Religion Ask a Christian - Continued in Part 2

[Chief]

Continued in Part Two:

https://www.bigfooty.com/forum/threads/ask-a-christian-part-2.1295001/unread

 

[Total Power]

What are the exact similarities? A quick Google indicates that these are the primary similarities:

The Flood of Noah and the Flood of Gilgamesh

Background The Epic of Gilgamesh has been of interest to Christians ever since its discovery in the mid-nineteenth century in the ruins of the great library at Nineveh, with its account of a universal flood with significant parallels to the Flood of Noah's day.1, 2 The rest of the Epic, which...

www.icr.org

If you agree, then we can go from there. If there's anything that you'd like to add, please do so.

From your link

The Book of Genesis is viewed for the most part as an historical work, even by many liberal scholars, while the Epic of Gilgamesh is viewed as mythological. The One-source Theory must, therefore, lead back to the historical event of the Flood and Noah's Ark.2



This is completely false. One scholar doesn't equal to many. I see only one scholar mentioned in the footnote over and over again. Genesis is not scientific, not historical. There was no global flood. Guys like Howard Vos are not liberal neither is NK Sanders. They are both Christians and none of them are liberal.

Roylion

 

[Roylion]

From your link

The Book of Genesis is viewed for the most part as an historical work, even by many liberal scholars, while the Epic of Gilgamesh is viewed as mythological. The One-source Theory must, therefore, lead back to the historical event of the Flood and Noah's Ark.2

This is completely false. One scholar doesn't equal to many. I see only one scholar mentioned in the footnote over and over again. Genesis is not scientific, not historical. There was no global flood Roylion

Yep. Absolutely there was no historical event of a global flood.

Geologists reject any notion of a global flood, because there is no supporting geological evidence that such a flood ever occurred.

Other experts in various scientific feidls have raised further problems. Why is there no evidence of a flood in tree ring dating? Tree ring records go back more than 10,000 years, with no evidence of a catastrophe during that time. Other scientists have raised the problems of various types of rocks such as chalk deposits, that could not possibly be where they are now, such as the cliffs of Dover - if a Global Flood had occurred 2-3,000 years ago. Molecular scientists studying DNA have disputed whether a Flood that destroyed all human life on earth except Noah, his wife, his three sons and his three daughters-in-law could have happened. Mankind may be all essentially related but DNA analysis shows that it is much further back than 2,348 BC, which is the date arrived at for the flood by the chronology/genealogy in the Book of Genesis.

Stratigraphy, Seriation, Chronological Marking, Dendrochronology, radiocarbon dating, geological dating, Potassium-Argon dating, Fission track dating, Obsidian Hydration dating, Thermoluminescence dating, Archaeo- and Paleo-magnetism dating, Oxidized Carbon Ratios are all archaeological methods used to date various historical and pre-historical events.

The evidence that they provide, does NOT support the notion of ONE global flood. No supporting evidence exists

Genetic data also shows no evidence of any human bottleneck as small as two people or eight people: there are simply too many different kinds of genes around for that to be true. There may have been a couple of “bottlenecks” (reduced population sizes) in the history of our species, but the smallest one not involving recent colonization is a bottleneck of roughly 10,000-15,000 individuals that occurred between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. That number could get as low as 2,000 people, but that's the absolute minimum. That’s as small a population as our ancestors had, and—note—it’s not as low as eight individuals.

DNA studies have also confirmed that there are living today millions of descendants, of women believed to lived between 12,000 - 45,000 years ago. If the Flood was to have destroyed all men on earth apart from Noah and his family, how is this accounted for? If we add up the genealogies in the Bible, we have Noah's flood in about the year 2348 B.C. That's in the Fifth Egyptian Dynasty and the Yao Dynasty of China. There’s no record of a Universal Flood in those years, nor could there be, as everyone and everything would have been destroyed. This is clearly not the case.

If so, the archaeological record of about 4-5,000 years ago would be replete with Pompeii-style ruins, the remains of thousands of towns, villages and cities, all wiped out by flood waters, simultaneously. Archaeology would show cultural development with a discontinuity as everything was wiped out and Noah's descendants had to restart. The near annihilation of the human race, if it happened, left no imprint on the archaeological record anywhere.

