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The vast majority of whom behave better than their heathen counterparts. Goes back to my initial point that only religion has the power to transform lives from degenerate wastes into productive successes.
Again, we're not arguing whether religion is a positive thing. If god willed that all people should paint their faces blue in the morning, and we all agreed that there was a god and he did indeed decree this, wouldn't it be pointless to argue if painting our faces blue had any benefit? Clearly it must, because God willed it. The only question that is interesting is whether there is a God and whether Christianity is the proper religion. Discussing the merits of Christianity as presented by god is pointless, because it is clearly divinely planned by God, and therefore all ramifications of that religion must be correct, or at least part of a greater plan.
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But at the end of the day, it isn't the Bible that people judge Christianity on, it is the followers.
Okay. I don't really care about how people judge Christians. There's only one person whose judgement I care about, and he hasn't been around in human for for the past 2000 years or so.Besides, it's not my fault that so many people are so bad at reading the bible and following the true wishes of Christ. All I can do is read the bible myself and, on that basis, decide what Christ wants from me, and then act accordingly. I pray for the salvation of others, and I act in a way that will help to achieve the salvation of those around me, but I'm just one man, and can't control the destiny of everybody else on Earth.
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Hi.Christianity isn't about a "need" for something. It isn't about "hope." That's like saying, 2 + 2 = 4 because I need it to be.It doesn't work that way. It just IS. God doesn't exist to fill a void (though, he does do that, of course). He exists because, without him, nothing would exist. Without an omnipotent entity to break the infinite cycle of regression, nothing can possibly be.There has to be an original mover, a universal cause. If not, we could ask, "what caused x, well, it was caused by y. But what caused y? It was caused by z..." There are two scenarios. Either we can ask these questions for infinity (ie there is no universal cause), or there is a universal end, and we eventually reach that end and say, "z was created by God".Clearly, the first scenario makes no sense. Infinite regression is impossible. So, there is a god, and it is he who is the cause of all that we see.Of course, that only explains that there is A god, not why there is the Christian god. For that, you have to look both at the evidence, and you have to search your soul to find what really makes sense, what you really believe in. Christianity has the benefit of plenty of evidence as well as making much more sense and being much more beautiful than any other religion. In other words, if there is a god, certainly he'd want to present himself to humanity, his creation, in some way. So, we can assume that god indeed has visited us in one form or another. What remains is to decide which claimed visit of those throughout history is most likely to have been the real god. I think Christianity (the story of Christ) wins by a wide margin.Good Luck.
mocking WLC and the KCA :club:
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Hi.Christianity isn't about a "need" for something. It isn't about "hope." That's like saying, 2 + 2 = 4 because I need it to be.It doesn't work that way. It just IS. God doesn't exist to fill a void (though, he does do that, of course). He exists because, without him, nothing would exist. Without an omnipotent entity to break the infinite cycle of regression, nothing can possibly be.There has to be an original mover, a universal cause. If not, we could ask, "what caused x, well, it was caused by y. But what caused y? It was caused by z..." There are two scenarios. Either we can ask these questions for infinity (ie there is no universal cause), or there is a universal end, and we eventually reach that end and say, "z was created by God".Clearly, the first scenario makes no sense. Infinite regression is impossible. So, there is a god, and it is he who is the cause of all that we see.Of course, that only explains that there is A god, not why there is the Christian god. For that, you have to look both at the evidence, and you have to search your soul to find what really makes sense, what you really believe in. Christianity has the benefit of plenty of evidence as well as making much more sense and being much more beautiful than any other religion. In other words, if there is a god, certainly he'd want to present himself to humanity, his creation, in some way. So, we can assume that god indeed has visited us in one form or another. What remains is to decide which claimed visit of those throughout history is most likely to have been the real god. I think Christianity (the story of Christ) wins by a wide margin.Good Luck.
this is a dangerous game you've suggested here vb.i'm convinced.
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Again, we're not arguing whether religion is a positive thing. If god willed that all people should paint their faces blue in the morning, and we all agreed that there was a god and he did indeed decree this, wouldn't it be pointless to argue if painting our faces blue had any benefit? Clearly it must, because God willed it. The only question that is interesting is whether there is a God and whether Christianity is the proper religion. Discussing the merits of Christianity as presented by god is pointless, because it is clearly divinely planned by God, and therefore all ramifications of that religion must be correct, or at least part of a greater plan.
This is true, of course, but probably not going to win over too many converts. I was trying to use the carrot. And since they haven't been able to disprove a single religious claim, despite trying for years and years with their fancy science, there isn't much of a question about god's existence. After all, it's quite obvious that there is something and not nothing.
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false. so far (with the exception of one post by RT) you're just debating whether religion is *useful* or not, for which the arguments of either side are trivially easy to understand. try reverse-arguing your position on the historicity of the bible. i'm quite capable of considering your point of view, which is why i consider you an intellectually dishonest a-hole.
We are ignoring you because you are too smug to play with us.Now go away and leave those of us sure in our beliefs to play a game that is beyond your ability to understand.And nice to see that for the second time you are defending the one guy that everyone else is pointing out how poorly thought out his arguments are. Your posts are a Freudian dream.
