Jamest is right!

[pErvinalia]

If you could actually read for comprehension and weren't thoroughly blinkered you'd know exactly what we discuss here. But you're not interested in that.

[Svartalf]

Brie is a definite proof for God. It would be unable to be invented, otherwise.

Brie is the devil's shite, like most soft cheeses

[Seth]

If you could actually read for comprehension and weren't thoroughly blinkered you'd know exactly what we discuss here. But you're not interested in that.

I'm less interested in what you want to discuss and more interested in what I want to make you discuss.

[rainbow]

If you could actually read for comprehension and weren't thoroughly blinkered you'd know exactly what we discuss here. But you're not interested in that.

I'm less interested in what you want to discuss and more interested in what I want to make you discuss.

Yes, yes, get back to the topic.

Are you still in Colorado?

[pErvinalia]

If you could actually read for comprehension and weren't thoroughly blinkered you'd know exactly what we discuss here. But you're not interested in that.

I'm less interested in what you want to discuss and more interested in what I want to make you discuss.

You are only interested in erecting strawmen. It's one thing that I wish we had here that they have at ratskep, and that is sanctions for blatant misrepresentation. It might actually force you to debate honestly for a change.

[pErvinalia]

He's an abused child (abused at ratskep), and he's acting out here because there's more latitude for it. Unfortunately for him he hasn't quite learned that most abuse here goes deeper than simple abuse. There's always a grain of truth in our abuse, and it serves a point. Just calling someone a cunt because they don't hold your belief set is intellectually lazy. Something I've found in spades with Jamest since he's been here. He's simply not up to serious in depth discussion.

Man, that's the finest iteration of the pot calling the kettle black I've seen in years. Huzzah!

Calling you names doesn't count, as everything that could be said about your "arguments" has been said at least 100 times before by multiple people. We just skip straight to calling you names. It's better for everyone that way...

[piscator]

If you could actually read for comprehension and weren't thoroughly blinkered you'd know exactly what we discuss here. But you're not interested in that.

I'm less interested in what you want to discuss and more interested in getting narcissistic supply.

[pErvinalia]

There's a small number of atheists out there who make a positive claim about Gods. Why aren't they lying?

They are. So are you.

Huh?! Another fine example of your "logic". Those atheist hold the opposite view to us. How can we both be lying?! You claim we hold the same view as that small number of atheists. So, under your idiotic logic, we lie so we don't sound like them, and they lie so they don't sound like us??? You couldn't make this shit up.

Why would we feel the need to lie about our beliefs and reasonings??!

Because you become acutely uncomfortable and threatened when I demonstrate how religious and irrational your beliefs are and how faulty your reasoning is of course!

You haven't demonstrated shit, Seth, as is clear from the fact that NO ONE has ever supported you in this bollocks "theory" of yours.

You are incapable of clear rational thought, and simply ignore evidence that clearly shows your beliefs to be wrong.

No, you're incapable of comprehending the rational thought I post. Big difference.

You claim there is evidence. You NEVER produce it. How rational is that?? It's not 'rational'. It's outright lying.

What the fuck are you even doing at a rationalist forum?

Well, at the moment, I'm annoying the ever-living fuck out of you. But that's just dessert.

While showing everyone what an ignoramus you are. Well done, champ.

about their true beliefs because they want the approval and support of their compatriots

What kind of retarded logic is that?!? If we are all lying, then why do we need to lie in the first place? If we share the same belief, then we don't need to lie about it to gain the approval of our compatriots.

Ah, but you have to lie in order to maintain the fiction that your positions and arguments are rational and/or logical in exactly the same manner, and for exactly the same reasons that you claim theists lie about their faith.

You are so full of shit. This is the usual Seth 'move the goalposts' fallacy. You said we have to lie to get the support of our compatriots (about 98% of whom define atheism the same way we do), and when shown what retarded logic that was, you pretend you were talking about something else.

and don't want to be excoriated as you excoriate me, for not adhering to the Atheist religious orthodoxy.

