"There is no heaven; it's a fairy story"

[ChrisGB]

TheHeretic said:

It is blood and flesh, honest, however it is SO magic that it can't be tested to give that as a result. When tested it is cunningly disguised as wafers and wine.

How terribly convenient. I am still curious how you know that the wafer and wine turn into blood. In fact I am still curious how you know anything about anything related to this God. Is the bible the inerrant word of God? If so, is that where you get your information? Of not, why is your God allowing his word to be twisted, and error ridden?

You made a long post a couple of days ago in reply to me that I haven't found looking back - do you remember which page? I will reply once I have it.

On this, why should there be scientific-discourse friendly "evidence" for that which is by definition "not natural", not the sort of thing that can be measured, seen, experimented on? Your cry of how convenient would only be relevant if anyone actually lived according to the belief that scientific discourse friendly knowledge is the only sort there is. How do you decide who to marry? How do you decide anything to do with people, affection, love, friendship? Try to imagine this life where everything down to the minutest detail is something you have scientifically verified. How could this not lead to mental illness? You wouldn't dare take a step out of bed until you had verified you were awake, that the floor was still solid. This scientific questioning is excellent as an academic pursuit with life-enhancing as well as life-destroying practical applications, but to pretend it is the only way to know is to have not reflected on practicalities. If you applied it strictly and measured every moment of your day, if you were not already mad you would end up despairing and have to cling to mathematical proof only (cf Hume and sunrises). Your life and conversation would be a little limited if everything you did had to be the object of a mathematical certainty.
There is knowledge through argument, reasoning, logic, experience, experiment.

[ChrisGB]

NobleGuy said:

ChrisGB said:

I've lost the post where someone put up a pic of their kids made by IVF, telling me off for wishing they were not here or some such.

What I said when asked about IVF was that the destruction of embryos in order to make a baby, because it is the destruction of a human beginning, is nothing to be celebrated, unlike the baby that eventually comes.

Please tell me how you read that as a condemnation of your kids? it plainly means nothing of the sort unless completely misunderstood.

While I don't agree with a lot of what you say (come on, sex is fun ), there's a lot of twisting and deliberate misinterpreting going on on this thread.

...it's not my view per se and I'm really just playing Devil's Advocate here, but does anyone think that the advances in science/healthcare is in danger of diluting the human gene pool...?

Edited by NobleGuy on Thursday 3rd May 08:28

Sex is fun, good, desire is good etc. I guess people don't realise the positive talk about sex in religion. As I quoted from Anscombe above, it is one of the great human goods and abstinence can be as bad as addiction - but that needs to be put in a healthy context.

[Gaspode]

ChrisGB said:

Appeals to Occam's razor are no longer helpful for the atheist. When lack of knowledge of nature meant a god of the gaps was widely accepted, fine, but now, it works the other way - the simplicity of God is the least involved explanation of first cause / creatio ex nihilo etc.

Oh dear, Chris, you've shot yourself in the foot (again). Ockham's Razor is actually rather less than useful for the religious. It says: "pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" or in other words 'plurality should not be posited without necessity'.

It is not necessary to invent a concept called 'god' to explain the observable universe, and as we have no evidence that anything existed 'before', then there is no need to posit a first cause. The available evidence indicates that Time and Space appear to have started with the big bang. Since time started then , there is no 'before' which can have existed. To ask what came before the Big Bang is like asking 'What's further south than the South Pole?"

..but I think I made this point about 20 pages back, so I guess either no-one is bothering to read my posts or I'm stuck in a Groundhog moment...

[carmonk]

Gaspode said:

ChrisGB said:

Appeals to Occam's razor are no longer helpful for the atheist. When lack of knowledge of nature meant a god of the gaps was widely accepted, fine, but now, it works the other way - the simplicity of God is the least involved explanation of first cause / creatio ex nihilo etc.

Oh dear, Chris, you've shot yourself in the foot (again). Ockham's Razor is actually rather less than useful for the religious. It says: "pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" or in other words 'plurality should not be posited without necessity'.

It is not necessary to invent a concept called 'god' to explain the observable universe, and as we have no evidence that anything existed 'before', then there is no need to posit a first cause. The available evidence indicates that Time and Space appear to have started with the big bang. Since time started then , there is no 'before' which can have existed. To ask what came before the Big Bang is like asking 'What's further south than the South Pole?"

