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Creationism in Czech

arg-fallbackName="AronRa"/>
Firstly I wanna ask why you're deleting post of someone who agrees with me? Aren't you all about honesty and openness?
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.

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.
We're not talking about "creation". There was no creation. We're talking about reality. Reality doesn't need a realtor.

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.
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.

AronRa said:
The truth of Christianity is that there is no truth to it, same as any other religion.
R.D. said:
Baseless speculation?
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".

It was Godly inspired. Yes the writers were man, they only write what they could understand.
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.

In God is Truth, without God nothing is true, or false. Without God nothing is.
Spoken like a Bhakti Hindu. They say the same thing about their scriptures being inspired and guided by Lord Krishna.

“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.

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.
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.

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.

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.
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.

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?
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.

AronRa said:
That's why the Bible is absolutely wrong about absolutely everything, scientifically and historically, ethically and morally.
R.D. said:
Unsupported claim.
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?

Regarding Jesus, so many eye witnesses and testimonies are not enough? What more can you ask for?
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.

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?
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.

False I love the truth, that's why I'm studying the word of God.
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.

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.
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.

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.
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!

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I can use your terminology. But the word "kind" means type of living thing.
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.

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!

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?
Birds *do* understand music, and most mammals experience joy and even wonder. We don't need magical terms.

It's in the Bible, Bible is truth, therefore it's true.
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Swami.png

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?

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.
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.

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.

1610992093462.png
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.

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.
View attachment 167
But God used the same building blocks (matter) to create A,B and C. That's why the similarities.
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.

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?
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.

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".

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.
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.

Dinosaurs are myth as fairies are.
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.

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.

1610994646840.png

Here is an incompletely extracted large therapod dinosaur, also in the warehouse of the Royal Tyrell Museum in Alberta.
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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?

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.
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.

You have no business teaching children!
 
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arg-fallbackName="We are Borg"/>
@R. D. i’m the one that deleted the comments of Otangelo (rationalist) like *SD* said he is copy pasting items from his site that mostly has nothing to do with where talking about. He thinks he knows everything he posts but he does not its an effect i cant remember the name atm. He is welcom to make his own topic but he is not welcome in others.
 
arg-fallbackName="AronRa"/>
@R. D. i’m the one that deleted the comments of Otangelo (rationalist) like *SD* said he is copy pasting items from his site that mostly has nothing to do with where talking about. He thinks he knows everything he posts but he does not its an effect i cant remember the name atm. He is welcom to make his own topic but he is not welcome in others.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is when you think you know better than all the world's best-educated expert specialists anywhere ever about a topic you've never studied and don't know anything about.
 
arg-fallbackName="We are Borg"/>
The Dunning-Kruger effect is when you think you know better than all the world's best-educated expert specialists anywhere ever about a topic you've never studied and don't know anything about.

Yes thats the one, name was gone from memory. But thats what i think when i see Otangelo (rationalist) post stuff.
 
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
Dear Moderators, could you please re-check whether anything I've written in this thread constitutes 'attacks' on R.D.?
 
arg-fallbackName="*SD*"/>
Dear Moderators, could you please re-check whether anything I've written in this thread constitutes 'attacks' on R.D.?

Terrible ideas exist for only one purpose - to be countered and hopefully destroyed. If someone's personal feelings are offended due to a rebuttal, we don't do anything about that, that person can just remain offended.
 
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
So for R.D.'s clarity. The moderators have said that this is a public thread anyone can post in, and that I've made no attacks on R.D. personally, only criticized his ideas. So Roman, no more personal messages trying to deflect my public criticism of your ideas, please. You're not obliged to answer if you don't feel you have the time or ability to do so, but you clearly desire to have a public conversation with Aron Ra, else you'd be corresponding with him privately. Conversations which take place in the public sphere necessitate accepting that the public have the right and interest to respond. Don't try and control who can speak or what they can say, regardless of how convenient that may be for you. Also, perhaps point your students to this forum so that a) they can test the value of your ideas and b) you feel obligated to maintain a higher standard of discourse.
 