Avail yourself of a dictionary, please!

No need, I'm perfectly familiar with the applicable definitions.

Bullshit. You've got no clue what "religion" means, just as you have no clue what "atheism" means.

Just as you draw conclusions (often mistaken) based on the body of my work, and aren't shy about drawing conclusions and inferences based on what I write, I do the same thing with respect to your, and everybody else's contributions here, and it's my considered and deeply held opinion that nearly everyone here, or at Ratskep, or at RDF in the past, falls firmly into the category of religious Atheist zealot, which is a kind adjective for what many of them really are.

The difference is, we provide examples of your past work,

Which you promptly mischaracterize, misunderstand and ridicule without a scintilla of rational argumentation in support of your refutation. The examples you claim to provide almost never provide an example of what you think it exemplifies.

Of course you'll claim that, as your more blinkered than a racehorse. But the point remains. We provide examples. YOU DON'T.

while you provide nothing because you are allegedly too lazy to do so.

Bored, not lazy. I see no point in mining ten years of your posts for something that anybody who has known you for a month knows is true. I've got better things to do than that.

Better things like lying and erecting strawmen. Produce evidence or STFU.

We all know it's not laziness that is stopping you from doing it. It's the fact that there isn't any evidence outside of the faulty inferences of your blinkered mind.

You continue to provide the evidence on a regular basis. I leave it up to someone who gives a fuck to go look it up if they doubt it.

EVERYONE doubts it, Seth. You've got ZERO people on your side. Everyone knows you're a lying douchebag.

That's what makes them Atheist, as opposed to atheists. The reasonable, rational non-believer is perfectly comfortable with admitting that they don't know the truth and that the question of God's existence remains open and unresolved.

We are all perfectly comfortable with admitting that we don't know the truth and that the question of God's existence remains open and unresolved.

Hardly. You avoid addressing that subject with great vigor.

I just addressed it there, dimwit!

And if and when you are caused to inadvertently address it, you almost always react with personal insults, derision and non sequitur in order to avoid having to say the one thing you can factually say about the existence of God: "I don't know."

More lies. I just addressed it right then without any insults derision non-sequitur etc. All of us here have stated before that "we don't know". Stop lying, you lying fuck. We even had a poll where we gladly stated we don't know. But you are so full of your own retarded mental inhibitions that you can't accept evidence that goes against your world view. The problem here is you, not any atheist.

Everything else you contribute on the subject is nothing more than ream after ream of personal insults aimed at people who do believe in God.

Lying cockbag. Produce evidence or STFU.

You're not satisfied to say "I don't know"

Lying cockbag. We've all repeatedly said we don't know. Because you are a dishonest cunt, you can't accept that. That's your problem.

and then have the common courtesy of allowing other people to believe what they choose to believe, you insist on insulting the majority of people on the planet at every possible turn,

Lying cockbag. Produce evidence or STFU.

Your blind hatred of all things theological prevents you from engaging in reasoned debate on the subject.

Your mental retardation prevents you from engaging in anything other than logical fallacy after logical fallacy.

We perfectly comfortably did so in that poll that you choose to ignore as an inconvenient truth. Why are you such a dishonest debater?

I'm not, you are. I respond to your diatribes and insults with thought and scholarship and I explain my reasoning even when you do nothing more than hurl childish insults.

Bullshit, you are a bald-faced liar. You are also a troll and an ad-hom specialist. You simply can't accept that you are wrong about the reality of the world. Produce evidence to back up your bollocks or STFU.

You just don't like the fact that I am adept at demolishing what you believe to be rational pronouncements. Mostly they aren't. But when they are, I am happy to both give you credit for them and engage you reasonably and rationally. This doesn't mean I have to agree with you however. Your "poll" means absolutely nothing, to me or anyone else who is able to formulate a rational thought and express it.

Laughable. How can it mean nothing if it directly disproves your idiotic "theory"?!? It means nothing to you, because it is an inconvenient truth. That's your problem, not ours.

