Imagining , so that means it not something you believe to be real , correct ?
No it means Skriten is not believing YOUR claims for your imaginary god thing. Start from there.
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Stupid is debating #3 when the person you are debating doesnât even believe #1 exists .
Itâs called an exercise in futility
And that is where you are wrong again, how many times do you need to be reminded.
An atheist is simply someone who is not convinced of the evidence so far put forward that a god exists.
It would be logically wrong to say with absolute certainty a god or gods does/do not exist.
So again, for clarity⊠people (theists) have made the claim, we have not been persuaded by the âevidenceâ put forward.
The only futility you seem to be experiencing, is that you do not understand our position and appear frustrated that we do not take your claim at face value.
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It is not futility. Itâs called not believing you. Youâre being a hypocrite about it. You donât believe in the claims being made by Hindus or the Muslims. You donât believe their gods exist. You raise a deaf ear to them.
Oh for fuck sake. He is imagining a thing that he also believes to be real. Now. Could you please provide anything at all that would constitute proof for you? Stop avoiding and deflecting.
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Thereâs a lot of things Iâd like to believe in. But I have to look at sources and double check on whether theyâre real or if I can believe in those things. Wanting to believe in something and believing in something are two different things. Wanting to believe in it doesnât make it real. Sorry, not sorry.
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What? NoâŠThat is not correct or incorrect, and an obviously specious response. Are you able to imagine both real and unreal things? Can you imagine something which has.a verifiable existence beyond your imagination? Do you think that belief is a determining factor in whether or not something is real, prior to a demonstration of it existing in reality? Are you going to answer my question?
Iâll repeat it since it appears you are having some difficulty with staying on point.
I will not define the thing by declaring belief/non-belief in the thing as you apparently have attached belief to reality in a deterministic
mannerâŠ.at least for yourself. Now, provide me with what criteria you would consider proof.
This whole nonsense of demanding a definition of what you believe in, from skeptics, before you will provide any definitional framework of parameters yourself, is bafflingly asinine and likely just a distraction from the very justified doubts you are experiencing.
Now, we all understand how much easier it would be for you to have a constantly metamorphosing identity for your god, as no refutation could ever satisfy your perpetually ambiguous âvisionâ. After all, who could argue with that which has not been identified? Really pretty absurd donât you think?
.
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Edit (it must be true if I believe it)
I donât think debate means what you think it does. As disagreement would be a necessary prerequisite for debate.
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Oh that one is simple. Try because many human settlements were constructed next to bodies of water.
Though itâs notable that the Tibetans donât have an indigenous flood myth, which has much to do with the fact that they live at an altitude of 10,000 feet above sea level or greater.
Though thereâs a difference between flood episodes that left behind them observational evidence of their occurrence, and the fantasy âglobal floodâ myth that the authors of your favourite mythology plagiarised from the Epic of Gilgamesh, then embellished with a raft of ridiculous fantasy extras.
Indeed, I can provide numerous cogent and consilient reasons why the fantasy âglobal floodâ, asserted to have occured within the pages of your sad little goat herder mythology, never happened. Strap yourself in for the ride, Looby Loo, this oneâs going to be a roller coaster.
[1] If the fantasy âglobal floodâ had ever happened, then geologists would have found this out, courtesy of the existence of a single, deep, globally present sedimentary stratum dating unequivocally to a young age. This was never found. Instead, geologists found that the global map of strata was varied, with in some cases ancient strata found close to the surface, including igneous strata that should never have appeared in the fantasy âglobal floodâ scenario.
One of those ancient strata, the Canadian Shield, being a Precambrian stratum, unequivocally dates to 1.8 billion years before present, and covers no less than 8 million square kilometres of land. Likewise, the Siberian Traps is another massive igneous rock stratum, covering 7 million square kilometres of land, which dates unequivocally to the end-Permian, 250 million years before present. The Deccan Traps in India, covering 500,000 square kilometres of land, and dating unequivocally to the late Cretaceous, around 70 million years before present, is a third example.
None of these strata would even exist, if the âglobal floodâ bullshit was something other than the product of the televisions in the heads of mythology fanboys.
