davidylan:

Huxley here is the real problem - it is ok for you to simply say "i dont know" (even though your entire claims are based around stuff YOU DONT KNOW!) but imagine we christians simply responded to all your questions with "i dont know"?

Atheism is the lack of a belief in god(s) or the belief that there is no god(s). The former is usually called weak atheism and the latter strong atheism.
Now, you said you do not believe in Ifa and Sango and you further claim that you KNOW Ifa.  How do you come to KNOW Ifa?  Is Ifa a rock, a tree, a doll, an animal?  What really is Ifa?  And why don't you believe in Ifa?

You ask - who is Jehovah?  What is his ontology?    Well, that is really for you to answer.  I don't know what it is?  I cannot believe in something that I don't know what it is.  You are the one who claims to know Jehovah, so you tell me.  I might as well ask you:

Who is Sussicorn and what is his ontology, and do you believe in Sussicorn?

My view, and the view of most atheists, is that you need an ontology of god or gods first before one can form a belief about the god.   No ontology, no belief.

bawomolo:

debating with noetic is like trying to fetch water with a basket. waste of time

I would have liked more background for these question, for I do not know or followered the context in which they were initially raised. But since you post them here, I shall attempt them as posted. I don't know. Can you give some more context?

I do not agree. Can you show where the law of biogenesis says that life begets life? Can you provide some credible and peer-reviewed definition of biogenesis that states that?

I also do not agree with your claim about evolution. Can you provide evidence that this is what evolution claims?
I do not know [/b]what mitochondria gene exception is. I shall do some research and get back on this one.

On the last common universal ancestor, [b]that I do not know. It could [/b]well be that none has been found to fit the deception of the common ancestor to all life, or it [b]could be that it is know by science but[b] I don't happen to have that knowledge.[/b] I shall have to research this too.

I would have liked more background for these question, for I do not know or followered the context in which they were initially raised.  But since you post them here, I shall attempt them as posted. I don't know.  Can you give some more context?

I do not agree.  Can you show where the law of biogenesis says that life begets life?  Can you provide some credible and peer-reviewed definition of biogenesis that states that?

I also do not agree with your claim about evolution.  Can you provide evidence that this is what evolution claims?  
I do not know [/b]what mitochondria gene exception is.  I shall do some research and get back on this one.

On the last common  universal ancestor, [b]that I do not know.  It could [/b]well be that none has been found to fit the deception of the common ancestor to all life, or it [b]could be that it is know by science but[b] I don't happen to have that knowledge.[/b]  I shall have to research this too.

noetic:

@  Huxley
Rubbish. I am not asking u for the layman definition of atheism. any idiot could have said that.

I am asking u to define the subject of ur disbelief within the scope of rationality. I know ifa. And within the limits of human vocabulary he is called the yoruba god of divination. the key word is divination.

noetic:

I have an appreciative understanding of ifa, as such I can make an intelligent decision of either believing or not. I choose not to belief, in other words, I disbelief. Now any ifa apologist can engage me in an informed debate concerning my disbelief, cos I do know the concepts and principles of ifa.

noetic:

Unlike ur glaring hypocrisy, I have continuously defined Him within the limits of my vocabulary and so also have several christians. Our understanding is the basis of our belief state. What understanding do u have of Jehovah GOD that necessitates ur disbelief?
who is Jehovah God? What is ontology?

noetic:

I dont know who or what sussicorn is. Since I have no knowledge, big or small about sussicorn, how do u expect me to make a rational, intelligent and logical decision to either belief or not to belief? I have no appreciative understanding of sussicorn. To say I believe or dont believe would be unintelligently irrational.

Since u dont believe in God. I am assuming that the basis of ur disbelief is rational and intelligent and also an informed one. So again I ask,
Who is Jehovah God? What is HIS ontology?
Is it safe to say that all atheists are a bunch of uninformed idiots?

huxley:

Now, this will not work because this is dishonesty and misrepresentation.    You asked for the definition of atheism, NOT the subject of my disbelief.   This is gross dishonesty and it will not work with me.

If you want to change the scope of the question, you are welcome come, but not misrepresent the initial question you asked.  That is called shifting the goal-post.

What is Atheism and the rationality of ur beliefs?

I did discuss some of the elements of Sussicorn's ontology on the thread about Sussiscorn.  For good measure, here are they;

1)  Half immaterial, half material
2)  Born by his father after 3 years manancy (When a man is carrying a baby, a very very rare condition). Sussicorn has no mother.
3)  Sussicorn is both male and female
4)  Sussicorn is the mother of all humanity.

I "believe" in Sussicorn  because, his ontology seems plausible to me.   Now you tell me, what is the ontology of Ifa, Yahweh, Allah

Can you keep the insults down.  I thought Christian were above such debase behaviour.

