n8nrgim

you hate hating, apparently 

i am pro force and pro coercion 

this was a fun related debate... 'the uinverse most likely didn't cause itself'

instead of saying god is necessary, id just say that the most straight forward way of looking at it, is that it looks like something other than the universe caused the universe to exist, and posit that that something might be God. 

eastern christians such as eastern orthodox dont believe we are born into sin, we are only born the propensity to sin. that sounds better in my book.  plus it's more common these days among christians to take adam and eve as a educational fiction. id say we shouldn't discount half of christians and pretend only western fundamentalist christianity matters.

engineering is more practical, so i would guess it would pay better. i think physics majors are smarter, but that doesn't pay the bills. at least, that's my impression. i majored in electrical engineering and environmental science, and it's nice to know there's lots of good paying jobs out there especially with my engineering degree. 

the ohio state university. yes, the 'the' is necessary in the title. 

for a hot minute there, the republican speaker race was between jordan versus scalise.... a pedophile sympathizer, versus a KKK sympathizer.

good points

Sorcerers and magicians in bible days might have just been slight of hand and the Bible is being misleading to call magic

We don't have examples of things that r inexplicable being explained. That would be a contradiction. We only have examples of things that look inexplicable at first later being explained. If something truly looks inexplicable, it's fair to offer theories

I missed that part. It's possible the Bible made a mistake, it's possible evil sources can do the supernatural too, but we have no examples in modern life. 

You r playing word games. Would it be fair for you to say the healings r inexplicable but that it looks like the body healed itself? According to you thats a contradiction. Apparently all we can do is say things r inexplicable and offer no theories.

The miracles of pope John Paul is

https://www.magiscenter.com/blog/the-miracle-that-made-pope-john-paul-ii-a-canonized-saint

Christians can show evidence of things that look supernatural and r inexplicable. Non Christians and especially atheists can't show that, or at least never do. The Bible says Satan can work false signs and wonders and might pretend to be good, but I don't know if that includes the supernatural... we certainly don't ever see demonic things that look supernatural 

You talk about credentials and personal attributes. I think there would be consenus that biden is better. But you leave out substance, the issues. It's reasonable for people not to focus as much on what you think is important, credentials and personal attributes. Since I have a liberal bias I would agree biden is better on the issues, but a reasonable person could disagree 

there's objectively pros and cons to both biden and trump. i can see preferring one or the other, and maybe even being somewhat passionate about it. but if you think half the nation is nuts for preferring the candidate that you oppose, that says a lot more about you than it does about them. 

it is odd that you have such hang ups on the intricacies of the bible. either you are excessively worried about a fiction book, or you harbor some sympathies to it being something that is worthy of concerning yourself. at least, that's what it looks like to me. you might want to honestly reflect on that. 

ABORTION

the wisdom of family guy, when it comes to abortion 

ABORTION 

I also highly doubt u have recent experience with dating apps. It's a sludge out there. Handsome successful men struggle. Dating is nothing like it was 20 years ago and especially longer

there's a heirarchy for who has it easiest with dating. lesbians have it hardest, cause they are all women and have to deal with the lesbian shit. straight men have it next hardest, cause they have to deal with women's shit. straight women have it next after that, cause they have to deal with men, which while they may not be as bad as women, have their own problems. and gay men have it easiest cause they are both men, and no one is dealing with a difficult woman. 

everyone cant be the top twenty percent of men. also, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. point, some people are just not as hot as others, and that's all there is to it... yes he can make himself as hot as possible, but to suggest that anyone can get into the top 20 percent is by definition misleading. even 'hot' guys struggle with online dating, even hot successful guys.... women on there want to be entertained, if a man doesn't use pick up artist skills, he has to be funny and interesting and smart, or he doesn't have much of a chance. 

your point that anyone could aspire to be, or be good enough to be compared to, the top 20 percent is by definition wrong. 

is the hearsay strong enough for an impeachment iquirery or investigation? 

maybe i'm making it too complicated. if we dont know if big foot exists, then we can't call it evidence and we can't call it not evidence... it might be evidence. so on weaker arguments for God, if we can't say it's evidence and we can't say it's not evidence.. we'd have to say it might be evidence. right? 