[2] Archaeologists have found ZERO evidence that several major civilisations extant at the time, ceased activity upon being purportedly drowned under 9,000 metres of water. The Ancient Egyptians and the Ancient Chinese, provide a vast body of archaeological evidence to the effect that they continued their activities unbroken, right about the time that creotard masturbation fantasists assert that they were under 9,000 metres of water.
[3] If the fantasy âglobal floodâ had ever happened, whole swathes of aquatic life would have been exterminated. This includes tropical fish species I kept and bred successfully in the aquarium during a 35+ year career as an aquarist. The species in question would have been wiped out through osmoregulatory shock within about 72 hours, if this fairy tale had ever been real. I donât even need to have studied fish physiology in order to know that this would have happened, but of course, the requisite scientific training helps here. ALL of the Ostariophysan fishes alone would have been exterminated, because they are ALL intolerant of salt, and something like twenty entire Orders of marine fishes, including all the reef-dwelling fishes, would have met a parallel fate. The species Iâve successfully bred in captivity have stringent water chemistry requirements, that would have been violated wholesale by the fantasy âglobal floodâ.
Oh, and donât try and peddle the creationist garbage that a few âkindsâ somehow survived, then underwent massive speciation to produce the 33,000 species known to science, because this too is garbage. First of all, creationist liars for doctrine canât even agree among themselves what a âkindâ purportedly is, and second, among the species Iâve bred successfully is Corydoras panda, a South American catfish with tightly defined water chemistry requirements, which has a distant relative that was alive in the Eocene - the fossil of that ancestor, Corydoras revelatus, was found in 1922. That fossil wouldnât even exist if creationist assertions about the âglobal floodâ were something other than the products of their rectal passages.
Also part of the death toll, would have been all the higher aquatic plants, which would have been exterminated wholesale not only from osmoregulatory shock, but from being buried under millions of tons of silt, and shut off from sunlight by 9,000 metres of water. Entire phyla of freshwater and marine invertebrates would also have been exterminated for the same reasons, a particularly apposite example being the reef building corals, which not only need stringent water chemistry parameters in order to live, but also need access to light, courtesy of a symbiotic relationship with zooxanthellae (a clade of algae), which require access to light for photosynthesis if they are to remain alive.
[4] The physical and biological unreality of made up shit creationist attempts to treat science dishonestly as a branch of apologetics, to try and prop up this fairy tale, on its own tosses this vicious little exercise in psychotic fiction into the bin. Starting with Kent Hovindâs wank-break âvapour canopyâ bullshit, which would have resulted in ludicrous thermodynamic exchanges, first cooling the entire planet to the ambient temperature of Pluto (around 30 Kelvins), at which point the breathable gases of the atmosphere would be liquefied or in some cases even turn into solid ices, This would then be followed by a second set of thermodynamic exchanges resulting in the ambient temperature of planet Earth rising to that of molten Copper. Iâve run the numbers on this.
Then thereâs Baumgartnerâs idiotic ârunaway subductionâ nonsense, which would have released enough heat to boil all the oceans off into space. Followed by Walt Brownâs âhydroplateâ nonsense, which apart from being in direct violation of the Gas Laws, hilariously invokes a level of meteorite bombardment that would have sterilised the planet, and turned your 600 year old barge captain and his floating petting zoo into plasma. Finally, thereâs the ludicrous âaccelerated nuclear decayâ drivel from Russell Humphreys, which would have generated enough heat to ignite helium fusion in the Earthâs core in the best case scenario, and in the worst case scenario, heated the planet to Grand Unification physics temperatures (yes, a whopping 1031 Kelvins).
[5] The exquisite sorting, in time and taxonomic order, of the fossil record, which involves sorting particles ranging from fossil pollen grains 50 microns across, to the carcasses of 100-ton Sauropod dinosaurs. The idea that this exquisite time and taxonomic sorting would have been produced by the fantasy âglobal floodâ is manifest bullshit, especially to anyone familiar with the mathematics of fluid dynamics, and the behaviour of the Navier-Stokes equations, which describe the requisite behaviour of fluids, and which are used by Boeing and Airbus to design airliners successfully (the recent 737 Max dĂ©bacle notwithstanding - though that was a software issue, not an aerodynamics issue).
