Re: Body of Evidence

Posted by Utahraptor on 11 February 1999 at 08:53:08:

In Reply to: Body of Evidence posted by Gremlin on 11 February 1999 at 04:38:53:

Well, techncially, if you prove YHWH to exist, you prove all other gods null and void, as He proved Himself to be the one true god. And YHWH is the Jewish God, who became the Christian God and subsequently the Catholic God. I'm not sure about Prodestants. I know Allah si basically suppsoed to be YHWH but under another name, and as for Ganeeshu (The Hindu dude, wiht all the arms), thatc na jolyl well be YHWH under anothe rname and ina diff form (and I'll buyt hat voer God amking HUamn in His image, afetr not making so amny creatures, even if just on Earth like Him. As for proof He exists outside of my faith alone, all I have is too may coincendeces hapenign too close togtehr tot hemsleves and in conjunction wiht other fatcs to be nothign mroe than the results of random actions. Soembody somewhere did all this. Or maybe more. Not necessarily God, though,a s any old alien coudl ahev decided to read my thoughts and be nice, or do soem other thigns.
And I think Darth VAder simply forgot where Obe Wan was. I emna, he's in thsi iron lung liek suit, obviously badly damaged. Couldn't hsi brain be damaged as well? And if the Emproer didn't knwo hwere evrybody was, there's a serious alck of info to reteach Vader with.

: There are enough different replies branching out from Reality, on the main board now, that it might be simpler to just post a new thread regarding this, since it's the common denominator.

: With any hypothesis, the burden of proof is going to fall on whomever makes the claim. It's not a matter of current laws, it's simple logic. If I were to claim that I had an Alligator mississippiensis, I'd be expected to prove it, assuming anyone cared either way. If I were to claim that I had a Velociraptor mongoliensis, the same rules would apply. The thing is, I actually have an A.mississippiensis--two, actually. And that's easy enough to prove. And, in various senses, I have a V.mongoliensis. The velo isn't alive, in the strictest sense. I have velos in things I've written, but that doesn't make them real. I have a skeleton, at 1:6 scale, of a velo, but that doesn't make it real. I've had the fossilised leg of a velo in my hand, which nether makes it mine, nor alive. Still, the evidence suggests that the velo was once alive, back in the Maastrichtian epoch of the Cretaceous, because we have fossil evidence supporting the hypothesis.

: When it comes to gods, I've never met anyone who happened to have one handy which they could prove to exist. I've also never seen any fossil evidence to suggest that one ever has. I've seen books in which gods exist, but that's the same as having a velo in a book and trying to claim that it's a real entity. Books are generally fictional accounts. A few are documents of actual events, but without corrosponding evidence from other sources, they're treated as fiction. Titanic, as a film, described the actual event of a ship that sank; the plot was fictional, centring on two characters who never existed.

: What the aggressively religious tend to forget is that it's not up to the rest of us to disprove their claims. If I claim to have a velo, and leave it at that, you'd say 'I'll believe it when I see it'. Or, you'd simply say 'he's mad; he's making this up'. The same goes for an alligator, of course, except that I can effectively prove the existences of Trin and Rex.

: While Trin and Rex exist, I know of no living velos on the planet. If one exists out there, and someone can prove it to me, then things will change. Until then, velos probably existed up until about seventy million years ago, but don't exist anymore. That velos and alligators are related animals is irrelevant to any of this.

: There's a point to this.

: Let's pretend, for the sake of argument, that I were a Here Krishna for a moment. The god Krishna predates the god YHWH. What christians would have me believe is that Krishna, believed to have existed long before YHWH was invented, is a fable, yet the christian god exists because some people got together and put him in a book. That's absurd. That's the same as telling me that Victor Frankenstein, who predates Darth Vader, never existed, but Vader does, because he was mentioned in Star Wars. The reality of it all is that neither Frankenstein nor Vader ever existed, and were merely purported to exist in books, and later in films. Dave Prowse exists; Vader doesn't. George Burns existed; YHWH, outside of the bible, doesn't exist.

: If you want YHWH to exist, there's already a very long line you'll have to step into. Not only have you got to prove that your god is the one true god, and that Krishna and Quetzocoatl and Zeus and Odin and Apollo and all of the other thousands of gods are, in fact, fiction, but you've still got to prove that gods in any form exist at all. Not only is there zero evidence to support the existence of gods at all, there's evidence that, in fact, gods have never existed--and a lot of that evidence comes from exactly the books in which the gods appear.

: That's where most atheists go wrong. They're so busy asking why gods do these things, that they inadvertantly give substance to the myths. Ask any idiot why Vader, who used to be Anakin Skywalker--a slave on Tatooine, wasn't still upset at Jabba the Hutt in The Empire Strikes Back, or why he didn't remember Tatooine as being the home of Kenobi in A New Hope. Some will try to rationalise it all out; others will ask what difference it makes, since it's just a story, and Vader is just a character. You've got to prove that Darth Vader existed before you can start wondering why he did so many dumb things. And you've got to prove that gods existed before you can start questioning their agendas. Until someone can capture one of these gods and prove that it's not just some hoax, everything in the bible, and the torah, and every other book in which a god is a character, the rest of the story is largely irrelevant fiction.

: It's not my responsibility to disprove the existence of gods. It's the godites' to prove that one ever existed at all, let alone still lurks about the cosmos, quietly laughing at the chaos its created.

: --Gremlin



Follow Ups:



209.130.141.132 - 209.130.141.132