arg-fallbackName="AronRa"/>
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.
Roman, while religion seeks enforce authoritarian dictates, restricting free thought by punishing heresy and apostacy, science works exactly opposite. Because truth matters more than whatever we might rather believe, all scientific postulations are limited to what is already indicated by prior evidence. So there can be no speculation about "maybe God created archetypes?" You first have to show that there ARE archetypes, and that this god of yours is both possible and probable, and that anything ever was or could be "created". Then you must submit your studies and/or conclusions to peer review where ANYONE could challenge it and disprove it, now or at any point in the future.

You could bring a battalion of creationist apologists into this thread and none of them could help you. Because they all know that dinosaurs are NOT "myths like fairies are". You're going to have to admit that mistake on your part. Worse, it's not even on your part. Because you said that God is the source of this alleged "fact". Since it's wrong, that That means your god is wrong! But since he is unable to apologize, or do anything for himself (since he is only imaginary) then it is still up to you to concede "his" error and correct yourself, to accept that dinosaurs are in fact real. It is your god that is a myth like fairies are.
 
arg-fallbackName="R. D."/>
That's why they only ever said silly things that we know are not true, and prescribed barbaric atrocities in place of justice.
Barbaric atrocities? Even you must accept 10 commandments as word of (if not God) than righteous human. Someone who found the way from that so called barbarity to morality. How was "he" able to do it? Surely not by himself with his earthly wisdom. That is what I mean by "Godly inspired". The God touched the minds of people. And they, with His help, wrote the holy text.

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.
I don't know. I always thought that the evidence for God is self evident. So maybe other religions looking at the same truth but with their own understanding?
Or maybe evidence for divine comes from heart. You can feel the existence of God (for example when you pray). Surely someone more profound than me can give undeniable evidence for God.
I would normally point you to Bible, study His text. But I can see your point. If you denounce God, you wont find Bible (to be) the truth.

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 hope you're at least wrong here. But yes God created everything before man. But no billions were involved.

No, thankfully, no part of the Bible is relevant today.
Slaves? Maybe in Old Testament, barbaric time needs barbaric laws. But at least you need to accept that New Testament is beautiful word of love.

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?
Bible is not talking about science. Bible is illustrating the divine so even the simplest person could understand it. You may see it as "wrong statements", but you can see Bible as textbook. You don't put quantum mechanic into the textbook for primary school.

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.
His disciples for start? Not only Bible is talking about miracle of resurrection.

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've got your book (Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism). I'll read it once I have enough free time (presumably weekend).

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!
I think truth is the most important thing. Why would I believe if it wasn't truth? There must be some scientist who could prove my position even to you.

Birds *do* understand music, and most mammals experience joy and even wonder. We don't need magical terms.
I looked it up, and you're correct. It's actually amazing. So maybe the soul allows us to feel the divine, connect with God. There must be some reason for soul.
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?
I don't know, I feel like I'm losing my ground inch by inch.

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".
I asked him and this is his answer (I'll try to translate it):
"[...] You can find answer in the Bible. Some things we can know, some things only God know. Pray and He'll reveal the truth for you. [...] Do not speak with atheists, they are liars who only trying to deceive."

I want to agree with him, but everything you say makes sense. I'm feeling bad, like I'm doing something wrong just by speaking with you. Maybe God is giving me the sign? Maybe the elder is right? But then why is it making sense? I tried to pray, but I don't know.

I looked up those species and they look similar enough. So I would say "yes" to all answers.

- And concerning dinosaurs
You were right, I was wrong. There is so many information about them, I didn't even know.
I'm sorry I was just trying to find something (anything, any instance) where you were wrong. Because you can't be right, otherwise my life's work is false.
 
arg-fallbackName="*SD*"/>
Because you can't be right, otherwise my life's work is false.

