AronRa
Administrator
Because Otangelo is a lying troll. He is not "agreeing with you". He's not making any valid points at all. He took the same challenge you did, but he failed it the way every creationist so far has always done, by repeatedly refusing to address the points or queries presented, and lying about them instead, and lying about me as well.Firstly I wanna ask why you're deleting post of someone who agrees with me? Aren't you all about honesty and openness?
We're not talking about "creation". There was no creation. We're talking about reality. Reality doesn't need a realtor.I don't understand how can we talk about creation without Creator? It would be like talking about the taste of cake without the existence of cake. God is my cake, my source for facts I'm trying to present.
The basics of morality do NOT come from religion. All societies had their morality before they invented religion. Morality comes from our evolution as a social species, having become dependent on society, and society being dependent on our mutually beneficial cohabitation. Religion just takes what already is, claims credit for it falsely, then ruins it.Maybe but the basics for morality comes from religion in all of societies. There is no society which isn't founded on religion (religious past). You cannot erase religion (religiosity) from culture. So you can't observe society which wasn't founded on religious past.
My basis is that I've been arguing with religious believers daily for a quarter century, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, neo-pagan spiritualists, and none of them have ever been able to show that their religion was any more accurate than any other, nor that there was any truth to it all. You will prove that when you can't show any truth to your religion either. You've never even tried to do that before. You've always just assumed your "truth" without question. But you cannot show that there is any reality to it whatsoever. Gods, ghosts, devils, witches, wizards, dragons, blessings, curses, spells and potions, souls, all are in the Bible, yet NONE of that is real. There is no "supernatural".AronRa said:The truth of Christianity is that there is no truth to it, same as any other religion.
R.D. said:Baseless speculation?
So that's why [what you call] "the word of God" is really the word of ignorant savages who had no idea what they were talking about, just like I said. That's why they only ever said silly things that we know are not true, and prescribed barbaric atrocities in place of justice.It was Godly inspired. Yes the writers were man, they only write what they could understand.
Spoken like a Bhakti Hindu. They say the same thing about their scriptures being inspired and guided by Lord Krishna.In God is Truth, without God nothing is true, or false. Without God nothing is.
“What Krishna has said 5,000 years ago in the Bhagavad Gita has stood the test of time. You can read it today and it is still perfectly valid. Your scientific theories will come and go but the absolute truth will not change.”
—Madhudvisa dasa Swami, July 14, 1995
Is the Bhagavad Gita evidence of Krishna? Or baseless speculation? Which is it?
Remember, the truth is what the facts are, what we can show to be true, NOT whatever else we might assume, imagine or make-believe beyond or instead of that. You don't have any actual factual truth. You just have the other stuff assumed or imagined instead of or beyond that.
Naga is a noun, but not a proper noun. All of the great artists of the Renaissance depicted the serpent in the garden as a woman because of the earlier legend that the serpent was Adam's first wife, Lilith. The cover of my book bears the image of Lilith in the garden from the entrance to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.Serpent in garden is Naga, not Satan. You can see that in art of early christian artists. It's actually depicted as half snake, half woman.
The modern interpretation is that the serpent is supposed to be Satan, but not only does the Bible never say or imply that in any way, it doesn't even allow for it. That's just one of several things that Christians read into the Bible that it doesn't say. If you read between the lines and then ignore the lines, you can make the Bible say whatever you want it to.
That's the question-begging fallacy, presupposing a magic invisible genie and pretending that everything else is contingent on that. But such is not the case. The universe existed some ten billion years before life on earth, and life on earth existed four billion years before men made their first gods in their own image.I'm able to question everything. But I don't understand you. Without God, the prime mover, nothing can "be". Existence exist because it was created. If there is no God, then there is no reality. God is a-priory to everything else. If we remove God from equation, there will be no equation at all.
