So you did a copy/paste of this from The Case For Christ
Because you did not note that you took this from elsewhere, you have engaged in plagiarism. Plagiarism is not allowed here. Do it again and you will be banned. This is an official warning.
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The study, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science today, found that on average people whose obituary mentioned they were religious lived an extra 5.64 years.
Atheists commit suicide far more often than those of faith, which is clearly not “rational”
“Atheism: Contemporary Rates and Patterns” in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, ed. by Michael Martin, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK (2005). In examining various indicators of societal health, Zuckerman concludes about suicide:
“Concerning suicide rates, this is the one indicator of societal health in which religious nations fare much better than secular nations. According to the 2003 World Health Organization’s report on international male suicides rates (which compared 100 countries), of the top ten nations with the highest male suicide rates, all but one (Sri Lanka) are strongly irreligious nations with high levels of atheism. It is interesting to note, however, that of the top remaining nine nations leading the world in male suicide rates, all are former Soviet/Communist nations, such as Belarus, Ukraine, and Latvia. Of the bottom ten nations with the lowest male suicide rates, all are highly religious nations with statistically insignificant levels of organic atheism.”[3]
The list of atheist shooters and serial killers does not correspond to claims of intellectual superiority and rationality.
Atheists have a long record of being mass shooters and militant atheism in general has a causal association with mass murder.
Due to this fact, peer reviewed research published in academic journals has found that society-at-large is likely to hold atheists responsible for capital criminal acts and that even atheists are likely to assume that serial killers are fellow atheists.[2][3][4]
Banned from this cesspool? Oh the horror! I could not bear it.
I have thousands of quotations and did not reference all of them.
So you go ballistic. Any excuse will do a tyrant.
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Since you find this a cesspool, and since I like doing nice things for folks, I’ll help you out of it by canceling your account. That should help you out a great deal. I would SO hate to see you continue to wallow in these waters.
Say okay bye now.
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Why am I not surprised 
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Yeah, I caught that…
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Sigh….actually, we tyrants don’t use just any excuses! We use only the choicest!
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This is fairly common knowledge. Are you trying to assert your God allows you to live longer. People who are not married, like myself, do not have routine lives. “Churchgoers tend to engage in positive behaviors including high social interaction and lower rates of alcohol and drug abuse,” said Bill Fiala, Ph.D., These three distinct subgroups of religious support were identified as support from the congregation, from church leadership, and from God. All three of these categories lowered depression and increased life satisfaction.
These are also the main reasons for sites like this one. Until the advent of the internet, atheists were few, far between, and alone. The internet has allowed us to congregate, support one another, and grow our numbers. "Atheism is the fastest growing religion (tongue in cheek) on the planet today.
" “Nones” on the Rise
The number of Americans who do not identify with any religion continues to grow at a rapid pace. One-fifth of the U.S. public – and a third of adults under 30 – are religiously unaffiliated today, the highest percentages ever in Pew Research Center polling.
In the last five years alone, the unaffiliated have increased from just over 15% to just under 20% of all U.S. adults. Their ranks now include more than 13 million self-described atheists and agnostics (nearly 6% of the U.S. public), as well as nearly 33 million people who say they have no particular religious affiliation (14%).3"
And that is how your quote> “Nones” on the Rise | Pew Research Center
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I would absolutely love to see a legitimate proof of God’s existence.
I don’t wake up in the morning, drink my coffee, and make up the day’s “to-do” list with “How can I spite God?” on it.
I would love to believe in God, as it would make things a lot simpler in my existence.
Unfortunately, there does not seem (as of yet) to be any evidence.
Theists (or at least the ones on this forum) seem to want to see atheists as some kind of adversary or enemy, when all we want is to see the Universe as it is rather than how we wish it to be.
I came to question God’s existence simply because I’ve seen people die because of it all of the time, as I work in the medical field. A specific example is how a child in a Jehovah’s Witness family died from want of a blood transfusion after a car accident . . . although I could probably give about 10 to 15 more examples off the top of my head, and quite a few more if I research my papers, files, and diaries.
I have no antagonism toward theists, except when religious belief kills people.
