You don't owe anyone an apology.

Whats wrong with mocking an absurd claim?

If I claimed I could fart a Lamborghinni out of my ass, and truely believed it what would be wrong with you mocking that claim and saying something like "Yea you can fart a Lamborghini out of your ass like I can fart a space shuttle out of mine".

It still boils down to "if it sounds too good to be true" it should be mocked to knock the claimant into reality, otherwise I would go on continuing to falsely believe that I could fart a lamborghinhi out of my ass.

Claims are like sphincters, everyone has one. My rule is that I will stop mocking any claim when the claimant can take that claim to the patient office and win a nobel Prize in science. Other than that, just admit that it is something one likes believing.

I have no duty beyond the human rights of government to protect one's right to make any claim they want. I will always protect that right even if I attack the claim itself.

The claimant does have a choice. They can make the claim and back it up with evidence, or accept that it is nothing but their own personal predelection. But they do not have the right to be free from having their claims mocked. If they want to shut me up, all they have to do is prove it. But I would advise them that it really is journey to nowhere.

So therefore magic babies are real and surviving rigor mortis is real and brains with no brains are real? That is a huge gap you want us to jump.

The show MASH had the character named Radar that was depicted as reading people's minds and "feeling" the arival of the helicoptors with the injured. All utter bullshit and completly fictional.

I used to know a mental trick that someone taught me a long time ago. Simply guessing the number they thought of. Once I learned that trick I could convince them that I was actually reading their mind. It is bullshit. What I was really doing is aksing leading questions which lead the person to give me the answer without them being aware that they were doing it.

Now  your "no knoledge" as used for an excuse to justify woo, is merely an argument of ignorance. Not knowing how something happened does not make any sort of woo credible. There are natural exxplinations that can fit in without gap filling. That gap filling was what allowed me to fool that person that I read their mind and "guessed" the number.

People can and do subconsiously and consciously pick up on all sorts of things and can be unaware that they are doing such.

My co workers think, quite falsely that I read their minds because I am hyper aware of what is going on around me, where as most workers simply ignore what others do and only do what they have to. So when i show up behind a co worker "suddenly" to help them, I am not reading their mind, I am playing the odds because I am aware of what they are about to do.

What can be ruled out in your "account" is superstition and souls and god/s. If you are not flat out lying to us, then it is merely a subconsious que picked up on that never got noticed. But like all good con artists, they always lie and say that is not what is going on.

It is why magicians for a long time got away with convincing the creudulous that the actually sawed the woman in half or made her float. Now that that con has been around for so long, the honest ones like Penn and Teller admit it is a trick even if they don't tell you how it is done.

If your "account" had any credibility a science with independent scientists could quite easly set up a lab and a control group to verify the plausability to your end conclusion. The wise scientist when the con makes the claim doesn't simply accept it on faith and the wise con artist runs and avoids the challenge to maintain their lie.

The conclusion when an "I don't know" occurs the FIRST thing logical thinkers default to is Ocham's Razor, which stipulates that out of all claimed solutions to an "I don't know", the least complecated is the most likely answer.

Now if you are going to ask me to chose between untested woo and base it on a personal "experiance", I am sorry, I cannot and will not. Between "woo" and the reality that humans simply do not understand how easily their own brains can fool them and others, the natural explination and the least complecated is that humans have flawed perceptions.

Otherwise that song could easily have been inspired by a pink unicorn, or Allah or Thor or an invisible teapot orbiting Jupiter and would be as equally valid a guess as to "why" this "experiance" happened.

Bottom line the natural explination is that humans fool themselves and can quite easily fool others.

A couple of other examples of how people fool themselves. Some people like to claim that mothers can "sense" when their kid is in trouble. The flaw in that claim is that they never take into account a long term sample where they have that "feeling" and nothing happens.

Some twins and married couples complete each other's sentances. So what. My best friend Bob whom I only talk to on skpe we do that all the time. It is not that we are litteraly reading others minds, but that we are so used to each other we consiously or subconciously que off the behavior we are used to having with each other.

Historically it is even worse when the tactic of theists when they claim "How could all these flood stories exist if there was no connection between cultures, it must mean a global flood happened"

NO, no one living back then knew that local floods happen all over the world. Back then the layperson saw the horizon as being the entire world they lived in. So independent flood stories are perfectly to be expected because they had no clue the real size of the world on a scientific level.