They are not afraid to face this insecurity and do not feel the need to cover up their insecurity about their uncertainty with bluster, bloviation and insult. As a Tolerist™ I have no dog in the hunt either way. I'm satisfied to let theists believe what they believe and Atheists believe what they believe without judging either one of them with respect to those beliefs

Yet you are perfectly happy to judge liberals about their beliefs. You aren't a tolerist. You are full of shit.

The difference is I'm specific and I only judge individuals based on their non-peaceable statements.

You are so full of shit.

I have no problem with your disbelief in God, that's yours to decide. What I have a problem with is your blatant and scurrilous lies and attacks on billions of people who have done you no harm merely because it satisfies some atavistic urge you have to excoriate theism.

Who gives a fuck if you have a problem? That's no excuse to lie and troll.

And produce evidence of these scurrilous lies and attacks on "billions of people" or STFU.

If you want to excoriate some specific Catholic priest against whom there is credible forensic evidence of sexual wrongdoing, I don't mind at all, and in fact I join you in condemning such people, and those who knowingly harbor and protect them from the consequences of their evil acts.

I don't give a fuck what you mind. You are incapable of reasoned thought.

But so far, out of more than 400,000 Catholic priests currently in service, only about 4000, or about one percent, have even been accused of sexual impropriety, which is about 14 percent fewer priests than ordinary citizens who commit sexual assaults on children.

What's this got to do with anything other than your own retarded strawman??

But that doesn't matter to you, nor do you care that hundreds of thousands of Catholic priests serve their parishioners faithfully and selflessly and perform all manner of charitable and altruistic acts, not infrequently at a cost to their own health, safety and lives.

Don't tell me what I care about, you lying fuck. Produce evidence to back up your bollocks or STFU.

You don't care that billions of people rely on their religious beliefs to carry them through tough times and you don't care that the vast majority of them apply their beliefs positively and to assist others, not harm them.

How the fuck would you know? You can't read simple English for comprehension.

You don't care that when the AIDS epidemic began in Africa, Priests and other religious orders were quite literally the only people willing to attend to the needs of the stricken, without regard for their own safety, while the rest of the world, including physicians, were refusing to treat or even approach the sick out of fear.

I've never once discussed AIDS on these forums, let alone said anything about any priests in regards to it. You are a liar of the highest order. What's your problem??

Most hypocritically, you get all worked up and resort to even more invective when someone challenges YOUR Atheistic religious beliefs.

No, I resort with invective when I am presented with a dishonest cunt and a troll.

[edit: had to split the cunt of a post in two as the cunting software said there's too many smilies in the post. ]

[pErvinalia]

The fact that of the thousands of members involved in discussions over the years virtually no one ever agrees with your "logic" and "rationality" should be a clue that you aren't as bright as you think you are.

Well, I don't think that's actually true to begin with, but in any event that speaks to the strength and scope of the Atheist religious orthodoxy more than it speaks to any deficit in my argumentation.

Oh the hubris. You think that 1 vs 10,000 rational thinkers reflects on the 10,000 rational thinkers, and not on the one. Fucking LOL.

You see, it doesn't matter to me if I'm right or not,

That much is patently obvious the way you abuse logic and reasoning. You literally can't be right as your "arguments" are basically a dog's breakfast. They aren't even coherent, therefore they can't be right in any sense of the word.

though mostly I am. It's the debate that's important. The journey down the path to enlightenment is far more important and instructive than some arbitrary destination along the way. If I'm wrong, I'm fine with that.

Bullshit you are. We waste so much time on this forum (and previous ones) trying to school you in the basics of logic and reasoning, not to mention science and atheism. It has zero effect on you. That's because you think you're right and 10,000 other atheists are suffering from some sort of shared delusion. I'd invoke Occam's Razor, but you're too stupid to understand it.

If my posts cause anyone at all to think more deeply about a particular subject or point, I've done my job well. You see, like Socrates, I'm an interlocutor.