The Bible is often considered the “inerrant, perfect word of God,” and this has a lot of negative consequences.
An example I often use is the Brescia church explosion. Basically, lightning was believed to come from God. There are many references to lightning in The Bible as God’s weapon, with a specific example being in the Book of Job, 37:1-13.
Well . . . since lightning is from God, then the church must be the safest place for the military to store all of the gunpowder. In the Brescia church, that amounted to almost 90 metric tons in the spaces and catacombs under the building.
As you might imagine, the church was struck by lightning and the explosion killed approximately 2,000 people and destroyed 1/6 of the town.
This was after Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod and had been aggressively campaigning and lobbying to have them mounted on church steeples, as the steeple was often the highest point in town, and Franklin wanted to protect the bell ringers from being electrocuted.
Franklin met resistance everywhere, as it was sacreligious to use lightning rods on churches if lightning is from God. It took the deaths of 2,000 people and a partially destroyed town to get his ideas accepted, and then the bell ringers stopped getting electrocuted by lightning.
My point is that if we decided to be morally flexible with regards to lightning rods on churches, then why not extend this flexibility to other issues like gay marriage, biological evolution, cosmology, and so forth?
And if we take this a step further, then we question how religion and theism has hurt us . . . and from there, only one small step to question God’s existence.
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Not really, religious bigotry is pretty common, many theists would hold the same objections to their children marrying theists who believed in the existence of a different deity, or even a different version of the same deity, god knows humans have imagined enough deities, and versions of deities to choose from, christianity alone has over 45k different sects and denominations globally.
Another sweeping and unevidenced claim, and of course no actual context offered so a meaningless claim at that. Given the level of divorce, and the exponentially increasing human population, one is left wondering why anyone would consider this a bad thing in and of itself?
Ah “the statistics”, no sorry I’m lost what statistics? You appear to be just making up bigoted rhetoric.
Who is you, what misery have they brought on themselves, and who have they blamed for this? Another cryptic piece of bigoted rhetoric, that is unsupported by either rational argument or any objective evidence.
Did you have a point?
I give up why?
This is a laughably facile attempt at a poisoning of the well fallacy, one decision that appear irrational does not suggest everything that person ever said or did was irrational, why would it? Your arguments for a deity on the other hand are relentlessly irrational, and unsupported by any objective evidence, which does suggest the belief is irrational.
There it is the poisoning of the well fallacy, oddly ironic that your bigotry decrying all atheists as irrational all the time, is itself irrational by definition.
Whenever I see a religious apologists filled with this much anger and hatred and bigotry towards others who just don’t share their belief in a deity, I wonder they can even pretend their beliefs make them happy, and paradoxically claim that my lack of belief must make me miserable. I guess irony is not your bag.
There is no objective evidence for any resurrection, only the unevidenced anonymous hearsay of the gospels, written many decades after the events they purport to describe. So this is not just another irrational appeal to authority fallacy, it seems a pretty lame one if this expert on rules of evidence finds anonymous unevidenced hearsay an example of a compelling piece of legal evidence. I can only pity anyone who fell under his judgment.
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Like what, teaching hate? Teaching your fellow Christians that it’s okay to hate Atheists like you do?
Prove it. What objective evidence can you prove for the existence of any deity?
You mean many Christians? Sounds like you have an irrational fear of atheists. Valid criticism is not Anti-Christian Sentiment, when you are ignoring valid points and arguments. That would make you the one with the irrational fear. Fear of confronting criticism. Fear of Atheists. So far most of what you have said comes off atheophobic.
liar, liar, pants on fire.
This is irrelevant garbage. I’ve known of several religious boards, including Christian ones, hang it up through the years.
Claim. You are making a No True Scotsman Fallacy. Devout Christian parents perhaps.
This is also a claim and a No True Scotsman Fallacy. An atheists’ beliefs have no bearing on how many kids they have or do not have. It varies atheist to atheist.
Cite evidence for this claim.
LMAO, So because we’re not Christian like you, that means we’re miserable?