Clearly the Bible states that all living things were destroyed except for those on the Ark, the humans consisting of the one family of eight people. Clearly many of the earth's people are descended from people other than Noah and for them to exist today those ancestors must have survived the "Flood".

The global flood story requires that only eight people were left alive in 2349 BC. In 2000 BC, only 350 years after the flood, the population of the world was 27 million. To go from a population of eight to a population of 27 million in 350 years would require an average annual population growth rate of 4.4%, which is only slightly short of the highest birth rates in the world today. Birth rate and population growth aren't the same thing, and such a high birth rate implies reasons for people to have lots of children very young. The countries with the highest birth rates today have high rates of infectious disease and death, low life expectancy, and political instability, with a median age of 15 and a population growth rate well below the birth rate. This does not much resemble the society of superhumanly-long-lived fathers of nations claimed to have lived over that interval, but stable societies where children can be reliably expected to reach adulthood tend to have much lower birthrates.

An even more severe problem is that sexually reproducing species reduced to a population of eight individuals often experiences a catastrophic (and almost certainly extinguishing) genetic bottleneck; and the more rapid the re-expansion of this population, the more intense the inbreeding. Genetic studies have actually revealed the presence of a genetic bottleneck in human prehistory but that scenario is about 66,000 years too early and at least 2,000 people too populous for the Flood narrative.

Indeed there's no reason to suggest any flood story from any civilisation is more than the story of a large localised/regional flood, such as the filling of the Persian Gulf after sea waters rose following the last glacial period. Global sea levels were about 120 metres lower around 16,000 BC and rose until 6,000 BC when they reached current levels, which are now an average 40 metres above the floor of the Gulf, which was a huge (800 km × 200 km) low-lying and fertile region in Mesopotamia. Human habitation is thought to have been strong around the Gulf Oasis for 100,000 years. A sudden increase in settlements above the present water level is recorded at around 5,500 BC. Then there's the Black Sea deluge, which suggests catastrophic deluge about 5600 BC from the Mediterranean Sea into the Black Sea.

A global flood simply did not occur and there is simply no robust convincing evidence to support that it did.

"The divine inspiration of the Bible would demand that the Genesis account is the correct version.

"The Book of Genesis is viewed for the most part as an historical work, even by many liberal scholars, while the Epic of Gilgamesh is viewed as mythological."

The Genesis account was kept pure and accurate throughout the centuries by the providence of God until it was finally compiled, edited, and written down by Moses.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, then, contains the corrupted account as preserved and embellished by peoples who did not follow the God of the Hebrews."

Quotes from your linked article.

The quotes are absolute rubbish.

Genesis is not a historical work written by Moses. There is no evidence that "Moses" wrote any of the Books of the Bible.

It's possible that the Black Sea deluge MAY have inspired the various Mesopotamian flood stories The oldest Mesopotamian flood story of Atrahasis written sometime between 1800 BC and 1700 BC (which was adapted by the writers of the later Epic of Gilgamesh) and then further altered into the story of Noah, when the Jews wrote Genesis in about the 6th century BC, probably in Babylon.

Two senior scientists from Columbia University have proposed a theory that a massive transfer of water occurred about 5600 BC - over seven and a half millennia ago. They wrote: "Ten cubic miles of water poured through each day, two hundred times what flows over Niagara Falls." "The Bosporus flume roared and surged at full spate for at least three hundred days." 60,000 square miles of land were inundated. The Black Sea shoreline significantly expanded to the north and east. The lake's its water level was raised many hundreds of feet. It changed from a fresh-water landlocked lake into a salt water lake connected to the world's oceans."

They have drawn on the findings of experts in agriculture, archaeology, genetics, geology, language, development of textiles and pottery, etc. They postulate that this deluge had catastrophic effects on the people living on the shore of the Black Sea. It triggered mass migrations across Europe and into the Near East, Middle East and Egypt. It may have been the source of many flood stories in the area.

