Cat rodeo?
Ohhh I’ll pay to see that. How’s 87 cents sound?
87 cents will get you in the door but you are gonna have to dig a bit deeper if you want to go on any of the rides or play any of the games.
Kitty Kat Round Up and Roping Ride starts at $1.50.
The Whirling Cat Toss is $3.00 but if you can find and return your own cat, you get a $2.00 rebate.
Cat painting is free but you have to catch your own cat, we provide the poo.
1 Like
Very reasonable. I was thinking of using the neighbour’s cat. Probably not a good idea after the fuss they made when I fed one of their children to Trevor my dragon (They had three, I didn’t think they’d miss one) It was terrible. I had to keep my head down for weeks. Poor Trevor was skin and bones by the time I managed to catch a homeless person.
On second thought, I think I might stay home and talk to Trevor
I doubt this will be the last example of the Dunning-Kruger effect to ‘grace’ these forums.
Joygirl simply doesn’t know what she doesn’t know, but she believes she knows all.
Sheer Unfiltered Hubris. 
I would say more, but I’d only be repeating what others have already said, it would very much be like shooting fish in a barrel.
1 Like
Well fuck me with a cactus pole. I can’t see how Sheldon’s fragile ego is ever going to survive this thrashing.
[quote=“Joygirl, post:42, topic:703”]
your knowledge of Evidence is Limited
[quote=“Joygirl, post:42, topic:703”]
for Toddlers [/quote]
Hey Sheldon: DAMN! See what happens when you use big words and attempt to communicate intelligently to people?
Joygirl is a very bad little boy. He got drunk last night and vomited all over the site. Here is a towel, go clean up your mess. Don’t get any on you. Joy girl vomit will eat through your skin and it doesn’t wash off.
You had to see the funny side of her offering naught but vapid subjective rhetoric, and insisting it was evidence. Did she fail to notice the word objective, or does she not understand its significance here? Then ranting about the laws of evidence, as if this were a courtroom. Her post implies that she seems to think a) evidence demonstrated in internet forums for religious beliefs should conform to legal standards applied in courtrooms, and b) that her asinine and subjective claim would satisfy such a standard.
The real hilarity was this though:
As if a legal judgement can be pronounced in an internet forum by some Billy no name, to demand her unevidenced superstitious guff about spirits, be ringfenced from criticism. Lots of luck with that dear.
NB She dismissed the dictionary definition of evidence, then tries to introduced a courtroom standard.
Talk about trying to run before you can walk. She ought really to master basic language skills first, as she seems also to believe Cognostic’s post was disagreeing with me, and agreeing with her claim to have evidenced spirits??
Bizarre, when this is the end of the post she quoted??
Obviously he was being too subtle for her there??
Let’s just remind ourselves of her original claim here, in case her pointless thrashing about obscured the hilarity of it.
Well quite obviously her claim is neither objective or proof, which she keeps using in error, as what was requested was objective evidence, and it falls woefully short of that as well.
There’s no arguing with that sort of rationale is there. It is both a tautology of circular reasoning, and an argument from assertion fallacy. Which would of course by her rationale, hilariously evidence that fucking trains have spirits for those with basic reading skills. As they can be described in precisely the fashion she claims is evidence for spirits. 
Cor blimey was my first impression of her claim, and she’s not raised the bar any since then.
2 Likes
I’ve witnessed people die, their body ceases to function, and their eyes go still.
I don’t see any indication that some mystical spirit flies away from their body.
If you get knocked unconscious, your brain is halted, which is why you don’t remember anything, just a black empty space. Why doesn’t your ‘spirit’ remember such an experience in the brains place?
Our memories of our lives are retained physically inside our brain, and when we die and brain ceases to function, so those memories can no longer be accessed by the individual; that person can no longer reason, think, move or feel, because to do these things the brain is required.
The human body functions due to electrical impulses and chemical balances, among other things, it truly is a fascinating biological machine.
There is no evidence a ‘spirit’ exists, there is also no reason the concept of a ‘spirit’ would function within the laws if physics. What would contain a spirit, what would power it, where would a spirits memories be stored, if it no longer has a brain?