My purpose and role is to advance knowledge and understanding by stimulating debate and causing people to think, although that usually doesn't include you. I've told you countless times that my actual audience is not the members of the forum, and particularly not you, it's the visitors and lurkers who may take away some new nugget of knowledge or understanding from the debate. Nor do I care WHAT nugget they take away. They can agree with me or disagree with me, it's all the same to me. What's important, the ONLY important thing is that my posts cause people to think about the subject, because thought is preferable to the sort of knee-jerk dogmatism you demonstrate with regularity.

Your posts literally can't do that as they don't contain any inherent logic or reasoning. They are just a series of logical fallacy and shifting goal posts and a total inability to stop abusing logic despite you knowing that you do it after we show you how you are doing it.

I understand that you like to vent, but I have yet to see you make an honest, introspective and respectful post acknowledging that for billions of people, theistic religion serves as a stable foundation in their lives that makes suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune somewhat easier.

Of course you haven't because you are blinkered and a dishonest debater. I and others often make such remarks. You would never see them as they don't fit your biased narrative. Open your fucking eyes.

Trust me, they've been open for three decades now, and I'm very satisfied with what I see.

Except that all of us understand, and have indeed made comments to this effect many times, that religion serves as a stable foundation in the lives of theists. You simply can't accept that because it goes against your idiotic world view.

Whether or not their beliefs are a fantasy or even a delusion isn't really relevant to the potential, and factual benefits of theistic belief to those who need solace and comfort in dealing with the stresses of life, as any psychiatrist will tell you. I've not yet seen you present a credible case for why anyone should be an atheist,

YOU are an atheist, you dolt! And atheism is the default state of humans until they learn otherwise. Some of us have just reverted back to our natural state.

No, I'm a non-theistic Tolerist™. And no, you have no critically robust evidence to show that atheism is the default state of humans until they learn otherwise.

Start a poll then, troll. I can promise you that I didn't know about Gods until I heard about them at school. Same with my kids. And I'd bet my house on it being the same with every atheist here. No one is born with any inherent knowledge of gods. It is a learned concept.

That's a presumption you make because you disbelieve that God, should he/she/it exist, is capable of making a fetus or infant or child or mentally-retarded person aware of his/her/its presence in the womb. But since you cannot prove that a fetus has no knowledge of God in the womb, and because infants cannot express such knowledge even if they have it, and because young children may forget (or be caused to forget) that knowledge for a time, it is irrational to say that atheism is the "natural state" of human beings.

Yeah, and pigs might fly.

Then there's the argument that if God is omnipresent in nature, God must be present in each and every human being as well, and therefore atheism, or the "absence of belief" is merely a state of ignorance that can be easily rectified through education or interaction with God when the time is appropriate. Therefore, one can argue that a-theism, the absence of belief, is like any other developmental deficit that changes as the human being grows and matures.

One could if they were an ignoramus and missed the obvious fact that people are TAUGHT about gods.

Zygotes don't have a heart, but all that is necessary for a heart to come into being exists within the zygote. There is no reason to believe that atheism as a "default state" is anything other than a stage of development that exists in all humans, but for one reason or another is suppressed in a small part of the population, such as yourself, which makes Atheists genetic aberrations as opposed to "normal" human beings.

Great theory, Einstein. Where's your evidence for this bollocks?

or an Atheist. I've not seen any evidence that your being an Atheist gives you any comfort or solace or any assistance in dealing with the perfectly natural stresses and uncertainties that come with contemplating one's own mortality and the uncertainties of life. If anything, I see the exact opposite in you. I see hopelessness, depression and a morbid attitude of uselessness because you try to take refuge in reason and logic when, as many others have demonstrated over the ages, abandoning yourself to faith in something greater than yourself might actually make your life better. I've yet to see someone as prominent as Dawkins honestly address the value of "religious delusion" to society or the individual. The best he came up with, in TGD, is a vague question asking why it isn't better to be rational and reject delusion, which he pointedly never actually answers.