I was raised in a Christian family in Cameroon and my family was a religious vagrant, moving from catholicism, seven days adventism to apostolic to full gospel to . . . I started having doubts about the claims of religion when we were SDA and as you may know SDA are great stickler for the bible and I did read the bible alot as a teenager. I was about 11 when my family converted from Catholicism to SDA, and my ever abiding memory as a new SDA convert was the criticism I would get from my Catholic friends that we were encourage to read the bible, together with the mockery of going to church on saturdays while everyone else went on Sunday.

Reading the bibel sowed the first seeds of doubts in my mind, but I could not really articulate them then. I was about 12 or 13 when these narratives from the bible became to disturb me. The doubts appear to me in the approximate chronological order;

1) The concept of the Chosen people. I found it difficult to accept the fact that God could have create all humans but chose just a small tribe (the Jews) as his own, at the detriment of all other tribes. I felt this was grossly unfair.

2) The amount of violence perpertrated by God in the bible left a cold chill down my spine. The narratives in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Judges I found particularly gruesome and loathsome.

I tried to seek answers to these, but as usual, the people I thought would know all had very unsatisfactory answers. I put these thought behind me and just concentrated as school and some months later I left home to attend a boarding secondary school. The first year at boarding school, although I had still not got answers to my questions, I attended church a couple of times, but by the end of that year, I had virtually decided that I could not commit by convictions on something I knew so little of. I stopped attending church, stopped praying and would still reading the bible occasionally. In fact, I had decided that the elders in the community were either gullible, stupid, deceitful and just plain ignorant and that I could not rely on them to help reach to anwsers to my questions. I decided that I was going to seek answers for myself by educating myself.

At around that same time, it occurred to me that I did not have to rely on the bible alone for an understanding of what was happening in Israel, Palestine, Romans, Jesus, etc, etc. I realised that there might in fact be other sources of information that could provide better data about the history, and socio-political and economic of the time and place. Somehow, I also realised that I did not have these material close at hand. So I consigned the thought of researching this to the background and concentrated on my exams.

At about that same time I started to become interested in the claims of the various witch-doctors, jazzmen, magicians, soothsayers, etc, around me. I guess it is the same in Nigeria. In Cameroon there are all sorts of supersitious claims and organisation that promote and support these claims. It then occurred to me that these superstition were not dissimilar for the Christian belief that I had but I did not have the means of articulating or dealing with such ideas.

Then at age about 16/17 I had a conversation with a friend who display doubts and contempt for the bible and I secretly thought that I had found a soulmate. I cannot remember exactly, but I left that conversation with my third major doubt, namely:

3) That sin originated in heaven, in god's own backyard and that if he could not bring his own home in line, how much less the earth. When my christian friends tried to rationalise this with the concept of freewill, which argument was doomed from the start, I knew this was an unanswerable question. If god endowed his angels with freewill, which caused them to sin, then it look to me that god was an inedept overseer at least and a callous and murderous and vindictive tyrant at worst.

Upon this realisation, all my sympathies with the god of the bible, Jehovah, had gone. I had not prayed not gone to church on my own volition for about 3 years,but would occasionaly accompany friend if they wanted company. At church, I would be busy eyeing girls or just daydreaming or silently making further of the priest/pastor.

Some years later, at 20, I came to Manchester/England and the veil was lifted. By the end of my first year in Manchester, I had succeeded in tracking down ALL the material I had so wanted to get hold of about 4 -5 years earlier. Manchester University has a great library and besides reading my core subject, I spent a great deal of time in the humanities section, reading up on religion, history of the Roman empire, etc, etc. I even stumbled on a piece of manusscript of the Gospel of John at the library - it is called P52. Do a google of John gospel P52, and you should find that it is house in the Manchester University library, John Rylands library.

By the end of my first year in Manchester, all my doubts had been removed. I knew that I could NOT rely of faith as a need of understand the nature of reality. I had decided that scientific rationalism was the route for me. I did not call myself an atheist then, but I was also reluctant to decribe myself as agnostic. It would be another 4 or 5 years before I would readily self-identify as an atheist, by this point I had overcome or become thickskinned about the risk social ostracism that being called an atheist might engender.

OLAADEGBU:

Here are some questions that you have been trying to avoid, now that you have shot yourself in the foot by opening this thread you have nowhere to hide except behind your thin index finger.

Kweshuns

[list]
[li]Give us just one irrefutable proof of evolution, i.e. a proof that absolutely eliminates any other possible explanation for the origin of the universe, the material world and human life.[/li]
[/list]
[list]
[li]Where did the dinosaurs come from?[/li]
[/list]
[list]
[li]Where are the missing links in the fossil records or in the museum? especially the missing link of an eye.  Where are the trillions of fossils of such true transitional forms?  a true transitional form would have non-functioning parts or appendages.[/li]
[/list]
[list]
[li]Where did the law of gravity come from?[/li]
[/list]
[list]
[li]Give an example of a genetic mutation or an evolutionary process which can be seen to increase information in the genome?[/li]
[/list]
[list]
[li]Any hypothesis or model meant to explain how all life evolved from lifeless chemicals into a complex cell consisting of vast amounts of information.  Can you explain to us the source of information and how this information was encoded into the genome:[/li]
[/list]
[list]
[li]How can you proof to me the existence of Charles Darwin?[/li]
[/list]

PS:  I will not accept "I do not know for an answer" I expect you to have a foundation to your beliefs.