Bud, I was more miserable than I ever was when my parents forced Christianity onto me. You Christians live under the idea that if you don’t please that imaginary friend of yours, he’ll send you to hell. I’ve watched many Christians go up to the altar, cry and beg for forgiveness because they’re afraid of being sent off to a fiery torture dungeon. If anyone is a miserable wretch here, it’s you. After all, you’re the first one here to say it in this thread.
The same could be said for Christian cultists who kill themselves and their followers. Maybe you just don’t believe in mental illness. I wouldn’t be surprised. A majority of Christian bigots dismiss because it’s a science they don’t yet understand. Looks like you’re one of them.
You mean that’s how you roll. The only proof you’ve given is that a majority of Christians are taught to hate and you’re one of them.
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And you’re about to provide more evidence of mythology fanboy failure in this regard …
Pull the other one, mythology fanboy, it’s got bells on. All your ilk has ever had to offer, is a mixture of “My favourite Bronze Age mythology says os” and ex recto apologetic fabrications that an astute child would point and laugh at.
Crap. “Here’s some made up shit I pulled out of my arse to con the gullible rubes into paying the tithes” isn’t “evidence”.
Crap. I’ve been reviewing scientific papers for 14 years, and I’ve never seen anything from your ilk that would pass muster even in kindergarten, let alone in the nuclear war zone of scientific peer review.
It’s garbage, and McDowell is a professional liar for doctrine, and a pedlar of apologetic bum custard.
No, it’s a screed that only morons would find convincing.
Crap. It’s nothing but conceit elevated beyond its level of competence.
Oh look, an apologetics website. How predictable.
Here’s a clue for you, Looby Loo … apologetics is the fine art of making shit up, in order to pretend that ridiculous Bronze Age mythological assertions purportedly constitute fact. Except that they don’t.
Funny how modern scientists, including Nobel Laureates, treat your cartoon magic man from your goat herder mythology as an irrelevance in both their work and their daily lives, as this article from a leading science journal demonstrates. By the way, None of the scientists in question provided an atom of evidence for your cartoon magic man, and indeed treated your cartoon magic man as an irrelevance every time they donned their lab coats.
As for this:
A Jesuit priest is hardly an unbiased observer …
You’re not capable of teaching anyone anything of substance here, as your extant forays into the world of made up shit apologetics already demonstrate.
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!
Oh please, this is so funny.
Oh wait, here’s a peer reviewed academic paper demonstrating that the USA is a backward shithole in comparison to other developed nations on a range of metrics. From that paper:
From that paper:
Looks like your feculent attempt at Christian Nationalist historical revisionism is destroyed.
Mythology fanboy projection time again … oh wait, who here used the prhase “atheist stench” in another of his posts?
Looks like both your bigotries and your mendacity are showing in a way that isn’t good.
I’ll take things that never happened for $500, Alex …
Bollocks. I’m used to seeing your ilk make shit up.
Liar.
Why do mythology fanboys like you have to make shit up in order to pretend to yourselves that the holograms in the broken televisions in your heads are real?
Bullshit. This is the entire basis of “Christian inerrancy”.
Your Bronze Age mythology doesn’t count as non-fiction. Talking snakes?
Which fits you to a tee.
Oh, you mean the scientists you lied about, by forgetting that most of them were born at a time when Christian religion infection was still poisoning many developed societies? None of whom provided an atom of evidence for your cartoon magic man, and indeed treated your cartoon magic man as an irrelevance every time they donned their lab coats?
Murderous mythology fanboys spent 1,500 years in Europe, torturing and burning alive people who didn’t conform to doctrine. The sordid history of the Inquisition and its aftermath is well known. Stop lying.
You mean the same Nobel Laureates who never found an atom of evidence for your imaginary cartoon magic man from your goat herder mythology, and who treated this risible entity as an irrelevance every time they donned their lab coats?
They were smart enough not to let your sad little fantasies pollute their work.
Already dealt with this shit above.
Meanwhile, I see your wankery is continuing …
Again, the same Nobel Nobel Laureates who never found an atom of evidence for your imaginary cartoon magic man from your goat herder mythology, and who treated this risible entity as an irrelevance every time they donned their lab coats?
Projection time again from you, mythology fanboy.
