Good Reason News: No! You Prove It →

testedspirit:

I have posted before how God has blatantly answered prayer in my life including the fact I should not be alive today except for the prayers of others when I was too sick to care if I lived or died. Of course according to unbelievers that is no proof. I have concluded that most atheists would not believe proof of God if it bit them on the backside. Oh, I forgot. Without God all truth and morality is relative.

Sounds to me like all you did was get sick, pray and eventually get better. You know that correlation doesn’t equal causation right? It’s like if I said that keeping an American flag flying on my house keeps tigers away. I mean, after all, there’s a flag and there ain’t no tigers! That’s called confirmation bias and it’s not proof. It’s superstition. Like lucky socks, and like lucky socks, it stinks. How do you know you didn’t just get better? Human bodies are remarkably good at repairing themselves. How do you know it was god that intervened in your disease and not just a functioning immune system or medical intervention or some environmental influence or Satan or Jupiter or Zoroaster? And even if you rule all that out, of course, it doesn’t matter because proving that medicine wasn’t what helped you, doesn’t mean a god did. It just means the medicine didn’t. Your flaw is a mix of argument from ignorance (if not god then what else?!) argument from personal experience (it happened to me! Just blindly trust that I had a supernatural experience!) and confirmation bias (the thing that happened is the thing I wanted to have happened so I obviously made it happen!)

How’s that for a bite on the backside?

No! You Prove It

testedspirit:

I am sick and tired of atheists demanding that I prove to them there is a God.

Too bad, the burden of proof for anything is on the person making the claim. You say “there’s a god,” I say “nu-uh, prove it.” You can’t just say “prove there’s not!” That’s like if I said Leprechauns must be real because you haven’t proven that they’re not real.  

People have been worshipping God for thousands of years.

The length of time in which people believe a claim has no impact on the truth value of that claim. People believed that the Sun revolved around the earth for thousands of years too. People believed (and many still do) that their personal social interactions could result in particular weather events. Of course, none of it is true or reasonable.

In all that time science has never proven there is no God.

We’ve been over this, but just to expand on it: Science (which is not a belief system, but a formula for understanding the natural world) never proves there is no anything. That’s not the job of science. Science helps us understand the natural world, not investigate the basis of fairy tales.

So prove it if you are going to insist there is no God.

Oh, well, atheists don’t actually insist there’s no god, so you might not have any clue what you’re even talking about. Atheists simply admit that there’s no good reason to believe a god exists, just like there’s no good reason to believe Leprechauns exist. That’s not to say those things aren’t there, but I don’t accept claims for which there is no good evidence. Can you give me one piece of good, solid evidence? Give me your best reason to believe that the claim that a god exists is true.

Scientology’s worst enemy

thegodlessatheist:

Already plagued by scandal, the church is getting punched in the gut with another harrowing exposé — this time, by the niece of its leader, David Miscavige

At the age of 6, most kids are learning their numbers and playing with blocks. According to Jenna Miscavige Hill, she was hauling rocks on a chain gang in the desert.

“We would get the rocks out of a running creek,” says the slight, 29-year-old blonde. “And it was freezing cold. A lot of times our uniforms didn’t fit us, because we were growing kids, so we’d be wearing shorts in the winter. We’d have to go into the creek bed and pick up the rocks. We’d either have a chain where we would pass them to another kid, or we’d just carry them all the way up, and we would make rock walls.”

Hill is the niece of David Miscavige, the current leader of the Church of Scientology. Her parents, Ron and Blythe Miscavige, were officials in the prestigious Sea Organization, which required its members to work 14-hour days, and Hill and her brother largely grew up in the care of church members at a desert school for high-ranking Scientologists’ kids in San Jacinto, Calif., known as the Ranch.

A Scientologist until her early 20s, Hill is now releasing a memoir, “Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape,” which chronicles her “education” inside the L. Ron Hubbard-founded organization many have described as a cult. The Post spoke with Hill about the book and her memories of the bizarre experiences she had being raised as a Scientologist — starting with signing a billion-year contract with the Sea Org at the age of 7 — and her eventual decision to leave and help others do the same.

“At the age of 10, I was the medical liaison,” Hill says. “Every morning, I would have to go around to all the kids at the Ranch and say, ‘Do you have any sickness?’ And I’d make a list of yeses and nos. I would make vitamin packages for everyone for every meal, and make this Cal-Mag [calcium and magnesium] drink that Hubbard invented.

“It doesn’t taste good,” she adds. “It tastes like feet.”

If a child flunked daily room inspection, he or she would receive a “chit.” On the third chit, she says, “you can’t go to sleep until you pass a white-glove inspection. On the fifth, you get assigned to ‘Pigs Berthing,’ a run-down room with a mattress on the floor. There weren’t any lights, so you had to use a flashlight. And there were bats in there. My friend got sent — she was about thirteen.”

One of the steps of Scientology, Hill says, was purifying the body from supposed toxins. As Hubbard had taught that drugs clouded the mind and prevented it from attaining clarity, even children had to be detoxed. Because Hill had taken Tylenol while in the hospital when she was little, and had Novocaine at the dentist, she was sent to Purification.

Evangelism’s secret history of racial discrimination - Salon.com →

[W]hat galvanized the Christian community was not abortion, school prayer, or the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment]. I am living witness to that because I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed.

What changed their minds was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation. In other words, as Randall Balmer has succinctly put it: “the religious right of the late twentieth century organized to perpetuate racial discrimination.”

Salon shows the history of how the political arm of Evangelical Christianity, as you might have suspected, is nothing but a veil for racists to try to push segregation and keep minorities oppressed.

ATTN: People calling themselves “Pro-Life”

You’re not pro-life, you’re pro-controlling other people’s lives. Give up the ghost, the position you advocate is a form of fascism and it’s been dead for years. It ain’t coming back either. If you don’t like abortion, you feel there’s something morally wrong with it, (but you somehow see no moral problems in strong-arming someone who’s situation you can’t possibly empathize with because you’re over-privileged) then the only thing you can do is fight the causes of unwanted pregnancy. That means supporting female empowerment, fighting to get comprehensive sex education in public schools, making birth control available and easily accessible to everyone.

samanthaajam:

“Until the day that we die, no person, creationist or evolutionist

can prove the origin of our existence.

Maybe God didn’t want there to be proof.

Scientists may have theories and data but the one thing Christians have that evolutionists can’t touch is faith.

And for me, I’d rather live my life with something to look forward to and receive nothing than to live my whole life with nothing to live for and there actually be something.”