God Who Cares? (Atheist) - DeYtH Banger, VeNgeR GrEenTag (feel good books .txt) 📗

from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose. The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood clotted cowskin."

- John W. Loftus



"This simply cannot be true given evolution as a scientific fact. There are precursors of our own reasoning abilities found in animals. There is morality, consciousness, tool-making, learning, problem-solving, community, and communication.[24] At some point human beings could comprehend that an A(pple) is an A(pple) and not an O(range), so A=A and A≠O. They also comprehended something we must all do to stay alive.

   
    1.  If we want to stay alive then we must eat.

   2.   We want to stay alive.

    3.  Therefore we must eat."



- John W. Loftus



"The brains of dogs, donkeys, and dolphins work to help them survive. The brains of chimps, chicks, and chipmunks help them survive. The brains of pigs, porcupines, and platypuses help them survive. If their brains had not evolved as they did, then they wouldn’t have survived. Why then is it different with human beings."

- John W. Loftus



"The brains of dogs, donkeys, and dolphins work to help them survive. The brains of chimps, chicks, and chipmunks help them survive. The brains of pigs, porcupines, and platypuses help them survive. If their brains had not evolved as they did, then they wouldn’t have survived. Why then is it different with human beings."

- John W. Loftus



"Christians have their own difficulties when justifying reason. Nominalists, following William of Ockham (1288–1348), argue that God does not have a nature, and as such, he does not have the property (or attribute) of reason. They argue that a full-blown concept of God is one in which he created reason; otherwise where did it come from? The alternative that he must obey the dictates of reason implies that reason itself is independent of God; and if that’s the case, we don’t need God to justify reason. So whence comes reason on Christian grounds."

- John W. Loftus



"How does Randal propose we know something if it isn’t useful to us and discovered by trial and error? Surely he understands the difficulties with the correspondence and coherence theories of truth given that we don’t have access to the thing-in-itself, as Immanuel Kant successfully argued. We’re not talking in terms of ontology—about that which exists. Instead, we’re always talking in terms of epistemology, that is, how we can know it. Pragmatism works despite the fact that Randal doesn’t like the conclusion."

- John W. Loftus



"Adaptive beliefs are the ones that are useful for our survival. The rest of our beliefs, no matter how many of them we have, are either irrelevant to our survival or detrimental to it. I think religious beliefs are largely detrimental to our survival as a species in a world with weapons of mass destruction."

- John W. Loftus



"As I said earlier, a religion should be judged based on how it treats the defenseless. Women have largely been defenseless in a male-dominated society stemming in the West from what we
find in the Bible. Given the cruelty toward women that we see there and acted out in history, all civilized people should reject Christianity as nothing but a religion created in a barbaric, sexist era. While there are a few positive female role models and pro-women statements in the Bible, overall it is anti-women. These texts need to be explained, not explained away.

    A man was created first, not a woman, so Paul argued that men alone are created in the image of God (1 Cor. 11:3–9). The woman was merely created to be a man’s helper (Gen. 2:18–24). Women are considered the easily deceived weaker sex who can mislead men just as Eve misled Adam (1 Cor. 11:3; 1 Pet. 3:7). That’s why God said men will rule (or domineer) over them (Gen. 3:16). That’s why Paul told women to keep silent in his churches (1 Cor. 14:34–35; see also 1 Tim. 2:11
14). That’s also why women are to be subject to their husbands “in everything” (Eph. 5:24).

    In fact, as biblical scholar Michael Coogan argues, “Husbands and fathers had virtually absolute control over their wives and daughters.”[26] Sarah called her husband “lord” (Gen. 18:12) and “obeyed” him (1 Pet. 3:6; see vv. 1–6). These things reflect the status of a wife, writes Coogan, for “she was under her husband’s rule, she was his property."



- John W. Loftus



"The really horrific stuff is how Yahweh treated his unfaithful wife, Israel. Biblical scholar Susanne Scholz informs us, “God turns out to be a rapist.”[31] His wife is described as whoring after other lovers, so in return Yahweh sexually violates her and says she is to be blamed for her punishment. Biblical scholar J. Cheryl Exum translates Isaiah 3:17 like this: “The Lord will make bald the heads of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will bare their cunts.”[32] In Jeremiah 13:22–26 Yahweh announces the rape of Jerusalem, and then he does this with “the obscene practice of exposing women by drawing their legs over their heads in order to uncover their vulvas completely.”[33]

    Yahweh punished his unfaithful wives like this, both Samaria and Jerusalem. (Yes, Yahweh was a polygamist!) The prophets Hosea (chapter 2), Jeremiah (chapter 13), and Ezekiel (chapters 16 and 23) tell us…"



- John W. Loftus



"They simply turn a deaf ear to the majority voices, something I call cherry-picking. Do Christians really think that a God who could threaten to kill off all the Israelites for disobedience could not have enforced a decent, civilized attitude toward women? Their delusion is probably never seen more than here."

