The terrifying thought of no afterlife

[Achronos]

I can see a trend here, rather than simply answering questions with succinct and to the point answers you simply refer to very lengthy and convoluted published material and put the hones on the questioner to try and find the answers.

Yes. That his MO, so far. And that's why I'm about to debunk Strobel for him.

I noticed, Achronos, that you listed Lee Strobel at the top of your list in a post on the last page. Here's a critique on Strobel's The Case for Christ. snip

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/ ... robel.html

At least cite your source please.

Furthermore, I am well aware the book won't convert skeptics. I'm not sure a single book could convince a skeptic otherwise.

[Stevil]

You're anthropomorphizing God. This statement assumes that God can be overloaded with requests. Not to mention that God is ignoring the world. The world is constantly being saved and subsequently trashed by the will of man.

Well, actually I was referring to your prayer more so than your god, sorry if my statement was not clear enough. I doubt you have enough time in your day for work, play, posting on Atheist websites, reading through every Christian literature known to humankind as well as praying for the things that you would like your god to do. I was suggesting that you pray for better things than for me. With so many things out of kilter in the world, you could easily find an endless supply of things to pray for before I became top of your pray priority list. Your God hasn't sorted out world peace for example. There are wars that have been going on for decades, your god has had plenty of time to solve these. It is not like as you suggest being saved and subsequently trashed. If your God can't be overloaded and can do anything and already knows the future then I don't know what the problem is? BTW do prayers influence your god's behavior? Would your god not know what to do if the Christians stopped praying?

God is perfect

That's nice, I think my new baby daughter is perfect too.

it would be best if you aligned yourself with the intuitive Spirit of God

No thanks, I may not be perfect, but I am quite happy with the way I am. I refuse to align to a sexist viewpoint, to intolerance and to bestow guilt onto others, this seems wrong to me and my moralities I could never agree with the stance of your church or your scriptures.
Just because you think your god is perfect it does not give you the right to judge others, to suggest that others should have guilt, or are psychopaths if they do not have the guilt you suggest they should have.

[Achronos]

Well, actually I was referring to your prayer more so than your god, sorry if my statement was not clear enough. I doubt you have enough time in your day for work, play, posting on Atheist websites, reading through every Christian literature known to humankind as well as praying for the things that you would like your god to do. I was suggesting that you pray for better things than for me. With so many things out of kilter in the world, you could easily find an endless supply of things to pray for before I became top of your pray priority list. Your God hasn't sorted out world peace for example. There are wars that have been going on for decades, your god has had plenty of time to solve these. It is not like as you suggest being saved and subsequently trashed. If your God can't be overloaded and can do anything and already knows the future then I don't know what the problem is? BTW do prayers influence your god's behavior? Would your god not know what to do if the Christians stopped praying?

There is no God.

Now whom do you blame?

That's nice, I think my new baby daughter is perfect too.

No thanks, I may not be perfect, but I am quite happy with the way I am. I refuse to align to a sexist viewpoint, to intolerance and to bestow guilt onto others, this seems wrong to me and my moralities I could never agree with the stance of your church or your scriptures.
Just because you think your god is perfect it does not give you the right to judge others, to suggest that others should have guilt, or are psychopaths if they do not have the guilt you suggest they should have.

Congratulations on the new baby. Many years!

That said, I think you mentioned girlfriend rather than wife (or do you have one of those too?), it seems you don't want to be bothered with anything that might disquiet your behavior. Understandable, perhaps.  However, that doesn't make the issues go away

[Stevil]

There is no God.

Ahhhh, I knew if we communicated long enough we would finally find some common ground.

Congratulations on the new baby. Many years!

Thank you very much. She arrived 4 days ago, I delivered her myself as we didn't have time to get to the hospital and the midwife didn't have time to get to our house. Terrifying experience but everything turned out just fine.

[Persimmon Hamster]

Furthermore, I am well aware the book won't convert skeptics. I'm not sure a single book could convince a skeptic otherwise.

That's it?  That's all you have to say?  Are you going to ignore all responses to your "near death experience" post?  And are you admitting there is no good verifiable evidence for the resurrection?  Or are you sticking to the story that the burden is on every one of us to read poorly written apologetics over and over until our brains are so fried by circularism that we finally accept it ourselves?

