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The fact that we held that belief does not necessarily mean it was the best conclusion we could have drawn from the available evidence.


I think a key difference exists between charlatans and religious adherents: the latter believe in the realism of whatever they choose to convey, while the former do not. Dismissing someone as unintelligent simply because they do not believe in the same reality you do seems a bit short-sighted.

(For reference, I'm an agnostic - I really couldn't care less, what you believe in is your business.)

The part you quoted is fine, but the rest of the article is unfortunately just intentional misunderstanding of words, in an attempt to show that atheists (I think he meant scientists) actually believe in the supernatural.

Religion is full of shit. anyway you like it at. End of discussion.

Agree with this very much except for the
atheist = genius, believer = moron part.

It takes a lot of brain power to do some of the mental gymnastics performed by many believers facing a problem.
On the other side, just because you (not you specifically, deepceleron) figured something out all by your wittle self, it doesn't make you Einstein.

People that are raised atheist and think they are smarter than other are especially unlikable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=todimjXi4IM

Just as likely. Is it fake?

This is what a presidential candidate believes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wuuXMaJ4_w&feature=relmfu

True. I just used that example because people can relate to it. It's my understanding that even the Egyptians understood the Earth to be a sphere, and calculated it's approximate size. Still, there is a flat Earth society and apparently some think it's a flat disc today. 
The point is that whatever you or I think may have no relationship to the objective truth. These days it seems like the press and others want to weight all opinions equally. So FOX news says the sky is red, PBS says it's blue, and the big three networks have a special investigation into how purple the sky is.

I'm saying that when we say "we believed the Earth was flat", it sounds like we had a belief that was erroneous. But if you rephrase it as "we believed that the best conclusion we could draw from the evidence that was available to us was that the Earth was flat", it's no longer clear that the belief was erroneous. In fact, that was the best conclusion we could draw from the evidence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_Law_of_Headlines

Nice but how is that related to what i said? rodeox said that we believed the earth is flat but actually only for brief periods of time that was true. For the majority of time we believed it was round.

It is also important not to equate a claim with the proposition claimed.

When someone says, "Your wife is cheating on you", a rational person responds, "why do you say that?" not "that's interesting, you've just stated a logical proposition that might or might not be true". We understand "Your wife is cheating on you" to be a *claim*, not a statement of a logical proposition. The person saying it means, roughly, "I have evidence and/or argument that justifies a belief that your wife is cheating on you".

If I *claim* the Earth is flat, I am saying that based on the evidence and knowledge I have, the conclusion regarding the shape of the Earth that I can best justify is that the Earth is flat. This can be correct even if the Earth is not flat and incorrect even if it is. The correctness of a claim is different from the correctness of the proposition vouched for. (It does implicitly claim the evidence is sufficient to justify the conclusion to a reasonable level of confidence though, and one could argue that this implicit claim was erroneous.)

To be honest, we almost never believed the world was flat. During the classical era greeks even managed to more or less measure the circumference of the earth. And even during middle age almost always we believed the world is round (just look at the Divine Comedy, the world there is depicted as a sphere)

Interest free! 

I think you owe me two and a half hours. It's unfortunate that Tzortzis couldn't hear me calling him an idiot every few minutes. Here are a few observations:

1) A believer in an eternal God denies that anything with an infinite past can exist. Wtf?

2) A believer in an uncaused God argues that nothing can arise without a cause. Wtf?

3) A believer in a God that causes the universe argues that there can only be one God because of Occam's Razor. But the argument works precisely the same with zero Gods.

4) He completely mis-states what a cause is, as if every event has a single cause that makes that event inevitable. This is inconsistent with modern science.

5) He doesn't seem to know what an agnostic is, thinking they are "on the fence".

6) His argument that the "remarkableness" of the Koran suggests it is miraculous is absurd. No matter how many times he says it's "logical", that doesn't make it so. The biggest flaw is that it is impossible to prove that a miracle occurred in the past. To be a miracle, it must be a violation of the normal rules of cause and effect. But to infer anything about the past based solely by looking at the present, we must assume the normal rules of cause and effect hold.

7) His comparison of the Koran to China and reporting is silly. If we had as many inconsistent reports about China as we do about Holy books, we'd legitimately start to wonder if China really exists. One of the reasons I believe China exists is because I don't have equally competent reports saying it's in North America, saying it's in Europe, saying it's mythical, saying it's underwater, and so on.

He loves to list a couple of possibilities including the one he believes and a few silly straw men and then disprove the straw men. He does this too many times for me to list them all. (For example, the Koran must have been written by a human, Mohammed, or God. Why not intelligent aliens? If you think that sounds absurd to you, that God wrote it sounds *much* more absurd to me. This is a form of special pleading.)

