Atheists & Christians: Argue the OTHER POINT OF VIEW

Discussion in 'Religion Archives' started by Darth Behemoth, Mar 29, 2013.

  1. Darth Behemoth Registered Member

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    AS an experiment, I'd like Christians & Atheists to argue the OPPOSITE point of view. Christians must argue the Atheist point of view, while the Atheist must argue the Christian point of view. Atheists must argue that 1. God exists, 2. That Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Christians must argue that God DOES not exist, 2. That Jesus Christ is NOT the Son of God.

    This will be interesting. My own position I will not say, so as not to influence the experiment.
     
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  3. arauca Banned Banned

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    You must be an atheist to come with a skim like that . Why would a Christian take an atheist position . This is not a debate ,for a Christian to be Christian or believer that is the base of their life .
     
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  5. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    I know it's the basis of my life. God appeared to me in the form of a sequence of fortuitous events that could not have been coincidence. I followed the clues and everything turned out OK. I don't think I have to go to church or praise God. Obviously, he knows what he's doing. Arauca's faith in nothingness, his perverted atheistic ideas, seem to be causing him some discomfort. He has never truly become poor in spirit. I can only feel pity. As a friend, I'm asking you, Aracua, can't you turn from your path of wickedness and torment, and turn towards the Lord?
     
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  7. Rhaedas Valued Senior Member

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    He's not asking you to change your position, only to try and form arguments from the other side. It's a common debate tactic.

    I'll come back to this thread once I come up with something other than the usual canned responses of circular argument or disbelief. Spidergoat's reply is pretty good, but I want to find something more grounded in reason than just feeling it's right. It might take a while.
     
  8. Balerion Banned Banned

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    I reject the notion that I am a Christian by faith alone. Certainly, in times gone by faith was the only means by which man could walk with Christ, but by His grace we have become enlightened. We now have the tools to gaze into the furnace of Creation and see its smallest embers dancing through the divine medium like firebugs lolling darkly bright through a rural field at dusk. It is with these tools that we can see the proof of God's work--the irreducible complexity of the coagulation cascade, the impossibility of random protein folding... With this knowledge we know that God has created us, and that he He is good.

    It is the scientific community that relies on dogma and doctrine, not us. They are guided by faith, not evidence, not reason or logic. They tell us that something cannot come from nothing, yet expect us to believe that this is precisely how the universe came to be! They invent tales of evolution as a blind process by which random accidents in genetic code result in, well, us. No, the reasonable man does not believe anything by faith alone. Not when God has imbued this generation with the means to see His fingerprints upon Creation.
     
  9. wellwisher Banned Banned

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    We have two sides of the brain with each side processing data differently. The left brain is more differential and is the primary side used by science and atheism. This is why science tends to break down into data differentiation and specialization. The right brain is more spatial and integral and is the primary side used by religion and spirituality who think in terms of universal truth.

    Like with calculus, you cannot integrate an equation and expect to get the same answer if we differentiate the same equation.. Or you can solve a differential equation, but will not get the same answer if we integrate the same equation. The two sides of the brain use analogies of these different processing methods, with both methods being useful but different.

    The differential left side looks for the slope of an equation at a given point. The integral right side looks for the area under the curve from x1 to x2. Science and atheism want a unique data point at a unique angle for proof. While religion is giving them an area under the curve, which is not what they want. The reverse is also true. The area of a curve given by religion cannot be defined by a slope at a point anymore, than a car can be defined by the tires.

    The two sides of the brain work together just like integration and differentiation. The differentiation breaks the equation down to all its unique slopes at points along the curve. Once these are differentiated, we can integrate all the points/slopes to get an area under the data points.

    God has the integration limits of plus and minus infinity; universal truth. We have not yet differentiated all the points under an infinite curve, with the left brain expecting differential or finite limits; temporal truth. From the POV of atheism they have points and slopes of the God curve, using finite limits (cherry picked traditions) and want only this segment of the curve integrated. But since it uses the wrong limits to solve the God equation, it is not easy to integrate and get the right answer; need faith to sense the infinite limits are not the same area as the finite limits (not fully differentiated yet).
     
  10. Buddha12 Valued Senior Member

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    I could not do this for it would not make any sense as I cannot come up with anything that could ever substantiate a god.
     
