The debate-thread can be found here.
Well, thanks for the reply, Bryan. Just to briefly document the process this is going through, I've started reading this and writing the first words of a reply on 19.04.2012 at 18:17. A second attempt has started on July 2nd, 2012, (designated area) at roughly 18:00 and is continuing through the 3rd, now the 4th. All labels are to be taken as gender neutral.
One thing I'd ask of you the next time, Bryan, is to not replace "and" by "&". At least for me, it makes for distracted reading, it makes it difficult to find quotes and I always get this nagging feeling that some edit has been made to the quote. It also seems to me that this practice might take quite some time?!
For the sake of convenience of the readers, I've given every point I'm making a small heading.
Bible health benefits
You start your introduction by once again pointing out the health benefits that apparently stem directly from the Bible. Let me point out a couple of things here:
1) As explained before, at most three of the blue zones but realistically only one of them are Christian in any meaningful sense to this discussion. (Namely the Adventists of Loma Linda.) It seems to me highly subjective to look only at the Adventists and say "Look how grand the Bible is." Instead, I suggest that we look at all of them and conclude that the reasons for longevity are not found in the Bible, instead they were written into the Bible because of the pre-found knowledge of the people at the time. To make this simple: Not God is the reason, Man is.
2) Many of the things people do to keep fit are not mentioned in the Bible, while some things mentioned make no sense when it comes to health what so ever. For example, your article suggests that SDAs completely abstain from alcohol, yet red wine has beneficial anti-oxidizing functions. Or take the ban against lobster on the other side. That may have been a good law at the time, but it's certainly outdated now.
3) Black-and-white thinking. This is what I touched upon with "red wine" issue above: The Bible paints a very black and white picture of the world, even though there are many shades of Gray in between. The dose makes the poison, right? I haven't heard of a single instance where one turkey or one pork chop were harmful. It's this black and white thinking in the Bible that has no impact on health whatsoever and also prohibits temporary indulgences aka fun.
Two-question worldview
Moving swiftly along, you suggest that we should ask two questions to determine our worldview. I'd largely agree on the first, but would add that it should be congruent with reality.
On the second question though, I wholly disagree. First, that would immediately disregard any worldview that does not include an afterlife. Since you've chosen to ignore that atheism is not a worldview, I must suspect that this is what you're getting at.
Second, what can you truly say about an afterlife? Can you even prove that there is one? I doubt it. Speculations about an afterlife are, at least when determining ones view on the world, utterly meaningless. I'd go further and suggest that they're entirely meaningless, but that's not relevant here.
Carl Sagan, the level six atheist
A little later, you quote Carl Sagans: "An atheist has to know a lot more than I know."
This is one of the very few times I must disagree with Carl Sagan. If we go by the Dawkins Scale of Belief, then Carl Sagan was a six, which is the same as most atheists believe. Carl Sagan was talking about a "level seven" atheist, something one will encounter very rarely indeed.
This is sometimes called a "Tooth Fairy Agnostic" or a "99% atheist", which all boils down to the same thing: I can not know for sure, but there is not enough evidence, if there is any at all, to persuade me that I should believe in a God.
Naturalism vs following the evidence?
In the Intro to your Intro, you provide us with two possibilities and, this I have to assume, suggest that position B is the atheistic/materialistic position. What you're doing though is completely disregard what I said in this post of the "What evidence would you accept?" thread, by claiming that we demand "higher standards of evidence" for ideas we have an inherent "bias against". But I already showed that you're misusing that quote, that "extraordinary evidence" doesn't mean "different evidence", it simply means "evidence proportional to the claim". I gave the example of neutrinos going faster than light vs my daily dietary habits. In the latter case, it would be sufficient for me to state that I ate X and you would immediately believe it. In the former case, me simply stating it would not make you accept it, because it is such an extraordinary claim. You would expect me to provide tonnes of very solid evidence to back up my claim and if I failed to produce said evidence, you would rightly dismiss my claim as absurd. The same happens with regard to you claiming the existence of God.
What you fail to understand then, is that methodological naturalism makes no a priori assumptions it has to stick with, as I showed in my very first reply to you, when I said the following:
Our observation is that we can learn about the universe, which strongly suggests that the universe is natural, because otherwise we wouldn't be able to learn about it. If there is evidence of a single time when the laws of nature were actually suspended, then Methodological Naturalism (MN) would immediately be rejected. So in summary: There is no inherent bias to MN, there are no traditions, "extraordinary claims" DO require "extraordinary evidence" and both positions you described (A and B) are actually the same, even though you wanted to twist the latter to be something it's not.
Rupert Sheldrake nonsense
I've already addressed the issue in the psychologytoday article above, so I won't address that specific article. The last words to be spoken on that issue will be left to David Hume:
"No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony be of such kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish" (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 'Of Miracles' 1748).
On the subject of Rupert Sheldrake though, I stopped watching the video at exactly 1:33. There's evidence of telepathy? Really?
The only thing I will say on the subject of Sheldrake is this: His hypotheses have been disproved in the peer-reviewed literature by a number of scientists and his research methodology could be described as "sloppy" at best. It is therefore no wonder that he would do everything to discredit the underlying theory behind it. Which in itself is surprising, because he was using just that when he thought he could prove his hypotheses. Isn't that odd?
Materialism vs Methodological Naturalism
You lay out an attack on "materialism" and suggest that we don't judge Christianity by different standards than we would other ideas.
The first one is a straw-man and the second has already been dealt with above. I won't repeat my above quote from Hume.
Now as to the straw-man of materialism. I don't accept materialism and neither do basically any scientists today. Instead, we accept empiricism, naturalism (especially methodological naturalism) and, related to materialism but not being quite the same, physicalism.
As I've already shown before, methodological naturalism does not adhere to any a priori axioms, but instead one acts as if physicalism were true, i.e. supernatural explanations are not per se excluded, but would have to be proven true first to make someone reject methodological naturalism. And that's basically the point of this debate: Is the case of the Bible, that there is a God with specific attributes, justified or not?
You're trying to end this debate by suggesting that we accept a supernatural agent from the outset, which perversely is something you yourself reject. Because if we don't accept said supernatural agent, then we must start from a physicalist perspective and wait for evidence of a supernatural agent. Which, as I will argue, has not yet been the case.
There's another problem here, too: If not methodological naturalism, which philosophy should one adopt to make sense of the world? Until proven otherwise, I hold that methodological naturalism and the related theories mentioned above are the only ones that can help us make sense of the world. I guess this will come up at some point in this discussion, so let me stop these ideas in their infancy: The Transcendental Argument fails.
Here starts day 2.
Active Church Participation
You're missing the point of these studies. The point here is that these benefits arise from participating in Church life, which means the benefits (if there really are any, and that is up for dispute) come not from following a particular life style, at least not in this case, but from group mentality. To my knowledge this isn't well studied at all, but I'd suggest the following: If you were to survey a group of people who all did the same activity, say hiking or doing Tai-Chi, and who were also atheists or agnostics, you'd find the same pattern emerging that you, or rather Neil McQueen, suggest for Church goers.
It's incredibly easy to study this pattern in Church goers because you will always find a very homogeneous group of people, while the reverse is true of atheists. I don't know of an "atheist Tai-Chi" class or any other related godless group that could be studied in such a way, so studies that don't account for that will always have an inherent amount of error. This is also the same problem I have with studies that compare a group of people who care about their health in some way or another, like vegetarians in general, with the populous at large who obviously don't care about their health as much. Is it really surprising that a person who cares about their health is healthier than a bloke who munches a burger with fries and a large coke for every meal? Compare vegetarians in general with any group of meat-eating people who also care about their health and I'll almost guarantee that the differences will entirely disappear or even be slightly reversed.
