Fake News Reporting Thread

[Proteus_MST]

There is no slim chance that God exists. The chance that God doesn't exist is slim. It's one thing to say that you don't believe in God because there is only a slim chance that he exists, but you have to be an atheist to think there is only a slim chance that he exists. That is just utter nonsense.

A lot of nowadays Atheists are former christians, who took the time to actually read the bible ... and not only those passages that their pastor regurgitated for them ... and then actually (and neutrally) think about it (especially the probability of the whole book being true ... and the consequences (for the probability of god), if the bible contains stories that aren't true.
As a result many Atheists have better biblical knowledge than many evangelical fundamentalists.

It is not surprising that many christians actually cling to their religion and just vastly overestimate the probability for god (even coming up with unscientific concept like ID and irreducible complexity in order to justify their belief in genesis ... or with concepts that involve lots of fantasy but littel scientific knowledge in order to justify ther passages about the great deluge).
After all, if you invest such a lot of time/energy/money into a religion, then it is hard to accept that it is false.

I guess it is the same problem many Trumpists have regarding abandoning their belief in Trump

I'm not going to bother much explaining to you why playing the lotto can be a rational decision, but I will give you a hint and then it's up to you. Everyone has their own utility curves

I'd rather use probability calculations in order to decide whether a thing is good or not.
Lets take the above mentiopned chance of 1/300 Mio fore a Jackpot.
Lets say there is one lottery each year, a lottery ticket costs 0.5 $ and a person is able to spend 50k $ each year on Lottery tickets for the Jackpot (-> 100,000 lottery tickets each year)

Due to the probabilities being independent, with 100k lottery tickets the person would have a chance to win the jackpot of ~0.033 %
Now, again, lets say the person has a working life of 50 years and each year said person spends the aforementioned amount (and have the same chance, each year, of winning the Jackpot),
then the chance for said person to win the Jackpot once in her lifetime would be ~1.653%

Another person who spends the same amount of money each year in savings books and/or stock portfolios will, by the end of his/her working life, be in possession of 2.5 Mio $ ... probably more if we take into account compound interest.

[Kidlicious]

Talking to an atheist about the Bible is like getting teeth pulled. The atheist is only concerned with arguing why the Bible is wrong and not what it actually means. But people don't normally use the Bible to argue for the existence of God. There are a lot of logical arguments for the existence of God.

[Jon Miller]

People believe what they want to believe. For most of the last ~200 years, it was ridiculous to be a strong atheist (I don't mean atheist as opposed to Christian, I mean atheist as opposed to deist or even pantheist). Yet if you go back ~100 years (when it was ridiculous), you see the same percentage of of intellectual leaders who are atheist as today.

The Bible's validity is about the validity Christianity, not atheism versus deism/pantheism.

Even today, there is nothing even approaching proof for atheism. There are just some very smart people (Hawking/etc) who argue that we have now proven that an atheistic universe is possible (and so are strong atheists, because that is what they have always desired to believe). Their reasoning depends still very much on axioms and not observational or experimental evidence, but still good logic/reason and reasonable axioms.

Yet theism is presented in the intellectual community as on the rocks. All that is demonstrated is that the intellectual community has a strong bias against deism/pantheism (and has for a couple hundred years).

JM
(With some reasonable axioms (at least more reasonable than the axioms of Libertarians/etc) you can prove the existence of God.)

[Aeson]

Downside to playing Christian God lotto is there’s a chance in so doing you end up stuck in heaven with Kid and Ben for eternity.

[Jon Miller]

BTW, faith and belief in Christianity have nothing to do with the existence of God. After all,
"You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that--and shudder." James 2:19

Rather, faith and belief in Christianity is about believing that Christ is God and so can save us.

JM

[Kidlicious]

Downside to playing Christian God lotto is there’s a chance in so doing you end up stuck in heaven with Kid and Ben for eternity.

Don't worry. He will cure all of your infirmities.

[Proteus_MST]

BTW, faith and belief in Christianity have nothing to do with the existence of God. After all,
"You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that--and shudder." James 2:19

Rather, faith and belief in Christianity is about believing that Christ is God and so can save us.