  11. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    Just play along, it's a good idea!
     
  12. mathman Valued Senior Member

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    Most people in this world are neither Christian nor atheist. Where do they fit in?
     
  13. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    Let's just say theist/ atheist.
     
  14. Rav Valued Senior Member

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    They'll fit in well enough in a pit of eternal despair. I don't wish such a fate on them of course, but it's not me who makes the rules. God does. Really, He's just giving them what they want anyway. They reject His sacrifice, which was the ultimate expression of His love, and the consequence is simply that they get to remain separated from it. The Bible is quite clear on this point. In Matthew chapter 7, verse 21, Jesus tells us that on the day of judgement there will be many religious people desperately arguing their case before God, but will not enter the kingdom of heaven because they weren't really embracing the truth.

    As far as truth itself is concerned, one need only utilize the correct epistemology to discover it. The cornerstone of this epistemology is that the Bible is the only complete and inerrant source of real knowledge about God. Study it, meditate on it, pray to God Himself for insight, practice its teachings, and you'll soon realize that you stand apart from all the atheists and horribly misguided theists in the world as one of God's chosen, cherished few.
     
  15. Rav Valued Senior Member

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    As for the existence of a god as a philosophical question, I can offer the following:

    In order to properly conceptualize God, one must hold that God is actual, because that's the one that theists are talking about. They are not talking about the god who may or may not exist, or who doesn't. In other words, the god of the theists, called God, is real by definition, and is therefore, well, real. Really real. You're simply not talking about the real God if you're not talking about this one. Any philosophical objection, then, can only legitimately apply to gods that aren't real. As soon as you try to level such an objection at the real God, you've instantly failed, because invoking the concept imports its actuality, thereby defeating any and all objections to its existence. Got it?

    I can't take credit for this absolutely brilliant and unassailable logic, as much as I'd like to. It was developed by one (or perhaps two) of our other resident theists.

    Case closed, I'd say.
     
  16. rodereve Registered Member

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    You're doing it wrong wellwisher lol. You're still arguing as a theist.
    "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle
     
  17. wynn ˙ Valued Senior Member

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    For the sake of exercise; for the sake of preparing for exchanges with atheists, to come up with arguments to refute the atheist ones; to uncover traces of atheism in oneself and to undo them.
     
  18. andy1033 Truth Seeker Valued Senior Member

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    There is something atheists are missing in this argument. Today science has cheated and are turning off brain receptors in your brain that normally where always used in spirituality. So today less people believe as these brain receptors are being turned off.

    Humans like to experience things, and turning off these brain receptors, has cheated so many out of believing.

    People are not whom they really are, as science has cheated them out of there real selfs.

    Thats why less people goto church today, and why so many of the public today see no believe in god, or right or wrong, as they have no connection with what ever those brain receptors where opening upto.

    Science and atheists cheated, but the masses have no idea its happening to them.
     
  19. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Where did you come up with that weird statement? In thirteen billion years a lot of things happen by sheer chance. It's very difficult to understand what it means to have a time-span of 13,000,000,000 years, when few of us even live 100 years. The difference is that scientists try very hard to understand it, whereas religionists just throw up their hands and say, "Shit, that's too hard for me. I'll let God figure it out. My brain hurts; I'll go read my favorite passage in the Bible for the two hundredth time."

    Like all supernaturalists, you misquote science because you don't understand it and don't want to. You have vastly oversimplified an event that we have barely begun to understand. I'll assume that you're familiar with the Laws of Thermodynamics, because if not then you're a complete fool for pretending to understand this stuff.

    The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that entropy tends to increase over time; in other words, order ultimately collapses into complete disorder. But spatially and temporally reversals of entropy are quite possible. We experience them every day inside our own bodies, where rather random combinations of organic molecules are ripped apart and reassembled so as to give us the energy to live and work. This is a spatially local reversal of entropy. The Big Bang was a temporally local reversal. It happened briefly, causing order to exist where there was none, and this order has been decaying ever since--with myriad local reversals such as our own bodies. The result of this local reversal of entropy was the universe coming into existence (temporarily). The matter and antimatter in the universe is in perfect balance so something did not come from nothing. The nothing (a universe with a net mass of zero) is still there, it just has temporarily more organization.