Note: I draw the above conclusions (that the differences are due to group activity instead of following any one doctrine) because it doesn't matter to which religion you adhere, the benefits are always there.
For example, this study (N=98,975) suggests that religiosity is responsible for "mild" benefits, but no specific religion is mentioned, as does this one, this one (Religion's effects ... generally protective, but modest in strength) and most importantly, this one:
"Even though most studies have been conducted in the United States in Christian populations, in the last few years several of the main findings have been replicated in samples from different countries and religions."
This is just a small sample of mostly meta-studies (see large sample size), and only ones concerned with religiosity's link to mental health, there are virtually thousands of individual studies on this subject and related ones. The outcome is always the same: It's not any one particular religion that gives alleged benefits, it's religion in general. Whether you're Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian or any other religion, you will always "reap these benefits". But as I already explained above, that's not really a fair sampling at all.
I'd also like to point out that you cherry-pick your studies. You suggest that "Belief in God" improves moral behaviour. Apart from the obvious mentioned above, other studies disagree.
The most interesting thing I've found, and this really was interesting to me, was that out of the tens, maybe hundreds of studies I read on this topic, about 2/5ths find a positive correlation between religion and morality, 2/5ths find a negative correlation and 1/5th suggests no correlation either way. All other topics (benefits in marriage and psychology, drug use, etc.) were all fairly clear.
Is the Bible the same one the early Christians received?
Simple answer, no. It can't be "the same" due to translations, there will always be slightly different versions. For example, taking a random verse ((Job 9:6) from the Bible, we can clearly see the slight differences. But OK, your point is that the Bible is in its essence still the same. But is that really so?
Out of the 24,200 manuscripts for the New Testament, there are an alleged 400,000+ "variations". These variations are merely minor mistakes, left out letters/words, duplicate lines, etc. They can be safely said to be of no importance to this investigation. However, there seem to be more serious alterations and changes. For example, Bart D. Ehrmann (though he has been criticized, this was the only book I could find that even discusses the issue) suggests that early Biblical revisions tended to purposefully de-emphasize the role of women, to unify conflicting portrayals of Jesus and so on. He even suggests that Jesus's divinity goes back to these revisions. What a shocker!
But let's suggest that they're actually all from within 75 years of the alleged events. What would that suggest? Well, nothing really. For example, one of the most muddied battles in all of history was surely Waterloo. In his book Les mensonges de Waterloo, Bernard Coppens documents the various differences that have arisen between the different accounts of the Battle. A battle that was fought out not even 200 years ago. This is just an example to show that if there is a big enough incentive, there will always be alterations.
For example, we know that there has been at least one revision regarding the King of Ugarit around 3500 years ago:
I suggest the following: What we should find, if the Bible were the one true word of God, would be absolutely no revisions at all, it should be "dominant everywhere in the world with no predecessors or parallels or alternatives in any language, because mere human authors couldn't possibly compete with it." The above is merely one of the more obvious revisions and it directly contradicts your idea that "The Bible is still the same".
Most laughable claims for truth
On quoting Simon Greenleaf, your most laughable claims for the Bible's "truth value" arise. Are you seriously suggesting that, just because a bunch of Christians would rather let themselves be murdered than give up their faith, this is serious "proof that the Bible is true"? Reading that red passage, that's what it suggests to me. I must ask again: Is my analysis correct or not?
If it is correct, this really is the most laughable claim yet. Have you never heard of Muslim martyrs (e.g. Abbas al-Musawi), Buddhist martyrs (e.g. Thich Quang Duc), the Samurai and so on and so forth. Not one of them wavered in his/her belief, all of them died for it. There are literally thousands of examples from each religion, every one of them as stupid as the one you cite. Martyrdom is not a sign of the truth of a religion, it's either a sign of the insanity of the religion or of the person, nothing more.
Miracles
Your next claim regards miracles of Jesus and how they could not possibly have been tricks or illusions. I've skipped the videos entirely, all of them in fact, as they're not likely to add anything relevant to this discussion. (And I already have enough to check with the tens of links and misquotes you use, plus of course your roughly 60k words) It is a fact that magicians (you misspelt André Kole, by the way) have replicated tricks like walking on water, turn water into wine and so on.
Before I remind you of a supposed miracle, let's quickly take a test. Done? Good. Now remember, you were probably fooled on that test. The message: If someone's trying to fool you and you're not vigilant, they will most likely succeed. Now why do I bring this up? Well, people were most probably duped by Jesus. (Or people who wanted Jesus to be an important figure.) For example, consider the "Cova da Iria in Fatima" story, told here and re-told and examined in "The God Delusion":
If André Kole really suggests that none of the tricks could be repeated then he's either a poor magician (which he's not) or a damn liar or he's simply never tried it.
Atheists for religion
I already had my doubts when you quoted the first three atheists, let me just say I think they're wrong on most things. To give merely one example, much of Christian charity is severely mismanaged. But when you quoted Richard Dawkins, I knew something must be up. I can't log into the original Times article, so I'll have to take "Ibloga"'s word for it.
The header is misleading at best: Richard Dawkins does not dread a non-Christian world, he just dreads a "no Christians, yes Muslims" more than one with "yes Christians, yes Muslims". That's not at all surprising, you've got two evils cancelling each other out here. What he's for though is a "no Christians, no Muslims" world. You're de facto quoting someone who says "Christians are not as bad as Muslims" as "Christians are cool".
In this section, part 5, you claim that the abolition of slavery was... due?... to Christians challenging the status quo. Now as I've said before I've studied (and then stopped studying) History at the University of Vienna and I've now taken some time to read up on it again, but I can't find anything suggesting that the anti-slavery movement consisted of only or even particularly outspoken Christians, nor that this was in any way based on the Bible. Maybe theyounghistorian77 can confirm? In fact, the whole idea of a Christian talking about ending slavery is absurd to the highest degree!
Leviticus 25:44-46
Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly.
Ephesians 5:6
Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.
1 Timothy 6:1-2
All who are under the yoke of slavery should consider their masters worthy of full respect, so that God's name and our teaching may not be slandered. Those who have believing masters should not show them disrespect just because they are fellow believers. Instead, they should serve them even better because their masters are dear to them as fellow believers and are devoted to the welfare of their slaves.
And so on and so forth. The whole idea of abolishing slavery is deeply contrary to Biblical literalism! Just a bit of comedy on the side: Swedish atheist comedian in a church
Let's also not forget that the one power no Christian is to challenge, no matter how morally wrong, is God itself! So why don't you follow your own advice of standing up to bigotry and stand up to God?
Your list on the Nazis also reeks of cherry-picking.
For example, many high-ranking Church officials were responsible for the Ratlines. Contrary to Einstein's comments (which have been addressed by theyounghistorian77), Pope Pius XII and his Church have been described as a mere envoy to Nazi Germany.
I'll let theyounghistorian77 speak.
One last thing though, something I've been trying very hard to teach you but which you've consistently overlooked: There is a difference between a person doing something because of X and a person doing something who also happens to be X.
Day 3
Accusations of misrepresentation
You reprimand me for misrepresenting you, yet you yourself are misrepresenting me, while I was not. Isn't that odd? Boy, that sure reminds me of someone...
That was my very last paragraph, when I'd already shown all of your other claims to be in error. Let me rephrase what I said, maybe you'll understand then:
"Even though everything you claim is evidence has been show to be wrong, you'll still believe it because you want to believe. Worse than that, you'll actually fabricate so called "evidence" just to suit your beliefs. In other words: You're making stuff up, yo!"
