mererdog

No. I was answering a logic problem. Making excuses would require making a lot of value judgements that I am not making.

Who asked you to?

An obvious answer is that humans change. A parent treats a child differently when it becomes an adult. Not because the parent is different, but because the child is. Make sense? A more commonly cited explanation is that God has been working a long term plan, and we have simply moved into a new phase of it.

To legislislate religious education is to legislate religious practice. To credential religious education is to establish religious standards. These things are unconstitutional government acts in the US.

The same differences of opinion about what is a real degree exist about what is a real ordination. The whole "the authority I recognise is the only real authority" notion is extremely prevalent....

That is the primary belief of the ULC. If you do not agree, why are you here?

Its an amazingly weak argument. They may as well just shout "I don't like it! Make it go away!"

I know only what he said. It wasn't said as part of a joke. It is possible he was lying. But he is very famous and very controversial and that attracts the crazy. It seems reasonable to take him at his word. But tying back in to my earlier point about trolls... I want to point out that you shouldn't necessarily trust the person sending the anonymous threat to describe themself honestly.

I am a big fan of Katt Williams' stand-up. A few days ago, I was watching one of his specials, and he started badmouthing atheists. He literally called us stupid. I not only didn't get upset, I never stopped laughing.There are a couple of reasons I cut him so much slack on this... First, all his negative talk about atheists came in the context of responses to negative talk from atheists. Getting called stupid for believing prompted him to call me stupid for not believing. That makes it an unartful defensive response, rather than a malicious attack, at least in my view. Mostly, however, I cut him slack because he states that he gets death threats from atheists. While it is unfair to blame all atheists for that, it is also human nature. I can't expect people to react rationally to something as emotionally charged as a death threat...

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2017/04/explaining_science_won_t_fix_information_illiteracy.html

To be even more fair, there is no real way to know who is a believer and who is just playing the part to troll nonbelievers.

From what I see, the stones seem to espouse a secular agenda, and to be silent on the subject of religion. Doesn't really seem much different than the Statue of Liberty, as far as that goes...

Correction: No one you have met has described themself that way to you. But does it always come up? I said there were many because I know more than a few. There are even atheists who believe in faeries, although I've only met a few of those....

And, oddly enough, the same is true of many Jews.

Many atheists believe in life after death. Some believe in reincarnation, some just believe in a sort of vague "there must be something."

Nope. It is about how the person sees the claim. The proof is simple. Take the same person and make the same claim, just with different timing. Often, what was extraordinary is now ordinary. Why? Perspectives shift over time, making claims seem different to us.

The core problem is treating opinion as fact. It isn't the words you are choosing, but the ideas you are expressing. Paraphrased: It looks different, therefore it is different and should be treated as such. The whole "extraordinary claims" thing is just special pleading. Of course claims that seem stupid to you will be harder to prove to you. But the important words there are "seem" and "to you". Because it isn't really about the claim, just how the claim seems to you.

All belief works that way. If you were raised differently enough, with a different enough psychological makeup, you would interpret all evidence differently. Proof of a round Earth becomes proof of a conspiracy, you know?

No. I am saying that "stupid" and "crazy" are just insults, and reflect opinion rather than fact. They indicate prejudice, not proof.

Two people who believe different things to be true will call different things facts and call different things knowledge. You can't talk about facts or knowledge without simultaneously expressing your beliefs.

I believe that belief is mostly the end result of processes that occur on a subconscious level. For the most part, we are not really aware of what we believe and we rarely know why we believe what we believe. I believe belief is binary, and it is confidence that comes in levels. This may be hair-splitting, but it is a distinction I think merits attention.

Oh. So there is no burden of proof unless you doubt you are right? So Christians have no burden of proof when it comes to the claims they make about the existence of God. They can simply label the claims "self-evident", safely implying that lack of agreement can only be caused by some sort of a character flaw in the people hearing the claims. Good to know... I certainly don't want to mess around proving my claims if I can just make up some implicit ad hominem...

One set of claims you made in this topic: "In general, small claims require small proofs. Big claims require big proofs. Huge claims require huge proofs." You have offered zero proof for any of these claims.

Ad hominem does not prove your claim.

No fair pointing out the punchlines...