Stephen Fry and Gay Byrne

PopePalpatine

lazygal wrote: »

http://corasherlock.com/lost-in-quotation-stephen-fry-on-the-meaning-of-life/

Cora "Women Deserve Better than Abortion" Sherlock weighs in.

There's no way I'm writing whatever bile she's spewed.

Turtwig

PopePalpatine wrote: »

There's no way I'm writing whatever bile she's spewed.

Of course not only would that be quite the mental torture it would also be plagiarism.

Hotblack Desiato

King Mob wrote: »

And lets not forget that after we made our choice so we can have free will and stuff, God then changed his mind and wiped out most of the Earth so we could start again.

"Ahhh, SH!T!" *ctrl-alt-del*

And then he changed his mind again and decided that now he'll never interfere with free will again. For realies this time.

Not only that, as far as we can make out he doesn't interfere with anything at all in any way...

Penn

Hotblack Desiato wrote: »

"Ahhh, SH!T!" *ctrl-alt-del*




Not only that, as far as we can make out he doesn't interfere with anything at all in any way...

Apart from sports, for obvious reasons.

Hotblack Desiato

Penn wrote: »

Apart from sports, for obvious reasons.

America at Large: Praising the Lord is as fundamental to US sport as pom pom girls

“Thank you for the Dodges and the Toyotas,” said Nelms, reciting a creed that sounded more product placement than prayer of the faithful. “Thank you for the Fords . . . Thank you for GM performance technology and RO7 engines. Thank you for Sunoco racing fuel and Goodyear Tyres . . . Lord, I want to thank you for my smoking hot wife tonight, Lisa. My two children, Eli and Emma, or as we like to call ‘em, the little Es. Lord I pray you bless the drivers and use them tonight. May they put on a performance worthy of this great track. In Jesus’ name, boogity, boogity, boogity. Amen!”

...

Was wondering how long this would take.

Church leader feels sorry for ‘spiritually blind’ Stephen Fry

The Rev Ian McNie, who on Monday night was elected to be the next moderator for Ireland’s 240,000 Presbyterians, said on Tuesday that what comedian, broadcaster and atheist Stephen Fry said to Gay Byrne only confirmed the “truthfulness of the bible”.

“Because the bible says that the God of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers that they cannot see the light of the gospel,” he said when speaking to the press in Belfast.

“He only confirms what the bible itself teaches and has been an asset to the Christian cause enabling us to know that the bible is true.”

Impeccable logic...

King Mob

Penn wrote: »

Apart from sports, for obvious reasons.

Unless you count the time he killed all those Egyptian babies. Or when he blew up two cities.
Or now when he changes his plan when people pray to him for stuff.
Or when they go to random miracle sites to get healed cause he can't do it anywhere else...
But that's it, he swears!

RikuoAmero

Hotblack Desiato wrote: »

America at Large: Praising the Lord is as fundamental to US sport as pom pom girls




...

Was wondering how long this would take.

Church leader feels sorry for ‘spiritually blind’ Stephen Fry



Impeccable logic...

Damn straight. The ONLY possible explanation is because the bible's telling the truth...no possibility whatsoever that the bible is bunk.

Penn

“Because the bible says that the God of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers that they cannot see the light of the gospel,” he said when speaking to the press in Belfast."

It's a pity that the God of this age has blinded the minds of believers that they cannot see the darkness of the gospel.

MrPudding

Zillah wrote: »

Aw hell, even if Eve was a wicked bitch that rejoiced in defying God it still doesn't make a lick of sense that her sin would need to manifest as some dark cloud that would haunt and condemn her descendants until the end of time, not to mention spilling out and corrupting the natural world like some evil spell in a Disney movie.

It'd be like if you designed a playschool so that at the first sign of misbehaviour from one of the kids the whole place would fill with corrosive gas that burns the skin and warps the wallpaper. Do you blame the kid or the fracking lunatic that built it in the first place?

But it is even worse than that. There is a major issue with the proportionality of the punishment. So the crime is not loving God, or something similar. Being extremely generous, the longest this could happen for is maybe 100 years. And the punishment for this last for eternity? How the hell (pardon the pun) does that work?

Ah, but the act of not loving god is so offensive to him that the punishment is justified, I hear you cry. WTAF I cry. How can an all powerful and just supernatural being be so harmed or offended by a mere human simply not loving it that it seems rational and justifiable to punish that human FOREVER? Seriously, how to people beleive this sh1t. How does someone read this, or have it explained to them and have the response 'yeah, that seems sensible'. Crazy.

