Presuppositianal apologetics revisited.

I am going to revisit presuppositional apologetics today. For those that don't know presuppositional apologetics is an attempt to make god the necessary presupposition, stating that without god you can't explain things like logic or inductive reasoning. The common practice used here is to then attack the atheist for not knowing. From what I gather of this technique is that they are trying to use a actual logical argument that can be valid. This argument is Reductio Ad Adsurdum or in other words to reduce other position to absurdity. The problem here is a misunderstanding of the dichotomy.

Most of the time the atheists position is that we may not know what the actual reason for these things are so they don't know. The theist will attack this position, where in reality they need to attack the other positions in the actual dichotomy of options for the existence logic or inductive reasoning. To do so would be a ridiculously futile attempt,so I understand why they try to blatantly cheat, by insisting that the atheist doesn't know proves god. Though that is telling the atheist their position. The theist is being very intellectually dishonest, there are many things in life that we may not personally know the cause of but we can still use them. So lets take a look at the options that are part of the true dichotomy of possibilities that could be there for inductive reasoning. This will not include all options, because what makes this even more ridiculous is that there may be many more possibilities we have never thought of. Here is a list they would actually need to attack to be able to use reductio ad adsurdum as their argument(this will be for inductive reasoning for our purposes):

Inductive Reasoning is a brute fact of the universe
Inductive Reasoning fairies
Inductive Reasoning trolls
Other gods, if they intend to prove their god
Inductive reasoning Unicorns
The invisible pink unicorn
Flying spaghetti monster
and many other unthought of natural explanations


Now I can here the morons who use this argument whining, well you don't believe that. Well guess what, whether I believe any of them has nothing to do with whats the truth. That is my point, I don't believe your god either, you need to show me why your god is more likely. I can make cases for several of these options over your god. Lets just try 2 to show the presuppositional apologetic proponents how it is done:

I will defend that inductive reasoning is a brute fact. I would argue that being a brute fact requires the simplest easiest explanation with the least amount of baggage. To add a god would violate the logical construct of Occams razor, that says that the explanation that requires the least amount of extra baggage is preferred, and god is a lot of extra baggage.

I would also argue that Inductive Reasoning fairies are more likely then the christian god as it only requires one seemingly unknown thing, inductive reasoning, where as the Christian god actually requires: zombie resurrections( Jesus, Lazurus, and the zombie apocalypse of Matt 27), so again based on Occam's razor, I argue they are more reasonable.

See how that works, you actually attack the dichotomy of possible answers the question, what is the reasoning we can know inductive reasoning, rather then attacking the withholding of judgement based on their being a larger dichotomy then you want to admit.

I here a recent person I debated on this topic, whining, but we are saying you must presuppose god, not that god is the cause. Well get this, a believer in inductive reasoning fairies could whine the same thing. The burden is on you to demonstrate your presupposition is necessary, not just to whine that I don't believe the other possibilities.

It just comes down to faith!

Undoubtedly if you are an atheist who actively engages theists in conversations about their religion or beliefs or faith you have heard this. You have heard this as a response to why they believe in their particular god. You are trying to find the reasons for their belief and some bumbling idiot of a theist invokes the faith claim. They do this apparently completely unaware of the other religions out there making faith claims. I mean seriously could they have bothered to hit the on button on their brain before making this statement. Im sorry but this is intellectual dishonesty 101. Let me break this down for you, here I am the atheist listening to all these people tell me what they believe:
Ibn Al-Sharik tells me I must have faith in Allah and the holy koran is gods word and that is what i must have faith in.

David Cohen comes up and tells me I must have faith in good ole' Yahweh and that the Pentateuch lays out gods law for us and I must have faith in this.

Some guy whose name oddly reminds me of a villain from the Children of the Corn series, tells me about John Smith and a little something about magic underwear, and I must have faith in this.

Tom Cruise tells me about Dianetics and e-meters and how I must have faith in them.


Now seriously thinking Christians, are you really going to just say, well it comes down to faith. Don't you see how absurd this is. You can't really be serious with this nonsense can you? It wouldn't even make sense if your faith or no faith was an actual true dichotomy, it makes even less sense when you explore the whole dichotomy of faiths.

Faith does not answer the question: Why do you believe in your god? It avoids the question, its a non answer, its the equivalent of jumping up and down and whining, it is because I say it is.