If there is evidence, you don't need any bias any way because you'll follow the evidence where it leads. You don't do that. You have a predisposition to believe what you want because it makes you feel good. It's Pascal's wager all over again. Tell me, would you rather believe and be wrong than not believe and be right? Because that's what I'm reading from you. It's also what I've showed you from other posts (look for purple font), that's what not only "so many" but actually ALL Bible-literalists (and indeed all holy-scripture literalists) have to believe, because there is no way to "defend" your dogma any other way.
Atheism is emotion-based?
I'm at a loss for words here. You know how just above I admonished you for making stuff up? This here is a prime example. Now I take it you're talking of Sir Julian Sorell Huxley here and not his grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley, correct? Because that would make even less sense than what you're doing now. But from what I can find, he wasn't an atheist at all and even suggested that completely abandoning religion wouldn't be a good thing. No other Huxley that I know of were promiscuous.
Misquoting me again?
You go on to suggest that I presuppose Methodological Naturalism, even though I've already specifically explained that in my very first post! I said that it comes closest to it, but I also stated that it would be a serious oversimplification. I showed you my two pre-suppositions and the conclusion one must draw from those two. I've so far had to repeat myself in every one of my replies to you, so this will be the absolute last time I correct you on this matter.
Faith and Evidence
You suggest that you have evidence and that your faith is based on evidence, but I've already told you that you fail every possible barrier of evidence. All of your so-called evidence can be shown to rely on out-of-date, out-of-context or simply made up quotes and information. I've many times said that all your cries of "my belief is based on evidence" will go unnoticed until you can actually show there to be evidence. A person can claim that he's no child molester all he wants, but if he's consistently found to be raping children then nobody will take him seriously. A person can claim to be on a diet, but if he's found with candy in his mouth, nobody will believe him. And just the same, a person can claim to have based his position of evidence, but if his evidence is found to be made up, flimsy or not necessitating his belief, then...
Christianity and the No-true-Scotsman fallacy
This is a double-standard if I've ever seen one. You readily decry somebody for not adhering to Christianity and call them non-Christians, yet at the same time you use their "contributions" to promote your cause.
I'd also like to point out that it's extremely difficult to asses what "being a Christian" means, because there are so many different denominations. A Christian, by most definitions I've seen, is a person who lives his life by the teachings of a man called Jesus. It doesn't carry any of the baggage you would have it contain. By the standards of Jehovas Whitnesses, you're not a Christian. By the standards of many Catholics, you're a Christian, but a bad one. By the standards of Biblical literalism, so basically suggesting that you're only a Christian if you follow the Bible word for word, you're not a Christian and neither is anyone else on earth.
You also suggest that the benefits of Christianity outweigh the harm. I'm inclined to disagree quite a bit with that statement, but that's not even at the focus of this discussion so I'll disregard it. The question is: Is there an evidence-based system that has a better case than Christianity/the Bible? And the answer to that is "yes, there are quite a few".
Eternal life
1) I already explained why eternal life can never be a good thing, that only an ending life gives meaning. Why should I want something that clearly can't make me happy?
2) So there's free will... but there isn't?
3) There's no sin nor death, so how can I die? Your "eternal life" isn't making a lot of sense.
4) Are you suggesting that if there were no God, which there isn't, then humans wouldn't be able to do good? Because once again, your "want to believe" shines through. You want to have eternal life and you want justification to do good because you can't think of any other reason to be good except by being forced (by God) to be good.
5) So God is incapable of dealing with humans in any other way other than killing them? Even though the death penalty has been shown to have little deterrence effect?
6) At least I won't be bored to death.
Correlation does not imply causation
It really doesn't, you should read up on that. What you're suggesting is that IF a causation does exist and IF there is a correlation, then... well, then what? It's obvious that they're linked and I have absolutely no problems with that. The fallacy you've been making is to show that there IS a correlation but no causation. The most prominent example comes from the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. (Blessed be his noodly appendage, Ramen!)
Heck, you yourself list examples where correlation does not imply causation. (That beautiful graphic "Correlation or Causation?") You showed it yourself, so why don't you accept what you yourself already proved?
Soft tissue......... WAIT, WHAT? SOFT TISSUE AGAIN??? Aw come on...
No, seriously, this can't be true. AronRa has already debunked that silly claim, not once, not twice, but actually three times just in one thread. It's also been discussed and rejected in his peanut gallery thread.
Atheism is not rational
So you suggest that atheism should be more rational and explain more than Christianity, but you forget that atheism is the null hypothesis. The position here is that we accepted Christianity/Islam/whatever due to false reasons. Now that these reasons have been shown to be false, we should revert to the null hypothesis.
Don't make truth a slave... and stuff
We don't need to know "how God did miracles or how He created the earth" because we already know how the earth was formed: By natural mechanisms. This isn't up for debate either, it's a fact and every snotty-nosed kid with a high-school geography textbook can prove it, too. We even have a vague idea of how the Universe came into "being", (what an ugly word for something that isn't a being nor was there really any "existence" so that's not useful either...) so we don't need to invoke God for that, either. As I'm sure has been pointed out before, yours is a God of the gaps, nothing more. In this case it's even a "God of the gaps-no-more", so why you're invoking one is baffling, to say the least.
I'm also not sure of a single case any one of us ever mentioned or of any case that is at all relevant to this discussion or indeed of any case period, where a scientists suggested that something didn't exist simply because we didn't understand it. Your example of Ignaz Semmelweis has issues other than "scientists ignoring stuff" at its core, errors (of his supporters) being one, the "insignificance" of the field being a second and political ones being the third.
Further on, you suggest that there is indeed evidence for other religions (including "false religions", whatever that may be) but that they're not true because they don't have the "weight of the evidence" on their side. I'll just point out to you that they'll use the exact same evidence you use for yours, and that yours has already been shown to be wrong.
Bible literalism
No, God does NOT need to reach us through some "imperfect human language", that's exactly the point I was trying to make. I'll once again quote AronRa's most excellent Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism:
The Bible is, contrary to what Dawkins says, an incredible dung-heap. It's a boring read, half of it could be thrown out without anyone noticing anything (think genealogies here, with all the begetting going on) and the rest of it is trivial, evil or wrong. Any modern person could have written a better book in less than two hundred pages, as indeed somebody did.
Now since you're so confident that most of it is so easy to explain, care to tell me which of these is to be taken literally and which isn't? Or what about this list, this list, this one, that one, this next one, this one or finally this one?
Day 4
And if this book of yours is so great, then why does it have stuff like "an eye for an eye" in it? Why doesn't it have cool stuff like this in it:
No! Instead it goes on and on and on about who you should kill and who you should buy as a slave and what you should eat (even though some of it is gross and unhealthy) and who you should have sex with.
Establishments of Truth
I write Truth with a capital T because you're referring to "ultimate truth" here instead of a statement that is true. Let me stop you right there and point out that I've never seen anything that would make me think there's one ultimate truth and that if there is, humans probably can't comprehend it. "Wrong" is relative, and so is Truth!
I've already explained in a different thread why I disagree with the idea of NOMA, but since you also disagree there's no reason to go into this.
What I do object though is your Venn Diagram. No, not for any obvious reasons. I simply reject your positioning of history as outside of science! History IS a field of science, the scientific method is applied here too.
Bible evidence... at last?