The bullshit about âhydrologic sortingâ peddled by professional liars for creationist doctrine, was flushed down the toilet by television footage of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the 2011 Sendai tsunami, in which the resulting turbulent water flows produced no âsortingâ of any variety. Plus, the manner in which any reasonable supercomputer model using the Navier-Stokes equations would have to be tampered with to a galactically dishonest extent, in order to produce so-called âhydrologic sortingâ, again flushes this fantasy down the toilet.
[6] The idea that a wooden ship twice the size of a Ticonderoga Class guided missile cruiser would be seaworthy, is a deluded fantasy, as any marine architect will tell you. The largest wooden ship ever built in recent times, was considerably smaller, and needed constant pumping to stop seawater ingress as it suffered from hogging and sagging as it traversed the waves. Itâs the reason we build aircraft carriers out of high tensile strength steel alloys, not wood. That wooden ship eventually succumbed to the stresses of flexing as it traversed the waves, as documented here:
That ship fell apart in heavy seas with the loss of all hands in 1924.
Furthermore, the idea that people with Bronze Age technology were capable of building a large wooden ship is again a fantasy. Greek triremes (warships constructed from wood) wre no bigger than 120 feet, and involved a considerable investment of resources and engineering skill on the part of Greek civilisation, which was in may respects far more advanced than the collection of nomadic tribes living in the Middle East. Indeed, HMS Victory, a famous wooden warship built by the British between 1759 and 1765, was considered to be impressive because it was 186 feet long, though its structure was reinforced with metal, which almost certainly helped ensure that it was seaworthy when launched.
Indeed, HMS Victory pretty much established the maximum specifications for operational naval vessels built of wood for some time afterwards, which were only exceeded when the first ironclads were laid down. While larger wooden ships were built, these were reinforced with metal hull frames, a classic example being the American clipper ship Great Republic, which had a multiplicity of steel cross braces to ensure the structural rigidity of the hull. Every wooden ship longer than 250 feet has either failed to remain seaworthy, or needed extensive metal strructural reinforcement in order to be operational.
Quite simply, the idea that a small family of Bronze Age nomads could build a vessel twice the size of a Ticonderoga Class guided missile cruiser, is a fantasy only the truly deluded could entertain.
Oh by the way, thereâs another little detail from this diseased fantasy, that contributes to its absurdity. Which centres upon Genesis 7:2, viz:
Just one teensy little problem with this passage ⊠according to creationist orthodoxy, the fantasy âglobal floodâ occurred sometime around 2,400 BCE. Except that, oops, the part of your mythology that defines what constitutes âcleanâ and âuncleanâ animals, namely Leviticus, wasnât written until 1,500 years after this date. How did the captain of your fantasy floating petting zoo know the difference betwene âcleanâ and âuncleanâ animals, fully 1,500 years before this was defined?
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If the question âdoes your magic man actually exist?â cannot be answered, then it merely adds to the absurdity endemic to treating such an entity as real, doesnât it?
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The creator of everything in the universe. Or maybe the first cause? The proverbial watch maker?
What evidence do you have to convince any of us that a god exists?
Yes you do, youâre the one making the claim that god exists, not us. Itâs exactly the same as believing in the Loch Ness monster. We donât have to prove that it doesnât exist, you have to prove that it does exist.
Damn, Iâm glad youâre on our side.
Oh look, itâs Gish Gallop time. Letâs dismantle this one step at a time, shall we?
First, Iâve already provided an extensive exposition on the scientific view of the origin of life, which doesnât involve a cartoon magic man waving its magic todger about, but instead involves comprehensible and working chemistry. I note how all your mendacious apologetic attempts to try and dismiss this with specious pseudo-objections have been destroyed.
Second, the idea that there is a âpurposeâ to life handed down from on high, is rendered absurd by one simple fact. Namely that the universe was, as far as current data informs us, devoid of life for eight billion years. Indeed, for the first 370,000 years of the existence of the universe, it was impossible for neutral atoms to exist.