..but I think I made this point about 20 pages back, so I guess either no-one is bothering to read my posts or I'm stuck in a Groundhog moment...

As did I, and long before ChrisGB stopped reading my posts. I explained too that language is not appropriate for describing anything other than macro physics so talk of 'before' and 'nothing' is literally meaningless other than for fun speculation. It's like saying god is a photon because how can a photon be everywhere in the universe at once? Well it isn't but that's the best approximate we can achieve with language. The maths, however, describes it perfectly and with no need for a deity, and soon maths will describe what happened at the 'creation' of the universe too.

[ChrisGB]

MiseryStreak said:

Almost all of the challenges facing humanity, and the other poor lifeforms who have to share this planet with us, are related to overpopulation. Everything bad that will happen to this planet is due to the fact we are breeding too successfully and having too many children (However long we may live through improved medicine and healthcare in the future, if couples only ever had two children, the population would actually go down). Famine, resource wars, disease pandemics, pollution, deforestation, massive extinction rates in all plants and animals. All because of overbreeding.

And you, ChrisGB, think contraception is evil? Can you imagine the population of China if they were all Catholics? Is that God's plan? I totally accept the Catholic Church's position on abortion, it's a legitimate viewpoint that once an ovum is fertilised that the life should be cherished. Please explain how catching some semen in a rubber sock rather than impregnating your wife every time you want to make love is evil. Please explain that, faced with the bigger picture of the evils that will come about by further population growth.

That's not to even mention the spread of HIV in countries where contraception isn't widely available. Is 5% of Sub-Saharan Africans living with HIV (many from birth) a good thing?

Contraception has evil consequences for societies where it is widely used. If that means that it isn't evil, I take it back. I refer you to Mary Eberstadt's book Adam and Eve after the Pill available on amazon and to Elizabeth Anscombe's essay Contraception and Chastity available at Orthodoxytoday website free.
In a nutshell, leaving sex open to procreation is a pretty sure way to me to be free of concern for career, money, power. And the social effects of increased abortion, broken families, divorce, promiscuity, later marriage, desperation among women in their 30s to meet someone before it's "too late" etc are all consequences of a culture of contraception. This is not to say anything about individual cases, where I can only say I don't know. In my own case, I don't know. The pope, who I tend to agree with on many things, has said using a condom may be a sign of greater love than not using one. So there is nuance, but as a mass effect on society, I think there is little doubt.
You wouldn't want to argue that single-parent families, high divorce rates, people never finding lifelong love, women desperate to meet a suitable husband before menopause, over 40 million abortions worldwide every year and so on are all great social goods brought about by the sexual revolution and its tools the pill and the condom?

[ChrisGB]

Gaspode said:

ChrisGB said:

Appeals to Occam's razor are no longer helpful for the atheist. When lack of knowledge of nature meant a god of the gaps was widely accepted, fine, but now, it works the other way - the simplicity of God is the least involved explanation of first cause / creatio ex nihilo etc.

Oh dear, Chris, you've shot yourself in the foot (again). Ockham's Razor is actually rather less than useful for the religious. It says: "pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" or in other words 'plurality should not be posited without necessity'.

It is not necessary to invent a concept called 'god' to explain the observable universe, and as we have no evidence that anything existed 'before', then there is no need to posit a first cause. The available evidence indicates that Time and Space appear to have started with the big bang. Since time started then , there is no 'before' which can have existed. To ask what came before the Big Bang is like asking 'What's further south than the South Pole?"

..but I think I made this point about 20 pages back, so I guess either no-one is bothering to read my posts or I'm stuck in a Groundhog moment...

I'm jumping ahead here, but it fits perfectly for the debate on origins. God in traditional metaphysics is perfectly simple. To coin a phrase, he is that than which nothing simpler can be imagined. As the answer to the question How come anything rather than nothing at all, which to recap is not a question science could ever answer as it is talking about that which accounts for nature rather than an aspect of it, is what we answer with God, this perfectly simple God is much less of the plurality Occam would abhor than other metaphysical theories such as multiverses.