You claim that the Bible got so incredibly many things (science stuff) right that it couldn't possibly have been written by bronze-aged herd-dwellers, at least not without guidance. But I already gave you a list of things that are wrong in the Bible, limiting myself just to the scientific aspects here for a second and not going into contradictions. So how can you possibly claim that the Bible contains so much wisdom when it clearly doesn't? In fact, the "wisdom" it does contain can be found in every other scientific source of that time. I had a talk with a guy about the concept Pi some time ago and he claimed that if you grant that Kings 7:23-26 speaks of the inner circumference instead of the outer, then Pi was calculated to a greater precision than any other scientific source of that time. I was easily able to show him that, even if I grant his silly suppositions, better approximations of Pi were already available hundreds of years before that time.
I'll also quickly point out that "pragmatic evidence" doesn't necessarily mean something's correct. All of your listing of pragmatic "evidence", even though 99% of it can be shown to rely on false presuppositions, wouldn't sway me one bit toward the Bible.
You claim that "[o]nly God could give such incredible wisdom in such a perfect mix", but I already showed that much of the Bible can be discarded as utterly irrelevant, much of the Bible is dead wrong, much of the Bible is trivial and only very small portions are actually improvements over the wisdom of the ages. In all the 66 Books of the Bible, is there ever as much wisdom as in the Gospel of the FSM, the Book of Midgets/Midgits, Chapter 4, Verses 32-35, when It says:
"Loyal subjects. The concept of holy war and wasting peoples lives in my name is a major bummer. I will not allow it. You must therefore resolve your differences by my way of choosing. I therefore decree that you shall resolve the issue in a series of televised taunting and verbal slanging matches."
Instead, here's how one can describe your God:
"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."
Is that truly a perfect God? I doubt it.
You claim that "no other nation in history without the influence of the Bible developed a comprehensive system of principles as valuable as God gave in the Bible". Ignoring for a second that I (and countless others) have already exposed your God to be a no-good bully, I can prove to you that "your" Golden Principle was already around for far longer, the Bible simply copied it. To use merely the Bhagavad Gita as an example:
"One should never do that to another which one regards as injurious to one's own self. This, in brief, is the rule of dharma. Other behavior is due to selfish desires."
,Brihaspati, Mahabharata (Anusasana Parva, Section CXIII, Verse 8)
But I'll go further than that and suggest that the Golden Rule is actually a crappy version, if it was indeed made up by a divine being. Shaw reminded us:
"Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same"
and Popper refined the idea:
"The golden rule is a good standard which is further improved by doing unto others, wherever reasonable, as they want to be done by"
And before you say "but how can I know what somebody else wants", remember that Popper said "wherever reasonable".
The big challenge
You propose a challenge in section 2, point 7, wherein you ask me to produce another society with better laws/rules/regulations and so on. But if you only understood history, you'd understand why that's a futile task. I once again recommend Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. In it, he powerfully argues why European societies (and not others) could proliferate and survive. Spoiler alert: It has nothing to do with religion. If you're not willing to buy the book, then at least read the (incredibly good) Wikipedia article on it or if you're up for it, read the pdf version.
Once you've done that, you might understand why your challenge is a bad one. Don't misunderstand me, it's not at all an impossible challenge, it's simply one that has absolutely no meaning.
"Millions of people... willing to hurt others in their pain"
Just under your many (and may I point out, unnecessary) music videos, you list something that, if I read it correctly, and I think I did, really shocked me. Here's the quote in full:
Scroll through the notes in the song above & see how many people have been lifted from despair by this song. Then multiply that by millions & think hard about whether you'd like millions of people angry about injustice & willing to hurt others in their pain (as many criminals, including non-Christians have done due to having such great difficulties in this life) or people with an attitude that they can overcome the troubles & that even if they have troubles in this life, God has something much better for them.
I'd like readers to think about this paragraph very hard and only open the spoiler-box when they've found what shocks me.
Day 5
You go on about happiness, but may I remind you that:
"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." -George Bernard Shaw
Marriage rates
You claim that belief in general and Christian belief specifically benefits in (the stability of) a marriage. But I've already shown before that this is a simplistic view at best and simply wrong at worst.
For example, the research group you yourself cited before, the Barna Research Group, showed that Atheists and Agnostics are among the least likely to get a divorce. Here's the thing though, neither of the research you show nor the one I quoted above is rigorous, I'm simply quoting it to show that your own sources disagree!
The problem with this kind of research is that many non-believers simply don't get married, they will "only" live together. The next question is, are they couples with one (non)-religion or with two? What constitutes a Christian, what a born-again and so on? In almost all of these studies, you can find an inherent bias just in their methodology description, which is the reason why their results are all over the place.
Religion improves you
I've already talked about the psychology of religion and why the whole group-attitude might be the cause of these so-called benefits. What really annoys me though is that you claim the Bible said something way before science, something that is incredibly obvious by the way, but you don't take a second to look at older books such as the Bhagavad Gita and see that it said the same thing hundreds of years before the Bible. In fact, it's even better than the Bible!
Take a look at 1 Thessalonians 5:18. Why should we give thanks? Because it is the will of Jesus. Well screw the will of Jesus, is there any other reason, perhaps?
The Bhagavad Gita says: "Whatever I am offered in devotion with a pure heart -- a leaf, a flower, fruit, or water -- I accept with joy."
The reason you accept it: There has to be none, you accept it because it makes you happy.
More health stuff
I already talked about Dan Buttner before, so I'll save myself that part. What I do want to comment about are the pictures you post.
At this point, it's hard for me to stay cool and calculating, because what you're doing is just so incredibly despicable! You take one person who purposefully lived his life in such a way and you compare it to others who didn't. You disregard other people who live just as long or longer at much higher frequencies due to completely different lifestyles. In short, you cherry-pick like there's no tomorrow.
Norman Borlaug is irrelevant here, too. His inventions and innovations sure as heck weren't in the Bible. He did good stuff because he was a scientist. Learn to differentiate here!
Human rights
You claim that so many human rights were pioneered by Christians and that those rights were derived from the Bible. Even a cursory reading shows that's wrong. Was it or was it not Christianity that enforced the very points you claim ancient cultures followed? It was! Read the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights. Read it? Good.
Even article one is in direct dispute with the Bible. If the Judeo-Christian God exists then we are not born free, because no person who is subjected to eternal supervision by a God can be free. Article four is also in direct conflict, because the Bible directly suggests you take slaves and even tells you how to do that.
If you're a Bible-believing Christian, i.e. the Bible is the authoritative word of God, then I suggest you never speak of morality again until you've burnt your "word of God".
I would once again challenge you to name one moral action that can only be performed by a believer and not by a non-believer. You can't name one because the Bible does not own, give, or suggest new moral guidlines.
That's basically all that needs to be said on that whole third post. Incredible. Not one bit proves that a God exists, or more specifically that your God exists. You're telling me I read through three posts, which took me about five days, (without me reading most of the links nor having watched more than five minutes from all videos combined, which would have taken another ten days!!) and there's not one bit of evidence for the existence of a God?
To answer your very last question: I don't deny the existence of the facts. I do however deny that half of them were found by rigorous research methodology, instead I pointed out the incredibly sloppy work that went into the research most of the time. I also deny that the other half have any importance to this topic whatsoever. Remember that atheism doesn't have any rules or regulations whatsoever, it has nothing to do with morality nor with immorality. The only thing it suggests is that there's likely no God. As such, all of your stats about health are entirely irrelevant. I also deny that the Bible was the first book (or that Judaism or Christianity was the first culture) to stumble upon any good messages you happen to find in that dreadful book. I was easily able to show that by only taking one book, in this case the Bhagavad Gita, you can find the same (and often better versions of these) laws centuries earlier.