Your profile says you're 30 years old, so thankfully you wont have spent even half of it being duped by obvious nonsense, provided you abandon the fantasy and embrace reality soon. So that's some conciliation at least. Not saying that as a jab, there are people who are more than twice your age when they discover Christianity is entirely nonsense, look how much time they've wasted believing things that aren't true.

I've been debating theists for about 20 years now, that's not as long as Aron, but it's a long time and what I've discovered along the way, among other things of course, is that it really all boils down to this one question:

Do you care about what is true or do you not? That's really it, at least from my perspective. If you do, excellent. If you don't then people are wasting their time trying to reason with you (I'm not suggesting the latter is the case, it's just the inevitable consequence of that option) because only an interest in truth can and will compel you to accept it, even if you really don't like it and would rather it was some other way.
 
arg-fallbackName="AronRa"/>
Barbaric atrocities? Even you must accept 10 commandments as word of (if not God) than righteous human. Someone who found the way from that so called barbarity to morality. How was "he" able to do it? Surely not by himself with his earthly wisdom. That is what I mean by "Godly inspired". The God touched the minds of people. And they, with His help, wrote the holy text.
No, I cannot accept what you mistakenly call the Ten Commandments as being anything more than plagiarized mythology, stolen from the earlier legend of Hammurabi and adapted to Judaism. You really should read your sacred fables and examine them. Notice that they are NOT "ten" commandments. There are at least eleven, if not fourteen commandments just in Exodus 20, and that list continues through Chapters 21, 22 and 23, listing such cherished classics as how brutally you can beat your slaves, how you can devalue sex slaves and abandon them if they don't satisfy you, and how fellow Jews get preferential treatment to other ethnicities; lot's of horrible immoral crap in there. Then Moses comes down with ALL the laws and edicts, destroys them, and has to go back up the volcano to get the 2nd Edition, which God promised would be exactly the same as the first, but they're not. Exodus 34 is the first time the Bible mentions "the ten commandments", only that's not the set that anyone would put up in any court house. The first two commandments are paraphrased from the original set in Exodus 20. Most of the rest come from Exodus 21-23. In them, the 4th commandment was changed to forcing believers to bring their first-born male children as a human sacrifice. The rest of the alleged commandments are mostly concerned with keeping Jewish traditions of the Feast of Weeks and of the Harvest and other things no one cares about anymore, and the 10th commandment is "thou shalt not boil a baby goat in its own mother's milk". All barbaric stupidity from front to back.

I don't know. I always thought that the evidence for God is self evident. So maybe other religions looking at the same truth but with their own understanding?
Remember, the truth is what the facts are. So what actual factual "truth" are all these other religions looking at?

Or maybe evidence for divine comes from heart. You can feel the existence of God (for example when you pray). Surely someone more profound than me can give undeniable evidence for God.
No, no one can. I've been debating apologists for twenty some-odd years. The best people you've got can only cite frauds, falsehoods and fallacies.

I would normally point you to Bible, study His text. But I can see your point. If you denounce God, you wont find Bible (to be) the truth.
You did not answer my question. Is the Bhagavad Gita evidence of Lord Krishna? Are the Avestas of Zarathustra evidence of the Righteous Lord, Ahura-Mazda? The Adi-Granth of the Sikhs and the Qur'an of Islam both claim to be the revealed word of the one true god, and both of them say that your religion is not the true path. Are any or all of these scriptures evidence that your religion is wrong? Or are they all just empty claims like the Bible is, and not facts in evidence after all? The choice is yours. Which is it?

I hope you're at least wrong here. But yes God created everything before man. But no billions were involved.
Again, you're making baseless assertions of things that are not evidently true and you're denying reality to do it. For centuries, science-minded Christians have devised many ways to know and confirm that the earth is indeed ancient, and that the universe is vastly older than this planet. I could give you several specifics, but I'll spare you the history lesson unless you ask.

