Holy James T. Kirk, this again? There are times when I really understand why Matt posts a picture of his cat rather than a refutation. Theist apologetics is all a matter of repetition.

The article: Fallacy of the bald assertion, several times. Straw man, several times. Wank wank wank.

 I'll see if I can get in before the Shizzle-Cat...

Luckily, belief is not truth-dependent.

Careful, there, kiddo.  Accident requires intent, and that's a pressuposition.  I do not pressupose the existence of intent, so I do not say that anything predating intelligence was an accident.

You should try listening to an atheist sometime.  You've got a lot of things wrong.  Again, there's no such thing as an accident.  Matter/energy interact in predictable ways, and anything that happened which gave rise to anything we perceive happened because matter/energy was doing what matter/energy does, and quite without intelligent guidance.

Truth is a construct of consciousness.  Since consciousness arose as an emergent property of mind, which arose as an emergent property of life, I can say that life produced truth, where truth is a binary measure of consistency with reality as perceived through a given system.

Without intent, there are no accidents.

It's a very poor analogy, particularly because his conclusion is wrong in the first place!  We can induce quite a bit from a spill of milk on the ground.  We might even, with proper equipment, be able to determine whether the milk was in a plastic or glass bottle, whether it came from a cow or a goat, approximately how large the container had to have been at a minimum, and whether the animal(s) it came from were treated with antibiotics or not.

Similarly, with abiogenesis, we cannot create a certain timeline of precise events, but we know an awful lot about it.  We have successfully replicated many parts of the most parsimonious theories of abiogenesis, including the precursors to liquid crystal replicators.

You have no idea how ironic this statement is.

Thanks for noticing.

I'd love to see this logical proof.  Really.  I've been looking for it for years.  And yes, I'm very well schooled in logic.

Let me see if I have your argument straight so far:

1) You think there's a logical disproof of atheism.

2) No atheists agree with you.

3) Therefore, god exists.

And you were the one talking about being well educated in logic... wow.

Fucking hell.  You were doing ok there for a minute, and now you have to go bringing this authoritarian bullshit into it.  Suppose you prove that atheism is impossible.  Now, prove to me that god isn't a fuzzy bunny rabbit that shoots rainbows from its nostrils, and wants nothing more than for every human on earth to stick a carrot up their ass and sing "I'm a little Teapot."

Fuck off, you ignorant fucking twat.

There.  Does that make you happy?  Are you convinced I'm an evil son-of-a-bitch now?  Actually, I'm going to disappoint you.  I'm not angry with you.  I typed that for effect so you could get a little bit of a boner thinking about how angry I am at god.  No, I'm afraid I'm really a very happy person, and without having to try to make Bronze Age patriarchal misogyny part of my life, I manage to live a very full, rich life.  Sorry to disappoint you.

Although... I'm going to have to admit, I wouldn't like you if I met you in person.  You really are a very presumptuous person, and it makes me sad for everyone who cares for you.  It's a shame they have to put up with that kind of closed-mindedness.  If you're as heavy-handed with your loved ones as you have been in this post, I'm truly sorry for them.

I'm going to give you exactly one chance to be taken seriously.  In your next post, present the logical disproof of atheism in standard logical notation.  If you can't, shut up about this proof.

I'm curious if you've heard of placebos.  You know that they cure illnesses, right?  Well, actually, they don't do anything of the sort.  They're inert dummy pills that get harmlessly digested.  The thing is, people believe they work, and that belief affects changes in their body which then heals itself.  It's all very well documented if you want to do some research.

No, I'm afraid an effect is not proof of the believed cause.  It is only proof of *some* cause.

Open minded to the end.

Actually, no.  Your whole theory collapses because I'm one of them, and I've never, ever, ever presented a list when asked why I don't like God.

You know logic, right?  Your premise is false.  Therefore, your conclusion is invalid.  End of discussion.

I could give two shits about the stupid Bronze Age mystical bullshit in the Bible or any other holy book.  I object to the belief in god or gods on epistemological grounds.  Can you see the difference?  It's like when your mother believes going without shoes will give you the flu, and you explain to her that the flu is caused by viruses, not the temperature of your feet.  You don't have a problem with the fact that bare feet cause the flu.  You have a problem with the BELIEF that they do.

No, kiddo.  We don't NEED a god to tell us what to do.  We have brains, and we can figure it out for ourselves.

Well, the last sentence is closer to the truth than anything else you've said.  I certainly don't want to be like you because you're very closed minded, judgmental, and not particularly good at logic.  However, I'm not like you because I don't believe in God... not because I don't want to believe in God.  That's an important difference.

Just for the hell of it, can you tell me precisely what "subjective belief" means?

You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.

By all means.  I'll be happy to examine any logical proofs you'd like to give me.

Nice to know that about myself.  Thanks.

Why should I care what you think?

Not.

Stop looking in the mirror.

I don't recall this.

How can you not like someone that doesn't exist? Excuse me, I don't get it.

Methinks you have drunk too much sacramental wine.

God who? Or your mythical buddy. Well, I've never met him so I have no idea. Tell him to drop by for coffee and I'll let you know what my opinion is.