Well, thanks for the reply, Bryan. Just to briefly document the process this is going through, I've started reading this and writing the first words of a reply on 19.04.2012 at 18:17. A second attempt has started on July 2nd, 2012, (designated area) at roughly 18:00 and is continuing through the 3rd, now the 4th. All labels are to be taken as gender neutral.
One thing I'd ask of you the next time, Bryan, is to not replace "and" by "&". At least for me, it makes for distracted reading, it makes it difficult to find quotes and I always get this nagging feeling that some edit has been made to the quote. It also seems to me that this practice might take quite some time?!
For the sake of convenience of the readers, I've given every point I'm making a small heading.
Bible health benefits
You start your introduction by once again pointing out the health benefits that apparently stem directly from the Bible. Let me point out a couple of things here:
1) As explained before, at most three of the blue zones but realistically only one of them are Christian in any meaningful sense to this discussion. (Namely the Adventists of Loma Linda.) It seems to me highly subjective to look only at the Adventists and say "Look how grand the Bible is." Instead, I suggest that we look at all of them and conclude that the reasons for longevity are not found in the Bible, instead they were written into the Bible because of the pre-found knowledge of the people at the time. To make this simple: Not God is the reason, Man is.
2) Many of the things people do to keep fit are not mentioned in the Bible, while some things mentioned make no sense when it comes to health what so ever. For example, your article suggests that SDAs completely abstain from alcohol, yet red wine has beneficial anti-oxidizing functions. Or take the ban against lobster on the other side. That may have been a good law at the time, but it's certainly outdated now.
3) Black-and-white thinking. This is what I touched upon with "red wine" issue above: The Bible paints a very black and white picture of the world, even though there are many shades of Gray in between. The dose makes the poison, right? I haven't heard of a single instance where one turkey or one pork chop were harmful. It's this black and white thinking in the Bible that has no impact on health whatsoever and also prohibits temporary indulgences aka fun.
Two-question worldview
Moving swiftly along, you suggest that we should ask two questions to determine our worldview. I'd largely agree on the first, but would add that it should be congruent with reality.
On the second question though, I wholly disagree. First, that would immediately disregard any worldview that does not include an afterlife. Since you've chosen to ignore that atheism is not a worldview, I must suspect that this is what you're getting at.
Second, what can you truly say about an afterlife? Can you even prove that there is one? I doubt it. Speculations about an afterlife are, at least when determining ones view on the world, utterly meaningless. I'd go further and suggest that they're entirely meaningless, but that's not relevant here.
Carl Sagan, the level six atheist
A little later, you quote Carl Sagans: "An atheist has to know a lot more than I know."
This is one of the very few times I must disagree with Carl Sagan. If we go by the Dawkins Scale of Belief, then Carl Sagan was a six, which is the same as most atheists believe. Carl Sagan was talking about a "level seven" atheist, something one will encounter very rarely indeed.
This is sometimes called a "Tooth Fairy Agnostic" or a "99% atheist", which all boils down to the same thing: I can not know for sure, but there is not enough evidence, if there is any at all, to persuade me that I should believe in a God.
Naturalism vs following the evidence?
In the Intro to your Intro, you provide us with two possibilities and, this I have to assume, suggest that position B is the atheistic/materialistic position. What you're doing though is completely disregard what I said in this post of the "What evidence would you accept?" thread, by claiming that we demand "higher standards of evidence" for ideas we have an inherent "bias against". But I already showed that you're misusing that quote, that "extraordinary evidence" doesn't mean "different evidence", it simply means "evidence proportional to the claim". I gave the example of neutrinos going faster than light vs my daily dietary habits. In the latter case, it would be sufficient for me to state that I ate X and you would immediately believe it. In the former case, me simply stating it would not make you accept it, because it is such an extraordinary claim. You would expect me to provide tonnes of very solid evidence to back up my claim and if I failed to produce said evidence, you would rightly dismiss my claim as absurd. The same happens with regard to you claiming the existence of God.
What you fail to understand then, is that methodological naturalism makes no a priori assumptions it has to stick with, as I showed in my very first reply to you, when I said the following:
Inferno said:
Our observation is that we can learn about the universe, which strongly suggests that the universe is natural, because otherwise we wouldn't be able to learn about it. If there is evidence of a single time when the laws of nature were actually suspended, then Methodological Naturalism (MN) would immediately be rejected. So in summary: There is no inherent bias to MN, there are no traditions, "extraordinary claims" DO require "extraordinary evidence" and both positions you described (A and B) are actually the same, even though you wanted to twist the latter to be something it's not.
Rupert Sheldrake nonsense
I've already addressed the issue in the psychologytoday article above, so I won't address that specific article. The last words to be spoken on that issue will be left to David Hume:
"No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony be of such kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish" (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 'Of Miracles' 1748).
On the subject of Rupert Sheldrake though, I stopped watching the video at exactly 1:33. There's evidence of telepathy? Really?
The only thing I will say on the subject of Sheldrake is this: His hypotheses have been disproved in the peer-reviewed literature by a number of scientists and his research methodology could be described as "sloppy" at best. It is therefore no wonder that he would do everything to discredit the underlying theory behind it. Which in itself is surprising, because he was using just that when he thought he could prove his hypotheses. Isn't that odd?
Materialism vs Methodological Naturalism
You lay out an attack on "materialism" and suggest that we don't judge Christianity by different standards than we would other ideas.
The first one is a straw-man and the second has already been dealt with above. I won't repeat my above quote from Hume.
Now as to the straw-man of materialism. I don't accept materialism and neither do basically any scientists today. Instead, we accept empiricism, naturalism (especially methodological naturalism) and, related to materialism but not being quite the same, physicalism.
As I've already shown before, methodological naturalism does not adhere to any a priori axioms, but instead one acts as if physicalism were true, i.e. supernatural explanations are not per se excluded, but would have to be proven true first to make someone reject methodological naturalism. And that's basically the point of this debate: Is the case of the Bible, that there is a God with specific attributes, justified or not?
You're trying to end this debate by suggesting that we accept a supernatural agent from the outset, which perversely is something you yourself reject. Because if we don't accept said supernatural agent, then we must start from a physicalist perspective and wait for evidence of a supernatural agent. Which, as I will argue, has not yet been the case.
There's another problem here, too: If not methodological naturalism, which philosophy should one adopt to make sense of the world? Until proven otherwise, I hold that methodological naturalism and the related theories mentioned above are the only ones that can help us make sense of the world. I guess this will come up at some point in this discussion, so let me stop these ideas in their infancy: The Transcendental Argument fails.
Here starts day 2.
Active Church Participation
You're missing the point of these studies. The point here is that these benefits arise from participating in Church life, which means the benefits (if there really are any, and that is up for dispute) come not from following a particular life style, at least not in this case, but from group mentality. To my knowledge this isn't well studied at all, but I'd suggest the following: If you were to survey a group of people who all did the same activity, say hiking or doing Tai-Chi, and who were also atheists or agnostics, you'd find the same pattern emerging that you, or rather Neil McQueen, suggest for Church goers.
It's incredibly easy to study this pattern in Church goers because you will always find a very homogeneous group of people, while the reverse is true of atheists. I don't know of an "atheist Tai-Chi" class or any other related godless group that could be studied in such a way, so studies that don't account for that will always have an inherent amount of error. This is also the same problem I have with studies that compare a group of people who care about their health in some way or another, like vegetarians in general, with the populous at large who obviously don't care about their health as much. Is it really surprising that a person who cares about their health is healthier than a bloke who munches a burger with fries and a large coke for every meal? Compare vegetarians in general with any group of meat-eating people who also care about their health and I'll almost guarantee that the differences will entirely disappear or even be slightly reversed.