[TheHeretic]

ChrisGB said:

You made a long post a couple of days ago in reply to me that I haven't found looking back - do you remember which page? I will reply once I have it.

On this, why should there be scientific-discourse friendly "evidence" for that which is by definition "not natural", not the sort of thing that can be measured, seen, experimented on? Your cry of how convenient would only be relevant if anyone actually lived according to the belief that scientific discourse friendly knowledge is the only sort there is. How do you decide who to marry? How do you decide anything to do with people, affection, love, friendship? Try to imagine this life where everything down to the minutest detail is something you have scientifically verified. How could this not lead to mental illness? You wouldn't dare take a step out of bed until you had verified you were awake, that the floor was still solid. This scientific questioning is excellent as an academic pursuit with life-enhancing as well as life-destroying practical application, but to pretend it is the only way to know is to have not reflected on practicalities. If you applied it strictly and measured every moment of your day, if you were not already mad you would end up despairing and have to cling to mathematical proof only (cf Hume and sunrises). Your life and conversation would be a little limited if everything you did had to be the object of a mathematical certainty.
There is knowledge through argument, reasoning, logic, experience, experiment.

Why should religious events be subject to scientific enquiry? You tell me. The idea talked about at the time was tram substantiation, and how the wafer and wine is 'actually' turned into the flesh and blood of Jesus. I commented that it is ever so convenient that on the one hand the authorities who apparently are in the know tell us this is actually happening, they also tell us that empirically they appear as wafer and wine. You don't find that just a little bit easy? You don't find it just a bit too convenient? If they were to tell us it is a metaphoric transformation, fair enough, have at it, but that is not the case.

If using the tongue in cheek description I used in the same post about the Morris Minor part, do you find that a perfectly reasonable concept? Why does religion seem to have this all to simple get out clause that whenever there is a claim, it is utterly unfalsifiable, and we know how strong unfalsifiable claims are. You say that scientific knowledge may not be the only knowledge we have, so let us in on the secret, as I'm sure many are dying to know.

How do I know who to marry? Well, looking at divorce statistics, not the Christians! We are biological creatures. We may be intelligent, and be able to look, and ask questions about things around us, but that does not mean our base, chemical induced reactions are anything other than base chemical reactions, based on what we see, hear, and smell, as well as mental stimulation. Assigning spooky ethereal reasons for these things is as usual baseless, and without any grounds, except to reinforce someone's belief system.

I am slightly aghast with your next bit... "Mental illness" brought on by scientific detail? Not get out of bed u til you have confirmed you are awake? What on earth brought on this stuff? You seem to be mistaking normal, rational enquiry, with obsessive, compulsive disorder.

Your last part is correct. There is knowledge through argument, logic, (same thing in my book), experience, and experiment. They do, of course, have to have falsifiability, otherwise it is not knowledge, merely speculation, and or fantasy.

PS, I would like you answer why talk of wafers and wine changing into blood and flesh is seemingly fine, and normal for a large proportion of the population, and yet a claim of bricks turning into Morris minor headlights, yet cunningly disguised as a brick, would be seen as nutty? Do you consider David Icke's claims to be perfectly fine, or 'nutty'.

[ChrisGB]

IainT said:

If it's not available for us to experience (that's all science is really - the study of the world we inhabit) then it cannot interact with reality otherwise we would be able to test and measure it.

Your assertion was essentially if only us Atheists had the imagination we would see the truth as though we're somehow deficient, tell me how that's not insulting? I'm not overly insulted though as I see the deficiency in the gullibility of the faithful. Now I know I have a very rich imagination and can and so contemplate realities outside our own, it's probably shown in my reading tastes. I fully comprehend what you're suggesting but will point out that imagining something, wishing something or having been brought up to believe something does not make it so.
You want to assert, without evidence, the spiritual is real? Fine. I'll assert, based on the lack of evidence, that it is not.

ChrisGB said:

The God of Christianity can and does interact with reality. Take the Mass, every day in every city, bread and wine become body and blood

IainT said:

They physically change? That would be testable. At what point in the physical process of ingesting them do they change? How does the blood and meat taste? Alternatively you're told this happens and cannot question your church, it's a mortal sin isn't it? Therefore it must happen.
Alternatively it's an entirely figurative, symbolic act of devotion with no alteration of reality.
I really cannot believe you're citing transubstantiation as prof of god acting physically in the world.

