Nadezhda

If you took a 10×10 chess board and randomly decided which squares were black and white (you can have more of one color than another if you want) … the amount of possible chessboards you could create is so large … we cannot possibly comprehend the enormity of that number. From our limited human experience … the number might as well be…[Read more]

@daughter

An atheist Spain has a remarkably different life than those in conservative religious America. To be honest, people of my generation or younger are often embarassed to admit they believe in God and go to church. The religious are the minority, the practicing religious is a very small group and those who are actively religious are tiny…[Read more]

re:daughter of karl

You are not a rarity. The majority of atheists hold some kind of spiritual or hocus pocus beliefs (the majority of atheists come from Eastern Asia (China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam). And despite years of secularism or even the chinese cultural revolution…belief in ancestor spirits and other kinds of fluff-talk is very real.…[Read more]

Steve wrote:
Could a ghost be a pattern of energy that does not dissipate fully after the body that held it together ceases to live? Could reincarnation be a pattern of energy that merges with a newer body?

No. There is not even the slightest evidence which demostrates that people have an essence, an immaterial being separate from our physical…[Read more]

There most certainly is a level of evidence that skeptics would accept. Ghosts appearing in public, immune to any attempt to explain them (trickery with light and smoke or holographic technology or some other deception), doing things that are impossible to explain. Behaving in the same predictable way in many different places…all recorded…[Read more]

Simon Paynton wrote:
I just think that insulting someone’s religion can be like insulting their mother: for a lot of people, it’s not nothing.

Yes. For sure. There is nothing virtuous about insulting a religion. However, it isn’t inherently wrong. The  “mother” example is relatable with religion in this sense:

Someone’s mother is spouting raci…[Read more]

re: rights of belief

Cheat sheet:

The four rights (holding beliefs, expressing beliefs, acting on beliefs, imposing beliefs) are separate and are not interchangeable nor does having one right guarantee another right. One of these rights does not exist:

• Right to hold a belief = unquestionable. No one can take that away from you.
• Right to…

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michael17 wrote:
Reg: ”What you are telling me Michael, or at least what I am hearing, is that you believe that it is possible that you will exist in some form in 20 billion years time as an immortal. Is that a correct assessment of your belief?” Science’s answer to the anthropic principle is the Mult-verse which is unfalsiable. I choose God,…

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@Michael

Okay. Thanks for the clarification. I take it then that you use metaphors a lot, which is one way of saying: you don’t really mean a lot of things that you say. It’s difficult to take someone seriously when their text is littered with possible metaphors. I recommend using them VERY sparringly. In my hunble opinion.

@Michael

re: continuous ducking and dodging

Give us the specific NAME, LOCATION and YEAR of someone raised from the dead by the arc of the covenant. Or admit you made an unjustified claim.

Otherwise I will put you on my ignore list (as I’m sure several users have already done).

Michael I asked you to give me specifics, not a link. Name, place and date. As I expected you didn’t deliver. I looked at that page and lo and behold…you’ve wasted my time. I read the link you referenced and NONE of those mentioned the arc of the covenant. I could not have been more clear. I never asked for a list of those raised from the dead.…[Read more]

That is still a long string of words…which do not remotely answer my question. I’ll put it as clearly as I can:

I need a CONCRETE EXAMPLE. Not an explanation, not an anlysis. Give me the NAME and TIME of a specific person who was raised from the dead BECAUSE of the ARC.

michael17 wrote:
living oracles of God
Yikes. they heal the sick, cleanse the leprer and raise the dead Could you give a concrete example of this? Christianity must put up or shut up. Without the day to day events descibed in the Book of acts continuing in the present no church has any legitimacy. The only excuse that I accept is the “body” has…

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