I know you've come across these too.

There are all these stories which preport to be "just the facts maam" accounts of conversations. They reek.

My sister in law who is an evangelical christian presented me with a small sheaf of paper that she wanted me to read.

It was a debate between a college student and a professor about the existence of god.

The student out-wits the professor and presents some language which is meant to portray the illusion of a solid argument (if you don't think about it too hard) and the professor is force to admit that he's been a fool all these years.

BIG TWIST.....

The student was none other than ALBERT EINSTEIN!!!

Hm..

Here we have a similar article, which i would like to share with you all.

http://nicenecouncil.com/media/display.pl?media_file=60

I thought at first that this might be the exact same tract i was handed by my sister-in-law, but it isnt.



We must always be careful about the words we use, yes? Atheism is not a positive belief or assertion about the afterlife. It is a lack of belief in someone else's positive assertion. So it isn't a belief, it is the failure to be convinced of a belief.

That's why atheism can't be a religion. It has no positive claims about anything. As i have said before, atheist is the answer to only one question.

Belief in a god? Yes( ) No (X)





You see that "1" there? lets see what that represents...


At the bottom of the page you see this.



Transcripts can vary from extremely detailed, to over-views. In the context of what this article is, a transcript would typically be a verbatim recording of a conversation which records, in detail, exactly what was said.

So, in no way shape or form is this a "transcript" of anything. What it is is this author making up a story that roughly adheres to another story they heard about a few years back which itself was probably imagined out of nothing.

Using the word transcript to describe an article you are spinning out equal parts imagination, and half-assed memory of somebody else's imagination is an attempt to load this text with historicity that it simply did not earn.

Typical.

SPeeding things up.

Atheist professor says belief in god is childish, equal to belief in santa clause.
I agree.

Christian student asks professor to help by drawing a dot and a circle around it on chalk board, which professor does.

The dot is the professor, the circle is his sphere of knowledge. What's inside the cirlce representing all he knows is far less than 1%, with the rest of everything else being beyond his knowledge.




I don't know about this atheist, but i wouldn't say that. Is there somewhere something which people might consider to be a god? Maybe. That couldn't be known unless we did in fact know everything there was, and everything there was not.

What i can say with a very high degree of confidence is that YOUR god is not real. Because nothing at all put forward about any god so far has been proven trustworthy in the least. Some kind of god may well be real, but when you begin to specify exactly what your particular god is, or does, then you have announced testable qualities and quantities which just do not line up with reality.

Such as,




The fact is that despite having enormous faith, people are still not able to accomplish anything even remotely like this. From mountain tops to thumb tacks, everything we know about anything indicates that matter is impervious to our attempts to pray it into motion.

Whatever you were trying to say about yor god with that statement is disproved. So, yeah, there may be a god out there somewhere, but it isn't like the one you just described.

Your fables failed to convince me, so i am an atheist.




Hilarious. Listen to the meek atheist whining. "but but but, i didn't know i would blah blah waaaah.....

I don't know about you guys, but i seek out and destroy this crap on purpose. I am not affraid of any creationist or christian opponent. And despite numerous threats of some grand game-shanging revelation none has ever been presented and all the argument continue to be garbage and word games.





I could not say it is IMpossible for there to be a god, but i would certainly say that the likelygood would be vanishingly small for there to be some anthropomorphic diety out there in the deep cosmos which created the universe. The numbers would be far more conclusive than any data we use on a daily basis. More restrictive than the numbers which allowed us to slingshot probes past the outer rim of our solar system, and buddy, THAT is some math you could count on.

We don't have to be god to know something about the world. Saying you know something about something which you made up out of your imagination and then claiming it is impossible to disprove it, as christians do with god, or atheists do with the magic cancer-curing samwich is a word game with no payoff.

faith is a belief in something for which there is no proof, or for which the evidence goes against.

Confidence is an expectation built upon past experience and the observation of evidence which determines historic results.

There has nowhere at any time been demonstrated anything at all supernatural in the history of our societies. Lots of stories. Lots of make believe. But any time any mystical claim is put to the test of empiricism it always and inevitably fails.

