@VRAEL
Simply wrong? So if the subject was on football teams you would still be complaining about their overuse of rhetoric? Come now.

No, this is not a possibility. When belief in God is mentioned my first reaction is pity not outrage. An atheist does not have faith that Gods do not exist. We "know" theistic Gods do not exist just like we "know" unicorns, fairies, and vampires don't exist. A theist has faith, and no evidence to back this up except a holy book and a bunch of other people all sharing the same faith (Remember the distinction between theistic and deistic before you make a foolish reply).

I could list a buttload of religious sites that are ten times more rhetorical and ten times more pushy then this one. It's laughably mild in comparison, you are overreacting because it concerns your God.

You can't cheat, then say don't accuse me of cheating. And then get uppity when I go ahead and excuse you of cheating. I asked you to disprove one of their 50 proofs, I'm still waiting. I can see you tying yourself up in knots trying to get out of this.

A gallant attempt at setting up a straw man and then knocking it down. I'll explain what the proof actually is, since you are refusing to read it.
1. Jesus says prayer works in: Matthew 7:7, Matthew 17:20, Matthew 21:21, Mark 11:24, John 14:12-14, Matthew 18:19 and James 5:15-16
2. Prayer does not work as consistently as Jesus claims.
3. Jesus is God, and God is infallible.
4. God made a claim which was incorrect. Therefor God is not infallible.
5. The Christians say God is infallible, yet we can clearly see from the Bible that he is not. Therefor the Christian God is made up, aka imaginary.

If you cannot refute their proofs then you must logically admit that the proofs are correct. The fact that they make "ill use of rhetoric and emotional appeal" is of little consequence if you are admitting that the proofs are logically sound. Damn you tie yourself up in knots something fierce.

Ok, I'll go ahead and show you your argument:

HAHAHAHAHA!!!! Fuck this made me laugh.

No....the Bible makes many claims about the effectiveness of prayer. By showing the statistics of prayer, it refutes the Bibles claim. Seriously why do I have to spell this out.

Yeah, we were originally arguing about God's existence, now you are arguing about a belief in God makes people happy, which is an argument of usefulness. You are trying to warp the argument by using semantic trickery. Forget about statistics, just ask yourself is it morally correct to make people happy by lying to them, or make them less happy by telling them the truth.

You are confusing deistic and theistic again. YHWH is specifically mentioned to have traits X X and X, if we disprove any one of these traits, which paradoxes do, then the theistic God YHWH is not what the bible says it is, this is a refutation.

Yep, but we can still have the illusion of free will without being free.

People tend to pray for things that are likely to happen anyway, in an effort to increase the positive reinforcement. All you have to do is stop praying for a week or so and you quickly realize that prayer makes no difference.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnoE1ho4Hhc
I agree with him.

To me God doesn't exist because I don't believe he or she or it exists.

The subjectivity vs objectivity canard is a banal one. Technology, medicine, construction, and many are all things that rely heavily on objective truths. To say God exists subjectively is NOT an adequate theory for the existence of God, in fact I would agree with you. God does not exist objectively, and exists only in the minds of the people who think he exists, just like the kids and Santa Claus.

This 'proof' relies on the flawed assumption that all christians believe exactly the same thing, and that their beliefs are firmly rooted in interpreting the bible, a book that was written 2000 years ago by people who were, at most, eyewitnesses to some events. To find a contradiction in the bible is at most, equivalent to finding a contradiction with a classmate about what your grade five teacher was like. Even worse, your second argument (2) is flawed in the sense that you cannot possibly know that prayer doesn't work. I personally don't believe that it does work, but there is no way to test that prediction. IE, if you were to pray with the intent of proving that prayer does not work, you're not actually praying. This is a bit unfair, in a sense, because prayer is effectively set up so that the only people who can prove that it doesn't work are those who truly believe that it does, but you have to accept this and move on, rather than trying to force a faulty argument to work. You also make the mistake in (3) of assuming that the alleged offspring of God was in fact, God himself. Few Christians actually believe this, so again, you're wrong.