    This is called "physics." You might want to read up on it before you dive in over your head again. Most of us took it in our university courses.

    Where in the holy hell do you come up with this utterly preposterous bullshit??? You talk like a precocious third-grader who knows a lot of fancy words but is very weak on the concepts behind them. Oh wait, all Christians talk that way, don't they. Everything in the universe is just a little too complicated so they don't bother to try to understand it.

    We did not invent evolution. We discovered it. There are two entirely different, enormous bodies of evidence for evolution that corroborate each other. One is the fossil record. We've carbon-dated fossils back through hundreds of millions of years so we know with considerable precision which animal, plant, fungus, alga, bacterium or archaeum lived when, so we can chart the temporal relationships among them, and deduce which was the ancestor or descendant of the other.

    The other body of evidence is DNA, which was discovered in the 20th century. We've found well-preserved DNA going back around 100,000 years. This is enough to determine the rates of mutation in the living organisms on this planet caused by cosmic rays and other perturbations. We've also compared the DNA of tens of thousands of species of animals, plants, etc., in order to see how closely they are related. For example, humans and chimpanzees (two different species of ape) share about 95% of their DNA. Humans and banana trees (one is an animal, the other a plant, from two different kingdoms of lifeforms) share about 40% of their DNA. We've also charted the DNA of organisms with very short lifespans such as bacteria, who go through a hundred or more generations in a year so we can actually witness their mutation and evolution, and learn to understand the mechanisms that drive mutation and evolution.

    All of this hard work in the sciences of paleontology and genetics give us an astounding view into the evolution of life on earth. It's hardly complete, but it is certainly not invented. When we insult your idiotic priests and the stupid fairy tales in their holy books, you scream at us and some of you (especially Muslims) simply come at us with guns. But when you insult the dedicated, hard-working, highly educated scientists who help us understand how the universe actually works, you expect us to endure it graciously.

    Hell no! Fuck all the brainless fairy tale believers who insult science and scientists. I'm sick to death of them.

    But your fairytale "God" is nothing more than a construct of faith. There is absolutely no respectable evidence for the existence of God. In fact you folks insist that he expects you to believe in him solely on faith. You're making up cute little stories that pretend to provide logic for your fairytales, but any first-year university student can demolish them.

    Christians are the largest single sect. That is, if you count the Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, Orthodox, etc. as a single sect. Not all of them actually do that. During the U.S. presidential campaign, many Christians from traditional denominations insisted that Romney is not actually a Christian because Mormons don't believe in the Trinity.

    Where do you guys come up with this crap??? Did you read that on a fortune cookie?

    You're out of your mind. At the time of the American Revolution, only about 20% of Americans were members of churches. Today the figure is 50%. The Religious Redneck Retard Revival in the late 1970s and early 1980s saw a huge increase in church membership and attendance.

    You and Balerion must get your misinformation from the same source. Fox News?
     
  20. Balerion Banned Banned

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    Erm, Fraggles? You realize the object of this thread is for atheists and theists to argue on behalf of the other side, no?

    Don't get me wrong, I love your zeal, but I fear it's wasted on me: I'm already on your side!
     
  21. Rav Valued Senior Member

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    Evolution is a lie told by Satan. God may have prevented him from messing with free-will, but he's been allowed to do as much tempting and misleading as he chooses. I can't see anything in the Bible that explicitly demonstrates that he has been barred from screwing with the fossil and/or geologic record, or expertly manipulating ancient fragments of DNA, all in an attempt to lead people away from the truth of creation.
     
  22. Rav Valued Senior Member

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    What this thread needs is atheists pretending to be theists pretending to be atheists, since it doesn't look like we're gonna be getting any actual theists pretending to be atheists, which makes pretending to be a theist a rather one-sided exercise, and therefore not much of an exercise at all. In other words, we need opposition so we can kick things into high gear!
     
  23. Rita Registered Member

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    I am neither a religious person, nor an atheist. Which side should I argue?

    Arauca, there is something to be gained by arguing the opposing point of view.

    Whoo Fraggle Rocker
    Do I detect some emotion there? I thought this was coming up in the thread I pulled out of. I hope it doesn't ruin this thread. Maybe you should stick to the science threads that don't stir up those emotions, or do you want to explore what all that emotion is about?
     

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