No, thankfully, no part of the Bible is relevant today. We can no longer buy female slaves for half the price of male slaves, and we can't buy male slaves for as cheap as ten shekels anymore. The fact that the Bible includes all the erroneous impressions that ancient people still believed in, things we now know to be wrong and stupid and evil, is not amazing at all. It is expected of any moldy old mythology.Yes I have no wisdom on my own. I'm only a humble admirer of His great deeds. And yes Bible was written by ancient mans as I stated earlier. That's why it's so amazing, that this Godly inspired ancient text is so relevant even today, right?
I don't make unsupported claims. I've already mentioned how the Bible got history all wrong. I could go on to explain how anyone who really uses the Bible as a moral guide would be a criminal in every country on this planet, and I've given public speeches about the laughable lack of Biblical ethics. Do I need to point out how wrong the Bible is on science? Because I could probably write a book just about that. Where would you like me to start?AronRa said:That's why the Bible is absolutely wrong about absolutely everything, scientifically and historically, ethically and morally.
R.D. said:Unsupported claim.
Zero is not "so many". How about one? Can you produce even one actual eyewitness testimony? Because the best I've ever heard so far was Paul suffering what had been described as a minor stroke and/or what may have been a bolt of lightning. That's it.Regarding Jesus, so many eye witnesses and testimonies are not enough? What more can you ask for?
Once again, evidence is a body of objectively verifiable facts that are positively indicative of, and/or exclusively concordant with only one available hypothesis or position over any other. I have all that for evolution but you don't have any of that for your god. All you have are the claims of impossible absurdity in a compilation of largely borrowed mythology that has been mostly disproved, and is more recent than other bigger and better works making the same claims about entirely different gods. Those claims are not testimonial evidence of themselves. That would be circular reasoning again. You need something more than just that, something you can show to be both true and indicative of your conclusion.How can you even say "evidently there is no God"? What makes that evident? For example you thinking about apple, I cannot show that you're thinking about an apple, so it means your thought evidently does not exists?
If you loved truth, you wouldn't refer to the Bible as the "word of God", because it obviously isn't that and can't be. If you loved truth, you wouldn't say that anything is true or false until you can show that it is, which you can't do here. If you loved truth, you would be careful not to let yourself be convinced of anything that is not evidently true. Yet here you are, absolutely fooled by complete lies and repeating ridiculous falsehoods, while pretending to know things you don't know.False I love the truth, that's why I'm studying the word of God.
Yes, you definitely are. That's what faith is all about. If you love truth, you must reject faith. Faith is the most dishonest and auto-deceptive position it is possible to have. The only thing in the universe that desires or requires faith is lies and liars. Thus, any belief that demands faith should be rejected for that reason. Though I get that you don't realize any of that yet.Once again example with apple. And please keep this respectful. Don't accuse me of being dishonest, or even lying to myself. I'm doing no such thing.
There you go, pretending to know things you don't know again. I am not hurt in any sense. I am one of the happiest guys you will ever meet. Unlike you, I actually do love truth. That makes me opposed to lies. I love truth because I love science, which is all about improving understanding. That means my information has to be accurate or it must rejected or corrected. That pits me against the frauds, falsehoods and fallacies of religion, which has no truth to it, but religion has a whole lot of lies. I wrote a 400 page book listing them!I know you're hurt or there is some other reason why you trail off from God. But maybe if you open your heart you can return to His light again. There are things you can explain by reason, but some things (like the Divine) can be only felt by heart.
As I have already explained, I know that term better than you do. There is no taxonomic definition for it. Ken Ham, the CEO of AnswersInGenesis has even admitted on-stage and on video that he will arbitrarily move that classification to any taxonomic level he wants to. Kent Hovind said that its any two animals so closely related that a five year-old would call them the same kind. But neither man, nor any other creationist either dares identify how we could know what a kind is, even though it would be a very simple demonstration.I can use your terminology. But the word "kind" means type of living thing.
So a decade ago, I came up with the Phylogeny Challenge to prove that the notion of "kinds" is now being used to move the goal posts in a dishonest denial of evolution. No creationist has ever even tried to answer that challenge. I doubt you will either. Because "believers" think it more important to defend the faith than to discover what the truth really is. I should add that plenty of believers have already admitted to me that they're still going to believe whatever they want to believe even if they know it's not really true. Truth does not matter to religious belief!
