andrel wrote:
> A couple of remark inspired by the video: The first few 'question' 
> center around prayer. If you don't believe in prayer this will make no 
> sense. I don't know how common it is for Americans to believe that 
> prayer really helps, among the Christians that I know, it is AFAIK 
> uncommon. (Though there was recently a book that claimed that you could 
> get everything that you wanted if you visualized it every day and that 
> was also popular here. Forgot the name.) Aside, some people say that 
> praying to God to get (material) things is a sin against the second 
> commandment, they might have a point.
> Then follow a few things about selective usage of verses. Again if you 
> don't claim that everything in the bible is the Truth that won't make 
> any sense. It may come as a shock (at least it shocked me when I first 
> noted it in real life) but there are people who seriously believe that. 
> The remarks in this video are directed against those people. The bible 
> is internally inconsistent, inconsistent with laws and constitutions of 
> every western country, and inconsistent with science (though the 
> examples may not be the most convincing). I think that if someone claims 
> that every word in the bible is True, it is a reasonable to ask how that 
> person handles all the inconsistencies. I also know that by definition 
> no answer will ever satisfy the person asking.
> Interesting thing is also that the examples are mainly from the 
> old-testament and thus would be equally valid for jews and muslims. Yet 
> the title only mentions Christians. Yet another example that the maker 
> of this video is not able to abstract from his own cultural environment 
> and attacking the world at large assuming everybody thinks like he 
> assumes his neighbours think. All in all I think it is very shallow and 
> hardly convincing. I don't think I would have listened to more than 30 
> seconds of it if you would not have recommended it.
> 

Yeah, this is the, "You don't understand the *deep* arguments, so you 
argue about the shallow ones which no one believes.", assertion. Its 
made *a lot* by two sorts of people: 1) Those that have no concept what 
the deeper issues are, but haven't observed believers around them making 
the stupid arguments that are being attacked, **often** due to being 
European, and 2) believers that want to side track the issue, without 
actually bothering to say what those deeper issues are. The sad thing 
is, there are no deeper issues. A while back someone asked a number of 
"prominent" religious scholars, including European ones, what they 
believed the deeper issues of their religion where. They inexplicably 
babbled 10 or so things they claimed where "huge" issues, ranging from 
creation vs. evolution, to whether or not someone can *be* moral without 
their own god and following his Bible, etc. In other words, their 
"deeper issues" where precisely the nonsensical stuff that everyone from 
Dawkins to you non-religious neighbor might complain about with 
religion, and precisely the arguments, ideas, concepts, and/or bad 
reasoning that believers always insist, "Miss the issue, because they 
are dealing with the shallow matters, not the *deeper* and more 
important things that people with **real knowledge** of religion think 
about."

There is a subset of scholar that "do" imagine themselves thinking on 
deeper matters, and will tell you that they don't think, can't imagine, 
and simply refuse to believe, that 90% of the other people that call 
themselves Christian all believe such *silly* things as god watching 
them all the time, answering their prayers, like a customer service 
desk, or spending all his time tinkering with things to make sure the 
universe happens the way its supposed to. These people are delusional in 
an entirely odd way. They deny the very ideas and concepts that 90% of 
Christianity ***do*** believe in, yet, when asked what their "deeper 
concepts" are... well, lets just say that they don't have answers, and 
their questions just wander around until they run aground on the same 
bad ideas and false premises that everyone else does, leaving them 
looking like the very people they insist, "don't exist".

It would be rather funny, if it wasn't so sad, or dangerous. I mean, how 
do you plan to fight the supposed "false(r?)" perceptions, when you, as 
some high and mighty scholar, deny that the majority of people hold any 
of them in the first place? When they deny that "they" hold them, 
because it would contradict their claim that they actually do more than 
circular logic, designed to mask the very things they insist they don't 
subscribe to. If they admit that the unmasks, crazy, version is 
dangerous and wrong, how do you fight it, when all your doing is 
supporting a masked version of the same thing, "while" insisting that 
most people don't follow the crazy unmasked version? Talk about 
dissonance...

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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