- John W. Loftus



"While there are a few positive things said about animals in the Bible, over all it is uncaring and oblivious toward the pain and suffering we know that sentient animals experience. These texts need to be explained, not explained away.

    After creating the world, God declared it all “good.” Good for whom? Good for what purpose? To humans alone was given the right to “subdue” and have “dominion” over every living thing (Gen. 1:28 RSV). When we look at these Hebrew words, subdue literally means “to trample upon” (see Esther 7:8; Jer. 34:11; Zech. 9:15). The word dominion means to “master” over someone, especially when he or she refuses to be subdued (the same Hebrew word is used to describe ruling over slaves in 1 Kings 9:23 and Isa. 14:2)."


- John W. Loftus


"My claim is that we do not see much of a concern for animals in the Bible. It truly is anthropocentric to the core. And as such, it’s not indicative at all of what a perfectly good God would reveal to us. If God was truly concerned for the welfare of animals, he would have consistently said, “Thou shalt not mistreat or abuse animals.” Then Western Christianized people could not justify the ill treatment of them down through the centuries.

    God simply should not have created predation in the natural world; he should have made us all vegetarians or vegans. The amount of creaturely suffering in this world is atrocious as animals prey on one another to feed themselves, including humans feeding on animals."

- John W. Loftus



"There are some things I know without much doubt at all. The most certain thing I know is the cogito of René Descartes: “I think therefore I am.” Could I be wrong and not really exist? I doubt it. And as long as I doubt it there is someone doing the doubting—me. There are other things I know; for instance, I know I’m typing these words and drinking some coffee while I do. (Ahhh, that tasted good.) I have no reason at all to doubt my senses and the
personal experiences I’m presently having. They are incorrigible to me. Do I have faith that my coffee tastes good? No, I personally sense that it tastes good. There are other things I know without too much doubt—things too many to even list—and they are all based on solid empirical evidence along with good reasons for thinking them to be so. The more evidence and reasons there are for what I think is the case, then the more I can claim them to be the case.

    When it comes to faith, there are at least two ways to understand it. First, faith as hopeful, wishful thinking, motivates us to achieve great things. It helps us win the love and affection of a lover, a sports contest, or an important award. Sometimes we must maintain it in the face of all odds; otherwise we may quit trying. This kind of faith is like a self-fulfilling prophecy. But it cannot make something come true that doesn’t involve our actions."


- John W. Loftus



"There are some things I know without much doubt at all. The most certain thing I know is the cogito of René Descartes: “I think therefore I am.” Could I be wrong and not really exist? I doubt it. And as long as I doubt it there is someone doing the doubting—me. There are other things I know; for instance, I know I’m typing these words and drinking some coffee while I do. (Ahhh, that tasted good.) I have no reason at all to doubt my senses and the
Faith will not change these kind of facts. So when faith is used to make facts true that it cannot make true, I think faith is pretty much irrational. Wishful thinking about facts we cannot make true is not what thinking adults should do.

    Faith in the second sense is always a leap beyond the probabilities, for if something is highly probable then I don’t believe it to be true. I know it to be true by the degree of probability it has. We need to think exclusively in terms of probabilities and not try to add faith to them since faith doesn’t add anything at all. If we did this, all that would matter would be the probabilities. There would be no need for faith. Faith in this sense means someone is accepting an improbable conclusion."

- John W. Loftus



"Psychology professor James Alcock defines faith-based reasoning as “belief in search of data.” Full stop. Think about the implications of this and you’ll realize that we must cultivate doubt not faith. Doubt is, after all, the adult attitude.

    Evolutionary psychologist Jesse Bering calls belief “an instinct” in that “we have a cognitive bias to see intentions in inanimate objects.”[56] Pascal Boyer, professor of collective and individual memory, argues that we are “agency detectors” just like our animal predecessors who thought they saw agents, or predators, in the rustling leaves.[57] Agency detecting produced many more false alarms than actual threats to their lives, but because they had that instinct, they survived. Human beings also see agents in inanimate objects."

- John W. Loftus



"…concluded there were supernatural agent(s) above the clouds who were angry. They saw it in bumper crops and wives who gave birth to baby boys and concluded there were supernatural agent(s) who were pleased. Believers today still cannot bring themselves to think the universe was not created by a supernatural agent precisely because they still are agency detectors. This is the problem to overcome…"

- John W. Loftus



"We need only look to the alternative proposition that people are within their epistemic rights to believe without sufficient evidence in any other area. That’s a recipe for disaster, and Randal knows this."

- John W. Loftus




"…their particular trinitarian, incarnational, resurrection faith in the back door? Mormons and Muslims do the same thing…"

- John W. Loftus



"Given cognitive faculties that are functioning properly, our senses are more than adequate to draw reasonable. conclusions about our experiences. Look at the lengths Randal must go in order to slip his God through the cracks. No wonder I think he’s deluded. Faith is an irrational