Slaves? Maybe in Old Testament, barbaric time needs barbaric laws. But at least you need to accept that New Testament is beautiful word of love.
The edicts for how to buy, sell, keep, release and brutalize slaves are all in your so-called "commandments". So these were not a product of "barbaric times", they were allegedly commanded by your god. Somehow he could forbid people from eating shrimp, working on weekends or wearing cotton-polyester blends, but he couldn't stop slavery. Instead he permitted, promoted and COMMANDED slavery, as well as all manner of evil even including molesting of traumatized children after you butcher their whole family in front of them. The Bible is full of evil, barbaric stupidity.

Bible is not talking about science. Bible is illustrating the divine so even the simplest person could understand it. You may see it as "wrong statements", but you can see Bible as textbook. You don't put quantum mechanic into the textbook for primary school.
But everything the Bible says about science wrong! The Bible was written by grossly ignorant superstitious idiots who thought that if you use a magic wand to sprinkle blood all over someone, it will cure them of leprosy. These folks believed that the earth was flat and bigger than the sun! They thought that if you display striped patterns to cattle while they're mating that they'll bear striped calves. How could anyone say that who knows anything about genetics?

AronRa said:
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.
R.D said:
His disciples for start?
You should know that the gospels erroneously attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were not written by those people, right? Mark was written between 65 and 75 on the Gregorian calendar. Assuming that all these characters really existed and that they were the same age as your Jesus, then Mark was written well after most people of that time would have died. And that's the earliest gospel! Matthew and Luke weren't written until another decade later, and John was written and revised and the revision published well beyond any human lifetime back then. Scholars admit that all of these were written anonymously, NOT by eyewitnesses. Why don't you refer me to the Gospel of Thomas? Scholars say that could have been written earlier than any of these others.

Not only Bible is talking about miracle of resurrection.
The Bible contains the only mention of Jesus as a living person, but there were other half-human god-men including a few dying and rising gods who came before your Jesus. Some of them have profound similarities, like Prometheus for example.

I've got your book (Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism). I'll read it once I have enough free time (presumably weekend).
Thank you. I'd be interested to hear your critique.

I think truth is the most important thing. Why would I believe if it wasn't truth? There must be some scientist who could prove my position even to you.
No, even Christian scientists all agree with me. Some of the pioneers and current champions of evolution have been and are Christian. But they're not creationists, and they're not reality-denying Biblical literalists either. Prof. Kenneth Miller PhD is a textbook author on evolutionary studies and the star witness in defense of evolution in the Kitzmiller v Dover trial. He is a friend of mine who explains evolution beautifully, but he is also a traditional Catholic. Dr. Francis Collins, Director the National Institute of Health is an Evangelical Christian. He was also Director the Human Genome Project. In his pro-evolution book The Language of Science and Faith, Collins and his co-author announced that “unfortunately” the concepts of Adam and Eve as the literal first couple and the ancestors of all humans simply “do not fit the evidence.” Another Evangelical, Dennis Venema, a senior fellow of BioLogos and a biologist at Trinity Western University, firmly states that there is no way we can be traced back to a single couple. He says with the mapping of the human genome, it’s clear that modern humans emerged from other primates as a large population—long before the Genesis time frame of a few thousand years ago.

I looked it up, and you're correct. It's actually amazing. So maybe the soul allows us to feel the divine, connect with God. There must be some reason for soul.
Once again, there is no such thing as a soul. All of that is literally just hot air.

I don't know, I feel like I'm losing my ground inch by inch.
Your position is indefensible. That's why Christians trained in relevant scientific fields like geology, zoology, paleontology and genetics are not creationists. Creationism is a rejection of science and does not work with it.

I asked him and this is his answer (I'll try to translate it):
"[...] You can find answer in the Bible. Some things we can know, some things only God know. Pray and He'll reveal the truth for you. [...] Do not speak with atheists, they are liars who only trying to deceive."