It’s so nonsensical an idea, that it’s just as likely a fairy came into my room as a child, and swapped my tooth for a £1 coin
I agree it is nonsensical, though that of course wouldn’t make it false. However @Joylessgirl seems to think asinine word games represent compelling evidence to believe it is true, and that’s patently absurd. If we set the bar for belief that low, then again I am forced to ask, what is her criteria for disbelief? As I can’t imagine she applies that absurdity to all claims or else she must believe literally every claim that is remotely unfalsifiable, and of course she does not do that, thus her bias in favour of her preferred beliefs are demonstrably obvious. Bias for or against certain beliefs is of course the very definition of closed minded.
Well I’ve never encountered a theist yet who could offer any objective evidence, as we saw from Joylessgirl’s posts, she doesn’t even understand what objective means in that context.
Not only that but like all the theists I’ve encountered who try and peddle this guff, she can’t even attempt to offer any accurate definition or explanation of the thing she’s claiming exists.
She prefers to throw her toys out of her pram, and throw ad hominem fallacies at those who reject her superstitious wares, then storm off, only to dishonestly sneak back later trying to start from scratch and pretend her previous claims have no relevance to the debate.
One need look no further than her coming here as a theist, then dishonestly pretending she’s changed to an atheist, and now of course making it obvious through her claims she’s nothing of the sort. If she was at least prepared to engage in honest debate it’d be something, but she’s not even prepared to have her claims subjected to critical scrutiny without a massive hissy fit.
1 Like
In the interest of open minded debate. Here is the definition of spirit.
Spirit
noun
the non-physical part of a person which is the seat of emotions and character; the soul.
So I invite anyone who claims such an entity exists to demonstrate sufficient objective evidence for the claim.
Please don’t waste everyone’s time with special pleading fallacies, or meaningless subjective rhetoric employing moronic word associations like the ones Joylessgirl used above. I set an open minded or unbiased criteria for belief and disbelief, it applies fairly to all claims, if you don’t agree fine, but I’m not going to favour your personal superstition, or any belief or claim, just because you feel aggrieved I don’t grant it a special dispensation from being properly evidenced, as I do all other claims and beliefs.
And yes, superstition is precisely the correct word for me to use for any belief in the supernatural that is unsupported by any objective evidence, so if you find the description irksome or offensive then the ball is in your court, so to speak.
1 Like
LOL… Non Physical Part? How is it a part and non-physical at the same time? Being non-physical, how did we establish it is inside of us or the seat of emotions, And, what in the fuk is a Soul.
One amorphous bit of assertive nonsense purported to be explained by some other assertive nonsense and then concluding with a finality of complete and utter nonsense.
Here is your definition… Utter and complete bullshit,
2 Likes
Just had a totally unrelated brain fart:
For a while at work, we had to provide manually gathered stats of our received phone calls. I couldn’t be arsed so I gave an estimate. Always used a prime number. Was never questioned once.
Since then, I have always used primes if making something up EG Mark 7:17. Which reads “Yea verily ,Jesu saith unto Mary Magdalene " Come forth”. Mary cometh fifth and was disqualified. Here end the lesson."
There were few anarchists, EG a mate ALWAYS put ‘indigenous’ in the space for race on claims
Another was a devout christian chap. He strongly objected to some of the punitive requirements in the ACT, so he simply ignored 'em. This was an open secret ,and he did it for years. Was never queried.
Guess you know that bureaucracies do not tend to attract the best and the brightest, certainly not at managerial level. The bright ones tend to be a bit individualistic and never get beyond middle management.
I’m late to this party, but I’ll bite …
And this far, no one has provided a substantive answer thereto. But I suspect this isn’t going to hamper your excursion into the world of ex recto apologetics.
Several million peer reviewed scientific papers, in disciplines such as cosmological physics and evolutionary biology, have rendered cartoon magic men from goat herder mythologies superfluous to requirements and irrelevant. Testable natural processes are sufficient to account for vast classes of entities and interactions, including classes thereof that the authors of mythologies were incapable of even fantasising about, let alone placing within usefully predictive quantitative frameworks of knowledge.
The first person to remedy this deficit will be guaranteed a Nobel Prize. That this hasn’t been awarded for this finding yet should be telling you something important.
Assert being all that the requisite mythologies and doctrines ever do.
The rigorous rejection of unsupported assertions has nothing to do with this.
So you slept through your biology classes? Quelle surprise.