If one book won't convince a skeptic and you admit as much is this not a recognition on your part that there is nothing of substance in any of them?  If you can find even a single irrefutable fact that is verifiable and would logically contribute to a god hypothesis that would at least be something to a skeptic reader.  Maybe it would not help them unravel the entire story just as any single scientific writing may not, but any skeptic would surely at least take something worth considering from it and perhaps find motivation therein to continue unravelling the whole story.

So can you bring any such facts to the fore from all of your recommended materials for us to consider?  Or are you just giving up and/or still insisting it is our responsibility to scour every apologist writing known to man until we find it ourselves?

It isn't that I, and skeptics like me, don't want to know and believe the truth.  We do.  That's why we are skeptics.  But we need reason to believe it.  If any apologist writing would offer such reason we would give it due consideration.  But not everyone has time to stay current on all the latest attempts, particularly when they all tend to say the same basic things over and over.  So at some point you trust other skeptics (whose reason you tend to agree with) to review them before even considering to read it yourself.  And you also must posit that if any of them had anything worth considering in them there would be a lot more buzz about it everywhere...including among skeptics, scientists (who also tend to value truth), and the mainstream media (read: not the 700 Club or ultra-conservative bloggers and "news" outlets with their own agendas).

So here we are.  You have an opportunity to reach us.  You have the ears of every skeptic in this thread.  If you have read these books and can present to us the worthy content that will give us motivation to reopen the case file of "God", why on earth would you back away from the task?

[Chandler M Bing]

Furthermore, I am well aware the book won't convert skeptics. I'm not sure a single book could convince a skeptic otherwise.

That's it?  That's all you have to say?  Are you going to ignore all responses to your "near death experience" post?  And are you admitting there is no good verifiable evidence for the resurrection?  Or are you sticking to the story that the burden is on every one of us to read poorly written apologetics over and over until our brains are so fried by circularism that we finally accept it ourselves?

If one book won't convince a skeptic and you admit as much is this not a recognition on your part that there is nothing of substance in any of them?  If you can find even a single irrefutable fact that is verifiable and would logically contribute to a god hypothesis that would at least be something to a skeptic reader.  Maybe it would not help them unravel the entire story just as any single scientific writing may not, but any skeptic would surely at least take something worth considering from it and perhaps find motivation therein to continue unravelling the whole story.

So can you bring any such facts to the fore from all of your recommended materials for us to consider?  Or are you just giving up and/or still insisting it is our responsibility to scour every apologist writing known to man until we find it ourselves?

It isn't that I, and skeptics like me, don't want to know and believe the truth.  We do.  That's why we are skeptics.  But we need reason to believe it.  If any apologist writing would offer such reason we would give it due consideration.  But not everyone has time to stay current on all the latest attempts, particularly when they all tend to say the same basic things over and over.  So at some point you trust other skeptics (whose reason you tend to agree with) to review them before even considering to read it yourself.  And you also must posit that if any of them had anything worth considering in them there would be a lot more buzz about it everywhere...including among skeptics, scientists (who also tend to value truth), and the mainstream media (read: not the 700 Club or ultra-conservative bloggers and "news" outlets with their own agendas).

So here we are.  You have an opportunity to reach us.  You have the ears of every skeptic in this thread.  If you have read these books and can present to us the worthy content that will give us motivation to reopen the case file of "God", why on earth would you back away from the task?

What you're basically doing is banging your own head against a wall by demanding evidence when you already know that there's no evidence which you'd accept. The clue's in the word "skeptic". It's pretty pointless really. Besides, you're assuming that theists even care about what you believe or what you doubt. There's a very good reason why theists generally don't bother trying to convert anyone who almost certainly doesn't see things, at least in part, as they do, and that reason is that it's a waste of time. As is demanding evidence as a skeptic. As a skeptic, you've already decided that no evidence exists. If you genuinely feel that perhaps there might be something, that's a different matter, but you clearly don't, so you're probably just trying to be a smartass, unless there's another reason for your demands. It's just that it doesn't make sense for somone to ask such futile questions. Some would say that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result

 

[Persimmon Hamster]

