Re: Atheists support evolution because evolution supports their

On Oct 21, 2:04 am, "Suzanne" <shil...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"chris thompson" <chris.linthomp...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

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On Oct 14, 9:37 am, "Suzanne" <shil...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"chris thompson" <chris.linthomp...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

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On Oct 12, 3:29 am, "Suzanne" <shil...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"Mike Painter" <mddotpain...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

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Suzanne wrote:
"Mike Painter" <mddotpain...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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John Harshman wrote:
chris thompson wrote:
On Oct 10, 7:59 pm, "Suzanne" <shil...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Mike Painter" <mddotpain...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

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Suzanne wrote:
<snip>
If I told you about baobab trees and you had never
seen one and no one you know ever wrote about
them or photographed them or saw them but me,
you would not believe me. But if I told you now
that the baobab tree supplied us with kapok for
pillows, would you believe that if you never heard
of kapok?
True, especially if it came from you.
However it would be possible to find proof for the existence of
the tree with little effort.
Further if you asked 10,000 people about the tree you would not
get 10,000 different descriptions and stories about it.
If you could provide any evidence for your god that was 1/10th
of
the evidence for the existence of the tree there would be no
atheists.
Evidence, evidence, evidence. You live by evidence.
Life just doesn't always give you the luxury of having
evidence. Suppose someone said to you, (perish the
thought!) "Don't move!! It's important that you listen
to me and don't bat an eyelash. There is a snake by your
foot. I'll distract it, and when I tell you to, then move."
Sometimes you have to trust people.

Suzanne

Is there any reason to think this is one of those times?

Is it too late to mention that kapok doesn't come from baobab
trees,
though they're both in the same family?

If Suzanne said it did then she got it straight from god so you and
the rest of the world must be wrong.
My but you are swift to stir up mischief.

Do you deny what I said?
Should I reference the posts when you made such claims?
"The Lord has assured me that he can
lead Linda in the way in which he wants her to go "

This is in a religious group. I spoke about having
prayed for Linda and I believe that the Lord showed
me that he is leading her. She doesn't think traditional
things, she thinks out of the box. So some were
criticizing her because I guess they had more of the
traditional kind of ideas. I feel that the Lord placed it
on my heart that he is leading her and teaching her.
But you evidently think that if you air that out here
in a group that you deem to not be very religious,
they will think things against me. Don't sell the
people in here short and assume that they don't know
anything about religion.

Suzanne

This is all very fine, but it does not answer my question, which I
will put to you again: is there any reason to think that this is one
of the times we need to trust another person? On top of that, is there
any reason we should be trusting you in this matter, as opposed to,
say, Richard Dawkins?

Chris

In looking back at this post, when you said this,
when I was talking about a snake being by someone's
foot, which constitutes an emergency. If you want to
get out your cell phone and call someone else that
is not there and ask them whether or not you can
move, I think you may have missed the point of what
has been said.

Suzanne

Thanks for your response. If I am hiking in snake country and my
partner warns me of a snake near my feet, I will certainly listen. I
sometimes hike in Palisades Interstate Park and there are Copperheads
there, so I know what you mean. (There are also plenty of Northern
Water Snakes, and while they aren't venomous they're fast as hell and
can give you three painful bites before most people can blink twice. I
knew a herpetologist who could catch them bare-handed- the only other
person I ever met who was that fast was a Captain in the US Army
Rangers.)

But that's not what I was talking about, and I think you know it.

Is there any reason to think that we need to trust another person on
the question of deities, and if so, is there a reason to think we
should trust you (or any theist) as opposed to Richard Dawkins, or
some other atheist?

Chris

I presume you are speaking of my belief in Christ to
be the Savior?...
I think there is a good reason why you should trust
what I've been telling you that I believe. . In the first
place, I've been telling you the truth. If you put your
trust in what I've placed my trust in, and then found
out later that it was not true (which you won't), you
would have lost nothing at all. But if you put your
trust in what people who oppose my beliefs say that
they believe, and find out later that they were wrong,
you would have lost much.

So in essence, I should trust you because you say so.

And here I was hoping God had faxed you some explicit
instructions...You know, combine 'A' with 'B' and 'C', mix at high
temperatures for 2 hours then give it a cold break, and voila! A cure
for HIV. Now THAT would be deserving of worship, perhaps.

But "trust me because I say so" doesn't quite carry the same weight,
does it?

In essence, we're just back to Pascal's Wager, and that's a sucker's
bet. Know why? Because you're saying follow Jesus, the Muslims are
saying follow Allah, the Rastafarians are saying have a toke, the
Satanists are saying follow Satan, and the Santarians are telling me
to kill little animals while the Buddhists are telling me to never
kill little animals. Meanwhile, there's some Christians telling me
we're doing God's Work (tm) when we slaughter thousands of people but
other Christians are telling me life is sacred. Given the history of
Christianity a lot more people follow the first tenet than the second.

And what if you're all wrong and when I die, there's (a) nothing at
all, or (b) some other god who's really pissed I didn't follow HIS/HER/
ITS improbable, internally-inconsistent, incomprehensible scripture?

Suppose I die and there's Coyote standing there in front of me,
smirking, and the last thing I hear before I get tossed into the
Volcano of Eternal Agony is, "April Fool, shithead"?

I'd say I've lost quite a lot.

Chris




As for Richard Dawkins, I wish that he also believed
what I believe. I saw the Ben Stein movie and
Richard Dawkins appeared in it. Ben Stein had shown
how complicated a single cell is. What it sounded to me
like Richard Dawkins conceded, is that life just might
have a designer but that the designer could have been
a highly evolved being from another planet, but that
he just would not have been God.

I've listened to what people who say they don't believe
in God say about him. They have a picture of him that
is not accurately who he is. If they knew who he was,
they would worship him. But even a new Christian is
not born spiritually knowing God. He learns who he is,
as he follows him. But the Christian has an example of
God's sacrificial love for him because of Christ's having
given his life for him.

Suzanne

.

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