The development of the story of Noah in Genesis goes something like this

2700 BC: Calculated time of the figure of Gilgamesh as per dating of walls of Uruk.
2100 BC: Apparent origin of the oldest Gilgamesh epic (Akkadian, AKA Old Babylonian). Alludes to the Flood, but does not specifically mention it.
Before Hammurabi (~1700 BC): Apparent time period of Atrahasis story, oldest Mesopotamian flood story
1830 BC: Oldest Estimated age of "CBM 13532" - also sometimes called the 'Nippur Flood Tablet'
1600 BC: Apparent origin of the known oldest copy of the Atrahasis story (but likely to have been assembled 1800 - 1700 BC)
1400 BC: Standard Babylonian version including all 12 tablets. Flood story complete as copy of Atrahasis.
1170 BC: Youngest Estimated age of "CBM 13532"
668-626 BC: King Assurbanipal of Assyria finds and stores the oldest preserved copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh in his library. Re-discovered in AD 1849

The approximate time of the writing / assembling of the Book of Genesis was between 600-300 BC in Babylonia.

It's clear that Genesis was written over an interval of many centuries by at least five author/editors. The universal flood story was derived from an earlier Babylonian myth by two of these authors. The Genesis flood myth is obviously based on an earlier Babylonian myth; there are many similarities between the two legends. The Babylonian myth appears to be based on an earlier legend that, in turn, might well have been based on dimly remembered memories of the Black Sea catastrophe, for which there is robust archaeoliogical evidence as having actually occurred.

 

[Number37]

'No atheists in foxholes'. Demonstrably false.

Try again.

Are you saying that atheists have no emotional reaction to traumatic events?

 

[Number37]

More tosh. Where are you getting this from?

How we react to traumatic events is dependent on the coping mechanisms we develop, most of this development occurs in childhood.
If you're an atheist struck by a trauamatic event and you find yourself praying for divine intervention it doesn't make you not an atheist. So you can relax. It is a result of a coping mechanism you developed as a child. You have no control over it.

It's like all those dudes that go to Thailand and accidentally spend a night or two with a ladyboy, doesn't mean they're gay.

 

[Gethelred]

Are you saying that atheists have no emotional reaction to traumatic events?

Strawman.

You know precisely what I'm saying.

 

[Number37]

I think there is the world of difference.

Rationalists do not make any claims to have found the meaning of life.

Rationalists do not aggressively proselytise their cause.

Rationalists do not gather every week; every day even, to sing the praises of rationalism.

Rationalists certainly do not tell people they are evil and only rationalism will save them from a ludicrous unproven fate.

Rationalists do not aggressively try to get their hands on their (non-existent) followers’ money.

When the French constitution more emphatically separates church and state than ours does, it’s not a quasi religious statement of “belief”, it’s a consequence of the simple fact that the secular domain is the province solely of secular thought.

I'm fairly certain that I was talking about the truly unexplained stuff.
It might only be a very very small gap, and unles you know something we don't know...there is undoubtedly a gap.

What you fill that gap with is up to you.
Filling it with religion is no different to filling it with atheism.
Pretending that filling it with atheism is somehow different/superior is just plain ludicrous.

It makes a mockery of your self proclaimed rationalism.
There are things that there are no explanations for and shouting from the rooftops "I'm a rationalist" doesn't, in any way, alter the fact that there are things that there are no explanations for. It is, in fact, irrational to do so.

 

[Number37]

Strawman.

You know precisely what I'm saying.

LOL
How people react to traumatic events is almost exclusively guided by their sub-conscious.

Not having an emotional response to a traumatic event makes you a psychopath.

 

[Gethelred]

LOL
How people react to traumatic events is almost exclusively guided by their sub-conscious.

Not having an emotional response to a traumatic event makes you a psychopath.

Same strawman as the last post.

You made a 'no atheists in foxholes' argument, which is demonstrably false. Now, you're repeating something I never said, or even hinted at.

You clearly have something you'd like to get off your chest. Let's hear it.

 

[mcnulty]

What you fill that gap with is up to you.

Why do you need to fill that gap?

 

[Number37]

Same strawman as the last post.