So why do I bring this up? Because it still boils down to the natural conclusion and the most simple answer is that if someone wants to believe something badly enough they will, and if they want to fool others badly enough they will.

In your case, like I said, there are only two rational options. 1. They are missinterpreting their "experiance", or they are flat out lying. You don't have to be lying to be wrong, but many people even when not intentually lying like the missinterpretation even if they are unaware that that is all it is.

No,

Amilia Eerhart's plane went down in the Pacific, that is a fact. It is also fact that we cannot find the plane, or have not so far. But if we go by your logic that it is true until proven false, then she was abducted by the Kebler Elves.

It was true that air flight was possible even before we knew it. The laws of physics and lift were arround long before the invention of the airplane. But even though we cannot find the plane, we can take the natural rout that a storm, or mechanical problem, or even worst case scenerio, shot down by mistaken identity. But what did not happen in her case was a Yetti throwing a gient snowball at her plane, or little green men, or Thor striking her down.

But science never made that assumption first and if since took your approach we'd simply strap feathers to our arms and jump off cliffs because we can see birds fly.

Newton got physics right, but he was NOT right about everything and even he gave up on his pet project of alchemy when he realized how absurd it was.

Sceintists do not claim nor should claim to know everything. Any scientist not willing to go where the evidence leads SHOULD NOT be in a lab.  But they do not fill in gaps with superstition or woo otherwise I could claim that Eerhart went down because of Godzila or King Kong and since you have never been to japan or been in every jungle, it must be true because you cant prove it isnt.

Never heard of this WA blob consperacy you are talking about. Lots of people claim horiscopes and ouija boards work. Lots of people think there was more than one killer in the JFK assasination and some people still today think the moon landing was faked.

Now if you think gap filling and faith is all that is required for evidence, then the next time you go to pick up your paycheck, let him say "It is an invisible pay check, in an invisible bank" Since paychecks are real and banks are reai then "faith" in an invisible one you cant see must mean it is real because he too could claim "how do you know it isn't real".

See if you can spot the pattern,

"Allah is real because you cant prove he isn't"

"Yawheh is real because you cant prove he isn't"

""Vishnu is real because you cant prove he isnt"

"My invisible pink unicorn is real because you cant prove it isnt"

So by your logic if you want to be consistant, all of those claims are true by default. The reality is that you wouldn't do that nor should you do that.

Now, take that same introspection you just used in rejecting the claims above, and apply it to your own claims as well. Otherwise all those gap answers above are true as well. That is what you are doing and that is what scientific method filters out.

Studies are worthless? What do you think product develoment is? How do you think computers went from light bulbs and switches taking up entire gyms, to smaller punchcard mainframes, to smaller monochomatic pcs, to color pcs, to Apple to to Microsoft, to IPADS and cell phones that are now more powerful than the first PCS?

And eggs are bad FOR WHO? Some yes because they have alergies  and they do have colesteral, but they also have good protien. They would both say it isn't harmfull occasinally. Water is good for you too, but no doctor is going to recomend you down 20 gallons of it in 5 minutes, even doing that would kill you.

You are still stuck on "personal experience". We can scientificaly prove that our own perceptians can be flawed. You can draw two lines on a peice of paper if you do it right, and make them look to be different sizes, but if you simply turn the paper to a different angle, your perception changes. That is just optical illusions. People have phantom pains where their brians tell them a missing hand or mising foot or leg are still there, even though they are not.

Our perceptions are notoriously flawed. The natural explination to your examples are very simple mentaly, just like misinterpreting the size of something. You simply see something you don't understand, or if you are a con artist lie about it.

So now your argument is that scientists don't agree? If they did all the time I would think they were cons themselves. But once competing claims are settled THE ETHICAL scientist will discard the bad data and adapt the good data.

Dont confuse a drug company or a food company whose "scientists" look for excuses. What happens when scientists work for corperate America, not that they always do or will, but when something dangerous gets out it is because the wistle blowers working for them either get fired or under contract to never talk about it.

But method itself is not a person, it is a tool and it is the same method that causes a car engine manufacturer to put a belt on a pully and not on the rear view mirror. It is why you will never find a softwear developer using a feather boa instead of a keyboard. It is the same method that causes an orthopidic sergon to use x rays and cat scans, rather than ouija boards.

What amazes me is that these people get support from the voters to actually make it in to office.