I want to agree with him, but everything you say makes sense. I'm feeling bad, like I'm doing something wrong just by speaking with you. Maybe God is giving me the sign? Maybe the elder is right? But then why is it making sense? I tried to pray, but I don't know.
Of course I say that he is the liar, and there are a few ways we can prove that. First, notice that I asked you to ask him each of these questions individually, and to tell me which ones he answered no. Y'all didn't do that. Instead, he lumped them all together and said that he said he knew the answer but that he wouldn't tell you, which means he doesn't really know the answer at all. He knows that I do know the answer, and he warned you not to talk to me because he doesn't want you to learn forbidden knowledge. That's because your entire belief system is a house of cards built on lies and there is no more to it than that.

I looked up those species and they look similar enough. So I would say "yes" to all answers.
Creationists often say they'll accept microevolution, the emergence of new varieties within a species, but they reject macroevolution, which is variation between species, at or above the species level. This includes speciation itself, "the origin of species" that Darwin wrote about. The chart I showed you was not of sub-species. Every one of those was at least a species level division up to higher taxonomic groupings. So most of these cannot interbreed to produce even infertile hybrids anymore. Some felines can hybridize with other felines. Some panthers can hybridize with other panthers. But you can't breed a leopard (panther) with a cougar (feline) because they have grown too far apart. But genomic sequence comparisons prove that they biologically-related as shown below. Since you accept the evidence that all of these are in fact related, then you accept mAcroevolution, where (as the chart shows) what would become panthers diverged from what would become felines over 10 million years ago, according to the molecular clock of averaged significant mutation rates.

An interesting note, Neofelis, the Clouded Leopard is another example of a transitional species, not just because it is karyotypic of the base of Panthers and Felines, but because it also represents a link between modern cats and the extinct scimitar cats, what you would know as the "saber toothed tiger". Not coincidentally, the clouded leopard has the longest fangs proportionately of any cat that is still alive.

1611160657172.png
The "saber toothed tiger" (Smilodon fatalis) is not a tiger at all. It is one of several species of extinct cats in a third group called machairodonts (scimitar cats). The first ones appear in the fossil record about 16 million years ago and the biggest and most famous of them (Smilodon) died out about 11,000 years ago. We don't have their DNA, but we can tell they were at least as distinct from modern cats as panthers and felines are to each other. Then there are nimravids, "almost cats". They're a much older group of several species (two are pictured below) appearing nearly 40 million years ago, and lasting until about 7 million years ago. They looked very much like scimitar cats and were perilously close to what true cats are, only lacking a minor modification in the inner ear to make them proper cats.

1611209910051.png

Since we don't have nimravid DNA either, we compare fossil morphology to classify Nimravidae between Felidae and Vivirridae. Now look at Viverrids, a group that includes meerkats, bearcats and civet-cats, none of which are actually cats but all have cat-like traits. These still exist and are a beautiful, adorable example of transitional species, being unmistakably cat-like but not-quite cats. Now look at hyenas. There are four remaining species, where the fossil record held fifty more. Genetically, it has been confirmed that hyenas are actually derived from African civets.

Carnivora.png
This chart was taken from a peer-reviewed scientific paper on "Molecular Phylogeny of the Carnivora (Mammalia): Assessing the Impact of Increased Sampling on Resolving Enigmatic Relationships".

The dog-side of the Carnivora family tree is just as closely-related and equally supported by genetic orthologues and fossil transitions, including bear-dogs and dog-bears and bear-like walking seals that aren't quite bears anymore and not fully seals yet either, but somewhere between. The further back you go, the more similar each lineage becomes until they're indistinguishable from each other, where they all look like wolverines or raccoons even if they're different from any modern species. Once you get to the base of the Carnivoran family tree, you get to Miacids, which look like genets, but they also look like weasel-dogs or would-be dogs that haven't yet lost their retractable claws that this whole group used to have. So we know from two different lines of evidence exactly how dogs were derived from the same ancestors as those who also begat cats.

1611163945901.png

I study evolution, paleontology and particularly phylogenetic taxonomy because I find it all absolutely fascinating. There is so MUCH to it! A vast network of intricate relationships, all indisputably real and meaningful.

