Taking Questions on Embedded Age Creation

[AV1611VET]

Plenty of people have shown that they are willing to die for Islamic beliefs.

Did any of them die, knowing their claim was false?

 

[dlamberth]

Even moreso is how it was moved and was changed over time.

Agreed. Some of what's coming to light is how the clockwise motion of the Northwest is about 1 degree every million years. And how that's had a direct affect over the past 50 million years on the Yellowstone Hotspot track as the continent moved over it. And at the same time period we have magma from a seduction arc from the Farallon plate bubbling to the surface which birthed the Cascade Mountains. Mt. St. Helens as an example.

 

[dlamberth]

Plenty of people have shown that they are willing to die for Islamic beliefs.

Many American Indians are another example of a people who died for their beliefs.

 

[Fervent]

Plenty of people have shown that they are willing to die for Islamic beliefs.

What does that have to do with explaining the origins of the beliefs?

 

[BCP1928]

12. What literary device reconciles Genesis 1 and Genesis 2?

(I'll answer this in my next post.)

First tell us why they need reconciling?

 

[Kylie]

Did any of them die, knowing their claim was false?

No, they all believed they were right.

What's your point?

 

[Kylie]

What does that have to do with explaining the origins of the beliefs?

You'll have to tell me.

You are the one who said that Jesus having followers who were willing to die for their beleifs was important.

I'm just pointing out that Islam has the same thing, when you specifically left out that fact and said that Islam spread through nothing but violence, presenting the impression that all Muslims were forced into it.

Careful, your bias is showing.

 

[AV1611VET]

Agreed. Some of what's coming to light is how the clockwise motion of the Northwest is about 1 degree every million years.

pffft

That impresses you?

Watch this:

2 Kings 20:11 And Isaiah the prophet cried unto the LORD: and he brought the shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz.

 

[AV1611VET]

Many American Indians are another example of a people who died for their beliefs.

Knowing those beliefs were wrong?

 

[Kylie]

Agreed. Some of what's coming to light is how the clockwise motion of the Northwest is about 1 degree every million years.

pffft

That impresses you?

Watch this:

2 Kings 20:11 And Isaiah the prophet cried unto the LORD: and he brought the shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz.

I wonder, which one of these has evidence to show that it actually happened?

 

[AV1611VET]

First tell us why they need reconciling?

Because academia got their fingers into it and created their usual rifts.

 

[2PhiloVoid]

Are you not trying to shift the burden onto my shoulders?

Shifting? No. I am clarifying the responsibility that is inherently incumbent on anyone who wishes to press others about the nature of "evidence." Remember, I have two degrees and while you might be able to contend about this with some of the other Christians here, you won't with me. Period.

QvQ made a claim, they must support it. You're efforts to wriggle out of it on their behalf are indeed a childish tactic.

No one at the university level will agree with you, Kylie. What's more, no one at the university level will rely upon mere dictionary definitions for discussion involving academic and/or scholarly issues, such as those of Science or Historiography/History, or even World Religions or the Philosophy of Religion.

So, it's just sort of time for you to tow the line for the sake of intellectual fairness. I'm sorry I have to be the one to break the news to you about this. If you can't adjust to, and abide by, what I'm suggesting you abide by, then you incline me to think that you're either trolling us or you have some personal issues with Christianity that none of us is responsible to alleviate for you.

Besides, you're always complaining that you want Christians to leave you alone, yet here you are............on CF of all things for over a decade. I'd call that dedication.

 

[AV1611VET]

No, they all believed they were right.

What's your point?

From AI Overview:

According to most perspectives, it is highly unlikely that someone would willingly die for something they knew to be a lie; the very concept of "knowing it's a lie" implies a conscious understanding that it is false, making it improbable to sacrifice one's life for it; however, people might die defending beliefs they strongly hold, even if those beliefs are based on misinformation or propaganda, as they may genuinely believe them to be true.

 

[AV1611VET]

You are the one who said that Jesus having followers who were willing to die for their beleifs was important.

I'm just pointing out that Islam has the same thing,

Negative.

Jesus performed miracles in front of His followers at will.

Mohammad?

No.

 

[AV1611VET]

I wonder, which one of these has evidence to show that it actually happened?

Dlamberth.

On paper.

What's your point?

 

[BCP1928]

No, they all believed they were right.

What's your point?

The trouble is, you have touched on a very sensitive point for fundamentalists, and it's not about the existence of God or the truth of the resurrection. There is no clear reason to suppose that the companions of Christ understood, in the immediate aftermath of what they took to be the resurrection, what it all meant theologically. Even the first recorded statement of what became known as the Atonement may not have been formulated until it appeared in Paul's epistle 30 years later. And that only weakly supports the specific theory of the Atonement being pushed by today's fundamentalists as essential to the faith, which in any case is not quite the same as that attributed by many scholars to the early church. As late as the third century Augustine was still struggling to give Apostolic authority to the doctrine of Original Sin on which it depends. You can be sure that if the least scrap of evidence of the kind you are asking for existed anywhere it would be speedily produced.

 

[2PhiloVoid]

The trouble is, you have touched on a very sensitive point for fundamentalists, and it's not about the existence of God or the truth of the resurrection. There is no clear reason to suppose that the companions of Christ understood, in the immediate aftermath of what they took to be the resurrection, what it all meant theologically. Even the first recorded statement of what became known as the Atonement may not have been formulated until it appeared in Paul's epistle 30 years later. And that only weakly supports the specific theory of the Atonement being pushed by today's fundamentalists as essential to the faith, which in any case is not quite the same as that attributed by many scholars to the early church. As late as the third century Augustine was still struggling to give Apostolic authority to the doctrine of Original Sin. You can be sure that if the least scrap of evidence of the kind you are asking for existed anywhere it would be speedily produced.

