Need help to deceive the deluded

[Thomas Doubting]

A while back, I wrote something in Bosnian for people who are permanently bugging me to think about their religion and stop being so "ignorant" and stupid, mostly Muslims, but also Christians.
I did so because I grew weary of the pointless and endless discussions where I am the only one knowing even their own side and all that comes with it, but they keep ignoring what I say and attacking the messenger and proving my point without even realizing it.
So I wrote it all down, although I knew they wouldn't really think about it or even read it thoroughly.. Then I had an Idea, I "softened" what I wrote,. trying to be less offensive, still admitting that I am an atheist as much as one could be, but I said I am willing to (for the 50000000000th time) listen to their arguments and consider the "proof" for their imaginary friends.
BUT, under one condition, they have to read ALL I wrote and see religions from my perspective and think about it RATIONALLY, also really avoid to feed me the arguments and reasons which I already rejected, then and only then they should present their "proof" and try to explain to me why I should accept their religion. "Unfortunately" whatever they say or show me is as good as the countless idiotic things I heard in the last few decades but at least some of them really think about some of that stuff and that is more than I mostly achieve in a conversation.

Later I translated that to English, added some things and uploaded it on a server, with similar results, I doubt I "un-brainwashed" somebody but I got few good reactions, along with blathering from hopeless cases, as expected.

My problem is... my English is not really that good... and I wrote too much, also my argumentation might sound confusing and contain wrong facts.

Now to get to the point... I need somebody to read what I wrote and help me correct it, shorten it, make it more presentable, make it address more religions, in short, help me to make it better.
If you can take some time and you think you are the right person for that job, please help me. Post here or send a PM, or send a message to the email provided at the bottom of the -->page<-- where I wrote that crap.

Thanks in advance.

 

[atheist_fox2]

As an ex-christian myself, I highly recommend FIRST seeing things in their perspective. Most christians/muslims would agree that the bible/koran is the absolute, infallible word of God. Start with questions like this: How do you know the bible/koran is infallible? How do you know the bible/koran is true? How do you know that the authors weren't telling the truth due to a large number of possible things, such as Tall Tales, using superstition to help keep people in line (For example, don't murder your friend or God will zap your balls off) since it was a very primitive time where morality wasn't so developed, how do you know they didn't suffer from mental disorders (such as Schizophrenia)? Questions like that would boggle their mind. Also, tell them that there are missing books in the Bible! And the books in the bible even mention those missing books (ironically!)...

The aim here is to make them question their own belief in a step-by-step process; just like how you have to explain the theory of gravity to somebody who accepts Geocentrism, and then it falls apart. You can't call them a 'retard' or 'ignorant' initially, or they'll just strengthen their belief/acceptance because the opposition is seemingly illogical. Maybe they haven't come across the opposition, so they assume by default THAT is what everybody thinks too! (A lot of theists use the 'strength in numbers' approach; which is absurd).

So, ask them the questions I noted above in the first paragraph. Then, ask them why they believe in God. Since most of them will come up with deist arguments (i.e. Something can't come from nothing, isn't it plainly obvious, etc.), ask them why they believe in YAHWEH in particular. Most will have no good reason, while some will claim personal experiences. A lot of them claim to have seen their guardian angel or something (My mother believes she's seen her guardian angel, and she told me that it was just a man standing around and disappeared in a short time, and told her 'it's ok' or something...), ask them how do they know that it's true.

Basically just build your argument up, and tell them it is scientifically impossible for miracles to occur and for a God to intervene with the world (For example, believing that God saved you from the tornado that went through your neighborhood is silly because it's all a matter of basic physics, like how strong the winds are and how strong your house is), and tell them that a personal God is laughable, and at best the most logical thing to believe while mantaining a belief in a God is to believe in a deity who just kickstarted the universe and fine-tuned the 4 forces of nature... because that is the only type of God that science allows. LOL.


----
By the way, the definition of decieve is of the following:

de,·ceive - verb /diˈsÄ“v/ 
deceived, past participle; deceived, past tense; deceives, 3rd person singular present; deceiving, present participle

1.(of a person) Cause (someone) to believe something that is not true, typically in order to gain some personal advantage
- I didn't intend to deceive people into thinking it was French champagne
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By the way, whenever I ask for proof outside the Bible then no christian gives me a straight response, or tells me to read the bible for proof. LOL.
Go get 'em tiger...

 

[Thomas Doubting]

Mate I already wrote most of that.. and i read both the bible and the Qur'an in 2 languages
and i had thousands of discussions with believers of all kind
i wanted somebody to read what i wrote and help me correct it.. good point with the missing things from the bible.. i might add that in my "why the bible is not to be trusted" part, need a summary of that..
but yeah i wrote all that
and deceive.. was intented.. i want them to think they can brainwash me but before they start washing they need to read my crap first because i heard theirs uncountable times, but they reject everything without thinking.. or even listening/reading..