The existence of the merely asserted “spiritual”, is another of those unsupported blind assertions from mythology fanboys, that is discardable precisely because it’s an unsupported blind assertion.
Indeed, humanity has been waiting for 5,000 years for mythology fanboys of assorted species, to provide something other than blind assertions in this regard. Concocting a mythology, then summarily decreeing that its assertions constitute fact, regardless of what real world data has to say on the matter, doesn’t work in the world of people who paid attention in class. Especially when the mythology thus concocted contains demonstrably risible elementary errors.
Except that “spirit” has only ever been asserted to exist by mythology fanboys. Since the requisite assertion is completely bereft of evidential support, said assertion is discardable with the same absence of effort exerted to fabricate it.
See above.
Blind unsupported assertion, and discardable as such yet again.
So many unsupported assertions rolled into one here.
First of all, what substantive reason exists, for any genuinely existing god type entity to be “immaterial”, assuming of course that a proper definition of “immaterial” exists? Indeed, the whole steaming pile of waffle and cant surrounding the term “immaterial”, on its own suggests strongly that even if the purported “immaterial” does actually exist, it won’t be mythology fanboys who will be informative on this matter.
Second, why would any genuinely existing god type entity require us to kiss its arse? The idea that an entity of this sort would possess the same mindset as Donald Trump, is laughable to anyone who paid attention in class. Any entity possessing the gifts of intellect and action asserted to be the case in various mythologies for their various cartoon magic men, would surely also possess a mindset devoid of the narcissism inherent in the whole fatuous “worship” business?
Indeed, an entity possessing those fantastic gifts would almost certainly regard the whole business of “worship”, as being fatuous and laughable in much the same way as those of us who paid attention in class regard it. The whole “worship” nonsense has more to do with the psychological need of certain people, than it does with any purported “requirements” on the part of any god type entity.
I’ll probably have more fun with the remainder of this thread once I’ve read it all …
2 Likes
Oh this is going to be good …
Waiting for the inevitable fail …
Complete bollocks. Didn’t see this shit taking place when my mother died.
If you think linguistic convention arising from a history of mythology fanboys skewing both language and the arena of discourse, provides “evidence” for the requisite assertion, then you need to go back to elementary school, and learn what actually constitutes real evidence for a postulate.
Er, no. I’ve been around enough dead people in my time to have observed nothing of the sort.
Oh, you mean "Universal Natural Truths™ " such as evolution, which so many mythology fanboys reject despite overwhelming evidence?
“My mythology says so” doesn’t count as evidence. Learn this lesson quickly before embarrassing yourself here.
[/quote]
3 Likes
Waaaayyyy too late I’m afraid. That ship has well and truly sailed.
Joylessgirl’s posts are I’m afraid an homage to vapid idiotic rhetoric of the sort you’ve quoted here. Pretty much a lost cause.
I agree it is a huge task bantering with people who have resigned the use of common sense. It is a neck wrecking task trying to reason with adults whose mental capacity are complete ship wrecks no thanks to wholesale brainwashing, dogma and childhood indoctrination.
As hard as it seems, I take solace in the fact that there are religious people whose minds are not nearly as damaged and totally decimated by yampy religious bullshitery. Such people may be seeking answers to the questions that normally rational minds would ask about indoctrinated beliefs.
My discussions with apologists is not to win, per say, but to make other theists on the fence see, first-hand, why religion is a total misnomer and how it brings out the worst in people.
The conversations I’ve read on this site some 3 years ago slowly helped me shed that skin of stupidity and irrationality religion clothed me since I was born. I believe it can do the same for few more people. We must not relent in engaging primitive religious minds. At least I can speak for myself on that.
I, for one, have enjoyed the quite resourceful rebuttals to theist propositions in this forum
1 Like
Apologies for the length of the post but it’s the product a reflection across decades, and I can’t express my thoughts much more succinctly without the response being incomplete.
Setting aside questions of what is meant by God, in terms of His characteristics, etc., the arguments for and against His existence have been around for centuries and in some cases millenia.
Besides arguments from personal experience, which atheists discount as subjective and hence unreliable, theists rely various forms of cosmological (first cause), teleological (design), and axiological (moral) arguments. And there’s a fourth argument, the ontological argument, which I still don’t understand which some (including churchmen) say have no merit and some (incl. Bertrand Russell) say deserves more respect.