MrP

Penn

MrPudding wrote: »

Seriously, how to people beleive this sh1t. How does someone read this, or have it explained to them and have the response 'yeah, that seems sensible'. Crazy.

MrP

Because the promised reward for toeing the line is so great. Everlasting happiness and eternal love with all the loved ones you'd lost, in a way which you'll never be proven wrong if heaven/hell doesn't exist because you'll be dead.

If you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain. If you want the reward of Heaven, you gotta accept Hell exists.

Zubeneschamali

MrPudding wrote: »

Seriously, how to people beleive this sh1t.

Well, lots of people don't. I've met lots of Irish Catholics who don't believe anyone goes to Hell for eternity, or that there is really a dude named Satan.

Adam&Eve is mostly regarded as a parable, Lourdes is a disgusting racket, and nobody understands what transubstantiation is even supposed to mean.

So arguing that this stuff is illogical doesn't get much traction, as they don't believe any of it anyhow.

MrPudding

Zubeneschamali wrote: »

Well, lots of people don't. I've met lots of Irish Catholics who don't believe anyone goes to Hell for eternity, or that there is really a dude named Satan.

Adam&Eve is mostly regarded as a parable, Lourdes is a disgusting racket, and nobody understands what transubstantiation is even supposed to mean.

So arguing that this stuff is illogical doesn't get much traction, as they don't believe any of it anyhow.

Whilst the a la carte people are an irritation, and cause some problems, in this area I agree, they think it is bull. But there are plenty of people that genuinely beleive it. I would say they most evangelicals beleive it. There are quite a few posters here on boards that also beleive it, antisceptic being the obvious one right now.

This is not a fringe belief, it is mainstream.

MrP

Zubeneschamali

MrPudding wrote: »

This is not a fringe belief, it is mainstream.

Well, I'd call evangelicals the fringe here in Ireland, where most people are "Shure, it'll be grand" catholics, who show no signs of believing in Hell or damnation. If we include the whole island, then we'd have the Presbyterians, and lots of them are pretty evangelical, but then it is a common belief among Catholics that they are all nuts.

mikhail

Zubeneschamali wrote: »

Well, lots of people don't. I've met lots of Irish Catholics who don't believe anyone goes to Hell for eternity, or that there is really a dude named Satan.

Most of that crowd don't really thing about anything at all. To them, churches are community centres where some dude says the magic words over newborns and corpses.

Brian Shanahan

feargale wrote: »

Did you hear Ray Darcy's interview of Gaybo yesterday? You can get it on RTE player. Come back and tell us if your opinion is unchanged. I'd like your 27 assentors to do likewise.

Not only are you pants at logic, debate and basic english, it turns out you can't even spot a joke at close range.

Well done, you.

Gits_bone wrote: »

Do you think cancer rates are the same now as they were 100/200 years ago?

All this radiation...mobile phones..wifi...electromagnetic forces.

The single biggest determinant for getting cancer is age. Which when you think of what cancer is, a mutation in the genome leading to cells which grow too fast, and the inexactitude of the genome copying when cells split, coupled with the general breakdown of ones internal systems as one ages, only makes sense. There are contributory factors, like smoking, eating certain foods, staying out in strong sunlight too long and others (note though that there is absolutely no evidence that the electromagnetic forces that people are subjected to from phones, wifi, &c. in their everyday lives has any effect on cancer rates, and that is after lots of independent research, though you strike me as a conspiracy nut so that won't reassure you) which speed up cancer rates, but age dominates cancer rates over all. A man in his 70's is way more likely to have cancer than one in his 20's.

So when we adjust for longer lives (we live nearly three times as long on average than 200 years ago and about twice as long as those born in 1900), and other factors which are worse (actually in this case we're adjusting past cancer rates down, because carcinogenic pollutants were far more prevalent at the start of the industrial revolution than now, due to a lack of knowledge of cancer and lack of health and safety standards) and misdiagnoses, I'd fully expect cancer rates to be exactly where we'd expect them to be leading on from the past, or maybe even slightly lower than expected.

Brian Shanahan

antiskeptic wrote: »

I would conclude therefore, that Satan is the one who powers the decay we see around - it's part and parcel of what he's about and the product fits his MO. But God is the one who permits him to operate and presumably sets boundaries for that operation as he did in the case of Job.