OLAADEGBU:

Is that a cop out or another way of saying "I don't know"?

OLAADEGBU:

Here are some questions that you have been trying to avoid, now that you have shot yourself in the foot by opening this thread you have nowhere to hide except behind your thin index finger.

Kweshuns

[list]
[li]Give us just one irrefutable proof of evolution, i.e. a proof that absolutely eliminates any other possible explanation for the origin of the universe, the material world and human life.[/li]
[/list]

OLAADEGBU:

[list]
[li]Where did the dinosaurs come from?[/li]
[/list]

OLAADEGBU:

[list]
[li]Where are the missing links in the fossil records or in the museum? especially the missing link of an eye.  Where are the trillions of fossils of such true transitional forms?  a true transitional form would have non-functioning parts or appendages.[/li]
[/list]

OLAADEGBU:

[list]
[li]Where did the law of gravity come from?[/li]
[/list]

OLAADEGBU:

[list]
[li]Give an example of a genetic mutation or an evolutionary process which can be seen to increase information in the genome?[/li]
[/list]

OLAADEGBU:

[list]
[li]Any hypothesis or model meant to explain how all life evolved from lifeless chemicals into a complex cell consisting of vast amounts of information.  Can you explain to us the source of information and how this information was encoded into the genome:[/li]
[/list]

OLAADEGBU:

[list]
[li]How can you proof to me the existence of Charles Darwin?[/li]
[/list]

OLAADEGBU:

@huxley,

Lame excuses. Your inability or unwillingness to answer any of these questions only goes on to prove that your religion, secular humanism, a religion based on blind faith, something like building your castle in the air, without any foundation.

KunleOshob:

@Huxley
This might be a bit personal but i am curious to know your professional and educational back ground. Also what fuels your passion for disparaging belief in God, as different from the practise of any religion. I can understand if you don't beleive in religion but i cannot fathom someone as intelligent as you not believing in the existence of a supreme being cause the evidence is so glaring and is all around us.

huxley:


I consider religion one of the unfortunate relics from the infancy of humanity that still impedes human progress, hence my contempt for religion.

KunleOshob:

Thanx for your prompt response, granted that religion as been used to perpetuate evil by men and used to manipulate and take advantage of other men i can understand your contempt, but the fact that most religions have been abused does to mean that God doesn't exist. Do you beileve that the earth and all that is in it is just a freak of the cosmos, isn't there enough evidence of intelligent design at play with all the harmony we have in Nature that makes our possible existence and survival a reality? As advanced as we humans are we cannot produce ordinary matter talkless of simple life forms yet we know how complicated our make up is. There are a billion and one things we humans cannot do yet they exist in perfect harmony in nature, is it possible it just came out of no where with no intelligence behind it. I know no religions answers all question about our reality or our ontology but that is not enough to say God does not exist. Can you state in clear terms why you hold on to the belief of NO God despite all the evidence? (lets leave religion out of this)

mazaje:

[/b]

what are the evidence for a god? and do the evidence agree or support the definations of any of the gods we have out there?

KunleOshob:

The very existence of complex life forms, Nature and all that is in it point very obvioulsy to a intelligent designer/maker/creator A.K.A GOD

KunleOshob:

Thanx for your prompt response, granted that religion as been used to perpetuate evil by men and used to manipulate and take advantage of other men i can understand your contempt, but the fact that most religions have been abused does to mean that God doesn't exist. Do you beileve that the earth and all that is in it is just a freak of the cosmos, isn't there enough evidence of intelligent design at play with all the harmony we have in Nature that makes our possible existence and survival a reality? As advanced as we humans are we cannot produce ordinary matter talkless of simple life forms yet we know how complicated our make up is. There are a billion and one things we humans cannot do yet they exist in perfect harmony in nature, is it possible it just came out of no where with no intelligence behind it. I know no religions answers all question about our reality or our ontology but that is not enough to say God does not exist. Can you state in clear terms why you hold on to the belief of NO God despite all the evidence? (lets leave religion out of this)

huxley:

I take from this that you amke God the ultimate designer of the universe? But that, unfortunately, only begs the question, "Who designed God?". Is there some other superior God who made your own god? If you know the answer for who made your god, then you will know how this universe came about.

Pastor AIO:

Dear Huxley, You seem to not be around at the  moment, however when you do get back could you please answer a question for me.

What is your definition of Naturalism?