"At first glance, I read this and agreed with you that it was a good point. But now after considering it, I don't. It really is an unscientific way of looking at evidence and theories. It presumes much and it denies the purpose of evidence which is neutrality.  "

back to the big foot example. if big foot dont exist, the foot print is more accurate to say consistent with big foot, but it'd be sketchy to call it evidence. if big foot does exist, then it'd obviously be evidence. but what if we dont know? i guess that is your point... we'd have to be neutral. but at that point, is it, or is it not, evidence of big foot, if we dont know if big foot exists? i know you said the footprint is evidence of something... but on that specific point, how do you answer it if we dont know if big foot exists? 

i agree, that 'evidence' in its most simple form, legally, is whether something is 'probative', whether it makes the liklihood of something being more true or not. it's not a high standard. 

i didn't respond to your post cause it was so weak. i typically only engage in responses that are quality worth responding to. 

the fact of the matter, is that something happened to that lady that looks like it reaches beyond the realm of what is possible. a damaged optic nerve as far as humans know, dont just spontaeously just heal themselves, especially when it was after praying for intercession. you call it just inexplicable and not supernatural. but you are rationalizing it. again, it looks like something happened that is beyond the realm of what is possible. you deny it to cling to your own preocnceived notions, when the evidence is plainly right in front of you. i understand that your theories are true, that there could be something naturally occurring that we dont understand... but with common sense, even acccording to our known science.... the most straight forward way of looking at it is something beyond the realm of possible actually occurred. why dont these sorts of things happen to atheists? to follow your belief, we would have to believe your big assumption that they do occur,and it's just not reported.  you claim there's no evidence, only because you have a dark heart, and a dark mind. 

the majority of swipes with online dating from women, go to the top ten percent of men. the average woman thinks 80 percent of men are below average looking, while the average man thinks only 50 percent of women are below average. women are known to engage in hypergamy, where the man must have similar or better education and income. men generally dont care about that much, and sometimes being better in that regard than the man is a red flag to the man. the conventional women is that 80 percent of women are chasing the top 20 percent of men. if you are an average man, you dont get very many mutual 'likes' on dating apps, but the average women gets swamped with matches. they say the average woman lacks quality matches, but the average man lacks quality and quantity of matches. it's common for women to go for years with no relationship, not because she can't find a date, but because she's too picky. the average woman gets swamped with men pursuing them. i realize not every option is decent, but it's the case that there's gotta be something decent if they tried even just a little. the stats, are that for men under 30, 60 percent are single, while only 30 percent of those women are single.in general, in the next ten years, it's predicted that getting close to half of people will be single. it's a cultural phenomenon regarding our rugged indivuduality... but the main reason is that women are just too picky. 

i would need examples to believe your claims. maybe the mind causes healings, but it's always associted with belief in God from what i can tell. i'd even go so far as to say christians receive healings, and non christian claims are suspect. you say you know of a cancer healing, but cancer healings can sometimes spontaneously manifest... so that's not a good example. 

it's a correlation versus causation thing, maybe it's not belief in God, but something that the mind causes. i wouldn't think so but who knows. 

for "God" to mean anything, it has to be a being,or at least a higher power, like 'source' that NDE people often talk about. 

what if we just used the word 'like'? 

taxation is 'like' theft? i'm not a libertarian, but i understand why a person would say this.

the lack of an option in choosing to participate in our system, is 'like' slavery?

i suppose it's possible to say it's all pie in the sky, it's just different philosophical ways of looking at things. 

i've always been posting examples of the miraculous, and ya'll skeptics just choose to ignore it. here is an example. 

the catholic church has a whole section of itself that investigates miracles. it's irrational to deny that things that look supernatural happen... the question is how to interpret them. 

dont get me wrong, i still think there is evidence for God, the afterlife, and the supernatural. i just think a person could rationally argue that there is no evidence for God, to disagree with me. also, dont get me wrong, anyone who says there's objectively no evidence for God, is being irrational. they should at least allow that it's open to interpretation. 

i realize any form of existence will involve struggle, maybe my thing is not having a real choice. that's why i maintain there is something in fact that can be called 'voluntary slavery'. 

do you deny that the large majority of people have no choice but to participate in our workers' economic system, at least to some extent, if they want to survive? 

also feel free respond  to my reply to the last person above 

dont make brother thomas 'bible slap you silly', like he does me and everyone else who isn't a TRUE christian. we smell sulfur and are preparing to be satan's bitch for all eternity, and God can glorify himself by bringing with wrath down upon us, praise!

is there something in that article you want to argue? from what i see, they are proposing a theory that parts of our brain cause different NDE expereinces, but even the paper admits it's all speculative. 

it's always the same song and dance, NDE researchers establish science to back NDEs as real, and skeptics at best provide weak philosophical arguemnts and are weak when it comes to actual science. 

