image? Once again, you are confusing the Church as an establishment, with Christianity.

I wouldn't say you necessarily have to live as he lived. That's a tough task for even the most reverent, humble, giving, self-sacrificing person. But I don't agree that the books that are included in the Bible don't provide enough of his lessons that people can't strive to follow his teachings. But either way, your claim was that these books espouse "any number of things" that would be bad for Jesus' image. I was just wondering what just a single one of those things would be. I might agree with you if you had said they contain things that would be bad for the image of the "Church."

I'd say this is one of the books that might conflict with the notion that Jesus was without sin:

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas: The only book that deals with young Jesus, it indicates that Jesus was a strong-willed child who one historian describes as "Dennis the Menace as God." The book reveals that at age five, Jesus may have killed a boy by pushing push him off a roof and then resurrected him.

The reason he resurrected him was so that he could testify (no, not in court ) that Jesus had not pushed him, but rather he had slipped and fallen of his own accord. Still, I don't think that story really tarnishes his image. His ministry didn't even start until he was 30.

[Burgundy&GoldForever]

The reason he resurrected him was so that he could testify (no, not in court ) that Jesus had not pushed him, but rather he had slipped and fallen of his own accord. Still, I don't think that story really tarnishes his image. His ministry didn't even start until he was 30.

That makes absolutely no sense unless one dismisses the trinity. Christians don't dismiss the trinity. Is Jesus supposed to be a prophet? That's what some other religions argue.

But if Jesus is the "son of god" then why would the first 30 years be a free for all? Or why would god go into a temple and knock over the money tables?

[Cappster]

The crux of the Christianity argument is this:

Do you believe that a human blood sacrifice took place in order to save humanity from eternal damnation? If the answer is yes, you probably need to work out why an almighty being simply cannot forgive himself for his own mistakes and instead, sends himself/son in human form so that he could sacrifice himself/son to himself to save humanity. Does that make any sense whatsoever? It simply does not make any logical sense to a thinking person. If any one of us had the ability to say end war, end poverty, end the pain and suffering of billions on this planet, we would do so in a matter of moments. To this god figure of the bible, our suffering seemingly gives him great joy and pleasure...if he did exist. Fortunately for all of us, the god of the bible is just a made up boogey man used to scare children with threats of hell.

[Deadskins]

Or maybe God sent his son to live as one of us, and show us that even under the worst of circumstances involved in the human condition, we could still have faith that if we follow his example, we can rest assured of having everlasting life in heaven.

[Deadskins]

The reason he resurrected him was so that he could testify (no, not in court ) that Jesus had not pushed him, but rather he had slipped and fallen of his own accord. Still, I don't think that story really tarnishes his image. His ministry didn't even start until he was 30.

That makes absolutely no sense unless one dismisses the trinity. Christians don't dismiss the trinity. Is Jesus supposed to be a prophet? That's what some other religions argue.

But if Jesus is the "son of god" then why would the first 30 years be a free for all? Or why would god go into a temple and knock over the money tables?

Why must you dismiss the Trinity? According to Jewish tradition, men could not enter the ministry until the age of 30.

[Burgundy&GoldForever]

Or maybe God sent his son to live as one of us, and show us that even under the worst of circumstances involved in the human condition, we could still have faith that if we follow his example, we can rest assured of having everlasting life in heaven.

And maybe Alicia Keys wants to have my children. But there's equal evidence for that as for the trinity. That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

[Cappster]

Or maybe God sent his son to live as one of us, and show us that even under the worst of circumstances involved in the human condition, we could still have faith that if we follow his example, we can rest assured of having everlasting life in heaven.

He could do better than to send himself, as a sacrificial lamb that he sacrifices to himself, to show humanity how to live. Maybe less death and more forgiveness would work better for the human condition than a blood sacrifice.