That was my point about morals being based on your belief system. Your religion (7th Day Adventist) holds these activities to be immoral while many other Christian and non-Christian do not. I realize you don't take everything in the Bible without interpretation, I've read your posts and I'm surprised you are 7th Day Adventist.

One of my ex religions, Roman Catholic has no problem with these activities but it is against birth control considering it a sin and immoral. This has included all forms of birth control including condoms.

 

Matt,

That's exactly my point. Bin Laden's Islamic group consider what they are doing to be moral though mainstream Islam does not. The Inquisition was moral as was the Crusades as God's man on Earth ordered them in his role of papal infallible at least from the Catholic Church point of view. I think both were immoral. The Holocaust can not be justified by religion even though Hitler was a Catholic as the pope didn't authorize it. The Nazi's knew killing millions was an immoral act as they all ran or committed suicide to avoid prosecution. If they felt it was moral they wouldn't have tried to hide what they did and destroy the evidence IMO.

What facts!? Present these facts Presupp, you can't just slide this bigotry by evenryone without some support you know. The study Matt alluded to is at least an actual study with visible parameters as much as I'd personally never use it to prove anything it at least is what it claims to be -  match it or keep your vain insults to yourself!

Ah, the parsimony objection, favorite argument of 16-year-olds everywhere. You assert -without argument- that a worldview with more is automatically worse than one with less, no matter what constitutes the more and the less. This is Occam's Razor at its shattering point. Why do you believe in atoms? Radiation? Minds, other than your own? Your worldview could do without any of these, but you cling to them. You cling to them because you cannot explain the world without them. This is the Christian's answer to your distortion of a great theologian's ideas: abductive necessity, whereby the sheer epistemic need of belief in a thing overrides parsimony-based objections like yours.

You cannot explain consciousness by means of the unconscious. A lump of coal is not conscious. A moving lump of coal is not conscious. A lump of coal joined to a moving system of other lumps of coal is not conscious. You must invoke something fundamentally different: an addition, a substance of experience, a soul.

So the numbers I don't care about aren't moving. Whoop-dee-doo.

Yeah, I'm obviously looking for validation. My posts just scream "please love me".

.....what game?

No. You guys always strawman me. Stephen Hawking is not retarded. He has an underdeveloped intellectual/moral faculty. Evidently he has an unusual talent for numbers, but that does not indicate that he has any special talent in other areas of life. I suspect that he is a savant of some sort.

That WAS serious apologetics. You have no idea what you are talking about.

Ah wonderful, yet another fool who brings up Occam's razor without understanding what it is.

Occam's razor most commonly reads as:
"All things Being Equal, the simplest answer is most often the correct answer."

Its original wording being;
"Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily."

What this means for your pitiful little attempt to use it to justify your baseless belief in the soul, is that you are needlessly adding something, namely the soul. The reason we can accept the atom, even though its simpler to just believe in the five elements of earth wind fire water and spirit is because that is what the evidence suggests. In this case the argument is thus;

The atom exists.

VS.

All of the scientific evidence is wrong and the atom does not exist and all of the technologies upon which our understanding of the atom rely work purely by coincidence and everything is really made of magickal Five Elements that are awesome and just do everything by magick and stuff.

Obviously the first option is the least complicated one.

As for the Soul

All of the evidence flat out states as fact that once the neural chemistry goes bye bye it nevers says hello again, long term oxygen deficiency often causes irreversible brain damage. You can say that this is because the neural chemistry is nothing more than a pathway to channel the soul, however there is no evidence to support this claim whatsoever, especially once we factor in that we have isolated speific parts of the brain that are apparently responsible for memories, these distinctions are further enforced by the evidence that damaging these parts of the brain damages the persons memories [I would like the input of DeludedGod or some other scientist on this, however this is the impression that I have gotten.]. There's nothing left for the soul to do. The claim that the soul exists is a violation of Occam's Razor.

The argument is thus;

If there is an afterlife that we go to upon the death of our physical body, then we must go with our memories. If we did not take our memories with us, then it wouldn't actually be 'us' going to the afterlife, as our memories shape who we are, even if you try to say that our mind is inherently based not on our memories but on its own consciousness there is no denying that our memories contribute to who we are today.