No clear reason? Even if it's historically of secondary nature, there is reason enough to think many early disciples of Jesus understood the essentials of "what it all meant theologically," BCP.

Let's not undersell what more than likely can be reasonably surmised.

 

[BCP1928]

No clear reason? Even if it's historically of secondary nature, there is reason enough to think many early disciples of Jesus understood the essentials of "what it all meant theologically," BCP.

Let's not undersell what more than likely can be reasonably surmised.

Surmise all you like, but it is telling that Traditional Christians still regard the nature of the Atonement as a Mystery.

 

[Fervent]

Are we not discussing objective truths about reality?

In a sense, but you're speaking about consensus agreements. As a philosophical skeptic, I don't believe objective truth is attainable from the ground up. All we can do is come to an agreed upon lie.

I mean, good luck trying to argue that the speed of light in a vacuum is not an objective truth. If you want to claim that what we're discussing here is fundamentally different, you'd have to be saying that the existence of God is not objectively true.

Now you are trying to shift the goalposts.

We are discussing whether a particular religious belief and the claims it makes are objectively true.

Sure, but worldviews change how the debate is seen.

But hey, if you want to admit that some religious belief is not factual, then we can stop right now, because I'll happily agree that any religious belief you can name is not factual.

I only know of two things I believe to be facts. Everything else is conjecture.

Lots of different things, you'd have to ask each individual skeptic, and it would be different for each one.

Do you think skepticism is a unified worldview like it's a religion or something? It's not.

I think there's a unified worldview among religious skeptics, perpetuated by biased perceptions like "they are all the same, we are all different" and the like

Ah, so now, finally, you decide to limit your definition of "skeptic" to one particular kind of skeptic.

Is any other kind relevant?

Would have been nice if you were clear about that from the start. You were not. You just said, "no amount of evidence will convince someone who is determined to be skeptical."

Yeah, and religious skeptics are determined to be skeprical about religious claims.

In any case, what I said still holds. I claimed that the skeptics you were describing were contrarians who would reject any knowledge statment. And indeed, there are sources that describe "philosophical skepticism" as "radical doubt." SOURCE

Not quite, but sort of. It's not about being contrarian, though. It's about not wanting to believe anything that isn't warranted, and then despairing the conundrum of having to make assumptions to begin searching for knowledge.

Really? From my point of view it looks like you are taking one narrow subset of skepticism and using that to describe ANYONE who claims to be a skeptic.

Not at all, I'm taking "skeptic" at face value, and pointing out that metaphysical naturalist is a better fit for most self-proclaimed skeptics, and they rarely engage in skepticism towards their own metaphysics.

I certainly wouldn't describe myself as a philosophical skeptic, more a "common sense skeptic." THIS is what best describes me, yet you are determined to portray all skeptics as THIS.

Half-hearted skeptic is what I'd call you, because "common sense" is highly subjective.

Do they also doubt that philosophical skepticism is valid?

In a way, philosophical skeptics are uncertain of the validity of Munchaussen's trilemma, but that doubt heightens their skepticism rather than diminishes it.

Yet that doesn't stop you from trying to portray all skeptics as holding a rather extreme version of skepticism.

I recognize that most self-proclaimed skeptics are selective about their skepticism, it's kind of my point.

It's worked just fine so far. Witness the device you are currently reading this reply on, which relies on reality working in a consistent way.

Regularity is sufficient to explain such success, no need for it to be entirely consistent.

No.

I've confined what I'll accept as true to that which can be tested in a repeatable way.

WHich is an unfalsifiable belief. How did you determine that leads to truth?

Can you give me any good reason why I should accept something as true if it is NOT testable in a repeatable way?

That's not how justification works. It's your belief, so it's up to you to justify it. Otherwise you've accepted something that is not testable as true. So how do you test that belief?

So you claim. But other people have made different claims about the nature of God.

I'm not interested in defending other people's conceptions of God. Blind men all describe an elephant differently, but if the variety of descriptions doesn't mean that the elephant doesn't exist.

How do I know which to believe? Is your claim correct, or is the correct claim one of the countless others made about the nature of God?

That's a decent question, but let's get your epistemics sorted before we start trying to justify things.

Gee, sure would be good if there was some system of investigation which we could use to TEST the validity of claims, wouldn't it?

You're using circular reasoning.

Okay, so an atheist has a completely different view of how reality works than a Christian.

Tell me, how does this difference manifest? I mean, does a Christian who is investigating reality use their religious beliefs instead of the scientific method? Do they get a different set of results? Do their different results work in a consistent way?

That's going to vary from person to person. For me, I take both the Biblical account and the scientific account as models, rather than generating independent truth.

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So, when it comes to the sensible and realistic results of these different viewpoints, they don't matter.

They very much do, because it alters how the information is interpreted. They may not matter when we're talking purely about what the scientific method indicates, but they matter for things that science can't touch like morals meaning and purpose

Then what difference does it actually make?

an eternal one.

It's like the guy who thinks that all of reality is a computer simulation but he continues to live his life as though it's real, and NOT a simulation.

not quite.

No argument was presented. It was nothing more than a claim. "Such and such dates from this particular time." No argument, evidence, or reason was given as to HOW this determination was made, it was simply presented as a statement of fact.

Ah...well then that's not a very good source. The dating of the new testament is a thorn-field that is largely speculative, and tends to break down across presuppositional lines.

 

[2PhiloVoid]

Surmise all you like, but it is telling that Traditional Christians still regard the nature of the Atonement as a Mystery.

Despite what some modern Traditional Christians may think today, this doesn't explain why the earliest Christians were willing to die for Christ if they didn't really understand what it was they were to die for at the hands of the Romans.