Christian Bigots and Homosexuality.(Martha Bigot Angeles)

So I wake up this morning, and what do I see on my facebook account but a status update from this Christian who had friended me, and what does her status say? Her status talks about Homosexuals and how they are an abomination, she says god hates them and we should too. She stated that god hated it so much he felt it deserved punishment. At the sake of outing her, her name is Martha Angeles. I have discussed religion with her many times and tried to be somewhat respectful, but this post I felt deserved no respect. Now keep in mind she was using these bible verse as justification:

Lev 18:22-23 "You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination."
Lev 20:13 "If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act; they shall surely be put to death."

I pointed out that she completely ignores other biblical laws such as these:

Leviticus 11:12 (New King James Version)

12 Whatever in the water does not have fins or scales—that shall be an abomination to you.

Leviticus 19:19 (New King James Version)

19 ‘You shall keep My statutes. You shall not let your livestock breed with another kind. You shall not sow your field with mixed seed. Nor shall a garment of mixed linen and wool come upon you.

1 Timothy 2:12 (New King James Version)

12 And I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence.

1 Corinthians 14:34 (New King James Version)

34 Let your[a] women keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak; but they are to be submissive, as the law also says.

I pointed out that she is picking a choosing which bible verses she was using and which ones she ignored. This girl did not grasp the point. She even told me I should be messaging her and asking questions. Now while I don't believe this, I said well according to your bible, Im the man, your a woman, you should be listening to me. She unfriended me once I called her a bigoted bitch, because I had insulted her, and she had never insulted me. This girl has no idea if anyone I know friends or family are homosexuals, and yes I did have a family member who is. So this whole comment offended me. This should offend humanity. She deserves to be called out and told exactly what she is. Reasoning with hateful bigots like this doesn't work. Sometimes they just need to be told how it is.

Religion should not be allowed the free reign to be justification for hate like this. This was genuine hate for people she was displaying. Christianity is not a religion of love but a religion of hate, she didn't like it when the very verses that were used to oppress woman for years were turned on her. But this bigoted bitch had no problem using her bible as means to oppress other people, this type of person makes me sick.

To end this, if any atheist is reading this, I am well aware the verses I used for the passages about women are probably forged into the bible years later, but Martha uses King James so I have no problem using them on her.

Why are we respecting belief at the expense of truth?

The other day I was sitting in the lunch room at my job, when another employee walks in and asks me about the book I'm reading. The book happens to be "A History of God" by Karen Armstrong. This sparks a discussion about the history of how the bible came to be, specifically the writers of the 5 books of Moses and the Gospels. Turns out that my co-worker claims to be an agnostic, never got to explain the problem with that to him, but anyway as we are having the conversation, he stops it to try to keep it quite. His reasoning is that someone with deep beliefs in the bible might hear it and get offended. Now, we don't know whether this was because he actually believed truth was less important then this persons beliefs or he just didn't want to deal with any situation that arises at work. That does not really matter, this brings us to the problem either way this conversation represents the problem. It was felt necessary to hide the truth to protect the believer. It was felt this was the right thing to do by the society we live in, so that he had to make these comments. Why?

Why should we protect belief from the truth. Shouldn't we protect the truth from wrong beliefs, not the other way around. If the 5 books of Moses are clearly written by 4 different authors: J, E,P, and D, why shouldn't I be able to say so at my job. I hardly think that, at my job, there would be a problem with me saying that George Washington was the first president. Even if there was a large contingency of people who had a deep felt belief that it was Michael Jackson. We would still respect the truth being said that it was George Washington. This makes no sense to me.

So, you may ask why is truth more important then belief? Well that is simple, the more mankind has found out about the truth the better our society has become. Look at our advancements in health and medicine when we stopped respecting the idea that most diseases were demon possessions, like good ole Yeshua O Nazarene would have one believe. We have advanced to the point where many diseases that meant certain death are curable in days. That is just one of many examples of how finding the truth has helped society.

Its time we turn the zeitgeist on this whole idea of respect beliefs in spite of the truth. The person whose beliefs are not grounded with facts should be the one that doesn't feel as comfortable saying them, not the other way around. I'm not talking banning of religious beliefs, I'm just saying our societies attitude toward truth vs belief(faith) needs to change. Lets keep the truth, not the faith.