Anyhow, do read what i wrote up there and if you have time check the link i gave up there and see if you can help me after you read it

 

[Deleted member 619]

A lot of what follows is going to be dealing directly with creationist claims, because they are the source of the misconceptions I will be dealing with.

Here's the place to start:

A question was "Where does information in the DNA come from? Doesn't there have to be someone who put the information there? He is our God."

Here, we require a definition of information that is robust. Now, there are two robust formulations of information theory, and both of them need to be considered. The first is that of Claude Shannon and, while this is the formulation that most of them will cite, largely due to apologist screeds erecting various claims about information having to contain some sort of message and therefore requiring somebody to formulate the message.

So just what is information? Well, in Shannon theory, information can be defined as 'reduction in uncertainty'. Shannon theory deals with fidelity in signal transmission and reception, since Shannon worked in communications. Now, given this, we have a maximum information content, defined as the lowest possible uncertainty. Now, if we have a signal, say a TV station, and your TV is perfectly tuned, and there is no noise added between transmission and reception of the TV signal, then you receive the channel cleanly and the information content is maximal. If, however, the TV is tuned slightly off the channel, or your reception is in some other respect less than brilliant, you get noise in the channel. The older ones of you will remember pre-digital television in which this was manifest in the form of 'bees' in the picture, and crackling and noise in the audio. Nowadays, you tend to get breaks in the audio, and pixelated blocks in the picture. They amount to the same thing, namely noise, or 'an increase in uncertainty'. It tells us that any deviation from the maximal information content, which is a fixed quantity, constitutes degradation of the information source, or 'Shannon entropy' (Shannon actually chose this term because the equation describing his 'information entropy' is almost identical to the Boltzmann equation for statistical entropy, as used in statistical mechanics. More on that in my article on entropy for the Ratskep sci-writing thingy, which can be found here).


This seems to gel well with the creationist claims, and is the source of all their nonsense about 'no new information in DNA'. Of course, there are several major failings in this treatment.


The first comes from Shannon himself, from the book that he wrote with Warren Weaver on the topic:

The semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering aspects

And

The word information, in this theory, is used in a special sense that must not be confused with its ordinary usage. In particular, information
must not be confused with meaning. In fact, two messages, one of which is heavily loaded with meaning and the other of which is pure nonsense, can be exactly equivalent, from the present viewpoint, as regards information.

So we see that Shannon himself doesn't actually agree with this treatment of information relied on so heavily by the creationists.

The second is that Shannon's is not the only rigorous formulation of information theory. The other comes from Andrey Kolmogorov, whose theory deals with information storage. The information content in Kolmogorov theory is a feature of complexity or, better still, can be defined as the amount of compression that can be applied to it. This latter can be formulated in terms of the shortest algorithm that can be written to represent the information.

Returning to our TV channel, we see a certain incongruence between the two formulations, because in Kolmogorov theory, the noise that you encounter when the TV is slightly off-station actually represents an increase in information, where in Shannon theory, it represents a decrease! How is this so? Well, it can be quite easily summed up, and the summation highlights the distinction between the two theories, both of which are perfectly robust and valid.

Let's take an example of a message, say a string of 100 1s. In it's basic form, that would look like this:

1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

Now, there are many ways we could compress this. The first has already been given above, namely 'a string of 100 1s'.

Now, if we make a change in that string,

1111111110111111111011111111101111111110111111111011111111101111111110111111111011111111101111111110

We now have a string of 9 1s followed by a zero, repeated 9 times. We now clearly have an increase in information content, even though the number of digits is exactly the same. However, there is a periodicity to it, so a simple compression algorithm can still be applied.

Let's try a different one:

1110011110001111110111110001111111111100110011001111000111111111110111110000111111000111111110011101

Now, clearly, we have something that approaches an entirely random pattern. The more random a pattern is, the longer the algorithm required to describe it, and the higher the information content.

Returning once again to our TV station, the further you get away from the station, the more random the pattern becomes, and the longer the algorithm required to reproduce it, until you reach a point in which the shortest representation of the signal is the thing itself. In other words, no compression can be applied.

This is actually how compression works when you compress images for storage in your computer using the algorithms that pertain to Jpeg, etc. The uncompressed bitmap is the uncompressed file, while the Jpeg compression algorithm, roughly, stores it as '100 pixels of x shade of blue followed by 300 pixels of black', etc. Thus, the more complicated an image is in terms of periodicity and pattern, the less it can be compressed and the higher the output file will be.

So, just what is information?

See here for an answer, including a lovely picture of dogshit.

i'll come back and do some more later, but that's a start, I think.

 

[Thomas Doubting]

thank you! awesome, you helped me get deeper into the topic for my own interest, but as for the "making what i wrote more simple and shorten it" part.. it was the complete opposite :mrgreen:
i will however check the links and go through your post one more time in detail to see if i can extract a word or 2 to fit to my "un-brainwashing for dummies"