I would also conclude God's hands bound to play by particular rules. He set things up so as to give man choice and would have had to render the potential downsides of that choice equal in magnitude as the potential upsides - so as not to tilt the balance in the choice given. That potential is fully found in our eternal existence: exquisite in the case of 'Heaven' and ' agonizing in the case of 'Hell'. Our life here offers, and must offer us, a taste of both sides.

I think God was bound, in giving us a choice, to make that choice balanced.

By your reckoning satan is more powerful than god, because he can compel god to do things that god wouldn't otherwise do, and he is able to create things beyond god's power to stop. Therfore, ipso facto, by the very rules you set up you should logically turn to satan worship, because he is more powerful than god, thus far more likely to determine your (non-existent) soul's fate after your death. Plus you've got the added advantage that, according to the bible, he is far less evil than god.

TheLurker

lazygal wrote: »

Cora "Women Deserve Better than Abortion" Sherlock weighs in.

The free will rebuttal to the problem of evil is so shockingly bad it is difficult to believe that even Christians actually believe it.

It seems more one of these arguments that Christians take comfort knowing exists but without having to actually rationally think about it, like the Tea Party holding onto birther conspiracies in order to justfiy not like Obama even when they know in the back of their head it doesn't stand up to reason.

I have yet to meet a single atheist who looks at the free will rebuttal for more than 2 seconds and goes "Umm, that is dumb"

What really grinds me gears though is that Christians often put forward the free will rebuttal not simply as a weak lets-not-examine-this-too-closely rebuttal before changing the subject, but the more ignorant ones like Sherlock (who I'm guessing got this argument from an apologetics website she didn't really spend much time considering) put this forward as not only a rebuttal to the problem of evil, but as evidence that the person raising the problem of evil should have thought about it a little bit more.

Ah you silly atheists, if you just opened your mind you would realize that this rebuttal exists. How foolish do you look now atheists. lol

Zubeneschamali

TheLurker wrote: »

The free will rebuttal to the problem of evil is so shockingly bad it is difficult to believe that even Christians actually believe it.

This is why you often read stories of people whose faith is shaken or destroyed when some horrible evil befalls them.

The free will defense is grand in theory, when the evil is happening to someone else far away, but not so good when the evil happens in person.

You'd have to be a fairly incurious person not to have noticed all this really horrible evil happening to other people far away, but apparently it just doesn't make an impression on these people until it is their own 10 year old dying horribly, or whatever.

Brian Shanahan

RikuoAmero wrote: »

I remember hearing about an experiment where the guy running it put objects around the room that would have been observable only to a spirit looking down, objects that would have looked weird and out of place, things that would have caught the 'eye' of anyone in the required position.
Not a single person in that experiment who claimed a NDE and who claimed to be able to see their body mentioned one of these objects.

Sam Parnia. He's now gone back and changed the parameters of the experiment simply because nobody who reported and OBE or NDE actually saw any of the signs placed in otherwise inaccessible locations (i.e. the patient wouldn't have seen them lieing in their bed, nor walking around the room), thus disproving his hypothesis. Being a true believer and not a proper scientist, he decided the test would be to find somebody who reported an NDE which he could somehow finangle into saying that this NDE happened when there was no brain activity.

Here's an article showing why Mr. Parnia's research isn't worth two ****s.

mikom wrote: »

Magnets, I think
But it's not an exact seance.

The ideomotor effect actually. The whole thing is quite interesting how we can subconsiously trick ourselves.

jank

Not sure if this is classified as a rebuttal but worth a listen.

http://podcast.rasset.ie/podcasts/audio/2015/0131/20150131_rteradio1-marianfinucane-god_c20720192_20720199_232_.mp3

jank

jank wrote: »

Not sure if this is classified as a rebuttal but worth a listen.

http://podcast.rasset.ie/podcasts/audio/2015/0131/20150131_rteradio1-marianfinucane-god_c20720192_20720199_232_.mp3

Certainly not a rebuttal, mostly whataboutery tbh.

He doesn't address points other than acknowledging them and sweeping them sideways.

Zen65

jank wrote: »

Not sure if this is classified as a rebuttal but worth a listen.

http://podcast.rasset.ie/podcasts/audio/2015/0131/20150131_rteradio1-marianfinucane-god_c20720192_20720199_232_.mp3

Certainly not a rebuttal of Mr Fry's points, merely an acknowledgement that there's another way of viewing it, which does not require logical thinking. Apparently Father Brendan Purcell thinks it reasonable to compare the existence of eye-eating bugs and cancer with the existence of gravity? Apparently God could not give us gravity without causing cancer?

silverharp

Zen65 wrote: »

Certainly not a rebuttal of Mr Fry's points, merely an acknowledgement that there's another way of viewing it, which does not require logical thinking. Apparently Father Brendan Purcell thinks it reasonable to compare the existence of eye-eating bugs and cancer with the existence of gravity? Apparently God could not give us gravity without causing cancer?