Jon Stewart had a segment on a last week about the three crazies (legit rape, blacks should be thankful and the earth is 9000 years old).

there are billions of people out there who have never had supernatural encounters. It is arrogant of you to assume that such people are all sinners and deserve eternal immolation at the behest of an undefined and unseen deity whose entire existence depends on belief without proof. Yet on the basis of no testable explanation you condemn us and our loved ones to death. It should not be very difficult for you empathy-saturated christians to put yourselves in our position and to feel a sense of our deep and abiding outrage and our distaste for the false morality of your dogma. Perhaps we should begin an atheist cult that condemns you christians to death for not genuflecting before the Taung Child. How would that feel? Mmm? 

In addition, given the supernatural is; by definition, non material; please explain how it is that anyone has experienced this assertion in a manner that could not be more adequately explained as adventures in the human imagination. To be honest, having been around you 2 theists for a while, it's obvious you need/want there to be something more, some extra meaning to life, something greater than just looking after the people you love and who love you. Something that makes each of you the centre of universal attention. I have no problem with this self-obsessed behaviour. And just as soon as you remove the baseless threats and bizarre 'moral' judgments from your 'holy' book I will be happy to let you get about your giddy lifetimes of creative reality without further comment.  

My point is that science is nothing more than a tool, and it's not infallible.  There could be a discovery years from now which completely changes what we thought we knew about our universe.  So does that mean what you are claiming today as fact really wasn't a true fact?

My other point is that science can't explain everything, and skeptics choose to just ignore such things.  Such as the mind/body connection.   I constantly struggle with this problem, and it can't be treated because science doesn't have an answer for it.  For example, it's common for first year med students to start experiencing symptoms of unknown diseases that they experience.  You read about this horrible diseases where itching is the main symptom and now your body feels itchy.  You have an illness, and start becoming afraid that it won't go away, and it doesn't.    How is it that an emotion like fear or anxiety can produce such physical real life tangible results?  Now a doctor can give you a sugar pill that does nothing, but if your mind has faith that it will heal you,  it often does.  Why?  

This illustrates that there is more going on with the human experience than just our physical bodies. 

Humans are infalibale, tools however minimize or SHOULD minimize that falibility.

Scientific method is a tool not a human. It is why you can use it to create medicine to cure a desease and create a weapon to kill other humans.

Your stupid mistake is that you confuse the hammer with the person using the hammer.

Theism is pulling shit out of your ass like lead protecting Superman from Kriptonite.

Can people use science to do bad things? DUH, but again, that is blaming hammer for what the user does with the hammer.

The technology that has caused death in all war has been produced by the mass majority of superstitious. Admitting that humans can do bad things is stupid and "DUH"

But scietific method is not a human, it is what humans use to come up with universal things like the computer you are typing your tripe on.

There are no 'true' facts. We can support hypotheses with varying degrees of certainty. That is all. Things that are claimed to be absolutely true are assertions. 

No they bloody don't. Skepticism is interwoven into the scientific method. No scientist believes they know absolute truth. What empiricists do expect is that objective assertions be supported with some data or be admitted to be assertions. It's really very simple. You can make whatever claims you want about things outside the universe but when you talk about supernatural intervention into material reality then there had better be objective proof. 

Your faith is your faith and your faith alone. While you might compare notes with others and believe that your faith is the same as the others who you are connected to, you are in fact, misleading yourself.

Faith is a blind belief that a 'thing' is real but you have no proof that it is real nor can any one disprove it. If you have proof that your 'faith' is real, then it stops being faith and becomes a fact.

You do not have faith because you keep trying to justify it by posting evidence to show to others that it exists. You are trying to gain acceptance by giving us personal opinions from you and others.

When a person of faith debates their faith they are not actually debating their faith because in order to actually debate you must follow specific rules of debating. One of which requires you to be open to the fact that you could be wrong.

If you actually debate you must suspend your faith and therefore are a non-believer. I however have never found a person of faith who can actually suspend their faith. They either are faithful or they are not. Since you can not suspend your 'faith' for a debate it is no longer a debate and becomes a speech with a conclusion.

You left out  the mental sciences. All writing is a product of the mind. Metaphors are normally attached to fact. In the book the metphors may be or are attached to mental facts.   "Sandy's wrath" is a metaphor describing  of a climatic fact is it not.