You're one to talk about pragmatics over principle. How dare you lecture anyone about pragmatics.

"Who dares, wins." SAS motto

Nice dodge, not. You are the most blatant example of a man willing to cut his nose off to spite himself for his alleged libertarian principles. You don't get to now pretend you give one fuck about pragmatics.

One of the reasons I recognize this trait in you is because I too suffer from the same atheistic ennui and dissatisfaction with life. But rather than respond to that internal conflict by attacking others for whom theistic religion is a solace and comfort and a moral compass that leads them to be better people, I try very hard to accept that my lack of belief is quite personal and isn't the fault of anyone or anything else, and I try to respect the beliefs of others...in other words, I'm tolerant of their beliefs so long as those beliefs manifest themselves peaceably and in positive, productive ways for both the individual and society in general.

EXACTLY the same for us, as we've mentioned many times over the years. The only problem we have with theism is when it starts messing with our lives. THAT is not acceptable.

That's not the impression get from your body of work.

That's because you are blinkered fool. You have a certain world view and no amount of evidence to the contrary is going to change your rusted on view.

As for what's "acceptable," you sound positively Libertarian in your insistence on personal autonomy and freedom.

That's because I am a libertarian (after a fashion), dickhead. And it's how I can confidently assert that you are without doubt NOT a libertarian.

I'd think you'd be directing your ire at Socialism and Marxism rather than religion, because both of them fuck with your life far more, and far more negatively, than religion ever has.

I do direct my ire at them, twat. If only you could read for comprehension you would understand this. But it goes against your idiotic rusted on world view.

Then again, being a Socialist and a Marxist who believes in majority rule, since the majority of human beings hold some sort of theistic belief, according to your own ethical and moral metrics, you should just shut the fuck up about theism and accept what the majority wants you to do.

I'm not a socialist or Marxist, you lying fuck. I've told you that repeatedly.

And that's precisely why I'm a Tolerist™ and not an Atheist. It does me no harm to respect the peaceable religious beliefs and practices of others, and it's good manners and a plus for civilized society for me to respect their religious liberties that initiate neither force nor fraud against me.

Exactly as every atheist does.

Religion and belief in God exist as an evolved behavior at the very least, and the fact that 80 percent of the planet's population hold some sort of theistic belief is not something one can simply dismiss and ignore.

Who's dismissing and ignoring it? More of your biases showing, Seth.

You're kidding right? You do so at every turn.

Then it should be easy for you to prove it, liar. Provide evidence or STFU!

And what, exactly, is wrong with that?

Nothing at all. But you'll ignore this, as it doesn't fit your biased narrative.

Then what the hell are you bitching about all the time?

I bitch because you are a dishonest cunt and a troll. What? Did you think that should garner you respect?

[Hermit]

rEv, you owe me a scroll wheel.

[pErvinalia]

It's the only way to defeat him. Beat him at his own game.

[Svartalf]

I defeated him long ago, by foeing him and denying him the opportunity to troll me. if you go on megaposting like that, I'll have to do the same to you

[pErvinalia]

Well, do what you must. But I'm offended by people who abuse logic and reasoning and who should know better. Seth is a strange example, as he's clearly not a total idiot. He has a good vocabulary and can write well. And in some cases he can construct a reasoned argument. That's the problem. It's not like he has no idea what a good logical argument is. He constructs them rarely from time to time. So that makes his regular abuse of logic and reasoning harder to take. He should know better. And his good writing ability has the potential to make it seem to his "lurkers" that he actually knows what he is talking about. It's important to combat that shit wherever we (well, I) come across it. So i do.

[Brian Peacock]

Haven't you figured it out yet man? Seth will just say that your logic is faulty and your brain function impaired for as long as you disagree with him and for one post more than you.

[rainbow]

I defeated him long ago, by foeing him and denying him the opportunity to troll me. if you go on megaposting like that, I'll have to do the same to you

I defeated him with love.

Amor Vincit Omnia