Were we talking about Santa here?

Guess not.

Did you just make this shit up or did you do a survey? If a survey, my response is other. Since I don't know how one can obey rules of someone not shown to exist?

Is that what you call delusion now. By the way you forgot to capitalize Truth.

Actually that's laughter you hear me breaking into.

How could you tell in your worldview of fantasy and delusion. 

all i have to say is

Hamby...of all the people I have never had the oportunity to meet (excepting those with vaginas) ...you just might be my favorite.

I guess I have a big list of those I'd like to met who I'd like fuck (only 3 still here right now and 1 I know is married) Those I would and wouldn't want to fuck (guys) and of course the 1 I actually met (Shelley. )

You know, I think Rich and I probably disagree a bit about the degree of nonmonogamy that is "natural" to humans, and we probably have different opinions about the psychology of nonmonogamy, but how can a person who studies human sexuality as much as I not want to meet the guy who made that site.

At the very least, I assert that Rich's lifestyle, and the attitude he espouses is not a culturally formed anomaly.  It's part of the spectrum of normal human sexuality.

This is nothing more than another, "I can't believe anyone really doesn't believe!"  Just the brainwashed trying to lead the blind.

...But I don't have any disciplines to straighten-out.

Ah, okay. This explains my error rather nicely.

Sorry for messing-up your science.

...Well, wait:

I don't understand the perspective of 'all of one man instead of half'. If someone has two girlfriends, why would either feel like they're only getting 'some' of their boyfriend's attention? I mean, presumably, the girlfriend in question also has multiple partners at her disposal, and it's probable that she really likes/loves more than one (right?) - so wouldn't they make the connection (at some level) that there's nothing really being taken away from them by their boyfriend's other partner? (Well, that I can think of. Is there something being taken away from one person when they 'share' a significant other with someone else?)

Hm. I'm not sure what I think about that. I mean, any person who's honest would have to acknowledge the fact (like you did earlier) that people (on average) are going to take multiple partners. So, every honest and somewhat intelligent person must enter into a relationship with the following (if we're polygamous, it's axiomatic):

P1: My significant other is polygamous, and therefore is likely to have a partner outside of our relationship.

...So, if the next premise is (and is also axiomatic via human nature, as you've implied):

P2: If my significant other has a partner outside of our relationship, I will get jealous and become destructive.

Then we have a real problem when we reach the 'C' part of this equation, don't we?

Essentially, you must then be arguing that almost every sexual relationship must end destructively. There nothing wrong with that as an argument in and of itself, but I'd have to then ask you if that's what we really see happening?

If P2 is not axiomatic, on the other hand, but is induced by poor reasoning and indoctrination, I think that this better explains what we see across the spectrum of the globe. People who have better reasoning talents and aren't indoctrinated lead healthier sexual lives and countries where education is important but religion is not have significantly increased degrees of overall contentedness.

On the other hand... I'm not the dude who's spent years of his time studying this stuff, and don't have firsthand experience with any of the aforementional turmoil. Feel free to correct me where I may have erred.

Does that make him an aatheist

 Rich brings up a very good point.  Outside of the biological definition, it is possible to interpret monogamy in different ways.  After all, sociology is the science of quantifying the human experience, not of prescribing behavior.

Consider that in an open relationship, it's damn difficult to cheat in the traditional sense.  Then again, there are people who remain sexually faithful to their mate, but for all intents and purposes, are cheating.  Consider a wife who maintains a platonic male friend, and though she never has sex with him, she shifts her emotional attachment to him, and no longer confides in or enjoys the company of her husband.  In the spirit of monogamy, this is certainly a betrayal.

Of course, it's just as possible for an open couple to experience the same thing.  However, I believe that one of the most often heard platitudes about marriage is incorrect.  You've probably heard it said that cheating in marriage is not usually about sex.  It's about something else that has gone wrong in the marriage.  This is only partly true.  For one thing, that applies more to women than men.  Cheating very often is about sex for men, particularly when their wives hit menopause.  For some women, too, cheating is about sex.  You have no idea how many women I've known who were in sexless marriages because their husband was no longer interested in them sexually.  We can go into the reasons, and some might legitimately be the woman's fault, but this is neither here nor there.  Some women cheat for sex.

Open relationships effectively end this particular cause for cheating.  It could be argued that the opportunity for falling in love with someone else is greater when you're having sex with multiple partners, but I'm not really sure that's true.  There's also the possibility (and I believe it's probably true) that people in open relationships have more personal motivation to stay involved.  After all, if they don't continue to woo their mate, they do stand a chance of losing them.  They're always competing against real people, not just the possibility of a real person existing.

I'm actually trying to dig up research on polyamory and swinging, mostly with regard to the longevity and reported happiness of these kinds of relationships as compared to what Rich calls "Vanilla" monogamy.  I'll let you guys know when/if I find any.  As you might expect, there's not a lot of free money out there for putting together studies of sinful sexual practices unless the stated goal is to prove them sinful.

So true. Now India - there's a real fake. No place like India could actually exist. The Brits just made it up.