JM

True ... which is why, in my next to last posting, I made explicit references to the christian god
For me it is the same ... while my thoughts have led me to reject a strict exclusive belief in the judeo-christian-islam god .... i.e. YHWH ... I don't reject a more spiritual faith into something that trascends us all (and also transcends all religions)
Which is, why I would refer to myself to being close to the Unitarian Universalists.

[Kidlicious]

True ... which is why, in my next to last posting, I made explicit references to the christian god
For me it is the same ... while my thoughts have led me to reject a strict exclusive belief in the judeo-christian-islam god .... i.e. YHWH ... I don't reject a more spiritual faith into something that trascends us all (and also transcends all religions)
Which is, why I would refer to myself to being close to the Unitarian Universalists.

You just moved the goal posts. You think you're slick, don't you?

And I don't know any Unitarian Universalists that tell you that there is less than 1% chance that your God exists. You're a fraud.

[rah]

How can someone that hates as much as you say they follow the teachings of Christ? Talk about frauds.

[Proteus_MST]

You just moved the goal posts. You think you're slick, don't you?

And I don't know any Unitarian Universalists that tell you that there is less than 1% chance that your God exists. You're a fraud.

I have little doubts most UUs would reject the idea of an exclusive god ...
i.e. if someone comes and claims that all people believing not in his specific religion/god (like a certain branch of evangelical christianity) will go to some kind of hell ...
or that certain types of people (like homosexuals) will have to suppress their feelings if they don't wnat to come to hell.

[Kidlicious]

I have little doubts most UUs would reject the idea of an exclusive god ...
i.e. if someone comes and claims that all people believing not in his specific religion/god (like a certain branch of evangelical christianity) will go to some kind of hell ...
or that certain types of people (like homosexuals) will have to suppress their feelings if they don't wnat to come to hell.

I understand that you don't like traditional Christians and a lot of UUA don't either, but officially the UUA believes in accepting all beliefs and not being intolerant towards anyone, including traditional Christians.

At any rate you are a fraud because you are a regressive leftist. You are nothing but a confidence man.

[Jon Miller]

Which is, why I would refer to myself to being close to the Unitarian Universalists.

I enjoy the religion discussion of this UU, similar to:

https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/56663457380/godless-religion

I think that if I had tons of time, that I would occasionally visit UU congregations.

JM

[Jon Miller]

I have little doubts most UUs would reject the idea of an exclusive god ...
i.e. if someone comes and claims that all people believing not in his specific religion/god (like a certain branch of evangelical christianity) will go to some kind of hell ...

That is almost like the core belief of the one of the Christian groups that became UU.

JM

[Ben Kenobi]

Kid, the lottos almost always have negative EVs, the money that you save by not playing the lotto is more valuable to your utility on all the curves that I can think of. The less money you have the more utility that lotto money would have for you.

[Ben Kenobi]

A lot of nowadays Atheists are former christians, who took the time to actually read the bible ... and not only those passages that their pastor regurgitated for them ... and then actually (and neutrally) think about it (especially the probability of the whole book being true ... and the consequences (for the probability of god), if the bible contains stories that aren't true.
As a result many Atheists have better biblical knowledge than many evangelical fundamentalists.

I would challenge that. Most atheists I've spoken to regurgitate lists off the internet listing all the biblical contradictions one by one. I find that their actual experience of the bible to be very lacking.

My challenge to any atheist who claims to have extensive biblical knowledge is to read the entire bible, starting with the Gospels.

It is not surprising that many christians actually cling to their religion and just vastly overestimate the probability for god (even coming up with unscientific concept like ID and irreducible complexity in order to justify their belief in genesis

What does science claim about God? Be careful, there's a difference between what science says and what scientists say.

After all, if you invest such a lot of time/energy/money into a religion, then it is hard to accept that it is false.

From a historical perspective, it's not just the Jews that record evidence of a significant flood. The Babylonians do as well. How do you reconcile this fact?