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Yorke's Wager:So, we're all familiar with Pascal's wager, and we're all familiar with the simple refutation of the wager. Simply put, Pascal doesn't tell us which religion to follow, and we can't follow them all at once. Several beliefs may contradict each other, so we can't every be fully covered.But that's not the point. The idea behind Pascal's wager is to maximize the expectation value as summed over the different possibilities. Here's the key: we must weigh each possibility by it's probability of being true.So, here's how I'll do pascal's wager. Let's say that P(x) is the probability that x is the correct scenario (x may be no god, Christian god, Jewish god, Buddhism, or may be subdivided however one sees fit).Let's say V(x) is the value of scenario x, weighted in the long run.The original point of Pascal's wager was that V(Christianity) >>> V(atheism) because of the whole eternal life thing. But it's important to remember to keep in probabilities.So, Yorke's expectation value goes as follows:E[V] = Sum over x { P(x)*V(x) }This is clear so far. Now, we make some simplifying assumptions. Any religion or scenario x that doesn't involve an afterlife or eternal happiness or heaven clearly has a VERY small value compared to any that does. So, we can simply drop those terms in the above sum, no matter their probability. Basically, we're saying that infinity * small number > Big Number * Big Number.So, the real expectation value is given by: E[V] = Sum over x { P(x)*V(x) }, where we only sum over religions with a well defined afterlife containing eternal happiness.Also, since eternal happiness is equal to any other eternal happiness, we can pull the V term out of the sum:E[V] = V(eh) * Sum over x { P(x) }, where V(eh) means the value of eternal happiness (essentially infinity), and again, the sum only goes over heavenly religions.So, it is clear what we must do. We must maximize this expectation value. The above equation tells us that, to do so, we simply choose the religion that contains an enternal afterlife of happiness that seems most probable and follow that religion.Since Christianity clearly is that religion, we are mathematically obligated to be Christian. qed

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We are ignoring you because you are too smug to play with us.Now go away and leave those of us sure in our beliefs to play a game that is beyond your ability to understand.And nice to see that for the second time you are defending the one guy that everyone else is pointing out how poorly thought out his arguments are. Your posts are a Freudian dream.
i wish you were ignoring me - this forum would be a friendlier place. instead you're on some sort of long-term propaganda/smear campaign, blatantly lying about what i say in my posts and insulting me at every chance even in threads i'm not participating in. enough already.
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Hi.Christianity isn't about a "need" for something. It isn't about "hope." That's like saying, 2 + 2 = 4 because I need it to be.It doesn't work that way. It just IS. God doesn't exist to fill a void (though, he does do that, of course). He exists because, without him, nothing would exist. Without an omnipotent entity to break the infinite cycle of regression, nothing can possibly be.There has to be an original mover, a universal cause. If not, we could ask, "what caused x, well, it was caused by y. But what caused y? It was caused by z..." There are two scenarios. Either we can ask these questions for infinity (ie there is no universal cause), or there is a universal end, and we eventually reach that end and say, "z was created by God".Clearly, the first scenario makes no sense. Infinite regression is impossible. So, there is a god, and it is he who is the cause of all that we see.Of course, that only explains that there is A god, not why there is the Christian god. For that, you have to look both at the evidence, and you have to search your soul to find what really makes sense, what you really believe in. Christianity has the benefit of plenty of evidence as well as making much more sense and being much more beautiful than any other religion. In other words, if there is a god, certainly he'd want to present himself to humanity, his creation, in some way. So, we can assume that god indeed has visited us in one form or another. What remains is to decide which claimed visit of those throughout history is most likely to have been the real god. I think Christianity (the story of Christ) wins by a wide margin.Good Luck.
The vast majority of your reasoning here is subjective. A person who is a followers of Islam would have equally subjective reasons for arguing that his religion is correct. And the same arguments you present for why his religion is incorrect would be used in my argument of why yours is incorrect.And the argument that there must be something that caused the universe isn't a legitimate reason for believing in the Christian God anymore than it would be to believe in the Muslim one.If you want to argue that causation gave us the universe, than I can present a viable list of laws and existing models for planetary creations that allows us to 'prove' that these things would happen without any other cause than the law of gravity
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i wish you were ignoring me - this forum would be a friendlier place. instead you're on some sort of long-term propaganda/smear campaign, blatantly lying about what i say in my posts and insulting me at every chance even in threads i'm not participating in. enough already.
You're just mad because you're an idiot and a liar. I have never insulted you.