Note: I draw the above conclusions (that the differences are due to group activity instead of following any one doctrine) because it doesn't matter to which religion you adhere, the benefits are always there.
For example, this study (N=98,975) suggests that religiosity is responsible for "mild" benefits, but no specific religion is mentioned, as does this one, this one (Religion's effects ... generally protective, but modest in strength) and most importantly, this one:
"Even though most studies have been conducted in the United States in Christian populations, in the last few years several of the main findings have been replicated in samples from different countries and religions."
This is just a small sample of mostly meta-studies (see large sample size), and only ones concerned with religiosity's link to mental health, there are virtually thousands of individual studies on this subject and related ones. The outcome is always the same: It's not any one particular religion that gives alleged benefits, it's religion in general. Whether you're Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian or any other religion, you will always "reap these benefits". But as I already explained above, that's not really a fair sampling at all.
I'd also like to point out that you cherry-pick your studies. You suggest that "Belief in God" improves moral behaviour. Apart from the obvious mentioned above, other studies disagree.
The most interesting thing I've found, and this really was interesting to me, was that out of the tens, maybe hundreds of studies I read on this topic, about 2/5ths find a positive correlation between religion and morality, 2/5ths find a negative correlation and 1/5th suggests no correlation either way. All other topics (benefits in marriage and psychology, drug use, etc.) were all fairly clear.
Is the Bible the same one the early Christians received?
Simple answer, no. It can't be "the same" due to translations, there will always be slightly different versions. For example, taking a random verse ((Job 9:6) from the Bible, we can clearly see the slight differences. But OK, your point is that the Bible is in its essence still the same. But is that really so?
Out of the 24,200 manuscripts for the New Testament, there are an alleged 400,000+ "variations". These variations are merely minor mistakes, left out letters/words, duplicate lines, etc. They can be safely said to be of no importance to this investigation. However, there seem to be more serious alterations and changes. For example, Bart D. Ehrmann (though he has been criticized, this was the only book I could find that even discusses the issue) suggests that early Biblical revisions tended to purposefully de-emphasize the role of women, to unify conflicting portrayals of Jesus and so on. He even suggests that Jesus's divinity goes back to these revisions. What a shocker!
But let's suggest that they're actually all from within 75 years of the alleged events. What would that suggest? Well, nothing really. For example, one of the most muddied battles in all of history was surely Waterloo. In his book Les mensonges de Waterloo, Bernard Coppens documents the various differences that have arisen between the different accounts of the Battle. A battle that was fought out not even 200 years ago. This is just an example to show that if there is a big enough incentive, there will always be alterations.
For example, we know that there has been at least one revision regarding the King of Ugarit around 3500 years ago:
[url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=ZFrkjEgUDZA#t=303s said:
I suggest the following: What we should find, if the Bible were the one true word of God, would be absolutely no revisions at all, it should be "dominant everywhere in the world with no predecessors or parallels or alternatives in any language, because mere human authors couldn't possibly compete with it." The above is merely one of the more obvious revisions and it directly contradicts your idea that "The Bible is still the same".
Most laughable claims for truth
On quoting Simon Greenleaf, your most laughable claims for the Bible's "truth value" arise. Are you seriously suggesting that, just because a bunch of Christians would rather let themselves be murdered than give up their faith, this is serious "proof that the Bible is true"? Reading that red passage, that's what it suggests to me. I must ask again: Is my analysis correct or not?
If it is correct, this really is the most laughable claim yet. Have you never heard of Muslim martyrs (e.g. Abbas al-Musawi), Buddhist martyrs (e.g. Thich Quang Duc), the Samurai and so on and so forth. Not one of them wavered in his/her belief, all of them died for it. There are literally thousands of examples from each religion, every one of them as stupid as the one you cite. Martyrdom is not a sign of the truth of a religion, it's either a sign of the insanity of the religion or of the person, nothing more.
Miracles
Your next claim regards miracles of Jesus and how they could not possibly have been tricks or illusions. I've skipped the videos entirely, all of them in fact, as they're not likely to add anything relevant to this discussion. (And I already have enough to check with the tens of links and misquotes you use, plus of course your roughly 60k words) It is a fact that magicians (you misspelt André Kole, by the way) have replicated tricks like walking on water, turn water into wine and so on.
Before I remind you of a supposed miracle, let's quickly take a test. Done? Good. Now remember, you were probably fooled on that test. The message: If someone's trying to fool you and you're not vigilant, they will most likely succeed. Now why do I bring this up? Well, people were most probably duped by Jesus. (Or people who wanted Jesus to be an important figure.) For example, consider the "Cova da Iria in Fatima" story, told here and re-told and examined in "The God Delusion":
The God Delusion said:
If André Kole really suggests that none of the tricks could be repeated then he's either a poor magician (which he's not) or a damn liar or he's simply never tried it.
Atheists for religion
I already had my doubts when you quoted the first three atheists, let me just say I think they're wrong on most things. To give merely one example, much of Christian charity is severely mismanaged. But when you quoted Richard Dawkins, I knew something must be up. I can't log into the original Times article, so I'll have to take "Ibloga"'s word for it.
The header is misleading at best: Richard Dawkins does not dread a non-Christian world, he just dreads a "no Christians, yes Muslims" more than one with "yes Christians, yes Muslims". That's not at all surprising, you've got two evils cancelling each other out here. What he's for though is a "no Christians, no Muslims" world. You're de facto quoting someone who says "Christians are not as bad as Muslims" as "Christians are cool".
In this section, part 5, you claim that the abolition of slavery was... due?... to Christians challenging the status quo. Now as I've said before I've studied (and then stopped studying) History at the University of Vienna and I've now taken some time to read up on it again, but I can't find anything suggesting that the anti-slavery movement consisted of only or even particularly outspoken Christians, nor that this was in any way based on the Bible. Maybe theyounghistorian77 can confirm? In fact, the whole idea of a Christian talking about ending slavery is absurd to the highest degree!
Leviticus 25:44-46
Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly.
Ephesians 5:6
Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.
1 Timothy 6:1-2
All who are under the yoke of slavery should consider their masters worthy of full respect, so that God's name and our teaching may not be slandered. Those who have believing masters should not show them disrespect just because they are fellow believers. Instead, they should serve them even better because their masters are dear to them as fellow believers and are devoted to the welfare of their slaves.
And so on and so forth. The whole idea of abolishing slavery is deeply contrary to Biblical literalism! Just a bit of comedy on the side: Swedish atheist comedian in a church
Let's also not forget that the one power no Christian is to challenge, no matter how morally wrong, is God itself! So why don't you follow your own advice of standing up to bigotry and stand up to God?
Your list on the Nazis also reeks of cherry-picking.
For example, many high-ranking Church officials were responsible for the Ratlines. Contrary to Einstein's comments (which have been addressed by theyounghistorian77), Pope Pius XII and his Church have been described as a mere envoy to Nazi Germany.
I'll let theyounghistorian77 speak.
One last thing though, something I've been trying very hard to teach you but which you've consistently overlooked: There is a difference between a person doing something because of X and a person doing something who also happens to be X.
Day 3
Accusations of misrepresentation
You reprimand me for misrepresenting you, yet you yourself are misrepresenting me, while I was not. Isn't that odd? Boy, that sure reminds me of someone...
That was my very last paragraph, when I'd already shown all of your other claims to be in error. Let me rephrase what I said, maybe you'll understand then:
"Even though everything you claim is evidence has been show to be wrong, you'll still believe it because you want to believe. Worse than that, you'll actually fabricate so called "evidence" just to suit your beliefs. In other words: You're making stuff up, yo!"