Birds *do* understand music, and most mammals experience joy and even wonder. We don't need magical terms.Yes but they can't understand music, write poems, experience joy and wonder. How could you possibly describe the need for art in cold biological terms?
It's in the Bible, Bible is truth, therefore it's true.
So Vedic knowledge is infallible, because the swami said so. That's why several of the chapters in the Bhagavad Gita have the words "absolute truth" right in their titles. The Bhagavad Gita is the absolute truth because it says it is. That's not circular at all, is it?
Same with the Qur'an. It too claims to be the infallible word of God and that every verse therein is a miracle dictated directly to Muhammad to correct for the Bible, which men have corrupted into lies. Does that make the Qur'an true? Is it also the Word of God just because it says it is, and because Muslims insist that there can be no errors or contradictions in it, no matter how many of both there are?
Yes, dogs and roses are related, just very distantly, having diverged well over a billion years ago, after the origin of eukaryotes, but before the origin of animals, when both lineages were what we used to call Protists.AronRa said:Do you accept that speciation has happened or can happen?
R.D. said:If you mean that two different dogs can produce new type of dog? Or two roses can produce new color of rose? Then yes. But rose and dog aren't related. Yes they both are formed from building blocks (matter) that God used (to form fauna and flora), but thats it.
A common misconception of evolution is that we need to cross-breed two existing types to get a third one. This is hybridization, not evolution. You've got it exactly backwards, or rather upside-down. What really happens is that every individual in any lineage has their own unique mutations. Humans average 128 mutations per zygote! Every sibling in every litter has their own mutations. Some of them may be shared by more generations later. The parent gene pool tends to restrict the expression of new variance via population mechanics, where novel mutations are more often overwhelmed by recombination with the norm in subsequent generations. However, if a population is divided, especially when small groups venture off on their own, and are kept isolated for several generations, then novel variance will be expressed. Each side will have their own unique mutations that aren't shared with the other group, such that it may not be long before we could visibly identify a lone wander in the wilderness between them, to know which group that one came from. This is the most common route, but it is not the only one.
Suffice to say that although hybridization has happened a couple times in evolutionary history, it is rare and atypical. What normally happens is that one group becomes two, then four, and eight and sixteen, and so on, increasingly distinct from each other, growing more different and further apart genetically, except for when some lineages occasionally go extinct. So from Asiatic wolves, we derived four mutant strains of domestic dogs, and from them we've bred hundreds more; not by cross-breeding, but by selecting novel mutations that appeal to us.
For example, in the 1800s, fancifully styled sculptures of lions were popular in Chinese art, even though they bore little resemblance to real lions. The empress Tzu Hsi reportedly found a puppy with a birth defect that she thought made it look like an Oriental depiction of a lion, so she bred that dog with normal females until she eventually got more puppies with the same type of birth defect. They continued breeding those puppies with other dogs that looked the most like them until every generation produced the same weird-looking Chinese “lions.” There are two breeds like that: the Pekinese (named for the city of Peking, which is today more commonly referred to as Beijing) and the Shih Tzu, which were named after the empress herself. Obviously, neither of these breeds looks much like an actual lion. Since Chinese artists didn’t have any real lions to look at back then, their renderings weren’t very accurate, but their lion sculptures do coincidentally look a bit like really big Pekinese dogs.
If you believe that, you should take the Phylogeny Challenge, which will prove that wrong. But I am not saying that all life evolved from the same thing. We can say that about dogs and roses, (both eukaryotes) but not all life. Remember that evolution is a ancestor-descendent lineage, but microbes, especially prokaryotes, often change by horizontal gene transfer, sharing genetic material on contact. So while there is substantial evidence that eukaryotes and prokaryotes are biologically related, we can't say that eukaryotes "evolved" from prokaryotes, because that was a different process. Once we get into the base of eukaryotes, then evolution takes over as the dominant mechanism.So you're saying that all life evolved from the same origin something? I can't see that as possible. You can see it this way: God created archetypes and within those archetypes some modifications cause different types of the same animal.