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Yorke's Wager:So, we're all familiar with Pascal's wager, and we're all familiar with the simple refutation of the wager. Simply put, Pascal doesn't tell us which religion to follow, and we can't follow them all at once. Several beliefs may contradict each other, so we can't every be fully covered.But that's not the point. The idea behind Pascal's wager is to maximize the expectation value as summed over the different possibilities. Here's the key: we must weigh each possibility by it's probability of being true.So, here's how I'll do pascal's wager. Let's say that P(x) is the probability that x is the correct scenario (x may be no god, Christian god, Jewish god, Buddhism, or may be subdivided however one sees fit).Let's say V(x) is the value of scenario x, weighted in the long run.The original point of Pascal's wager was that V(Christianity) >>> V(atheism) because of the whole eternal life thing. But it's important to remember to keep in probabilities.So, Yorke's expectation value goes as follows:E[V] = Sum over x { P(x)*V(x) }This is clear so far. Now, we make some simplifying assumptions. Any religion or scenario x that doesn't involve an afterlife or eternal happiness or heaven clearly has a VERY small value compared to any that does. So, we can simply drop those terms in the above sum, no matter their probability. Basically, we're saying that infinity * small number > Big Number * Big Number.So, the real expectation value is given by: E[V] = Sum over x { P(x)*V(x) }, where we only sum over religions with a well defined afterlife containing eternal happiness.Also, since eternal happiness is equal to any other eternal happiness, we can pull the V term out of the sum:E[V] = V(eh) * Sum over x { P(x) }, where V(eh) means the value of eternal happiness (essentially infinity), and again, the sum only goes over heavenly religions.So, it is clear what we must do. We must maximize this expectation value. The above equation tells us that, to do so, we simply choose the religion that contains an enternal afterlife of happiness that seems most probable and follow that religion.Since Christianity clearly is that religion, we are mathematically obligated to be Christian. qed
vb, time to ban LLY. No way any Christian could be this smart so he is therefore not playing by the rules.Although I did like the little "oh btw pascal's wager is flawed here
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I'm getting the feeling that crow isn't really embracing the spirit of the thread.
He sees everything one way and one way only.Any attempts to shine any new light into his viewpoints only results in insults and fear based lashing out with name calling.
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He sees everything one way and one way only.
all that has happened here is i didn't feel like participating in this thread and you jumped on the opportunity to attack my motives like you always do.in actuality i was raised a christian and know your arguments better than you do. your presentation of them in this forum is and always has been quite amateurish, and in almost any other religious debate forum you wouldn't even be engaged - you'd just be laughed at and mocked. unfortunately you're the only foil we've got here so you are given much more of a pass than the basement intellectual level of your posts warrants.
Any attempts to shine any new light into his viewpoints only results in insults and fear based lashing out with name calling.
more like you attacking and attempting to smear me without provocation every chance you get results in name calling. douche bag.
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all that has happened here is i didn't feel like participating in this thread and you jumped on the opportunity to attack my motives like you always do.in actuality i was raised a christian and know your arguments better than you do. your presentation of them in this forum is and always has been quite amateurish, and in almost any other religious debate forum you wouldn't even be engaged - you'd just be laughed at and mocked. unfortunately you're the only foil we've got here so you are given much more of a pass than the basement intellectual level of your posts warrants. more like you attacking and attempting to smear me without provocation every chance you get results in name calling. douche bag.
Wow, he used to only claim to know what large groups of people think and feel, now he even claims to know what I think and feel.It's like he's a psychic, without the cool hair or catchy theme song.Or ability to attract females
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Yorke's Wager:
JoeyJoJo's Very Elementary Knowledge of Mathematics as Applied to Religion as a Good Thing TheoryLet's assume that a good person contributes positively to society.Let's also assume that a bad person actively takes away from society.Therefore, the scale in which we rate a person should be -10 to +10 (rather than 0 to 10 as most scales are). As VB said in his OP, religion can take someone with a negative rating and convert them to a positive. Likewise, if you have someone who really, really wants to do what is right and give him religion, he becomes an extremist, like a suicide bomber or something (or a positive to a negative).But you don't hear stories about the good person who found religion and became a little bit better person. Or the really bad person who is now just only kind of bad.Therefore, "Good" * "Religion" = "Bad" and "Bad" * "Religion" = "Good"So on our scale of -10 to +10, Religion must be a negative number.:three dots in a triangular shape: Religion is negative.
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now he even claims to know what I think and feel.
no, i claim to be able to read. do you think and feel differently than you post? if your anti-intellectual bible-thumping redneck persona here is just a monumental 4-year-long level i would be pretty impressed :club:
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no, i claim to be able to read. do you think and feel differently than you post? if your anti-intellectual bible-thumping redneck persona here is just a monumental 4-year-long level i would be pretty impressed :club:
Pretty sure that the only thing that can impress you is you.
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i'd be impressed if for the sake of the forum you dropped your personal vendetta.
Unfortunately ..impressing you is low on my list of things to doAlthough if you relented from your high horse and played this thread's game, I would see that going a long way in raising my opinion of you.If anyone asks, we will tell them you don't really mean it and your war on God is still on, you just took a little break to try out new tactics.
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Unfortunately ..impressing you is low on my list of things to do
i said for the sake of the forum. sucks having to defend myself on a personal level in every thread, but if i have to i will.
Although if you relented from your high horse and played this thread's game
i didn't feel like playing and didn't think it would accomplish anything if i did. no high horse involved.
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