If there is evidence, you don't need any bias any way because you'll follow the evidence where it leads. You don't do that. You have a predisposition to believe what you want because it makes you feel good. It's Pascal's wager all over again. Tell me, would you rather believe and be wrong than not believe and be right? Because that's what I'm reading from you. It's also what I've showed you from other posts (look for purple font), that's what not only "so many" but actually ALL Bible-literalists (and indeed all holy-scripture literalists) have to believe, because there is no way to "defend" your dogma any other way.
Atheism is emotion-based?
I'm at a loss for words here. You know how just above I admonished you for making stuff up? This here is a prime example. Now I take it you're talking of Sir Julian Sorell Huxley here and not his grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley, correct? Because that would make even less sense than what you're doing now. But from what I can find, he wasn't an atheist at all and even suggested that completely abandoning religion wouldn't be a good thing. No other Huxley that I know of were promiscuous.
Misquoting me again?
You go on to suggest that I presuppose Methodological Naturalism, even though I've already specifically explained that in my very first post! I said that it comes closest to it, but I also stated that it would be a serious oversimplification. I showed you my two pre-suppositions and the conclusion one must draw from those two. I've so far had to repeat myself in every one of my replies to you, so this will be the absolute last time I correct you on this matter.
Faith and Evidence
You suggest that you have evidence and that your faith is based on evidence, but I've already told you that you fail every possible barrier of evidence. All of your so-called evidence can be shown to rely on out-of-date, out-of-context or simply made up quotes and information. I've many times said that all your cries of "my belief is based on evidence" will go unnoticed until you can actually show there to be evidence. A person can claim that he's no child molester all he wants, but if he's consistently found to be raping children then nobody will take him seriously. A person can claim to be on a diet, but if he's found with candy in his mouth, nobody will believe him. And just the same, a person can claim to have based his position of evidence, but if his evidence is found to be made up, flimsy or not necessitating his belief, then...
Christianity and the No-true-Scotsman fallacy
This is a double-standard if I've ever seen one. You readily decry somebody for not adhering to Christianity and call them non-Christians, yet at the same time you use their "contributions" to promote your cause.
I'd also like to point out that it's extremely difficult to asses what "being a Christian" means, because there are so many different denominations. A Christian, by most definitions I've seen, is a person who lives his life by the teachings of a man called Jesus. It doesn't carry any of the baggage you would have it contain. By the standards of Jehovas Whitnesses, you're not a Christian. By the standards of many Catholics, you're a Christian, but a bad one. By the standards of Biblical literalism, so basically suggesting that you're only a Christian if you follow the Bible word for word, you're not a Christian and neither is anyone else on earth.
You also suggest that the benefits of Christianity outweigh the harm. I'm inclined to disagree quite a bit with that statement, but that's not even at the focus of this discussion so I'll disregard it. The question is: Is there an evidence-based system that has a better case than Christianity/the Bible? And the answer to that is "yes, there are quite a few".
Eternal life
1) I already explained why eternal life can never be a good thing, that only an ending life gives meaning. Why should I want something that clearly can't make me happy?
2) So there's free will... but there isn't?
3) There's no sin nor death, so how can I die? Your "eternal life" isn't making a lot of sense.
4) Are you suggesting that if there were no God, which there isn't, then humans wouldn't be able to do good? Because once again, your "want to believe" shines through. You want to have eternal life and you want justification to do good because you can't think of any other reason to be good except by being forced (by God) to be good.
5) So God is incapable of dealing with humans in any other way other than killing them? Even though the death penalty has been shown to have little deterrence effect?
6) At least I won't be bored to death.
Correlation does not imply causation
It really doesn't, you should read up on that. What you're suggesting is that IF a causation does exist and IF there is a correlation, then... well, then what? It's obvious that they're linked and I have absolutely no problems with that. The fallacy you've been making is to show that there IS a correlation but no causation. The most prominent example comes from the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. (Blessed be his noodly appendage, Ramen!)
Heck, you yourself list examples where correlation does not imply causation. (That beautiful graphic "Correlation or Causation?") You showed it yourself, so why don't you accept what you yourself already proved?
Soft tissue......... WAIT, WHAT? SOFT TISSUE AGAIN??? Aw come on...
No, seriously, this can't be true. AronRa has already debunked that silly claim, not once, not twice, but actually three times just in one thread. It's also been discussed and rejected in his peanut gallery thread.
Atheism is not rational
So you suggest that atheism should be more rational and explain more than Christianity, but you forget that atheism is the null hypothesis. The position here is that we accepted Christianity/Islam/whatever due to false reasons. Now that these reasons have been shown to be false, we should revert to the null hypothesis.
Don't make truth a slave... and stuff
We don't need to know "how God did miracles or how He created the earth" because we already know how the earth was formed: By natural mechanisms. This isn't up for debate either, it's a fact and every snotty-nosed kid with a high-school geography textbook can prove it, too. We even have a vague idea of how the Universe came into "being", (what an ugly word for something that isn't a being nor was there really any "existence" so that's not useful either...) so we don't need to invoke God for that, either. As I'm sure has been pointed out before, yours is a God of the gaps, nothing more. In this case it's even a "God of the gaps-no-more", so why you're invoking one is baffling, to say the least.
I'm also not sure of a single case any one of us ever mentioned or of any case that is at all relevant to this discussion or indeed of any case period, where a scientists suggested that something didn't exist simply because we didn't understand it. Your example of Ignaz Semmelweis has issues other than "scientists ignoring stuff" at its core, errors (of his supporters) being one, the "insignificance" of the field being a second and political ones being the third.
Further on, you suggest that there is indeed evidence for other religions (including "false religions", whatever that may be) but that they're not true because they don't have the "weight of the evidence" on their side. I'll just point out to you that they'll use the exact same evidence you use for yours, and that yours has already been shown to be wrong.
Bible literalism
No, God does NOT need to reach us through some "imperfect human language", that's exactly the point I was trying to make. I'll once again quote AronRa's most excellent Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism:
[url=http://darwinwasright.homestead.com/2ndFFoC.html said:
The Bible is, contrary to what Dawkins says, an incredible dung-heap. It's a boring read, half of it could be thrown out without anyone noticing anything (think genealogies here, with all the begetting going on) and the rest of it is trivial, evil or wrong. Any modern person could have written a better book in less than two hundred pages, as indeed somebody did.
Now since you're so confident that most of it is so easy to explain, care to tell me which of these is to be taken literally and which isn't? Or what about this list, this list, this one, that one, this next one, this one or finally this one?
Day 4
And if this book of yours is so great, then why does it have stuff like "an eye for an eye" in it? Why doesn't it have cool stuff like this in it:
The Gospel Of The Flying Spaghetti Monster said:
No! Instead it goes on and on and on about who you should kill and who you should buy as a slave and what you should eat (even though some of it is gross and unhealthy) and who you should have sex with.
Establishments of Truth
I write Truth with a capital T because you're referring to "ultimate truth" here instead of a statement that is true. Let me stop you right there and point out that I've never seen anything that would make me think there's one ultimate truth and that if there is, humans probably can't comprehend it. "Wrong" is relative, and so is Truth!
I've already explained in a different thread why I disagree with the idea of NOMA, but since you also disagree there's no reason to go into this.
What I do object though is your Venn Diagram. No, not for any obvious reasons. I simply reject your positioning of history as outside of science! History IS a field of science, the scientific method is applied here too.
Bible evidence... at last?