What you're basically doing is banging your own head against a wall by demanding evidence when you already know that there's no evidence which you'd accept. The clue's in the word "skeptic". It's pretty pointless really. Besides, you're assuming that theists even care about what you believe or what you doubt. There's a very good reason why theists generally don't bother trying to convert anyone who almost certainly doesn't see things, at least in part, as they do, and that reason is that it's a waste of time. As is demanding evidence as a skeptic. As a skeptic, you've already decided that no evidence exists. If you genuinely feel that perhaps there might be something, that's a different matter, but you clearly don't, so you're probably just trying to be a smartass, unless there's another reason for your demands. It's just that it doesn't make sense for somone to ask such futile questions. Some would say that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result

 

Chandler, did you even read what you quoted from me?  I don't think you did.  If you did, and you still decided to say what you said, then you have apparently assumed I am a bald-faced liar and I would like to know what basis you have for that assumption.  There is certainly evidence that would convince me & other skeptics to give more consideration to the God hypothesis.  I'm waiting for someone to present it.  I've searched some out myself in the past and came up empty, hence how I arrived at my current position on the subject.  I continue to regularly read & listen to skeptical critiques of current apologetic efforts (because I don't have time to read them all directly myself--I actually have a job in an unrelated field, and a life which I prefer not to waste entirely on pursuit of the possibility of the existence of invisible beings).  You could claim this is a one-sided approach to keeping current, but if you had ever listened to many skeptical critiques you might discover that skeptics are quite happy to entertain every last point of the apologist and address all of them, while the apologists themselves tend to refuse to do any such thing.

Achronos has previously claimed to have been one of us and to have since found all the evidence he needs, and furthermore he has claimed he is here on this very forum to share it to us and has made numerous starts at doing so.  Yet when anyone probes beyond his initial, vague, general philosophizing filled with logical gaps and tries to get at any real meat behind his position, he repeatedly comes up empty (actually he just continues rolling with more tangential philosophizing, hoping that he will appear "the winner" of the discussion by sheer volume of text alone).  Here in this very thread he has just recently claimed that he found concrete, verifiable evidence that stands on its own outside of the Bible and of Church authority, but refuses to even give us a single such example.  When Gawen posted a thoughtful critique of his cited book of preference, which even points out what that very book's author claims to be the strongest such evidence, and explains why that so-called specific evidence is completely ridiculous, he had nothing at all to say on the matter.

So I am forced to consider at least two possibilities:
1) Achronos really has no interest in helping skeptics to understand how he arrived at his conclusion, and just likes to appear the "winner" (to himself, anyway) in forum discussions/debates.
2) Achronos was never truly a skeptic to begin with, or never a very good one, lacking sufficient critical thinking skills to properly analyze what he is reading.

[Chandler M Bing]

What you're basically doing is banging your own head against a wall by demanding evidence when you already know that there's no evidence which you'd accept. The clue's in the word "skeptic". It's pretty pointless really. Besides, you're assuming that theists even care about what you believe or what you doubt. There's a very good reason why theists generally don't bother trying to convert anyone who almost certainly doesn't see things, at least in part, as they do, and that reason is that it's a waste of time. As is demanding evidence as a skeptic. As a skeptic, you've already decided that no evidence exists. If you genuinely feel that perhaps there might be something, that's a different matter, but you clearly don't, so you're probably just trying to be a smartass, unless there's another reason for your demands. It's just that it doesn't make sense for somone to ask such futile questions. Some would say that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result

 

Chandler, did you even read what you quoted from me?  I don't think you did.  If you did, and you still decided to say what you said, then you have apparently assumed I am a bald-faced liar and I would like to know what basis you have for that assumption.  There is certainly evidence that would convince me & other skeptics to give more consideration to the God hypothesis.  I'm waiting for someone to present it.  I've searched some out myself in the past and came up empty, hence how I arrived at my current position on the subject.  I continue to regularly read & listen to skeptical critiques of current apologetic efforts (because I don't have time to read them all directly myself--I actually have a job in an unrelated field, and a life which I prefer not to waste entirely on pursuit of the possibility of the existence of invisible beings).  You could claim this is a one-sided approach to keeping current, but if you had ever listened to many skeptical critiques you might discover that skeptics are quite happy to entertain every last point of the apologist and address all of them, while the apologists themselves tend to refuse to do any such thing.