Gravity and the laws of motion are dangerous enough in themselves , was there anything in Genesis about being able to grow back limbs or were Adam and Eve like Superman and could fall off a cliff with no risk of injury.

Doctor DooM

silverharp wrote: »

Gravity and the laws of motion are dangerous enough in themselves , was there anything in Genesis about being able to grow back limbs or were Adam and Eve like Superman and could fall off a cliff with no risk of injury.

Kal-el, the birth name of Superman, resembles the hebrew קל-אל, which can be intrepreted as "the voice of god" apparently if one feels like it.

Not strictly speaking related to what's being discussed, but an interesting aside I feel.

PopePalpatine

Doctor DooM wrote: »

Kal-el, the birth name of Superman, resembles the hebrew קל-אל, which can be intrepreted as "the voice of god" apparently if one feels like it.

Not strictly speaking related to what's being discussed, but an interesting aside I feel.

Well, the guys who came up with Superman were Jewish, so that might explain it.

TheLurker

jank wrote: »

Not sure if this is classified as a rebuttal but worth a listen.

Not really worth listening to since its been said a million times already.

Just the same tired debunked "official line" arguments and more of the the "Good question, let me try and answer that .... OH MY GOD LOOK OVER THERE!! ... so I hope that answers your question" style of response.

If there are Christians out there who have genuinely figured this out properly they ain't telling the rest of them. If I was a Christian that would annoy me far more than Stephen Fry.

RikuoAmero

TheLurker wrote: »

Not really worth listening to since its been said a million times already.

Just the same tired debunked "official line" arguments and more of the the "Good question, let me try and answer that .... OH MY GOD LOOK OVER THERE!! ... so I hope that answers your question" style of response.

If there are Christians out there who have genuinely figured this out properly they ain't telling the rest of them. If I was a Christian that would annoy me far more than Stephen Fry.

Aye. Any christians out there who have figured this out, do you want to tell us? I'm genuinely curious about the answer, if there is one. I won't take simply "Oh, God has a plan for us" without
1) An elaboration on what that plan actually is
2) Why the plan somehow requires us to suffer through all sorts of evils
3) Why the plan couldn't have been reworked to avoid these evils
4) Why it's somehow considered moral for us humans to suffer through evils simply because the one who is ultimately responsible for them has a plan.

Zubeneschamali

RikuoAmero wrote: »

Aye. Any christians out there who have figured this out, do you want to tell us?

Eh, it's a mystery?

pH

Zubeneschamali wrote: »

Eh, it's a mystery?

yea, God works in mysterious ways, No way to know! he's unknowable and mysterious, except for teh gays and teh condoms and meat on Fridays - we *Know* he's against all of that! But the rest is mysterious .. except all these other things we know he likes and want us to do

The strange thing is that all these theists also do believe that god has managed to create a very special place with no cancer/death/suffering/eye wasps called heaven (as to whether it has gravity an one is susceptible to a grazed knee we can only guess!) - but he stuck us here on this sh*thole as a kind of test for our souls.

Which would make a little sense if he had started out like this - but according to scripture before the fall there was no death - so no one ever was to get to heaven! None of it is particularly clever or well thought out - it still amazes me that anyone over 10 actually believes any of it.

shruikan2553

pH wrote: »

yea, God works in mysterious ways, No way to know! he's unknowable and mysterious, except for teh gays and teh condoms and meat on Fridays - we *Know* he's against all of that! But the rest is mysterious .. except all these other things we know he likes and want us to do

The strange thing is that all these theists also do believe that god has managed to create a very special place with no cancer/death/suffering/eye wasps called heaven (as to whether it has gravity an one is susceptible to a grazed knee we can only guess!) - but he stuck us here on this sh*thole as a kind of test for our souls.

Which would make a little sense if he had started out like this - but according to scripture before the fall there was no death - so no one ever was to get to heaven! None of it is particularly clever or well thought out - it still amazes me that anyone over 10 actually believes any of it.

Don't forget he knows if we'll go to heaven already just to make it extra pointless.