Argument from No Body as presented by David Velasquez

So the other day I was having a conversation with this guy David Velasquez on facebook about the resurrection of Jesus and his comments went something like this. I have heard all the alternate theories and they are ridiculous, until someone comes up with the body Jesus was resurrected. That was his proof for the resurrection. We are going to be very liberal with this, as a matter of fact we are going to pretend for a moment or 2 as David does that he has a personal relationship with a zombie savior. We are going to pretend that his argument doesn't completely shift the burden of proof, we are also going to the land of make believe and going to assume that this David guy, who claims to be going for a masters in college, has the ability to comprehend what a syllogism is and actually put one together. Yes I know atheist brethren this is a huge leap to a conclusion, but please just play along. I present to you the syllogism for his argument.

Premise 1: we have not found Jesus' body.
Premise 2: A resurrection is the most probable explanation
Conclusion: The belief in the resurrection is justified.

Premise 1 is true, I grant that, so far so good. One of the most successful theist arguments ever, first premise is sound. So we get to the second premise.

This is where David runs into huge issues. We have a huge data set on resurrection possibilities. We have millions of cases and not a single resurrection out of the last how ever million cases. Our data set is so large that the margin of error is near zero. The percentages are very low that Jesus resurrected. So we can say we are close to a zero percent chance that a body resurrects after 3 days. So these other possibilities must be pretty bad and impossible right. Well, we could probably stop this ridiculousness at the body was stolen, but that would be to easy. As grave robbery happens far more frequently then bodily resurrections. So that is more likely. Premise 2 is sounding very poor, but I contend that we can do better then this. I contend that there should be no expectation at all that Premise 1 should come as any shock.

Lets go back to this now. I contend that if Jesus was a real person, and this is a huge concession to make, that the historical Jesus is so far from the Jesus of Christianity that we should not expect to find a body. My contention is that if you had only seen the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, you would not expect the person to find Ed Gein, in case you are not familiar he is the real life serial killer that inspired the character. (http://crime.about.com/od/murder/p/gein.htm). You would not expect to find st Nicholas by only knowing the story of Santa Claus. The latter may actually be a better example, by the fact that we got there from a constant expansion of myth about the man, where as Ed Gein turned to Leatherface in a more intentional way, as the writer of the movie took many liberties. But that is neither here nor there as the end result is the mythical character makes it hard to find the real person if that is all you have.

Im going for my masters, David, seems to miss the concept that historians only give credit to a historical Jesus as being a apocalyptic preacher. That is far from the actual character that we are searching for. The story of Jesus was not written down until at least 30-40 years after his supposed death. It had long been mixed with Mythology and authors making changes. The changes could be mere mistakes, or intentional to cover up opposing views of Christianity. Early christians had many different alien views of Jesus then modern christians. There are many examples of these causing authors to change the story. He also ignore the whole theory that the resurrection is myth that follows the tradition of many previous gods being raised from the dead. So we have some huge problems with his assumption. We are well aware that throughout history characters have far more often become more myth then reality. This happens in a far greater proportion then any 3 day resurrection story. Not only this but if Jesus was really crucified, he ignores another problem. Criminals executed like Jesus were commonly buried in mass graves, not given anything like a single tomb like the gospels portray. If he was crucified there is no reason to believe that he would be treated any different. How would we even know his bones if we found them.

Another possibility is hoax. This means it was mad e up a people bought into it being real. Many modern examples of this exist today,many people bout the Blair with project as real, ditto for Paranormal actiivity and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. People buy into the lochness monster and in almost every state there is a ghost story about the prom girl walking the road or the hooker man walking the railroad tracks as ghost stories. Wow that is far more modern day examples of fake events being bought into as being real,then any 3 day resurrection stories.

There is zero reason to believe that we should have found Jesus's body. So it turns out our good boy David is just accepting a story without even giving it the basic thought process it deserves. Sorry David your argument fails. Then again I would hope that David would have been honest enough with himself not to have bought into 4 unknown authors claiming a resurrection, when he wouldn't buy into 4 of his own friends telling him someone who died 3 days ago was outside playing basketball. This has to be one of the most blatant displays of intellectual dishonesty in a long time and for a guy who claims to have studied theology this argument gives it an even worse black eye then it already has. That's quite a feat for a field that includes clowns like William Lane Craig and Lee Stobel, but alas thats probably where David adapted this from. Those 2 buffoons empty tomb arguments.

Personal experience or confirmation bias.

Today I want to get to the heart of why people believe in personal gods. This will not apply to everyone but i think it fits a large number of believers. As humans we are naturally afraid of the unknown, some of the more popular ones religion prays on is fear of death. There are definitely other fears that religions pray on but this one is a popular one. People don't want death to be the end so religion sells them a solution. These people want to believe. Once they are in a position where people want to believe, obviously it does not mean people will continue to believe. This is where the actual topic of this blog comes in. People are taught to confirm their god with certain unknowns and confirmation bias. So, in this blog I am going to cut throw the red herring type arguments for their belief such as the argument from design and take a look at the actual factors that lead to religious belief to begin with.