9) His arguments are permeated with the error that you can discard incredibly unlikely possibilities. You cannot do so. For example, if I flip 100 coins, whatever outcome I get is incredibly unlikely. If you discard unlikely possibilities, you conclude there is no way I can flip 100 coins. This is obviously incorrect. In fact, incredibly unlikely events happen all the time.

10) His argument that Mohammed can't be deluded because he said some things that people recognize are important is comically absurd. And, again, he ignores much more likely examples that that Mohammed was sent by God, for example, that Mohammed had his mind engineered by intelligent aliens. (I consider God at least as unlikely and absurd as you consider intelligent aliens.)

11) And, of course, every religion can make precisely these same arguments. Any argument that equally supports multiple inconsistent conclusions, cannot be valid.

12) He thinks his arguments are correct unless someone can come up with better arguments for different answers to the same questions. This is silly. "I think Abraham Lincoln had bread for lunch on his 12th birthday because I saw it in a vision. You must accept this unless you can come up with a better argument showing what Abraham Lincoln had for lunch on his 12th birthday."

13) Tzortzis was blatantly dishonest in complaining that Buckner failed to rebut his arguments in his opening. Tozrtzis went first, so he got to make his argument first. This means that when Buckner speaks, he either has to rebut Tzortzis before ever making his own argument (and thus be on defense the whole debate) or largely ignore Tozortzis' arguments (until rebuttal time) and make his own opening (which is what he's supposed to do, it's *his* opening). For Tzortzis to complain that his arguments weren't rebutted *before* *rebuttal* *even* *started* is dishonest and scummy. And as an experienced debater, he had to know what he was doing. (Buckner pointed this out, but it's hard to point out that your opponent is being a rude jerk and should know better.)

14) Other evils don't justify an evil. If religion starts wars, that's an evil of religion, period. It makes no difference what other evils start other wars. A rapist doesn't defend himself by pointing out that there are murderers out here.

15) Tzortzis doesn't seem to understand how you show an argument is inconsistent. When Buckner presents an argument, "You believe X, that leads to Y, which leads to Z, which is false", he responds, "You can't make that argument because you don't believe X". Wtf? (For example, that the problem of evil is a problem for atheists. No, no problem for atheists at all.)

16) Tzortzis is a very good debater and very adept at making the weaker argument appear the stronger. Buckner's refusal to be dishonest (and inability to achieve what he needs to achieve honestly) hurts him a lot. It's a skill he just doesn't have, but in fairness, it's very hard to debate someone who argues the way Tzortzis does. (Look how poorly he pointed out Tzortzis' cheating in 13 above.)

Tzortzis won the debate. Buckner needs to learn how to counter that style of debating better. (It's very, very hard.)

Anyone that says they or someone they know has talked to god, or brings me a book that they or someone else wrote that purports to be a message from a deity in the sky is indistinguishable from a genuine kook or fraud artist. I went to church, but an unfortunate DNA lottery gifted me with intelligence and analytical thought, and I quickly dismissed religion before reaching puberty as just a long series of fairy tales made for dough-minded individuals like in the first poster's video. Religious people comparing fine points of religions like this generally can't see beyond the preposterousness of the whole thing. Religion's highest virtue and value is of course "Faith" or "Belief" in something inherently illogical.

Believe in whatever you want though and we can still be friends, unless your religion involves interrupting my dinner, blowing me up, or abridging my freedom or the freedom for other individuals to believe what they want or live a verdant equitable life. If so, then we have a problem. That's my version of atheism, but of course I don't care if it's yours.

It's undeniable proof!

All hail FSM, creator of potholes to fit the shape of water!

Hey, the water inside that pothole is the same shape as the pothole! Therefore, the pothole was created by the FSM for the water!

yeah, that one was not really a conversion. I think I did see one where he "converted" a Muslim. To me all of them are about the conversion of a minor actor into a fringe element con-man.
Look at his partner Ray Comfort. Funny stuff watching him struggle with reason. Like his assertion that bananas could only have been made by a creator to fit so perfectly into your hand. Funny thing is he's right. Modern bananas were created to fit in your hand by people.

Found it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6F-8tzjAu8

The actor is Kirk Cameron

Remember when the world was flat because we all "believed" it? 

By the way, this is not a Muslim thing. I think he is copying this from a Christian show I have seen on TV. It's by some washed-up child actor who goes around "converting" people on the street. He asks a dimwit some leading questions that prove you are really a Christian.