Achronos has previously claimed to have been one of us and to have since found all the evidence he needs, and furthermore he has claimed he is here on this very forum to share it to us and has made numerous starts at doing so.  Yet when anyone probes beyond his initial, vague, general philosophizing filled with logical gaps and tries to get at any real meat behind his position, he repeatedly comes up empty (actually he just continues rolling with more tangential philosophizing, hoping that he will appear "the winner" of the discussion by sheer volume of text alone).  Here in this very thread he has just recently claimed that he found concrete, verifiable evidence that stands on its own outside of the Bible and of Church authority, but refuses to even give us a single such example.  When Gawen posted a thoughtful critique of his cited book of preference, which even points out what that very book's author claims to be the strongest such evidence, and explains why that so-called specific evidence is completely ridiculous, he had nothing at all to say on the matter.

So I am forced to consider at least two possibilities:
1) Achronos really has no interest in helping skeptics to understand how he arrived at his conclusion, and just likes to appear the "winner" (to himself, anyway) in forum discussions/debates.
2) Achronos was never truly a skeptic to begin with, or never a very good one, lacking sufficient critical thinking skills to properly analyze what he is reading.

Yes, I suppose it is a one sided approach.

[Persimmon Hamster]

Yes, I suppose it is a one sided approach.

So, you find my approach to keeping current to be one-sided.  Fair enough.  I, however, disagree, because of what I noted.  Nevertheless, that was not my approach to arriving at my position in the first place and again that was clear in my post.  So is there a point to be found in your post, or what?

Also, a request along the lines of forum etiquette -- could you avoid quoting entire posts, especially relatively lengthy ones, especially when you are writing a one-sentence response?

[LegendarySandwich]

Please don't waste your prayer on me. Nice gesture but a waste all the same. Pray for world peace, equal rights, end to world hunger, happiness and love instead. Maybe one more prayer request will be all it takes for God to decide to grant these prayers, I would hate to think you wasted that important prayer on me. If there was a God who fulfilled prayer, I would never be selfish enough to pray for myself when there are much bigger issues in the world to solve. Again, please direct me to the form I need to fill out in order to nominate myself for a sainthood.

It is interesting to hear from you that you think that the problem is me and that I need to be aligned with your church. From your responses it seems that you are totally aligned with them, which is an amazingly good fit, I am truly happy for you. I hope that your church allows its other followers who may have differences to question the church and diverge on matters that are important to the individual followers.

You're anthropomorphizing God. This statement assumes that God can be overloaded with requests. Not to mention that God is ignoring the world. The world is constantly being saved and subsequently trashed by the will of man.

Although I do appreciate you finally showing a sense of humility, but I can see plain and clearly that you are just spinning your wheels, and I have been there, and we are always going through. God is perfect, but not us. We are all flawed, fractured and hurt. We turn to God to continually heal our wounds. We don't doubt Him just because our wounds hurt, just like we don't doubt the love of our mothers when we were children just because it stung when we scrapped our knees. We Christians feel all the pain, and we love you the more so for it, because we truly empathize with you.

By the way, you don't need to be aligned with my Church at all, but it would be best if you aligned yourself with the intuitive Spirit of God to heal your wounds of life and scrapped knees of living, just as we all do, but we ourselves find this healing in the Church. Just as you go to the hospital, and take the treatment prescribed by the doctor for a physical healing, and if you skip your medication or your therapeutic treatment your disease or injury or ailment will not fully heal, so to if we did not follow our Church, our spiritual wounds would only continue to fester, burn and scar deeply. I can only testify to you and others out of love, what good things God has done for us, when we are surrounded by a confusing world of pain, but only Jesus Christ is the healing of the pain, and a clear Light through the darkness of confusion, apprehension and fear.

When you say things like that, all I hear is a bunch of religious bullshit.

[Chandler M Bing]

Yes, I suppose it is a one sided approach.

So, you find my approach to keeping current to be one-sided.  Fair enough.  I, however, disagree, because of what I noted.  Nevertheless, that was not my approach to arriving at my position in the first place and again that was clear in my post.  So is there a point to be found in your post, or what?

Also, a request along the lines of forum etiquette -- could you avoid quoting entire posts, especially relatively lengthy ones, especially when you are writing a one-sentence response?

Jawohl, mein Fuhrer.

[McQ]

Yes, I suppose it is a one sided approach.

So, you find my approach to keeping current to be one-sided.  Fair enough.  I, however, disagree, because of what I noted.  Nevertheless, that was not my approach to arriving at my position in the first place and again that was clear in my post.  So is there a point to be found in your post, or what?

