dr_coatlicue
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[I wrote this up with the consideration of showing it elsewhere, so I'm avoiding Satan-focused points, and I'm writing "xian" as "Christian". Please bear with it.]
Tonight, I attended an interactive presentation held by Christian "activist" (I'm pretty sure he counts as such) Frank Turek. The presentation is titled after his corresponding book and TV series of the same name, "I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist". Due to time constraints, he only covered about half of the material in his book. The issues addressed were "What is Truth?" and "What is God?".
He first went over logical rules to show that there must be some absolute truth, but what he -actually- did was show that you can't question absolute truth, and there were holes that could have slipped right through his logic that he of course didn't cover. Most of his "proofs" centered around absolutist fallacies, in this section and the next.
In the God-based portion, he didn't use the Bible to "prove" the Bible or God (amazing, isn't it?). He used science, but again, he took advantage of the audience's assumed lack of knowledge to show that his answer was the only correct answer. Most of these claims revolved around the Big Bang, and how the universe -had- to have a beginning, and therefore -had- to have a creator. As he puts it, the universe must have a creator, but this creator does not need a creator, and he cited some scientific theories about the nature of space-time-matter-whatnot in a poor manner. This insufficient logic was used to show that "pantheistic" ideologies (such as the universe being god) can't work, because the creator had to be outside the universe.
Then, perhaps the worst of his claims, was about morality. Again using absolutism, he compared the holocaust and 9/11 to good things, and tried to emotionally convince the audience that some acts are absolutely evil and some are absolutely good (and twice, he mentioned the 6 million figure). His assertion was basically: Mother Teresa is good and Hitler is bad because we have a standard to compare to, and this standard has to come from god to be absolute. As though morals can't come from people, or that we ALL agree about Hitler.
He also mentioned in the questions afterward plenty of awkward stuff about homosexuality and how it's a sin since it denies the genetic purpose of sexual differentiation. However, in the same answering he said that if there was scientific evidence that "gay-bashing" was hereditary, that people should deny this to be civil. Apparently you can deny some genetics and not others.
I'm almost definitely missing a few good details to show more concisely why his logic was faulty, but rather than take what I'm saying as an absolute fact about his opinions, I'd like to see people skim over what he says himself, and confirm that I wasn't the only person to notice that he's selling a pile of shit and calling it ice cream.
His website is crossexamined.org, most of the material he covered should be on it.
My final thoughts on this: Nice try by Christians to prove that they're right; if only they'd used REAL logic to arrive at their conclusions.
[Sorry for a long read, and I realize that some things I said may not agree with what everyone here believes about the nature of the universe anyway. Interpret it as you will, and if you have time, do suffer to hear his side of the story, just to see how wrong he is.]
Tonight, I attended an interactive presentation held by Christian "activist" (I'm pretty sure he counts as such) Frank Turek. The presentation is titled after his corresponding book and TV series of the same name, "I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist". Due to time constraints, he only covered about half of the material in his book. The issues addressed were "What is Truth?" and "What is God?".
He first went over logical rules to show that there must be some absolute truth, but what he -actually- did was show that you can't question absolute truth, and there were holes that could have slipped right through his logic that he of course didn't cover. Most of his "proofs" centered around absolutist fallacies, in this section and the next.
In the God-based portion, he didn't use the Bible to "prove" the Bible or God (amazing, isn't it?). He used science, but again, he took advantage of the audience's assumed lack of knowledge to show that his answer was the only correct answer. Most of these claims revolved around the Big Bang, and how the universe -had- to have a beginning, and therefore -had- to have a creator. As he puts it, the universe must have a creator, but this creator does not need a creator, and he cited some scientific theories about the nature of space-time-matter-whatnot in a poor manner. This insufficient logic was used to show that "pantheistic" ideologies (such as the universe being god) can't work, because the creator had to be outside the universe.
Then, perhaps the worst of his claims, was about morality. Again using absolutism, he compared the holocaust and 9/11 to good things, and tried to emotionally convince the audience that some acts are absolutely evil and some are absolutely good (and twice, he mentioned the 6 million figure). His assertion was basically: Mother Teresa is good and Hitler is bad because we have a standard to compare to, and this standard has to come from god to be absolute. As though morals can't come from people, or that we ALL agree about Hitler.
He also mentioned in the questions afterward plenty of awkward stuff about homosexuality and how it's a sin since it denies the genetic purpose of sexual differentiation. However, in the same answering he said that if there was scientific evidence that "gay-bashing" was hereditary, that people should deny this to be civil. Apparently you can deny some genetics and not others.
I'm almost definitely missing a few good details to show more concisely why his logic was faulty, but rather than take what I'm saying as an absolute fact about his opinions, I'd like to see people skim over what he says himself, and confirm that I wasn't the only person to notice that he's selling a pile of shit and calling it ice cream.
His website is crossexamined.org, most of the material he covered should be on it.
My final thoughts on this: Nice try by Christians to prove that they're right; if only they'd used REAL logic to arrive at their conclusions.
[Sorry for a long read, and I realize that some things I said may not agree with what everyone here believes about the nature of the universe anyway. Interpret it as you will, and if you have time, do suffer to hear his side of the story, just to see how wrong he is.]