It then follows that our memories must be a crucial part of this so called soul. If that is the case, then why does damage to the physical brain sometimes cause damage to the memories of a person? If the physical brain is nothing more than the motherboard of the human computer while the soul is the hard drive, then why does damaging the motherboard also damage the hard drive. No you cannot say that damaging the physical brain would impair its ability to access its memories, because if that were the case than the damage would either prevent access to all memories or random memories that would fluctuate as time went by and the brain was using different parts of its 'memory access port' to access the different memories. IE it would not actually stop people from having access to their memories, it would just mean they would not be able to remember quite as much at any given time. This is not the case, we get cases where people lose specific years from their life. So either the soul is being damaged by the brain suffering damage, which would mean that the soul will likely not continue post mortem, or the memories are stored in the brain as well, or the soul just does not exist of course.

If the soul is damaged by the brain taking damage, then you can kiss your afterlife goodbye, unless Jesus saves your soul when you die. This however means that you should kill yourself now*, instead of waiting for alzheimers and other neurological disorders that come about because of aging to get a chance to set in and destroy your pretty little soul.

If the memories are also stored in the brain then the soul is kind of redundent. This lands you in trouble with Occam's razor, as you have added an entity when it is apparently not necessary. Congratulations.

Thus you have three choices, either say goodbye to your afterlife, or say goodbye to your soul, or say goodbye to being able to claim to use reason with a straight face.

Or you have the fourth choice, you can ignore everything I've said just like you've ignored the posts of everyone else who's shown you to be in fact, quite stupid.

I'm guessing you'll go with choice 4, but go ahead, prove me wrong.

As to your pointless drivelling about lumps of coal being or not being conscious, you're actually right about something. Of course what you fail to realize is that there's a big difference between lumps of coal and the neurons in your brain, maybe not in your case, in that neurons are capable of communicating, lumps of coal are not. If they could communicate, then who knows, if we assembled a network of them on the scale of complexity of the human or any other creatures brain we might get a comparable intelligence.

*This post does not actually advocate suicide.

Oh presupp... you are so much smarter than us, as you proved in the post where you thought an atheist joke page was actual proof for god's existence.

As for morals: how can you claim that you are more moral than us, you know nothing about us. You are more arrogant than us, which does seem to be a defining christian characteristic.

The idea that morals came from the bible has been trumped time and again. Buddah came up with his own morals thousands of years ago too, and they were much better than all of god's rules. He didn't mention stoning people to death even once.

Men are stronger than women. If a male scientists reports it, is he a sexist? Does he lack humility? Or is he just reporting what is obvious to all, but voiced by none?

No. Why is this relevant?

Nope, he's just publishing test results.

Uh, it's voiced by pretty much everyone. Yeah. Common knowledge, really. Men, on average, have greater physical strength than women. That's commonly known.

Here's another something that's obvious to all, but voiced by none: God never shows up. Not for parties, not for church, not for bible readings ... never. He's also invisible and makes no sound. And his knowledge of the world He created isn't very well represented in the book He's supposed to have written.

"Obvious to all" is a good choice of words.

 

Your self serving “research” is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!  Your unsubstantiated assumption throughout that Christians are morally superior to atheists, and that Christian nations are more compassionate and ‘civilized’ than predominantly atheist/secular nations is incorrect.  The reality is the opposite to your assumptions.

Have a look at some proper research:

http://moses.creighton.edu/jrs/2005/2005-11.html

[18] In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies (Figures 1-9). The most theistic prosperous democracy, the U.S., is exceptional, but not in the manner Franklin predicted. The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developed democracies, sometimes spectacularly so, and almost always scores poorly. The view of the U.S. as a “shining city on the hill” to the rest of the world is falsified when it comes to basic measures of societal health. Youth suicide is an exception to the general trend because there is not a significant relationship between it and religious or secular factors. No democracy is known to have combined strong religiosity and popular denial of evolution with high rates of societal health. Higher rates of non-theism and acceptance of human evolution usually correlate with lower rates of dysfunction, and the least theistic nations are usually the least dysfunctional. None of the strongly secularized, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing high levels of measurable dysfunction. In some cases the highly religious U.S. is an outlier in terms of societal dysfunction from less theistic but otherwise socially comparable secular developed democracies. In other cases, the correlations are strongly graded, sometimes outstandingly so.