Third, you do realise that the operation of the human brain is an active research topic? As a corollary, expecting a simple answer to that question is wholly disingenuous, but weâre used to seeing this sort of legerdemain fom mythology fanboys. Though once again, all the available evidence points to human brain chemistry being responsible for our thoughts.
Fourth ⊠oh this is hilarious. Guess what, Looby Loo? There exists an abundant scientific literature, documenting in exquisite detail, the evidence for the evolutionary and biological basis of [1] our capacity for ethical thought, and [2] the motivation to act thereupon. This literature covers such topics as:
â The evolution of brain development genes expressed in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that has been known to be implicated in ethical decision making for over a century;
â Observed instances of ethical behaviour in non-human species.
With respect to [4] above, I was recently introduced to peer reviewed scientific papers, documenting experimental determination of ethical behaviour in rats. Which have been shown in the laboratory, to reject behaviours that would inflict pain and suffering upon a fellow rat, even when a substantial reward for those behaviours is offered. Seems rats have a better ability to reject avarice than a good many human beings I can think of.
Those of us who paid attention in classes devoted to ethics, learned a long time ago that this subject is far more subtle and complex than the fatuous caricature thereof that mythology fanboys embrace, namely âMagic Man says soâ. Which of course is recognised by those of us who paid attention in class, as not merely a caricature of genuine ethics, but a dangerous one, as anyone familiar with Susan B. Anthonyâs famous and succinct critique thereof is well aware. In addition, a paper I have presented in various places about differences between secular and religious societies, also has significant input at this juncture.
Those of us who paid attention in the requisite classes, learned some time ago of a simple and powerful test that can be performed, to determine the ethical status of an action, that is independent of any âauthorityâ - namely, what benefit or harm is bestowed upon the recipients of the action in question. Being able to perform this test, courtesy of our ability to place ourselves mentally in the situation of others, doesnât require a comsic Big Brother, but empathy, a property that is actually to be found possessed by eutherian mammals all the way down to rodents. Likewise, the concepts of reciprocity and fairness are to be found distributed much more widely than the usual suspects imagine.
As an example of the contributions to this topic from the scientific literature, here are some sample citations:
Characterisation Of Empathy Deficits Following Prefrontal Brain Damage: The Role Of The Right Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex by S.G. Shamay-Tsoory, R. Tomer B.D. Berger and J. Aharon-Peretz, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 15: 324-337 (2003)
The Role Of The Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex In Abstract State-Based Inference During Decision Making In Humans by Alan N. Hampton, Peter Bossaerts and John. P. OâDoherty, The Journal of Neuroscience, 26(32): 8360-8367 (9th August 2006)
Characterisation Of The Decision-Making Deficit Of Patients With Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Lesions by Antione Bechara, Daniel Tranel and Hanna Damasio, Brain, 123: 2189-2202 (2000)
Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Activation Is Critical For Preference Judgements by Martin P. Paulus and Lawrence R. Frank, NeuroReport, 14(10): 1311-1315 (28th March 2003)
Impairment Of Social And Moral Behaviour Related To Early Damage In Human Prefrontal Cortex by Steven W. Anderson, Antoine Bechara, Hanna Damasio, Daniel Tranel and Antonio R. Damasio, Nature Neuroscience, 2(11): 1032-1037 (November 1999)
Damage To The Prefrontal Cortex Increases Utilitarian Moral Judgements by Michael Koenigs, Liane Young, Ralph Adolphs, Daniel Tranel, Fiery Cushman, Marc Hauser and Antonio Damasio, Nature, 446: 908-911 (19th April 2007)
The Regulatory Function Of Self-Conscious Emotion: Insights From Patients With Orbitofrontal Damage by Jennifer S. Beer, Erin A. Heerey, Dacher Keltner, Donatella Scabini and Robert T. Knight, Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 85(4): 594-604 (2003)
