I gave you my answer and told you a little about myself at the same time... I like CAKE not pudding.

Later

I see above how the scientific method is really practiced. If you can't get an answer under the given constraints, change the protocols until you do. Congrats, you are a credit to peer review.

This is supposed to be a scientific study?

Yea right…

Later

Now make it so a billion Muslims are entering Door A.

Hey, congratulations, you're a Muslim! Now do it with Hindus!

These thought experiments are the best since Einstein.

Is it that hard to understand someone's intent? Replace the word "belief" with "truth"(or whatever you want to call it, as long as you understand what the referrent is.)



We? I'm discussing you. You believe your heuristics trump logic.



Well, asking for a claim is indeed a trap. It is also a requirement. Well, you can do whatever you want honestly, but unless you specify what claim your "evidence" supports, your evidence points towards nothing at all. If you say "the entire bible", it's easily disproven. The true farce is that you're unable to connect the dots between evidence and the claim it supposedly supports. So you pretend indignity at being asked to supply the claim. There is no such thing as dark without light, and no such thing as death without life, and no ying without yang. There is no such thing as evidence without a claim. Just like every complete sentence requires both a subject and a predicate.



Why believe in something which "may" exist, but doesn't? That's a rhetorical question. The answer is faith. You are not justified in holding anything other than the agnostic position. But you'll be relieved to know that no such thing will happen, at least not as the biblical storytellers imagined.



Yes, you are correct on every point. Now please tell me why you believe it. There are a million reasons why I don't believe it. That evil does not exist without good, that the story is stupid, that men tell fiction stories, that babies can't be evil, that mothers can be evil towards their babies, that at least some love must exist for sustainable populations, that evil isn't something which can be "pure", since it is defined subjectively. You don't need to answer any of these reasons, because there are a million others as well. Note that I didn't once say your story was impossible and that I didn't believe it(I don't). These are all tangential issues. The elephant in the room, which hasn't left the room yet is; "why do you believe it?"



Your arrogant opinion, like many of your previous opinions, references nothing from our reality. You're trying to come to conclusions about the book by what's written in the book. Not only can you not possibly know which "thoughts" aren't pleasing to god, you have no idea whether or not he even exists. You're also shoehorning the word "evil" to help harmonize the passage. What, truly, is evil? I see it as a spectrum.

BTW, lust is not evil. It's merely human, evidence of our evolutionary heritage. Neither is vulgarity either. I could consider hate evil, but then I don't think it's evil to hate some things, as long as those things are bad. When you pull your answers from a book, they don't conform to the world around you. Your conceptual definitions are all wacky, absolute and superfluous.



This truly isn't a debate Stahrwe, you have been wrong since the start. I couldn't care less about the people to decided to believe on a logical basis. They are not evidence. The "logical basis" they used could perhaps be, but the people themselves are not. The logical basis must be examined if it's to be used as evidence.

The entire world believing the sun orbited the Earth is much different from a family myth. The majority of humanity has been fantastically wrong on a number of occasions, and many of the adherents had logical reasons for their beliefs.



Supporting your beliefs with false reasoning is still blindness. I'm sure most Christians think they believe for good reasons. You are an excellent example, having been on Booktalk a year and given us a score or more of examples of faulty reasoning. Every piece of "evidence" you've submitted has a critical error or is fallacious.



I don't need reasons. I'm appealing to their authority. But they do have reasons. The same reasons that produce technology.



There is no way to rule out deceit or disillusionment. Deceit, false visions, false beliefs, and modified testimonials are as common as the hairs on our heads.



Picture perfect projection, and you don't even realize it.

The truth is, nothing in Otto's book would change the truth of my answer. No matter how vigilant the biblical editors were, the fact stands that they could only harmonize, and not empirically validate.



Go back to your corner and collect all your evidence for "every man having only evil thoughts", and I'll do the same for abiogenesis. Then let's reconvene and see who has more/better evidence.

The other part of your strawman belief(that you don't even realize) is that I'm actually agnostic towards abiogenesis. Well, towards any specific hypothesis at this point, although I believe some variant is the answer. We have enough evidence to say conclusively that all life as we see it today(including man) evolved from a common ancestor that was incredibly simple. Complex enough to replicate, yet more simple than the lowliest bacteria.

Seems several are a bit prolix tonight. I need to review to see if there is anything actually being said.

I had said something about the connection between religion and personality type in the "Religious people I hate you" thread. This further comment seems to belong better here. You can find a lot of discussion about whether certain personality types naturally gravitate toward religion, but nothing that, as you might expect, has scientific weight. For all the influence of upbringing on religious belief, the personalities that we are more or less born with seem to me just as decisive--maybe more so when you consider how many people come to find that their indoctrination doesn't fit who they realize they are later in life.

The most well-known classification of personality is probably the Myers-Briggs inventory. Although I'm no great fan of this measuring tool because of its low reliability and validity, I think it does capture some true distinctions between personalities. These types are most often cited in relation to who might be most inclined to be religious. The writer in the linked essay wants, however, to explore which Myers-Briggs type might correlate with atheism. He picks out one type, the INTP (introversion, intuition, thinking, perceiving) as most similar to the traits of atheism. He identifies those traits in himself.

http://www.atheistliving.com/2011/02/do ... uence.html

This matters because if we believe that certain personalities are more likely to be religious, and that we can't argue people out of their personalities, it might be better to chill at times instead of dispute.