I think the issue with the 'how come' question is that it confounds both science and theism because it's predicated on our experience and understanding of space-time. If you can ask the question "how come something rather than nothing?" of the physical view it can be asked of the Theist view. The Theists answer, your answer, is that god is a special case that the question does not apply to with no evidence to back that assertion up other than a belief that god exists therefore must be eternal.

I find it interesting how you clearly don't accept couple of points I make about why, for me, I find Theism wholly untenable... I'm certainly not going to spend hours going through the many points where it's only held together by a willingness to ignore contradictions and things that are blatantly 'evil'. There's plenty of information out there in various forms ranging from the 'hostile to religion' dismantling to the purely scholastic views of the text, it's origins and authors.

No, the lack of evidence is crucial, to me that's the kicker but Theism doesn't work when truly examined. Even without it's own internal failures to make sense how do you know Ra or Odin aren't the one true god? The only reason you're Christian is because you're not a follower of Islam or Buddha by some utterly randome set of events, birth most likely.

I lead a full and rich life full of emotion. Sometimes positive and sometimes negative. Science tells me a huge amount about the mechanisms that these work out through and it's utterly staggering that we have evolved from a set of simple chemicals to such a complicated and interesting set of beings.
Of course the point you're trying to make is that I'm happy to live parts of my life with out recourse to science but you either ignore or don't understand that the physiological aspects of, for example, attraction are well understood.
I see no need to add a spiritual dimension to life to experience the important things - love, trust, etc.

Science is experience? Experience is much more than the measurable. It is also memory, decision, will, narrative. How do you measure the truthfulness of the story you tell yourself about your own life when you are old? You cannot measure by scientific experiment the transformation at Mass, you can accept or deny in light of the intervention that really matters, the incarnation. It is knowledge through argument.

On the imagination bit, it wasn't an insult, it was to say that there is a difference of imagination. You see it as absurdly weird to talk of "non-natural", I think of it as weird but worth exploring. These are not reactions that are different in terms of their truth, we are talking about a reaction to something pretty much inconceivable, but they open up different possible worldviews. To an atheist, the word "non-natural" sounds like nonsense, to me it sounds like where we need to go to get to the bottom of things. Is that insulting?
In the end, yes, I can accept absolutely everything that the scientific method will tell me about the universe, just as you can. And I also think the logic of the How come question needs some concept of simple unknowable God in the traditional metaphysical discourse for it to make sense, which takes me on a different path after science but to me equally compelling intellectually and emotionally. This is not available to you. If you feel insulted, go on that journey too. Insulting?
I don't assert without evidence of the kind you do in fact accept - argument, coherence. Give me an answer to the How come question that avoids positing something not of the universe? What possible answer could there be simpler than the simplicity of traditional metaphysics. If something fits a question perfectly, is it unreasonable to take it as a correct answer?
There is a question about the universe.
The only plausible answer involves some X not of the universe.
Therefore this X is a plausible answer not of the universe.

You've said somewhere that you were formerly Christian, but if you write that questioning my church would be a mortal sin, what did you spend that year learning? What you describe is unrecognisable. Plenty of celebrated orthodox catholics have questioned use of the term transubstantiation, including one of my heroes Herbert McCabe. It is a way of describing what happens in Aristotelian language. Anyway, I accept it was a bit of a tease to use that as my example, and I have explained that a few minutes ago in another reply - it's all about the incarnation really.
I say again though that you won't look at the universe and say this or this bit reveals God, because he is for us that which creates and maintains the whole thing.

"The How come question confounds theism" - well not the sort that I have got to know and love. I think there is a correspondence between what we can work out of the answer and what we see in revelation about the God of the Bible. This is of course through reasoning, not through experimentation. And I think your objection here is that God is made a special case. I'd say the answer to the question is what we call God, for good reason, which I think is not the same process of thought.
For example: what is this answer X? X cannot be physical, measurable, observable etc. This negative deduction of X gives you a list of "attributes" to X that just happen to be what you find in revelation. This is just fluke and means nothing of course, but the gullible read something into it. In any case, you cannot take this as being talk of anything real, because it is not of the universe, of nature, of the world. For me however, this needs attention, I can't just dismiss it because it is not "scientifically verifiable". I know that science is not going to be a help here, if it were then we would plainly not be talking about the answer to this question, I hope that much is clear.
If there is some error of logic in this question, then I need to be told. The only error I see is Bertrand Russell's.