From a purely rational sense, you can't actually say any of this, because you could go through the whole descartes thing to find reasonable doubts in the existence of things you claim to be objective truths. That being said, I won't fault you for making some basic empirical assumptions, because most rational people agree with you there. That being said, relating the idea of a God to Santa Claus is a fallacy because of the scientific practice of verification. I can verify that Santa Claus does not exist by staying up late, or putting a camera in my chimny, or even measuring my chimney and coming to a scientific measure of Santa's waist size restrictions that would invalidate the basic premise by which Santa could exist. That being said, believers in god do not make predictions that can be tested in this way. I know it's unfair to put the onus of disproof on you, as an atheist, but if you can't prove someone wrong, you can't tell them they're wrong. You can tell them that their beliefs are essentially immaterial in the sense that they cannot be verified by science, but that, in itself, is the essense of belief.

Anyways, at the risk of going a little ad hominem here, you do need to stop belittling religious people and the people you're arguing against. Comparing religious belief to the childlike faith in Santa and using condescending arguments doesn't help you in any way. I've found it to be incredibly common for intelligent young people to have a firm belief that religious people are weak-willed and that they require some faith-based alternative to nihilism, determinism or the finite nature of existence. One may even be inclined to think that being an atheist and 'accepting' these concepts makes you a stronger person than someone who chooses to be religious. My point is that once you realize that the atheist arguments are just as invalid as the religious ones, it's common to head back over to the agnostic camp. Take from that what you will, but my point is that you can't adopt a condescending attitude against religion when there are people who are much smarter than yourself who accept that it could be at least somewhat valid.

Lastly, here's an old logic argument, since folks seem to like those.
Premise 1: One cannot know with absolute certainty that a God either does or does not exist.
Result: The statement "I know that God does or does not exist." is false.
Premise 2: A lie is the deliberate telling of a false statement to another person.
Result: You would have to lie to tell someone that you knew whether or not God existed. This creates an implied lie in the statement 'God does or does not exist' in the sense that making the statement is a knowledge claim.

This is sometimes called the argument for agnosticism, and I've yet to see a reasonable way to refute it. Anyways, there's my 2 cents on the subject, if I was a little heavy-handed with a few of the words, no offense to anyone or anything was meant.

Let's analyze a study done on prayer.


Pretty clear results right there that intercessory prayer has no effect. You can preach, "well you're praying for a study lalala." No, that's not true, they were being prayed for by people who were doing it for their wellbeing, not the study. Furthermore, why would an all-loving deity ignore someone's wellbeing over something as trivial as it was being watched? Smells fishy.

You seem to have an improper view on what proof is. Negative proof is not an argument for anything, at all. All it means is that there is no evidence for something. But if I were to ask you if you believed in flying unicorns you'd say no. If I asked why you may tell me that's silly, or, more logically, because there is no proof that they exist. And there's the same for UFOs.


No, that's completely untrue. Our arguments are not invalid because they're backed with evidence and logic - which by its very definition means it is valid. I never once claimed religious people to be weak-willed. I was once a creationist and very strong-willed. It wasn't until I started opening my eyes to logic and reason that I renounced my religion in favor of the truth. It difficult to debate with creationists and I know why. Being one I was blind to logic and science, employed doublethink, and used logical fallacies to cover-up my religion's misgivings. Using these techniques we can only present the evidence before you and encourage you to think about it. YOU'RE the one who has to discover what you're actually doing with your thoughts. Doublethink is used to prevent you from doing this.


Based on the evidence shown it is fairly reasonable to conclude that a deity probably does not exist. And it is for the same reason I don't believe a mining colony of gnomes exists on Titan.

That statement wasn't directed at you, and it wasn't about arguments. I was just saying that using an argument that likens religion to something silly and ridiculous and juvenile is insulting at the expense of reason. I'll explain the counter argument to any such arguments (Russel's teapot, for example) later. This response, in a way, confirms what I was saying in the paragraph you quoted. It's fine to claim that you used to be religious, I believe you, but your characterization of yourself as a typical creationist is used to insult creationists, calling them blind to logic and science, and apt to use fallacies to cover up flaws in their belief system. Again, this is just a comment about what you're saying, here, but I think it's good practice to avoid insults and present data a little more calmly.

For example, you could cite the belief that god created the world just over 6000 years ago and show that it is almost undeniably false. This argument can be elaborated by showing scientific example of objects that are over six thousand years old and have no reasonable means of being created. In this case, a reasonable attack on the belief can be made by asking for an explanation of things that could be much more easily explained by refuting the belief that the world is 6000 years old.

As I mentioned earlier, I do intend to address this particular style of argument here. In general, the argument goes like this:
1. Present a situation with utmost absurdity that cannot be scientifically proven to be false or true, but that seems false due to absurdity.
2. Show that you cannot prove this statement to be false by any means and that there is no tangible evidence of the statement's truth.
3. Show that you cannot prove that God doesn't exist by any means and that there is no tangible evidence that God exists.
4. Come to the conclusion that believing in god is 'like' believing in the initial situation.