We can have great confidence that no god exists, and very specifically any god which is described and therefore testable, because all of our experience indicates that nothing of the kind has ever been. Proof to the contrary may yet still be out there, but we can be as confident that there is no god as we can be that the sun will still be there when our part of the planet comes back into the sight-line.




Dan Barker puts it well.

Gnostic deals with the confidence level.

Theist deals with the god level.

Gnostic Theists have absolute faith in god's existence
Gnostic atheists have absolute faith in god's non-existence.

Most people are agnostic theists, and fewer are agnostic atheists.

AronRa puts it this way.

(paraphrasing)

"ask yourself that regardless whether or not you believe the reality of a god or gods is at least possible, are you sure that somewhere a god MUST exist?

If the answer is no, then you are not just agnostic, but an atheist as well."




HAHAHA!!!

Yes. We atheists just LOVE to beat up on the poor and defensless. Just so long as nobody has anything to say in return...

THEN, we tuck tail and make for the hills. Isn't that pretty much the pattern here on booktalk, everyone?



Christians love to try and put atheism and science on the same footing that religion is on. The whole point of disbelief is a rejection of the bad reasoning involved in swollowing religious dogma.

I am an atheist because i refuse to believe something which is not evidentally true. My backing of any position is entirely dependant on the evidential support for that position, and if new evidence comes to light which disproves what i have always held true then my opinion will requisitely change in response to that new evidence. No matter what i would LIKE to believe.

Religion is just the very opposite of that. Faith is the rejection of disproving evidence on the basis that it DISPROVES what you were already determined to believe. And no amount of reasoning or evidence to the contrary will ever change that position because it was decided from the outset that nothing ever would! on the other hand, anything that seems to fit into your belief system is welcomed with open arms and if soemthing can be twisted to make it say what it never really set out to say it will be lied about. So long as it can be made to back your a-priori assertions of truth. Evidence is rejected or accepted not on validity or evident truthful representation of the actual world, but on whether or not it confirms a favored fairy tale.

The two positions are the very opposites of eachother and not at all on the same level of intellectual honesty.

This really boils down to why it is difficult to enter the discussion between faith and reason.

Faith heads have no problem whatsoever putting something like this garbage out and asserting it as legitimate truth without ever bothering to check into it. And nobody on their side will double check them, or see if their argument is wrong. Hell, you can even get away with being a creationist and even though moderate christians disagree they will never step out and call these irrational screeds of nonsense out for what they are.

On the other hand, if you get something wrong from the rationalist's side, they will call you out on it. Not the opponents of rationality, because just like their own arguments they will not bother to look up what you are talking about to check for veracity, the people who will call you out are those on your own side of the debate who want to see that the truth comes out, and is accurately represented.

It SHOULD be that way. lying to protect a truth is not moral. Lying to protect a stance would also mean that the stance is NOT the truth. Otherwise, there would be no need to lie...

But looking up the truth and trying to represent the world accurately is a whole lot more time consuming than just making stuff up as you go along. And it's possible to assert the figments of your imagination as absolute fact more easily than it is to explain what needs to be understood to grasp basic scientific facts.

I love this post. I used to hear & repeat those same urban myths when I was a xian. And about that...



Maaan, that shit came right out of a Ray Comfort tract I used to hand out way back in the late 90s. It might be even older than that, since Ray didn't cite a source for it. But anyway, in Ray's version, it was written in 2nd person to the reader, and not set up as a dialog between professor & student, so it sounds to me like this person who is allegedly recalling this "transcript" from memory has simply amalgamated, from memory, a Ray Comfort tract, along with a typical professor vs student insta-pwn dialog that is the staple motif of many a Jack Chick tract I also used to hand out, and in particular, I'm thinking of the one on evolution he did back in the 80s called "Big Daddy"(which was co-edited by Kent Hovind).

Yeah, I agree, this whole scenario is entirely made up.

It’s a straw man set up... without a doubt I don’t know any non-believers that are that ignorant as to what the term atheist means, the rest is pure hogwash as well...

But I have seen that one as well it’s been around for a while.

These tracts remind me very much of other myths.

Some person full of themselves is shown the door by a much more humble person.

It's just classic come-uppance, ego, and justice fantasy.