There is also a specifically Christian argument centering on the life of Jesus Christ, but this will not apply to non-Christian theists.
Atheists, based on what I’ve seen, rely on four, two of which I believe deserve more respect and care in addressing than the other two. None are completely without merit, but I have reasons for not being convinced by the four individually or collectively. Having looked at the 100 questions posted elsewhere in the forum, the four categories seem to cover the majority.
The argument to which I give the least merit is the argument that since there have been bad things done by people in the name of religion then religion itself must be wrong, evil, or both. I don’t give a lot of credibility to this because one could make the same argument about science. The Reign of Terror, the Third Reich, and Stalinism/Maoism were all based, philosophically, on what certain individuals considered to be science, broadly defined.
The second weakest argument is that modern religion is the product of an attempt by the ancients to explain things which have now been explained by science, so we can therefore discard religion. I don’t think this is a good argument because the monotheistic religions do not put a lot of focus on explaining natural history. The focus of the Scriptures is on morality, purpose, and humankind’s relationship with the Creator. Whether or not one agrees with the natural history described in the Bible, it is incidental.
The second most serious argument that the atheists have is the “absence of evidence” one; a Creator that existed would provide more concrete evidence of that very existence. As J.P. Moreland opined, those who put faith in this argument would prefer a concrete reminder; for instance, a kind of “Made by God” stamp on elements of creation. There are two refutations to this I would present, not as definitive but certainly as having some merit. The first is that, based on what we know about the complexity of interrelationships in the observable universe, that evidence already exists; in other words, the argument from design. The second refutation, as described by Moreland, is that God’s ultimate end is not that we believe Him but that we love Him. Love implies choice and constant “reminders” from God of who is in charge would be more likely to inspire resentment than love.
The final argument for atheism, which I take most seriously, is the argument from moral contradiction. God is defined as good, yet the Old Testament is filled with bloodshed, bad things happen to good people, and, in the Christian view, many will be condemned in the end. This problem has been around at least from the time of Job, and has been a concern of Jewish and Christian thinkers from the beginning. Without claiming to have completely put the issue to bed in my own mind, I’ve worked through it enough so that it is no longer an issue, but to describe my answers would require a much longer response than the present, which is already quite long.
However, there are two responses I can make immediately which will give some indication of how I have addressed this question. Regarding the first, I started the previous paragraph with the phrase “God is defined as good” but many have argued that proposition is inverted; properly stated, it should be “Good is defined as God” and this is in fact the point made at the end of the Book of Job. For the second, I would point to Jesus’ response to Peter in their encounter as described in John 21:15-21, and it is not entirely unrelated to the first.
But the existence of the moral contradiction problem raises an even bigger problem for atheism, a point made by C.S. Lewis, and which is probably the deal-breaker for me. Stated, the problem is that, if the universe exists as result of accidental events and has no outside authority which serves as the foundation right and wrong, morality is nothing more than preference for a given individual at a given time. It has no “scientific” basis in the way the term is understood, and thus contradicts the claim of some atheists that they rely exclusively on science.
No one can claim that a particular act is more or less moral than another in the sense of being consistent without some principle which transcends individual desires, and I believe there must be a source for such a principle. I do not think it too strong to describe the absence of such as a state as moral anarchy.
And my entire being resists that. Perhaps I’m wrong, and perhaps we do live in such a universe, but I cannot or choose not to subscribe to such a view. For me it’s an axiom, to use the language of mathematics.
I saw a number of quotes addressing this matter on the links attached to this forum but for the most part they struck me as no more than celebrity cleverness with no reasoning to back them up. I would invite any atheist who believes he or she has a counterargument to this assertion of moral anarchy to present it to me.
Thomas Nagel, and atheist I admire, writes about this and other issues (without abandoning his atheist worldview) with the naturalist/atheist perspective in his book “Mind and Cosmos.”
In the end it comes down to this. Both positions (theism and atheism) give rise to explanatory problems, and my choice, to a great degree, is determined by which explanatory problems I can resolve in my own mind.
Atheists do not rely on four arguments: This is absolutely wrong. Atheists have no arguments against your God. NONE. All they do is ask you for evidence of your claim. You assert God exists. Please demonstrate what you are talking about. That is the ONLY atheist position that needs to be looked at.