You made a 'no atheists in foxholes' argument, which is demonstrably false. Now, you're repeating something I never said, or even hinted at.

You clearly have something you'd like to get off your chest. Let's hear it.

I already said it.
You don't like what I said so you're going to go down the ad-hom route again it looks like.
There is another choice....

 

[Number37]

Why do you need to fill that gap?

Don't have to fill the gap.
IMO everyone does, it's part of who we are and have been for thousands/millions of years.

 

[Gethelred]

I already said it.
You don't like what I said so you're going to go down the ad-hom route again it looks like.
There is another choice....

Tell me, do you enjoy the feeling of straw on your knuckles?

When you want to address or correct your 'no atheists in foxholes' argument, we can talk. Other than that, I've important sleeping to do instead of arguing with a dude who keeps a revolving door of strawmen in his basement.

 

[mcnulty]

Don't have to fill the gap.
IMO everyone does, it's part of who we are and have been for thousands/millions of years.

So it’s irresistible. You’re guessing.

 

[Number37]

So it’s irresistible. You’re guessing.

What do we do with our newborns?
We teach them things. Eat, walk, sleep, s**t.
Why do we send our kids to school?
To learn.

It's ingrained in us from birth...to know about things we don't know about.

 

[mcnulty]

What do we do with our newborns?
We teach them things. Eat, walk, sleep, sh*t.
Why do we send our kids to school?
To learn.

It's ingrained in us from birth...to know about things we don't know about.

We teach our newborns to s**t?

That'll do me….

 

[Number37]

Tell me, do you enjoy the feeling of straw on your knuckles?

When you want to address or correct your 'no atheists in foxholes' argument, we can talk. Other than that, I've important sleeping to do instead of arguing with a dude who keeps a revolving door of strawmen in his basement.

I love strawmen. Strawmen are the best.

Maybe I should try something new by making up s**t like 'tangential reasoning'?

 

[Number37]

We teach our newborns to sh*t?

That'll do me….

Do I have to spell everything out?
I thought it was obvious?
In a bowl.

 

[sdfc]

Yep. Absolutely there was no historical event of a global flood.

Geologists reject any notion of a global flood, because there is no supporting geological evidence that such a flood ever occurred.

Other experts in various scientific feidls have raised further problems. Why is there no evidence of a flood in tree ring dating? Tree ring records go back more than 10,000 years, with no evidence of a catastrophe during that time. Other scientists have raised the problems of various types of rocks such as chalk deposits, that could not possibly be where they are now, such as the cliffs of Dover - if a Global Flood had occurred 2-3,000 years ago. Molecular scientists studying DNA have disputed whether a Flood that destroyed all human life on earth except Noah, his wife, his three sons and his three daughters-in-law could have happened. Mankind may be all essentially related but DNA analysis shows that it is much further back than 2,348 BC, which is the date arrived at for the flood by the chronology/genealogy in the Book of Genesis.

Stratigraphy, Seriation, Chronological Marking, Dendrochronology, radiocarbon dating, geological dating, Potassium-Argon dating, Fission track dating, Obsidian Hydration dating, Thermoluminescence dating, Archaeo- and Paleo-magnetism dating, Oxidized Carbon Ratios are all archaeological methods used to date various historical and pre-historical events.

The evidence that they provide, does NOT support the notion of ONE global flood. No supporting evidence exists

Genetic data also shows no evidence of any human bottleneck as small as two people or eight people: there are simply too many different kinds of genes around for that to be true. There may have been a couple of “bottlenecks” (reduced population sizes) in the history of our species, but the smallest one not involving recent colonization is a bottleneck of roughly 10,000-15,000 individuals that occurred between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. That number could get as low as 2,000 people, but that's the absolute minimum. That’s as small a population as our ancestors had, and—note—it’s not as low as eight individuals.

DNA studies have also confirmed that there are living today millions of descendants, of women believed to lived between 12,000 - 45,000 years ago. If the Flood was to have destroyed all men on earth apart from Noah and his family, how is this accounted for? If we add up the genealogies in the Bible, we have Noah's flood in about the year 2348 B.C. That's in the Fifth Egyptian Dynasty and the Yao Dynasty of China. There’s no record of a Universal Flood in those years, nor could there be, as everyone and everything would have been destroyed. This is clearly not the case.