Theory Of Mind Enhances Preference For Fairness by Haruto Takagishi, Shinya Kameshima, Joanna Schug, Michiko Koizumi and Toshio Yamagishi, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 105(1-2): 130-137 (Jan/Feb 2010)
The Neural Bases Of Cognitive Conflict And Control In Moral Judgment by Joshua D. Greene, Leigh E. Nystrom, Andrew D. Engell, John M. Darley and Jonathan D. Cohen, Neuron, 44: 389-400 (14th October 2004)
How Does Morality Work In The Brain? A Functional And Structural Perspective Of Moral Behaviour by Leo Pascual, Paulo Rodrigues and David Gallardo-Pujol, Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 7(65): 1-7 (September 2013)
Empathy: Its Ultimate And Proximate Bases by Stephanie D. Preston and Frans de Waal, Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 25: 1-20 (2001)
Mechanisms Of Social Reciprocity In Three Primate Species: Symmetrical Relationship Characteristics Or Cognition? by Frans B. M. de Waal and Lesleigh M. Luttrell, Ethology and Sociobiology, 9(2-4): 101-118 (1988)
Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay by Sarah F. Brosnan & Frans B. M. de Waal, Nature, [/b]425:[/b] 297-299 (18th September 2003)
PrimatesâA Natural Heritage Of Conflict Resolution by Frans B. M. de Waal, Science, 289: 586-590 (28th July 2000)
Reconciliation And Consolation Among Chimpanzees by Frans B. M. de Waal and Angeline van Roosmalen, Behavioural Ecology & Sociobiology, 5(1): 55-66 (March 1979)
Attitudinal Reciprocity In Food Sharing Among Brown Capuchin Monkeys by Frans de Waal, Animal Behaviour, 60: 253-261 (2000)
Cooperative Hunting And Meat Sharing 400â200 kya At Qesem Cave, Israel by Mary C. Stinera, Ran Barkai and Avi Gopher, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 106(32): 13207-13212 (11th August 2009)
Capuchin Monkeys Are Sensitive To Othersâ Welfare by Venkat R. Lakshminarayanan and Laurie R. Santos, Current Biology, 18(21): R999-R1000 (11th November 2008)
Do Infants Have A Sense Of Fairness? by Stephanie Sloane, Renée Baillargeon and David Premack, Psychological Science, 23(2): 196-204 (1st February 2012)
How Infants And Toddlers React To Antisocial Others by J. Kiley Hamlina, Karen Wynn, Paul Bloom and Neha Mahajan, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 108(50): 19931-19936 (13th December 2011)
Empathy And Prosocial Behaviour In Rats by Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, Jean Decety and Peggy Mason, Science, 334: 1427-1430 (9th December 2011)
Harm To Others Acts As A Negative Reinforcer In Rats by Julen Hernandez-Lallement, Augustine Triumph Attah, Efe Soyman, Cindy M. Pinhal, Valeria Gazzola and Christian Keysers, Current Biology, 30: 949-961 (23rd March 2020)
Once again, no cartoon magic man needed.
Fifth ⊠oh wait, havenât you paid any attention to any recent development in cosmological physics? Indeed, Iâve spent an extensive amount of time here discussing the braneworld cosmology of Steinhardt & Turok, and its implications for a range of issues, none of which you appear to have even acknowledged the existence of, let alone read.
Did you really think no one here would be able to deal with your sad little Gish Gallop of failed âgotchaâsâ?
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Iâm currently nursing a nasty head cold, so Iâm operating at about 70% capacity. Iâll probably think of points I missed in three daysâ time when reviewing the thread 
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Thatâs okay, weâll take any help we can get dealing with these kinds of believers. I think they just like to hear(see) themselves.
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Not true at all, I lack belief in any deity or deities, what you are describing is a belief or claim no deity exists, and I hold no such belief, and have made no such claim.
I simply disbelief the claim you have brought here, that a deity exists, and am waiting for you to define and evidence it, though it seems you can do neither.
The only thing truth excludes is that which is not in accordance with fact or reality. There is no such thing as âmyâ truth either, only what I accept to be true, and my criteria for that is that sufficient objective evidence be demonstrated to support it. If this canât or isnât done then I withhold belief.
If the â Proof â you ask for is to be subjected to the highest authority in the atheists defense - Science , then thatâs the unanswerable question and the end of debate .
That line of reasoning does pose another question -
To sustain that line of reasoning that there is no Creator then the Atheist needs to demonstrate infinite knowledge which I think is a bit of a hard sell.