Also, a request along the lines of forum etiquette -- could you avoid quoting entire posts, especially relatively lengthy ones, especially when you are writing a one-sentence response?

Jawohl, mein Fuhrer.

Chandler, PH made a reasonable request. Your response to the request is unwarranted.

[Chandler M Bing]

Request noted. I was just having a laugh, as one does.

[Achronos]

There is no God.

Ahhhh, I knew if we communicated long enough we would finally find some common ground.

No. And further how can you say that when I asked you a qeustion:

"Now whom do you blame?"

But since you won't address this, let me go back to what you originally said:

Well, actually I was referring to your prayer more so than your god, sorry if my statement was not clear enough. I doubt you have enough time in your day for work, play, posting on Atheist websites, reading through every Christian literature known to humankind as well as praying for the things that you would like your god to do. I was suggesting that you pray for better things than for me. With so many things out of kilter in the world, you could easily find an endless supply of things to pray for before I became top of your pray priority list. Your God hasn't sorted out world peace for example. There are wars that have been going on for decades, your god has had plenty of time to solve these. It is not like as you suggest being saved and subsequently trashed. If your God can't be overloaded and can do anything and already knows the future then I don't know what the problem is? BTW do prayers influence your god's behavior? Would your god not know what to do if the Christians stopped praying?

You ignored what I wrote. So instead of returning the same favor, I'll point out your logic flaws.

You talk about the 'world' as a single variable. The current population of the world is up to, what, 6,750,000,000 as of last year? That's 6.8 Billion variable wills counter to God's. Some will feel his peace, some will ignore it, but each one is a changing variable. Conflicts alone involve hundreds of thousands of individuals, each one capable of rejecting God's peace.

So yes, it is being saved and trashed between the 6.8 billion people with the revolving door of 350K born a day and 150K dead every day.

BTW do prayers influence your god's behavior? Would your god not know what to do if the Christians stopped praying?

God desires our freewill for His 'miracles' and Will. Can he act outside of this? Of course. Prayer is opening up your life to His will, making it possible for Him to work WITH you, and not AROUND you. The more people open to His work (read in communion with God), the more effectual our prayer. (This has held up in scientific study.)

[Achronos]

Furthermore, I am well aware the book won't convert skeptics. I'm not sure a single book could convince a skeptic otherwise.

That's it?  That's all you have to say?  Are you going to ignore all responses to your "near death experience" post?  And are you admitting there is no good verifiable evidence for the resurrection?  Or are you sticking to the story that the burden is on every one of us to read poorly written apologetics over and over until our brains are so fried by circularism that we finally accept it ourselves?

If one book won't convince a skeptic and you admit as much is this not a recognition on your part that there is nothing of substance in any of them?  If you can find even a single irrefutable fact that is verifiable and would logically contribute to a god hypothesis that would at least be something to a skeptic reader.  Maybe it would not help them unravel the entire story just as any single scientific writing may not, but any skeptic would surely at least take something worth considering from it and perhaps find motivation therein to continue unravelling the whole story.

So can you bring any such facts to the fore from all of your recommended materials for us to consider?  Or are you just giving up and/or still insisting it is our responsibility to scour every apologist writing known to man until we find it ourselves?

It isn't that I, and skeptics like me, don't want to know and believe the truth.  We do.  That's why we are skeptics.  But we need reason to believe it.  If any apologist writing would offer such reason we would give it due consideration.  But not everyone has time to stay current on all the latest attempts, particularly when they all tend to say the same basic things over and over.  So at some point you trust other skeptics (whose reason you tend to agree with) to review them before even considering to read it yourself.  And you also must posit that if any of them had anything worth considering in them there would be a lot more buzz about it everywhere...including among skeptics, scientists (who also tend to value truth), and the mainstream media (read: not the 700 Club or ultra-conservative bloggers and "news" outlets with their own agendas).

So here we are.  You have an opportunity to reach us.  You have the ears of every skeptic in this thread.  If you have read these books and can present to us the worthy content that will give us motivation to reopen the case file of "God", why on earth would you back away from the task?

St. Matthew 7:6.

What do you see as the basis of truth?

Also If you adhere to a strictly scientific standard for belief, there will always be a more logical explanation than the supernatural. You will not come to the faith by intellect alone. It is a journey of the heart that must be lived.