Science can tell you of attraction, but tell me how you scientifically verify the correctness of the promise of fidelity and love until death, assuming you got married? So what is the scientific proof of true love? How can I scientifically verify that I have chosen the right soul mate when I am at the altar? Yes science can monitor chemicals and brainwaves, but what will that do to make life's biggest decisions happier ones? How can i scientifically verify that someone is trustworthy? What value is this science if I am later deceived? You would have to hold to some immense scarcely conceivable experiment to really test trustworthiness and then assume some sort of determinism - and you did see the debunking of determinism at Dawkins's expense by Williams and Kenny?

Your speculation about why I am Christian is a bit unnecessary. Where is the science? I might make up a shopping list of possible "gods" possessing the attributes I deduce from the answer X to the reason anything exists, and I think that list would be a pretty short one. That everything that makes us up is entirely random is a little pessimistic. Random, determined, that must apply to your atheism too?

Edited by ChrisGB on Thursday 3rd May 23:54

[ChrisGB]

fluffnik said:

There being something is a necessary prerequisite of any question, there need not be a why.

When Bertrand Russell was asked How come there is anything at all rather than nothing? he said You can't ask that.
Hegel thought the great question was Why is there anything? Wittgenstein said that THAT the universe is, is the marvelous thing, not how it is.

Perhaps the appeal of this question to some and not to others is aesthetic? Would it be satisfactory to apply aesthetics to other questions though? I don't like atheism because I don't like the look of it, would that do?

On the other hand, it doesn't fail any logical step from the humblest How come Fido rather than any other dog up to a question about everything, so why not answer it?

There being us humans with language and self-awareness is a necessary prerequisite of any question, but what does that say about the validity of asking the questions or why you should not answer them?

[TheHeretic]

The entire problem with asking 'why' is that is assumes a purpose. That is entirely unfounded assumption. 'Why' is an entirely human construct, especially in the realm that you are talking about. For some reason 'why' in repaying to existence needs to have an answer, but that is in no way apparent. I think it is this sense of purpose that leads some people to irrational ideas based on their own purpose, and making themselves feel like they have one. The reality from where I see it is that we are insignificant when viewed on cosmological scales. I think that smallness when looking out at the stars, and knowing they are so numerous, and so distant, makes people frankly scared. Purpose, in whatever form it takes, is a distraction from that.

[ChrisGB]

fluffnik said:

I was not the first to mention a wicker bull or magic hydra and I don't know if they have any history outwith this thread. There here as examples of equivalent improbability mostly.
There is currently no satisfactory for the First Cause issue, gods are every bit as in need of a First Cause as the observable Universe.

The answer to the How come question needs no first cause, is that why you avoid it?

fluffnik said:

You can remove gods from the system and nothing changes.

If there is a valid How come question and you "remove" its answer, then there would be no system for starters.

fluffnik said:

I don't see anything irrational about considering the natural Universe to be the whole enchilada, indeed I can see no rational reason for thinking there might be anything else.

But it's irrational because the only proof acceptable to justifiably hold that view with the evidence that sort of mind would crave would be "scientific" and it is absurd to look for scientific proof for the existence of the "metanatural", by definition something not available to a method of dealing with nature, the scientific.

[IainT]

Chris - this discussion is getting a little unwieldy and there are many many different threads to it that could be delved into in greater depth. Might I humbly suggest we focus on one area than the whole lot? Quoting seems to be a bit of a problem with longer posts and nothing gets really dealt with properly.

I will just make one thing clear - my understanding was that questioning the edicts of your church was a big no but I'm happy to be corrected on that. My own background was one of the 'free' church movement also often called house churches.

[Pesty]

Just an observation.

As I went to vote tonight there is a small church/chappel? attached to the school.

Its got a huge glass entrance and I could see all the congregation. Couldn't help but notice that there did not appear to be anybody younger than 60 in the seats.

