That may not be quite the endorsement that you think it is. Besides, Christ had little to do with Christianity's success as a world religion, although that is irrelevant to my point. Christianity has not been good for mankind. I realize that you believe otherwise - you have to if you are to remain a Christian - but Christianity has been an anchor on Western intellectual and moral evolution. Fortunately, humanism rescued the West from theism to a large degree and helped civilize Christianity, which was still conducting inquisitions and hanging women as witches when the deist instituted the humanistic model of government including church-state separation and a host of guaranteed persons rights including freedom from religion. Compare that with the Muslim world, which has NOT had the benefit of four centuries of humanism, and is still pushing people off of towers and burning them alive in cages with theistic governments' approval or condoning.
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You stare into your high definition plasma screen monitor, type into your cordless keyboard then hit enter, which causes your computer to convert all that visual data into a binary signal that's processed by millions of precise circuits. This is then converted to a frequency modulated signal to reach your wireless router where it is then converted to light waves and sent along a large fiber optics cable to be processed by a super computer on a mass server. This sends that bit you typed to a satellite orbiting the earth that was put there through the greatest feats of engineering and science, all so it could go back through a similar pathway to make it all the way here to my computer monitor 15,000 miles away from you just so you could say, "Science is all a bunch of manmade hogwash."- anon.
Debate is impossible if both debaters are not critical thinkers engaging one another's claims with rebuttal (falsifying counterargument), a process also called dialectic.
No, the atheist perceives what every other human being with a functioning sensory system perceives, and he has the same neural circuits to interpret them. The difference is how they do that, how they interpret those apprehensions. The theist has misunderstood his own mental state. He thinks it is showing him something other than his own mind. But this is common to the human condition. Man has long misunderstood his own thoughts as evidence of an external reality informing those thoughts.
We know that the ancient Greeks made this mistake regarding creative inspirations, which they had no concept of arising from within, so they invented the muses, who they imagined were transmitting artistic intuitions to them. Likewise with the Christian model of internal conflict between older and newer neural centers (cognitive dissonance) depicted as God speaking and the devil trying to steal one's soul. And then there's people who see dreams as messages. It's all the same phenomenon - assigning external agency to internal intuitions.
No, that's a description of empiricism, which goes from evidence to sound conclusion. Faith is the opposite. It begins with unjustified premises, then massages the evidence tomake it seem to support the premise, as if that premise were a conclusion rather than the starting point.
The theist has no more evidence, and I've told what I think of these so-called profound insights. They're errors. Profound insights are the kinds of ideas that change worlds. Humanism was a profound insight, and it has improved the human condition dramatically. Our lives are longer, safer, more functional, freer, easier, more comfortable, and more interesting thanks to Enlightenment values ascending. Theism can make no such claim.
LOL. How many theists know what a mammal is? Christianity has misjudged humanity from the start, thinking man was created in the image of a god with a soul rather than evolving from apes. There is no such thing as sin. Christianity depicts man as a spiritually diseased race born fit for perdition and needing salvation. That's incorrect, and a very damaging doctrine except to the institution that has the only remedy.
Your atheophobia is natural for your demographic, the Abrahamic theist. Your religion teaches it because it doesn't like dissenting opinion. It teaches that atheists are empty vessels living pointless lives, fixed on some limiting epistemological paradigm that strips life of meaning and color.
I saw this recently and had a chuckle. Here's a spiritualist (maybe a theist as well, I don't know) placing himself above those with religion, and both above the atheist, who is described to be as empty as a robotic vacuum mindlessly bumping into objects in the room and "measuring" them then turning and mindlessly going somewhere else until it makes another measurement:
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If your argument is because a god exists, you're wrong. People have a proclivity to assign agency to all action, and to seek to control their fates by appealing to unseen deities with prayers and sacrifices. This is the bottom-up part. Others see an opportunity to manage them, and develop organized systems to do that. That's the bottom-down aspect that leads to organized religions.
That's much of the evidence that the religions have nothing to do with an actual god. Those same people are of multiple and varied languages. Both are systems of symbols that evolve as nested hierarchies. If these religions had anything to do with an actual god, there would be only one, just as there is only one periodic table of the elements. That's the power of empiricism.