Bullshit. Oh wait, once again, the same Nobel Nobel Laureates never found an atom of evidence for your imaginary cartoon magic man from your goat herder mythology, and treated this risible entity as an irrelevance every time they donned their lab coats.
It wasn’t their “beliefs” that led to them being Nobel Laureates, it was finding evidence supporting new and in some cases counter-intuitive postulates.
Did you have a school to attend as a child, Looby Loo?
Projection time again, mythology fanboy?
Projection time again … got any substance to offer instead of this infantile bluster?
Hilarious seeing you point to a religious group as an “exemplar of evil”. Bullet in own foot time perchance?
And the wankery continues from you I see …
Ah, the pungent smell of Christian bigotry that is so familiar to many here …
Which on an already overpopulated planet is a good thing …
That peer reviewed paper I provided above, pointing to societies being far better places without your sad little religion, is merely one of many refutations of your Christian Nationalist bullshit.
It’s projection time again …
And look at the sort of people who aren’t atheists … convicted felon Kent Hovind, the liars for the Duplicity Institute and Arsewater in Genesis, and all those sleazy “televangelists” riding around in private jets paid for by the “tithes” of the gullible rubes they swindled.
If you’re a Trump supporter, you really don’t want to go here. Oh, and I also seem to recall Newt Gingrich being another serial womaniser?
You mean the way you obviously don’t give a flying fuck about the feelings of anyone outside your bigoted little doctrinal pale?
Says the mouthy bigot.
Meanwhile …
No, he was a pedlar of Christian apologetics. Stop lying. He was a devout evangelical Episcopalian all his life.
Oh look, it’s lying Christian Nationalist historical revisionism again …
A copy-pasted meme from an apologetics website isn’t a “source”.
And now, in predictable fashion, you’re moving on the cherry picking, quote mining and well poisoning … quelle surprise … and it’s amusing that your “links” are from Conservapedia, which is a Christian Nationalist joke. A joke site run by a creationist liar, who to use that favourite phrase of yours, had his arse handed to him by Richard Lenski over the E. coli long term evolution experiment. But I digress. The mere fact that you think this rampantly biased website constitutes an “academic source” speaks volumes about both your stupidity and your duplicity.
Oh really?
First, you can’t even provide a proper citation for the work in question (something that Conservapedia avoids in order to keep the rubes gullible). Second, when I visit the website of the journal in question, and search for the article, I find a somewhat more nuanced picture being painted than in your Christian Nationalist historical revisionist version - here’s the article in question:
Meanwhile, a second paper reveals the following:
In other words, you’re more likely to live longer if you’re surrounded by people like yourself. Quelle surprise.
Looks like your lies are being busted again.
Ahem, that peer reviewed study I presented earlier by Gregory S. Paul in Journal of Religion & Society has the following to say on that matter:
Hmm, looks like your lies are being busted again …
And this is also a lie. Even an elementary check of the statistics shows that from the top 10 countries in terms of suicide rates, 8 are in Africa, and have nothing to do with fantasies about “communism”, and the other two are groups of Pacific islands (Kiribati and Micronesia). Top of them all is eSwatini.
Any more lies you want to post here, in violation of the Ninth Commandment from your god?
Oh look, more lies … again, all the “references” being from the lying sack of shit Conservapedia website … notice that there are NO links to actual databases of statistical information in your plagiarised diatribe.
And once again, an “evangelical Christian” demonstrates that his religion has made him a pathological liar for Jeebus.
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I don’t know about atheist serial killers or mass shooters . . . but I do know that a large majority of convicted criminals in prison are deeply religious.
Please see below:
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I’m going to assume you mean “evidence” and not “proof.” There is NO proof. There is no proof for several reasons. Nothing is ever absolute in science. Science does not build proofs it builds models. Any model can be adapted or changed whenever new evidence is discovered. “Proof” is a mathematical concept. So I am giving you the benefit of doubt and trying to help you clarify your position. The word you mean to use is “EVIDENCE.” If you say there is ‘proof’ for the existence of a god, or Jesus, you are demonstrably correct. (Edit the overly enthusiastic - OOPS!)