A person is taught to see the good in the world and attribute it to god. They look at the world and their lives and attribute the good things that happen them to god. Many christians will ignore the bad or attribute it to satan. There is no evidence that this is the reason any of this happens they are just trained this way. People have a psychological tendency to fall for these types of things. For instance people will go to a psychic like John Edward and he through some tricky help(spies) and the use of statistical guesses will make a claim about someone in the group. Once the person decides this is about them they find a way to confirm the belief that he really is talking to a dead relative or friend. When actually analyzed we find many errors he has made and many misses but the person did not hear these because they want to believe. The same can be said about religion, it makes you want to believe and you confirm the ideas with your own confirmation bias.

Another example would be prayer, prayer works is a common claim among christians. They ignore the failed prayers and are taught to attribute it to gods will. Then they confirm their beliefs with the prayers that actually come true. Even though prayers are usually something you want so you increase the odds of them coming true by working towards them. Other times you may know somebody who was cured of a disease that kills most, they take that person surviving the disease as a sign of god, but fail to see that many people who were prayed for die.

People will confirm miracles or what they call miracles as well. I had one christian tell me it was a miracle he didn't wreck his motorcycle one day. This person was well trained to attribute this to god, without ever considering the number of people who do crash. Another great example is a miracle that was attributed to Mother Theresa had to do with a new film actually working the way it was suppose to. The camera man made a comment about it being a miracle even though it was the film and he knew this, the rumor spread and out of nowhere even the camera man correcting the situation and saying it was the film not really a miracle could not stop this belief.

Another thing they use are what we call spiritual experiences. It can be through the use of music or the community effect or meditative brain states. . Music is often used in a way to get people to think they are experiencing god. The people are trained to actually think that the feeling they are getting through the church music is god. This is ironic as contradictory gods are given credit for this feeling. The same can be said about the use of the community. Being a part of a community can make a person feel better, even improve themselves, this is then attributed to the god of that community. Also, people all throughout religions have what are called as spiritual experiences, if you are in deep prayer in the usa you will attribute this brain experience to jesus, where as if you are in iran you may attribute it to Allah, or a Buddhist may give credit to reaching nirvana.

Speaking of Geographically, I also talk to a lot of Christians who claim to not have been indoctrinated with their belief by their parents. This may be true but chances are these people are American. A place where 80% of the population is Christian. They probably pass several churches on their way to work. They watch tv filled with TV messages that are associated with the christian world view. One of the biggest ironies many Christians will oppose things such as horror movies or heavy metal music that uses the imagery of Satan, which stays within the christian worldview. This makes the person who wants to be good, go against Satan, further ingraining the idea of Jesus is the right decision.

The person desperately wants to believe in religion so they accept the explanation they are given for these experiences on unfounded evidence, the religion self supports itself without actually having to prove these things are actually related to religion. If there is one thing we can say about religion is the design is brilliant from a psychological side.

Toy Salesman rapes 96 children, today I have an interview with the one witness to all the crimes!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41051427/ns/world_news-asiapacific

A man has raped 96 children and there is one witness so I will interview him today. Ok so we have a witness coming forward to all these crimes the one being who saw all this is our Lord and savior who has a multiple personality disorder Yahweh/Jesus. Lets get right to the interview now.

Atheistbebil: Hi Yahweh or Jesus whatever you want me to call you. Thanks for being here.

God: Just call me God, and no problem.

Atheistbebil: Why did you choice to do nothing in this situation.

God: I had to give the guy free will, besides Joe Smoe american was needing help with a struggle because their child didn't agree with them today.

AtheistBebil: So you thought Joe Schmoe americans problem was worth violating free will and not 96 boys being raped? Interesting?

God: Yup.

Atheistbebil: You don't find this wrong?

God: not at all. What did you want me to do?

Atheistbebil: Well you are all powerful are you not?

God: Yes, but I couldn't do the obviously right thing that would make the whole concept of faith invalid.

Atheistbebil: So faith is more important to you then actually carrying out your supposed love for the people you claim to love?

God: Come on, thats harsh, if i made it to obvious, you atheists would believe in me, then who could I burn.

Atheistbebil: Guess that gets right to the heart of it.