then i think it's misleading to the point of being wrong to say you had an NDE. at best you had an OBE and not NDE. but even on the OBE out of body experience point, in scientific research, the strories are almost always accurate or at least consistent with reality. if you had an OBE that wasn't consistent with reality, then it was probably just a drug trip and not an autehntic OBE. 

ive read enough of NDE OBE research to know your story wasn't going to make sense, even before getting the details. 

i know i said i wanted to talk about God, but i'm curious about your NDE. do you admit your experience was different than a classic NDE? i dont deny that it's possible to hallucinate afterlife stories, but there's no comparison to real NDEs. you probably didn't have those common elements like tuneels light beings deceased loved ones being told it's not your time life reviews etc. and authentic experiencers almost always say there's no doubt about their experence as real or that the afterlife exists. do you admit you didn't expereince these hallmarks of authentic experiences? i dont evven know your details, but if you had an authentic experience, then i know enough to say that your drug trip caused you to die and that you are an extrememly rare person who thinks it wasn't real when they experience it. drugs dont cause NDEs point blank, so anyone who did drugs and had an NDE must have died... at least that's the overwhelming way the evidence points.

the better explanation, is that you know it and we all know it, at best you hallucinated an afterlife experience that's nothing like a classic NDE. do you admit all this?

maybe God doesnt talk to people in a burning bush, cause that story was made up in the bible. i like to think the new testament is where the truth is, and jesus liked to heal people. there's not a lot of evidence of non healing miracles in the new testament. i like to think jesus still heals people with things that look like miraculous healing. to the extent that God does miracles that aren't healings, he's not going to do something that dispels all faith except in special circumstances. we're meant to walk by faith to a large degree. 

im more curious if you think being an atheist makes sense from a common sense perspective. i've finally concluded after decades of thinking about this sort of stuff, that it's plausible to say there's no evidence for God. but, from a common sense perspective, i'm still as strong a theist as ever. 

it's misleading to the point of being wronng to say drugs reproduce NDEs. it's almost never the case that a drug causes an eleaborate afterlife story. rarely a person might think they met God or visited the afterlife, but the experience is random and not clear like NDEs. it's rarely an elaborate afterlife story... it's more like there are similiarities, and that's all there is to it. also, even to the extent that there are similiarities, it's not like a genuine NDE. NDEs have classic elements that drugs dont cause, like tunnels, light beings, life reviews, meeting loved ones, being told it's not your time etc. drugs dont do that stuff. 

it's at best a stretch to compare NDEs to drugs. 

are you so sure that a person can choose not to participate? you guys keep saying things like 'go live off the land if you want to'. but the laws of man have made it such that we can't. that's not a law of nature. communes are not common enough for most people who might want to opt out of society. a person can't ride their horse around and essentially needs to car to participate. so what choice does the average person have? they have to buy a car, find a place to rent, and become a part of the machine.

the closest i can come to saying ya'll might be right, is the fact that a group of people can always group up and have a bunch of people living in a house with not enough rooms for everyone. there's more possibillities than this, but this is the most practical way to opt out of the grind that the average person does. but even with this way of life... we are still dependant ecnomically on society, and must work at least part time. at this point, in this hypothetical, it's fair to say we're not slaves, just that it's a practical reality... but i still think it's fair to say there's an element of slavery since we have no real choice but to participate. and, i still maintain, if you want to live an average life.. you have no choice but to join the machine and slave away for forty hours a week for forty years. 

you'd think technology would make is such that a forty hour work work wasn't necessary. but, the way the system is designed... to be an average person, almost everyone must be a cog in the machine and work for 40 hours.

also, even if i agreed that we're not slaves... would you at least agree the coercive nature of the way things is, could at least be a philoophic underpinning for liberal social contract theories?

this thread was posted in the wrong forum, so i posted the same debate in the religion forum 

an atheist here made a good point... sometimes things look more like they are 'consistent' with God theory, rather than 'evidence for' God theory. any time you see evdience for God, ask if it would be better or at least possible to not call it evidence but merely consistent with God theory. 

there's lots of philosophic arguements for God. id group those with things like casuality arguments and design arguments. the thing about these is that there's at least plausible arguments that can be made that are counter those. so it's easy to just call these consistent with God and not evidence. 

then you get into more science type arguments. the most straight forward way of looking at these, is that they are in fact evdience for God. things that look like supernatural healing. atheists usually become theists during NDEs.  something impossible happening with healing it looks like, and we dont see that as far as we know coming from atheists, we dont see impossible looking healhings from atheists. and it's almost never the case that theists become atheists during NDEs and NDEs are objectively evidence for the afterlife, so it's at least realistic to say it's also evidence for God. 