Now, lets pretend you used the word “Evidence” and your assertion read more like “Atheists claim there is an absence of evidence for God’s existence.” Well, those atheists would be demonstrably wrong. There is in fact a lot of horrible evidence for the existence of all gods. That’s why we don’t pay attention to it. Your god has the exact same evidence for it as all gods ever invented. Personal testimony, stories, and miraculous events attributed to it. While all of this does qualify as evidence, it is easily dismissed as unverifiable, unfalsifiable, and unsubstantiated. If you have any evidence at all that does not fall into these categories that clearly demonstrate the existence of your god or the baby Jesus we would all love to hear about it.
Just saying Jesus rose from the dead is not enough. Saying that someone saw him, is hearsay. It is not enough. Telling a story of magical events is not enough. Asserting that something you do not understand is a miracle is not enough. You must directly link the god thing you believe in to the miracle or the event, and you can’t do that without first demonstrating the god thing is real. To argue otherwise is to argue fallaciously.
Do you have any evidence at all that does not fall into these categories?
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Be careful now, your moral superiority is starting to show. What the fuck do you know about anyone else’s marriages? I’m a lifetime atheist who’s been married to a devout christian believer for almost 42 years.
We have 2 awesome kids who are both married with families of their own, and 4 grandkids. You’re talking out of your ass.
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In the way I explained in that very post, obviously. Lets take a look at it verbatim since you clipped and misrepresented one small part to create a straw man claim I had not made.
Here’s the full post:
I’ll try using bullet points since a small paragraph seems to have left this particular apologist befuddled, or he’s lying of course, after reading his posts I know where my money would be, anyway:
- I never claimed Alfred Nobel’s lack of belief trumped anything, so a pretty obvious lie to create a straw man fallacy from Bullwinkle there. While ignoring the rest of the post, dishonest much…
- He also used his unevidenced stat without any context, in order to create an appeal to authority fallacy, by falsely implying the subjective religious beliefs of scientists means there is (any) scientific evidence for any deity.
- After misrepresenting my first claim to create a straw man, he ignores the part I have emboldened and underlined above, to ignore the fact that his claim is an irrational appeal to authority fallacy.
- By implying the larger percentage of unevidenced subjective religious beliefs trumps the single example of Alfred Nobel being an atheist, he is also of course using an irrational argumentum ad populum fallacy. Since he has failed to offer anything to support the idea that the subjective religious beliefs of those scientists is supported by any objective or scientific evidence at all, it remains both a fallacious appeal to authority, and a bare appeal to numbers.
This is something of an own goal as well, since if there actually were scientific evidence for any deity, those elite scientists would be best placed to find it, and if they are theists would certainly be motivated to do so, yet not one of them ever has done this.
What’s more a now dead theists and religious apologist called John Templeton who was incredibly wealthy, realising this, set up the Templeton Foundation which reflects his own subjective beliefs and seeks to promote his chosen religion. To that end it has long offered a substantial cash prize to anyone who can successfully provide any scientific evidence for any deity, a prize that of course has remained unclaimed to this day. So if even one Nobel laureate or any scientist for that matter had done this, one wonders why they haven’t claimed that prize, and more tellingly of course why the Templeton Foundation and the wider theistic world isn’t busy celebrating it being successfully claimed. Well, any objective reader won’t really be wondering of course, as the answer is too obvious to ignore.
Well done Bullwinkle, for “teaching” us the lengths of duplicity religious apologists will sink to, and for confirming that your apologetics is as relentlessly irrational as the others we have seen come here, and though it hardly needed to be confirmed of course, that there is no scientific evidence for any deity.
Oo-oo-oo!.. Pick me! Pick me!.. (jumping up and down like a maniac… waving hands wildly above head)… I know I’m not the “leader” around here, but I’ve been away for awhile and need some lightweight warm-up exercise to get back into the swing of things. Pleeeeease-please-please! 
I promise I’ll be gentle with you. 
You can be as rough as you like, he’s long gone. Washed away on a tsunami of his own hubris, like Noah’s flood it was.
What?.. When?.. Aw, maaaaan… Some things never change around here. Just when I thought I was gonna have a chance for a bit of fun, they always up and run away before I can get here… (storming off to break room to pout)…
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