The problem of evil is an explicit argument against a god that is “all loving.” P1. If an omnipotent, omnibenevolent and omniscient god exists, then evil does not.
P2. There is evil in the world.
C1. Therefore, an omnipotent, omnibenevolent and omniscient god does not exist.
This SPECIFIC VERSION of god does not exist. It is not applied to all versions of all gods. You are pulling specific arguments directed at specific versions of God and trying to debunk them by asserting they do not apply to all versions of God. DUH! At best this is DISHONEST. It is not completely without merit. It completely debunks an all loving God.
You would not know the meaning of the word religion if it jumped up and bit you in the ass. Maoism was a personality cult. Stalin-ism was a personality cult. Nazism was a Christian , anti-Catholic and Anti Jewish movement. Another word for the Nazi movement was “Positive Christianity.” "Positive Christianity (German: Positives Christentum) was a movement within Nazi Germany which mixed the belief that the racial purity of the German people should be maintained by mixing Nazi ideology with elements of Christianity. Adolf Hitler used the term in article 24[a] of the 1920 Nazi Party Platform, stating: “the Party represents the standpoint of Positive Christianity”. Positive Christianity - Wikipedia
Germany was a Christian Nation. While Hitler himself had a warped sense of religion and paid lip service to religious beliefs. He used the Christian faith to motivate people and to maintain power.
“Explain things” and you jump to “Natural History.” WTF???
So they explain "Morality, Acts of God. Purpose of Life, … THAT IS EXPLAINING THINGS! We have scientific explanations for natural history and no need of the bible at all.
What we know about the universe does not refute the Absence of evidence for your god idea. To assert “Design” you must demonstrate “Design.” That means, show me the designer. We know things are designed because we compare them to things that are naturally occurring. Painting? Designed. Building? Designed. These things do not occur naturally. Snow flake? Crystals? Naturally occurring. Elements? Naturally occurring. Atoms, molecules? Naturally occurring.
You do not get to assert design without producing a designer.
Not all Gods are defined as good. The Bible itself clearly states God Created Evil. Isaiah 45:7 " I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things." There are many other passages as well.
The bible itself contradicts an all loving God. It does so over and over and over again.
YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND ATHEISM AT ALL. We do not have arguments. Christians assert their god is this way or that way and all we do is ask questions or demonstrate why that is not the case. Your version of God CAN NOT BE ALL LOVING, KIND OR ANYTHING LIKE THAT. This god is clearly debunked by the problem of evil. It is also clearly debunked by the FUCKING BIBLE. It is an erroneous assumption. USELESS.
All you need do is provide objective evidence for the existence of your God. THAT’S IT! Nothing more.
3 Likes
Not a very auspicious start, to try and argue for something you cannot define.
Well if they’re solely personal experience then they are subjective by definition, why single out atheists for pointing out a plain fact.
What an atheists thinks does not change the fact that atheism is simply the lack or absence of belief, and therefore carries no burden of proof, or any need for counter claims or arguments.
Rubbish, facile nonsense. Science is the study of the natural physical world and universe, it is an objective method for gathering and testing data and hypothesis. Nothing more.
I’ve skipped your irrelevant objections to arguments that atheists present, as these are a) not necessary to disbelieve the claim for any extant deity, and b) don’t remotely evidence or validate any arguments for any extant deity. Like nearly every theist who comes here, you are putting the cart before the horse, by trying to reverse the burden of proof.
I’d agree, and the evolved human intellect is a sufficient source. All animals that have evolved to live in societal groups are capable of morality, and this is supported by valid scientific research.
Atheism is the lack or absence of belief in any deity or deities. This “position” doesn’t need evidence or argument, since it is not a belief, a claim, an ideology nor a worldview.
Try honestly addressing the following questions.
What objective evidence can you demonstrate for any deity?
How many beliefs do you hold without any objective evidence to support them, but that form no part of your religious beliefs?
Lastly what is your criteria for disbelief?
I have found these there question are sufficient to expose theism as inherently biased. Since they are setting different standards for belief for their theism.
Deism of course offers nothing, as such a deity would be indistinguishable from a non existent deity.
My criteria for disbelief is that insufficient, or in the case of theism no, objective evidence can be demonstrated for the belief.
I apply this unbiased and open minded criteria to all claims. The theists i have read and engaged with however do not.
2 Likes