- And concerning dinosaurs
You were right, I was wrong. There is so many information about them, I didn't even know.
I'm sorry I was just trying to find something (anything, any instance) where you were wrong. Because you can't be right, otherwise my life's work is false.
I'm sorry that your life's work has been the promotion and perpetuation of lies. Had you been raised as a moderate Christian, this wouldn't be an issue for you. But religious extremism like Biblical literalist Young Earth Creationism requires that you deny or ignore certain facts, which cause the whole thing to come crashing down once you pull the blinders off and discover reality. So let me put you in touch with the Clergy Project. It's a group that helps priests and imams and such when they realize they no longer believe any of this nonsense anymore, but the only careers they've ever had were preaching things they now know not to be true at all. I'm sure they can help you.
 
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@R. D. you are on a cross road, if you go straightforward nothing changes your faith stays the same. If you go left you accept that the Bible is not 100% but you still believe, but you accept the science we have as humanity. If you turn right you are an Atheist and you drop your believe. Only you can choose you now know about dinosaurs, why you looked it up and had no idea. Its the same with Evolution you need to study it, it’s fascinating that all live is connected. Even if God exist (i’m an Atheist btw) Evolution would still be true, but would God not know if he seeded live here on Earth what would happen. Take the Phylogeny Challenge the correct way don’t talk about believe only about the Phylogeny Challenge. The people that made name in science most are Christian does people believed but did science.
 
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some things (like the Divine) can be only felt by heart
I felt to address this, because I think I can explain why we need to reject this without even considering it.
I was 30 years old when I saw the animation Toy Story 3. I genuinely cried at one point. I bet you know the feeling, most likely you too were sad, scared, relieved when watching a movie. Looks like not only we can feel something genuine based on illusions, but we actually want to.
If it is so easy to fool ourselves into feeling real things based on fantasy, than how can we ever trust what we feel by heart?

Then we go back to the lying accusations. We catch liars usually too late, when the "real" truth is revealed. Whenever we are lying to ourselves we might not even realize it. And we do it quite a lot. Movies are pretty much a safe space, we can lie ourselves into feeling something genuine.

If the Divine can be only felt by heart that is a great problem and such feelings need to be ignored. You may say that in the Divine case, is a different, unique emotion....doesn't matter. We have to look out for our feelings, just in case somebody sometime manipulated us.
So this is why appeals to emotion will be rejected and should be rejected by those who are really looking for what is true.
 
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nicely done, kudos to all the scientists in this discussion. a few off topic runs and a few overly harsh reviews of RD, but generally a well rounded refutation of his arguments.

He was an amateur though. I'd love to see "elder" take the phylogeny challenge.
 
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I asked him and this is his answer (I'll try to translate it):
"[...] You can find answer in the Bible. Some things we can know, some things only God know. Pray and He'll reveal the truth for you. [...] Do not speak with atheists, they are liars who only trying to deceive."

I want to agree with him, but everything you say makes sense. I'm feeling bad, like I'm doing something wrong just by speaking with you. Maybe God is giving me the sign? Maybe the elder is right? But then why is it making sense? I tried to pray, but I don't know.

That's very sad to see, but is wholly expected. It's how otherwise good people protect their bad ideas from scrutiny; cognitive bias. From an outside perspective, you'd quickly see how poor this is as an answer.

Imagine, for example, that you were talking to a believer in Hinduism to try to get them to understand what you think is the 'truth' of Christianity, and their response was not to engage in the substance of your speech, but to instead attempt to label you as bad and thus, by association, all that you say is bad. I think you'd readily identify why that's a failed approach - the example Hindu in this case has closed their mind to inquiry; they don't want to know, they just want to be right even when that sense of being 'right' involves ignoring anything that challenges their beliefs.

I'm afraid to say that your elder is suffering a paucity of curiosity. Even if there is a god, and even if that god happens to be the exact one portrayed in the Bible, then the Bible doesn't tell us how 'he' created life, only that 'he' did. So your elder doesn't know how God created life, just believes that it is so. Even if your God exists, then the way God created life is through evolution -'he' made a universe in which evolution can occur.
 
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