[ChrisGB]

TheHeretic said:

ChrisGB said:

This is what the Bible says - when Jesus is asked if a person with a handicap has that handicap because his parents have sinned, Jesus says no, but so that the glory of God can be revealed - in other words the true love that would be daily care or provision of daily care is a beautiful thing, and assisted suicide / old people as a burden etc is a road to dealing with people as objects for one's own convenience, not as a way for them to know they are loved and you to learn love.

And you think that makes perfect sense? Rather than do anything, somehow the suffering millions go through is so that the glory of God can be revealed?

"Hi, I'm going to shoot you in the spine, that way you will be able to glory in the love, and care of the people around you as they nurse you to health, and look after you for the rest of your days, that I have given you by shooting you in the spines. I am nice like that."

Rather than do anything? Caring for someone suffering is not doing anything? I don't follow.
I talk of people born with handicaps worthy of being cared for and you talk of shooting people? In what way are these equivalents?
But if a loved one was shot, what would you do with them? How would a life of devoted care for them change you? How would a life begrudging the burden of having to care for them embitter you? I don't think what I said is esoteric, though I guess that you reacted violently against just because it was NT.

[ChrisGB]

TheHeretic said:

The entire problem with asking 'why' is that is assumes a purpose.

That's why I always say How come? I am not interested or distracted by purpose, red herring. What's the answer?

[ChrisGB]

IainT said:

Chris - this discussion is getting a little unwieldy and there are many many different threads to it that could be delved into in greater depth. Might I humbly suggest we focus on one area than the whole lot? Quoting seems to be a bit of a problem with longer posts and nothing gets really dealt with properly.

I will just make one thing clear - my understanding was that questioning the edicts of your church was a big no but I'm happy to be corrected on that. My own background was one of the 'free' church movement also often called house churches.

I edited your previous and my reply to make it legible. What would you rather talk about?

On edicts, everything needs interpretation, and the official line on dogma, i.e. what the church holds to be revealed truth, is that any interpretation that says the opposite of said dogma is to be considered false. That leaves quite some leeway. There are many shades of authoritative statement below the level of "dogma".

[carmonk]

TheHeretic said:

The entire problem with asking 'why' is that is assumes a purpose. That is entirely unfounded assumption. 'Why' is an entirely human construct, especially in the realm that you are talking about.

But even if you ignore the implication of a purpose and assume 'why' is just enquiring about the cause it is still a moot question. In the macro world you might ask Why did the rock fall? Answer, because I dropped it. And that's accepted and it's logically correct. But when you talk about things at the quantum level the question 'why did...' has no meaning. Why did the photon travel up and not down? That doesn't actually mean anything because cause and effect is an illusion of convenience based on the cumulative probability of quantum events that make up all reality. So going back past the time the universe was on a quantum scale and saying there must be a reason for the universe existing / expanding / whatever is as meaningless as asking what came before it, or how something can come from nothing.

[ChrisGB]

TheHeretic said:

Why should religious events be subject to scientific enquiry? You tell me. The idea talked about at the time was tram substantiation, and how the wafer and wine is 'actually' turned into the flesh and blood of Jesus. I commented that it is ever so convenient that on the one hand the authorities who apparently are in the know tell us this is actually happening, they also tell us that empirically they appear as wafer and wine. You don't find that just a little bit easy? You don't find it just a bit too convenient? If they were to tell us it is a metaphoric transformation, fair enough, have at it, but that is not the case.

It's just that there is John chapter 6, this seems to pretty thoroughly rule out any metaphorical interpretation. Things would be more convenient / inconvenient if it was just a metaphor, but so what? What is this theory of truth as inconvenient / convenient?

The Heretic said:

You say that scientific knowledge may not be the only knowledge we have, so let us in on the secret, as I'm sure many are dying to know.

You answer that yourself a few sentences further down....

The Heretic said:

How do I know who to marry?

My point is that the certainty you have, OK, that I have, is through a common understanding of love, which enables a promise that really can last a lifetime without fear of untrustworthiness. Love, promises, lack of fear, these are not things you will learn about by applying the scientific method to life.