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But God used the same building blocks (matter) to create A,B and C. That's why the similarities.
I told you before that the Hebrew word for "kind" is equivalent to the modern biological species concept, which for sexually reproductive animals means that they can and will interbreed under normal natural conditions. But creationists can't admit that, because they know that speciation has happened, and that means that two animals descended from the same ancestor can't or won't interbreed anymore because they're now different species.AronRa said:Do you accept that the Scottish wildcat, pallas' cat, margay and other assorted small wildcats are biologically related to our domestic house cats? Meaning that they all evolved from a common ancestor?
Do you accept that the cougar and cheetah are biologically related?
Do you accept that all leopards and jaguars are biologically related?
Do you accept that all panthers are biologically related to each other?
Do you accept that panthers and felines as well as scimitar cats all evolved from a common ancestor?
R.D. said:I would say yes to all, they are all beasts. Within the same kind. But I asked elder and he said no. So maybe they are distinct kinds. Bible doesn't give clear answer on this very question. Maybe if they are able to interbreed they could be the same kind?
How large is the "beast" category? If God created a male and female beast and all other beasts evolved from that pair, (a genetic impossibility) then did Noah have only two beasts on board? Didn't he already have a division between "clean" beasts, specifically cattle, that were supposed to be sacrificed? As if an actual god would have ever wanted a sacrifice.
This is an important question, and I still don't have an answer, because one of your elders said no, but he didn't specify where or why. So ask him each of these questions individually, and tell me which one(s) he answers "no". Then be sure to get his "reasoning".
Wrong. We don't have souls. But if we did, all other animals would too, and so would plants and fungus and so on. There is no such thing as a soul, but even if there was, that wouldn't have anything to do with our experience of joy and wonder, which other animals experience too. These are mostly products of the physical brain, and they can be chemically altered. So they are not in any sense supernatural.AronRa said:Even if we had a soul, that would not be the reason we can think. Our consciousness is an emergent property of our biology, and other animals experience this too.
R.D. said:This may be true, but without soul we wouldn't be able to feel, experience joy and wonder.
How can you believe something so dumb yet be put in charge of children? How are you qualified to teach anyone anything? You have been lied to all your life, and it has debilitated your mind.Dinosaurs are myth as fairies are.
I belong to the Dallas Paleontological Society. I studied paleontology at the University of Texas. I have been to fossil digs in Cretaceous strata here in Texas. I have done paleontology both in the field and in the lab, doing chemical treatments to remove the stony matrix without damaging the partially exposed fossils inside. My daughter worked in the lab at the Natural History museum, now the Perot museum in Dallas, where they have actual dinosaurs. I had a private guided tour of the lab and fossil troves at the Tyrell Museum in Alberta. There I got to see this ankylosaur (below), the best-preserved dinosaur fossil ever found, before they had finished removing the rock from around it, a year before the public got to see it. The details in the skin (yes, skin!) were so perfect, even up close, that it looked like it died yesterday.
Here is an incompletely extracted large therapod dinosaur, also in the warehouse of the Royal Tyrell Museum in Alberta.
I have friends at the Natural History Museum in London, where they have the first dinosaurs ever discovered, way back in the 1800s. I went with one of these guys and an international team of experts into the South African Karoo on a two-week paleontological expedition funded by the University of the Witswatersrand in Johannesburg, where I personally found the bones of large Permian therapsids. But you think dinosaurs (and presumably therapsids too) are just a myth like fairies?! How STUPID must you feel right now? Would you subject your students to this same feeling of idiocy?
The words "magic" and "miracle" share essentially the same definition, being the evocation of supernatural forces or entities to control or forecast natural phenomena in ways that are inexplicable by science because they defy the laws of physics. Anything supernatural is by definition magical. Call it pejorative if you like. But everyone understands that blessings and curses are magical enchantments, and you believe in both of those, along with a whole lot of other embarrassing nonsense.Magic is pejorative used to describe someone who is dealing with evil forces. Prayer is communication with God, I'm not demanding (like in the case of magic), I'm simply humbling myself before the Creator.
You have no business teaching children!
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