There are several fallacies involved in this argument. The first is that you assume that because A has property X and B has property X, they have more in common than just property X. If you break the initial argument down, then it looks like this:

1. Give A that has X and Y.
2. Give B that has X.
3. Assume that B has Y.

This is obviously false, yet it is the exact argument used in so many cases. To specify, X is the property of unprovability and Y is the property of absurdity. This arugment attempts to implicity apply the property of absurdity to the existence of God in a way that is by no means a proper argument. Now, this argument wouldn't be a fallacy if we could prove that X implies Y, but we can't and this assumption is made but left out in your argument. Here's a quick proof that something which is unprovable is not absurd. The statement "I believe that other universes exist" could be true or false, yet it is highly improbable that we will ever know the answer to that question. Given the fact that all operations on our universe can be mapped to vector operations on a closed space, it is theoretically impossible to verify the existence of another universe. Yet, I would argue that it is not absurd to believe that other universes exist, nor is it absurd to believe that they do not. (Note, if you really want to attack this point, you can find other examples) As such, unprovability does not necessarily imply absurdity in belief.

The result of this discourse is that absurdity is not inherited when you show the unprovability property of various statements, which means that the likening of religious belief to that of mining gnomes on Titan involves an implied fallacy. But we're far from done. For this argument to result in a true refutement of the typical Russel's Teapot style claims one would have to show that various religious beliefs are not absurd. Because we haven't explicitly defined absurd, we'll need to do that first, and show that it is the defining characteristic in all Teapot style arguments. The simple, abridged definition of absurd is 'having no rational or orderly relationship to human life.' I don't need to show that this applies to all gnome, teapot or unicorn arguments. But now let's consider the word 'absurd' in relation to 'belief in God.' I won't argue that all religious beliefs are not absurd, because some are, but the fundamental underlying one, the belief in a diety, is not. I justify this by the fact that the belief that the existence of a God creates a moral standard by which humans should live is both and orderly and a rational relationship between the belief and human life. The question of whether or not we were created is deep and far from one-sided, and while some interpretations of this creator may be absurd, it is not absurd to believe that one may exist.

The result of this discourse is, if you choose to follow it, that while some creationist beliefs may be absurd, it is inherent in the belief itself, and not tied to the belief in a diety. Because of this, Russel's Teapot is not a valid way of passing the onus of proof on to religion. Essentially, you are making the mistake of confusing the answering of a question with a claim of knowledge. Religion attempts to answer such questions as 'why are we here', 'is there a being greater than ourselves', etc. while your argument would liken this to asking someone to believe an absurdity of no consequence. In short, I do not believe that there is a gnomish mining colony on Titan because it is not connected to human life in any logical or reasonable way. I do choose to entertain the possiblity that a diety may exist because it is a potential answer to a question that is important and directly tied to my own existence and because I cannot justify why the atheist belief is in some way inherently superior to it in such a way as to discount it entirely.

It's time for us to shut up, and start listening Of course, unfortunately its a forum so we can't listen, so I guess we'll have to keep talking.

You may choose not to believe me, but I am simply saying that the topic is not inflamed in my eyes. If the subject of the discussion was football teams, then yes, I would still complain about their overuse of rhetoric. I personally find things written in that manner to have bad taste.

I think you miss my point. Your belief in atheism is so ardent that you cannot accept the possibility that there might be a God, just as you say an ardent Christian cannot accept the possibility that there is no God. The blade cuts both ways, and simply being the first to accuse does not exempt you from being guilty of it as well. Logic has nothing to do with this; it is a human characteristic, not a godly one.

I think you miss the point; it's the rhetoric that I don't accept, not the position. I wouldn't accept an argument for God from a site like that either. Again, the blade of overreaction cuts both ways. Metaphorically speaking, can you handle the blade?

To truly disprove that "God is Imaginary" is beyond my means. It is not sufficent to merely strike down all "proofs" which say "God is Imaginary," rather I would have to somehow prove that God actually exists. If you merely want me to search through their website for a bit of faulty rhetoric, then I suppose I will do so to satisfy the challenge. Note that I do not make the mistake of assuming that a false proof for the non-existence of God implies the existence thereof, I only mean to "disprove" one as you have asked, to show that it is nothing more than faulty rhetoric.