The Heretic said:

I am slightly aghast with your next bit... "Mental illness" brought on by scientific detail? Not get out of bed u til you have confirmed you are awake? What on earth brought on this stuff? You seem to be mistaking normal, rational enquiry, with obsessive, compulsive disorder.

Your last part is correct. There is knowledge through argument, logic, (same thing in my book), experience, and experiment. They do, of course, have to have falsifiability, otherwise it is not knowledge, merely speculation, and or fantasy.

Slightly aghast? Do you actually talk like that? It's beautiful. Can you live a day where absolutely everything you do is subject to rigorous scientific testing please? Then tell us how it went. Test that you are really awake in the morning. What will the test be exactly? When you get out of bed, test first that the floor is as solid as it appears. And so on. Or alternatively, acknowledge that the scientific method, wonderful as it is, is of no conscious importance to us for most of the time. We know plenty without any conscious recourse to verifiability, we need another narrative to explain daily life and what we know of it. Unless of course you want to do that experiment and report back tomorrow.

The Heretic said:

PS, I would like you answer why talk of wafers and wine changing into blood and flesh is seemingly fine, and normal for a large proportion of the population, and yet a claim of bricks turning into Morris minor headlights, yet cunningly disguised as a brick, would be seen as nutty? Do you consider David Icke's claims to be perfectly fine, or 'nutty'.

Bread and wine into body and blood of christ is accepted as a consequence of accepting the incarnation, it is a specific case where the primary example of intervention, the incarnation, has repercussions for what we want to say about, in this case, the role of the priest, the meaning of christ's words of institution etc. Outside of this context, why would you appeal to the incarnation for saying something is not as it seems?
I don't know what David Icke's claims are, feel free to spare me.

[bikemonster]

ChrisGB said:

Appeals to Occam's razor are no longer helpful for the atheist. When lack of knowledge of nature meant a god of the gaps was widely accepted, fine, but now, it works the other way - the simplicity of God is the least involved explanation of first cause / creatio ex nihilo etc.

This smacks of special pleading.

Once you define god as the most simple thing that can be imagined, you arrive straight back at the question of "who moved the mover" because you have to accept the most simple thing creating more complex things.

Describing god as the simplest thing that you can conceive of is pure woo, like the sound of one hand clapping. Pure mental navel gazing.

[fluffnik]

ChrisGB said:

fluffnik said:

Faithful Catholics will not seek gay marriage or (assisted) suicide in the face of illness, no-one else has any duty to follow Church doctrine and should not have it foisted upon them.

It would seem to me a very odd scene if these loved ones were telling you they were going to die in a suicide pact and you just sitting there nodding saying I am gutted but it's your choice. A doctrine of total non-interference would be indistinguishable from a doctrine of total neglect.

I would in most circumstances be trying very, very hard to dissuade them but ultimately I have no right to stop them if they are (rationally) resolved.

I'm a proper liberal, me. I don't think autonomous beings have any right to boss other autonomous beings about in a general case.

ChrisGB said:

So a doctrine or law that forbids say men from having several wives in order to protect the equality and dignity of women is in fact me forcing my views through legislation?

I have been in both polygamous and polyandrous relationships, it's honesty and equality of regard which protects the equality and dignity of women and men, not the law.

I'm firmly of the opinion that the foundation of most disfunctional sexuality is religious in origin, if we all fked on first acquaintance life would be soooooo much simpler...

ChrisGB said:

Can there ever be a sense in which legislation is not somebody's view? Forcing through legislation for assisted suicide affects everyone, because it then becomes the norm in society that what is legal becomes what is morally acceptable, and so life is cheapened. We as a culture now say that a life where there is pain is not worth living as much as a life without pain. A doctor who previously swore to heal must now be almost prepared to kill.

All legislation is someone's (prejudiced) view, that's why we should have as little as possible.

I regard all autonomous self aware people as equal in and by right; who has the right to force one such to remain in a life they can no longer thole?

No-one need ever assist except as an act of love.

ChrisGB said:

Once the idea that life is sacred is abandoned, what makes any life worth protecting?

I am handicapped as a result of my own shabby motorcycling but I love my life and would protect it fiercely if threatened.

...yet I can foresee situations where I might want to leave it, mainly involving (further) loss of autonomy...