You claim that the Bible got so incredibly many things (science stuff) right that it couldn't possibly have been written by bronze-aged herd-dwellers, at least not without guidance. But I already gave you a list of things that are wrong in the Bible, limiting myself just to the scientific aspects here for a second and not going into contradictions. So how can you possibly claim that the Bible contains so much wisdom when it clearly doesn't? In fact, the "wisdom" it does contain can be found in every other scientific source of that time. I had a talk with a guy about the concept Pi some time ago and he claimed that if you grant that Kings 7:23-26 speaks of the inner circumference instead of the outer, then Pi was calculated to a greater precision than any other scientific source of that time. I was easily able to show him that, even if I grant his silly suppositions, better approximations of Pi were already available hundreds of years before that time.
I'll also quickly point out that "pragmatic evidence" doesn't necessarily mean something's correct. All of your listing of pragmatic "evidence", even though 99% of it can be shown to rely on false presuppositions, wouldn't sway me one bit toward the Bible.
You claim that "[o]nly God could give such incredible wisdom in such a perfect mix", but I already showed that much of the Bible can be discarded as utterly irrelevant, much of the Bible is dead wrong, much of the Bible is trivial and only very small portions are actually improvements over the wisdom of the ages. In all the 66 Books of the Bible, is there ever as much wisdom as in the Gospel of the FSM, the Book of Midgets/Midgits, Chapter 4, Verses 32-35, when It says:
"Loyal subjects. The concept of holy war and wasting peoples lives in my name is a major bummer. I will not allow it. You must therefore resolve your differences by my way of choosing. I therefore decree that you shall resolve the issue in a series of televised taunting and verbal slanging matches."
Instead, here's how one can describe your God:
"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."
Is that truly a perfect God? I doubt it.
You claim that "no other nation in history without the influence of the Bible developed a comprehensive system of principles as valuable as God gave in the Bible". Ignoring for a second that I (and countless others) have already exposed your God to be a no-good bully, I can prove to you that "your" Golden Principle was already around for far longer, the Bible simply copied it. To use merely the Bhagavad Gita as an example:
"One should never do that to another which one regards as injurious to one's own self. This, in brief, is the rule of dharma. Other behavior is due to selfish desires."
,Brihaspati, Mahabharata (Anusasana Parva, Section CXIII, Verse 8)
But I'll go further than that and suggest that the Golden Rule is actually a crappy version, if it was indeed made up by a divine being. Shaw reminded us:
"Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same"
and Popper refined the idea:
"The golden rule is a good standard which is further improved by doing unto others, wherever reasonable, as they want to be done by"
And before you say "but how can I know what somebody else wants", remember that Popper said "wherever reasonable".
The big challenge
You propose a challenge in section 2, point 7, wherein you ask me to produce another society with better laws/rules/regulations and so on. But if you only understood history, you'd understand why that's a futile task. I once again recommend Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. In it, he powerfully argues why European societies (and not others) could proliferate and survive. Spoiler alert: It has nothing to do with religion. If you're not willing to buy the book, then at least read the (incredibly good) Wikipedia article on it or if you're up for it, read the pdf version.
Once you've done that, you might understand why your challenge is a bad one. Don't misunderstand me, it's not at all an impossible challenge, it's simply one that has absolutely no meaning.
"Millions of people... willing to hurt others in their pain"
Just under your many (and may I point out, unnecessary) music videos, you list something that, if I read it correctly, and I think I did, really shocked me. Here's the quote in full:
Scroll through the notes in the song above & see how many people have been lifted from despair by this song. Then multiply that by millions & think hard about whether you'd like millions of people angry about injustice & willing to hurt others in their pain (as many criminals, including non-Christians have done due to having such great difficulties in this life) or people with an attitude that they can overcome the troubles & that even if they have troubles in this life, God has something much better for them.
I'd like readers to think about this paragraph very hard and only open the spoiler-box when they've found what shocks me.
Day 5
You go on about happiness, but may I remind you that:
"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." -George Bernard Shaw
Marriage rates
You claim that belief in general and Christian belief specifically benefits in (the stability of) a marriage. But I've already shown before that this is a simplistic view at best and simply wrong at worst.
For example, the research group you yourself cited before, the Barna Research Group, showed that Atheists and Agnostics are among the least likely to get a divorce. Here's the thing though, neither of the research you show nor the one I quoted above is rigorous, I'm simply quoting it to show that your own sources disagree!
The problem with this kind of research is that many non-believers simply don't get married, they will "only" live together. The next question is, are they couples with one (non)-religion or with two? What constitutes a Christian, what a born-again and so on? In almost all of these studies, you can find an inherent bias just in their methodology description, which is the reason why their results are all over the place.
Religion improves you
I've already talked about the psychology of religion and why the whole group-attitude might be the cause of these so-called benefits. What really annoys me though is that you claim the Bible said something way before science, something that is incredibly obvious by the way, but you don't take a second to look at older books such as the Bhagavad Gita and see that it said the same thing hundreds of years before the Bible. In fact, it's even better than the Bible!
Take a look at 1 Thessalonians 5:18. Why should we give thanks? Because it is the will of Jesus. Well screw the will of Jesus, is there any other reason, perhaps?
The Bhagavad Gita says: "Whatever I am offered in devotion with a pure heart -- a leaf, a flower, fruit, or water -- I accept with joy."
The reason you accept it: There has to be none, you accept it because it makes you happy.
More health stuff
I already talked about Dan Buttner before, so I'll save myself that part. What I do want to comment about are the pictures you post.
At this point, it's hard for me to stay cool and calculating, because what you're doing is just so incredibly despicable! You take one person who purposefully lived his life in such a way and you compare it to others who didn't. You disregard other people who live just as long or longer at much higher frequencies due to completely different lifestyles. In short, you cherry-pick like there's no tomorrow.
Norman Borlaug is irrelevant here, too. His inventions and innovations sure as heck weren't in the Bible. He did good stuff because he was a scientist. Learn to differentiate here!
Human rights
You claim that so many human rights were pioneered by Christians and that those rights were derived from the Bible. Even a cursory reading shows that's wrong. Was it or was it not Christianity that enforced the very points you claim ancient cultures followed? It was! Read the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights. Read it? Good.
Even article one is in direct dispute with the Bible. If the Judeo-Christian God exists then we are not born free, because no person who is subjected to eternal supervision by a God can be free. Article four is also in direct conflict, because the Bible directly suggests you take slaves and even tells you how to do that.
If you're a Bible-believing Christian, i.e. the Bible is the authoritative word of God, then I suggest you never speak of morality again until you've burnt your "word of God".
I would once again challenge you to name one moral action that can only be performed by a believer and not by a non-believer. You can't name one because the Bible does not own, give, or suggest new moral guidlines.
That's basically all that needs to be said on that whole third post. Incredible. Not one bit proves that a God exists, or more specifically that your God exists. You're telling me I read through three posts, which took me about five days, (without me reading most of the links nor having watched more than five minutes from all videos combined, which would have taken another ten days!!) and there's not one bit of evidence for the existence of a God?
To answer your very last question: I don't deny the existence of the facts. I do however deny that half of them were found by rigorous research methodology, instead I pointed out the incredibly sloppy work that went into the research most of the time. I also deny that the other half have any importance to this topic whatsoever. Remember that atheism doesn't have any rules or regulations whatsoever, it has nothing to do with morality nor with immorality. The only thing it suggests is that there's likely no God. As such, all of your stats about health are entirely irrelevant. I also deny that the Bible was the first book (or that Judaism or Christianity was the first culture) to stumble upon any good messages you happen to find in that dreadful book. I was easily able to show that by only taking one book, in this case the Bhagavad Gita, you can find the same (and often better versions of these) laws centuries earlier.
