My latest infatuation with logic.

[Squeek]

Since you're away for several hours, let me sum up a lot of key points I think you may have overlooked.

1)

Originally Posted by afro

My point still stands that you're taking God as a given. By taking that as a given, you're starting with a leap of faith and attempting to build logic around it. That's not bad in and of itself, but to claim that the entire thing is logical for that is wrong. You started with a seed of faith, but you overlooked that somewhere along the way.

I want to elaborate on this, because it's one of the things that makes trying to prove "God" so ass-backwards. In science, we begin with formulating a hypothesis as to how something works, and then we do thousands of tests to try to confirm it, and then if it gets confirmed we call it a theory until someone can disprove it or someone can tell us it's true always and forever.

In religious science, you begin with the 'facts' and work your way backwards. However, instead of applying thousands of tests, you apply slippery-slope logic that makes assumption after assumption to "PROVE" that God exists.

2) I think Reach went into far too great of an explanation when it comes to pretty pictures and music benefiting our survival.

First of all (and this is going to be a huuuuuuuuge assumption), let's assume that not every culture on Earth speaks English. I know, it's a leap of faith, but bear with me for a second. Now, let's assume other cultures actually want to communicate with each other. Hmm. They don't all speak English! How do they communicate with each other? Oh.

Another way to look at this is to understand that cultures tend to look at their culture and think it is great and worth passing on. Clearly worked for the Renaissance folks, since everything they painted has been idolized to this very day.

Pictures are a way of passing on your culture long after it has been destroyed, or communicating with people you have no hope to communicate with. You can describe with thousands of words what you're trying to describe, but since our cultures are so vastly different, we will probably not pick up on what exactly you mean by bright multicolored round disappearing object, even if we do understand the translation, whereas drawing a simple little circle in the sky with small lines coming out from it clearly shows you mean the Sun.

3)

Originally Posted by windsurfer

If you can go through and show the illogically of what the religion preaches, the fruit of the religion then I don't see how it is too hard to discern either way. Judge things by their fruits. Judge the validity of what the religion says.

I can see what you are saying. [Generic statement without a given basis] But logically looking through some of the evidence for and against the major religions of the world and Christianity certainly stands up to the test. [/] But religion will never be agreed on by logic alone.

First of all, I did judge Christianity and I deemed it illogical. So many things in Christianity don't make sense, and when I asked a priest / youth group leader, they told me that "god works in mysterious ways" and "you just have to have faith".

That wasn't good enough for me. And clearly, it's not good enough for you if you're reading apologetics.

How can Jesus be his own father? If Jesus and God are the same person, why does Jesus ask God for forgiveness? If Jesus is his own father, then does that mean he committed a sin by impregnating his mother with himself?

You don't have to answer any of that, because I'm sure you can come up with some convoluted answer to all of it. That's not the point I'm trying to make here. The point is that none of it makes sense, and it's not supposed to. Trying to explain miracles takes away the fact that it's supposed to be a miracle. This same phenomenon happened on the anti-Bible episode of Bullshit. A guy tries to explain how Moses could have parted the Red Sea by stating that they probably crossed the Reed Sea during low tide. But that removes the fact that it was a miracle!

When you remove miracles from religion, then it's no longer a faith. Just stop trying to prove that God exists and take everything at face value.

But since that won't work, please post these "proofs" of Christianity. Not just the Big Bang one either, though that was fun to debunk. I sincerely hope there's more than just "we don't know so God did it" in all of them. And I sincerely hope none of them are as dumb as the only other one I've heard, which is that the Great Flood carved the Grand Canyon.