with that said, if you have a dark heart and mind, an atheist could say there's no evidence for God with these scientifc things. you could say we only have confirmation bias that healings that look supernatural happen, or that theists only assume those things only happen to theists and not atheists. they make a big assumpion that impossible looking things happen to atheists, but we'd have to admit it's possible and just not reported. and, as far as NDEs, the conventional wisdom is that NDEs are subjective and influenced by the mind... so even if NDEs are objectively evidence for the afterlife, it's also possible to say visions and thoughts of God are merely produced by our psychology and not signs of an objective reality 

with all this said, even if they could plausibly say there's no evidence for the God, atheism still lacks common sense.

-i think there's too much emphasis in NDE research on saying their experiences are based on psychology... it looks more like objective things happen, and any deviations are misinterprataions. for example, christian NDEs are common, but hindu NDEs are just the experiencers interpretation... at least there's not enough deviant types of NDEs to say it's all psychology based. 

-when healings that look supernatural happen, it still looks like impossible things are occurring. you can try to rationalize it, but that's what it looks like. 

-to say humans are merely flesh robots is riduculous. it's obvious we are more than robots. 

-there's no explanation that we know of that can explain how life started on earth, or how something as complicated as human consciousness occurrs. there's theories, yes, but they are weak from atheists on the common sense level.

-even if there are counter arguents for the philosophic arguments for God, they are at least formidable and strong, and help explain the God theory, at least if the God theory is in fact true. eg, causality or the argument from design 

can evidence exist for something that doesn't exist? 

what if you saw foot prints in the woods, and claimed that was evidence of big foot? and, we'll assume big foot doesn't exist. is it fair to call that evidence to begin with, then, if big foot doesn't exist? 

or we have more speculative things. we have lots of credible people like pilots who say they see flying objects doing things in the skies that aren't possible to our understanding of physics. is that evidence of UFOs? would it be evidence if UFOs didn't in fact exist?

an atheist at this forum made a good point once... he said, we shouldn't be so quick to call things 'evidence' if all it is is 'consistent' with a certain theory. 

i know, to get more religious, a lot of philosophic arguments for God exist, but they could just as easily be called 'merely consistent' with the the God theory than 'evidence for' the God theory.  when it comes to these philospohic arguments, for everyone you can make, there is a at least plausible alternative non God argument that could be made. 

then there's more scientific arguments, less philosohical. i do think when we get into things that look like supernatural healings, and atheists becoming theists during NDEs, that those are more in the realm of evidence and less about merely consistent with the God theory. but, it would be possible to spin even those things, if you have a darkened heart and mind, into things that are merely 'consistent' with the God theory and not look at them as evidence. 

what does it matter what it's called? is it possible to go to someone and say "i will be your slave if you take care of me"?

i dont think joining a commune makes practical sense. but i suppose it's possible for a bunch of people to live in a house even if they dont get their own room. then they might only have to work part time. we are all dependent on the current economic system, though, so there's at least a little bit of forced 'voluntary' slavery at play. 

there's at least enough unfairness that it should be the basis of a social contract and basic social safety net. even if it's not considered slavery. 

you didn't answer my question. "Do you agree voluntary slavery exists? A person can choose to be someone's slave. How is the average person any different than a person choosing to be a slave?"

Communrs and land and building supplies cost money. A below average income has little choice.

Do you agree voluntary slavery exists? A person can choose to be someone's slave. How is the average person any different than a person choosing to be a slave?

The pioneer days and wild west were free. If a person wants 100 acres of crops and to plant some apple trees, all they have to do is go do it. Can a person go plant an apple tree now when they r starting out in life? Nope. Is this limitation a law of nature? No its a law of man. He can't go rode his horses around but must buy a car if he wants to survive. He's forced to work 40 hours a week. Is voluntary slavery a sensible concept? I'd say it is, and that shoe fits here 

You say slaves have no choice. The average person has no effective choice. If the alternative is destitution, they have no choice. At best, given they can choose jobs and try to work for themselves they have a choice in slavery. 

I'm not saying needing to work is slavery. Tribal folks have a choice in how to survive. The way our society is structured the average person has no choice

if you dont want to call it slavery, what would you call it? you do acknowledge that the average person must work 40 hours a week for most of his adult life just to survive, and he has no choice in the matter other than to be poor or homeless as the alternative?