If so, the archaeological record of about 4-5,000 years ago would be replete with Pompeii-style ruins, the remains of thousands of towns, villages and cities, all wiped out by flood waters, simultaneously. Archaeology would show cultural development with a discontinuity as everything was wiped out and Noah's descendants had to restart. The near annihilation of the human race, if it happened, left no imprint on the archaeological record anywhere.

Clearly the Bible states that all living things were destroyed except for those on the Ark, the humans consisting of the one family of eight people. Clearly many of the earth's people are descended from people other than Noah and for them to exist today those ancestors must have survived the "Flood".

The global flood story requires that only eight people were left alive in 2349 BC. In 2000 BC, only 350 years after the flood, the population of the world was 27 million. To go from a population of eight to a population of 27 million in 350 years would require an average annual population growth rate of 4.4%, which is only slightly short of the highest birth rates in the world today. Birth rate and population growth aren't the same thing, and such a high birth rate implies reasons for people to have lots of children very young. The countries with the highest birth rates today have high rates of infectious disease and death, low life expectancy, and political instability, with a median age of 15 and a population growth rate well below the birth rate. This does not much resemble the society of superhumanly-long-lived fathers of nations claimed to have lived over that interval, but stable societies where children can be reliably expected to reach adulthood tend to have much lower birthrates.

An even more severe problem is that sexually reproducing species reduced to a population of eight individuals often experiences a catastrophic (and almost certainly extinguishing) genetic bottleneck; and the more rapid the re-expansion of this population, the more intense the inbreeding. Genetic studies have actually revealed the presence of a genetic bottleneck in human prehistory but that scenario is about 66,000 years too early and at least 2,000 people too populous for the Flood narrative.

Indeed there's no reason to suggest any flood story from any civilisation is more than the story of a large localised/regional flood, such as the filling of the Persian Gulf after sea waters rose following the last glacial period. Global sea levels were about 120 metres lower around 16,000 BC and rose until 6,000 BC when they reached current levels, which are now an average 40 metres above the floor of the Gulf, which was a huge (800 km × 200 km) low-lying and fertile region in Mesopotamia. Human habitation is thought to have been strong around the Gulf Oasis for 100,000 years. A sudden increase in settlements above the present water level is recorded at around 5,500 BC. Then there's the Black Sea deluge, which suggests catastrophic deluge about 5600 BC from the Mediterranean Sea into the Black Sea.

A global flood simply did not occur and there is simply no robust convincing evidence to support that it did.




Quotes from your linked article.

The quotes are absolute rubbish.

Genesis is not a historical work written by Moses. There is no evidence that "Moses" wrote any of the Books of the Bible.

It's possible that the Black Sea deluge MAY have inspired the various Mesopotamian flood stories The oldest Mesopotamian flood story of Atrahasis written sometime between 1800 BC and 1700 BC (which was adapted by the writers of the later Epic of Gilgamesh) and then further altered into the story of Noah, when the Jews wrote Genesis in about the 6th century BC, probably in Babylon.

Two senior scientists from Columbia University have proposed a theory that a massive transfer of water occurred about 5600 BC - over seven and a half millennia ago. They wrote: "Ten cubic miles of water poured through each day, two hundred times what flows over Niagara Falls." "The Bosporus flume roared and surged at full spate for at least three hundred days." 60,000 square miles of land were inundated. The Black Sea shoreline significantly expanded to the north and east. The lake's its water level was raised many hundreds of feet. It changed from a fresh-water landlocked lake into a salt water lake connected to the world's oceans."

They have drawn on the findings of experts in agriculture, archaeology, genetics, geology, language, development of textiles and pottery, etc. They postulate that this deluge had catastrophic effects on the people living on the shore of the Black Sea. It triggered mass migrations across Europe and into the Near East, Middle East and Egypt. It may have been the source of many flood stories in the area.

The development of the story of Noah in Genesis goes something like this

2700 BC: Calculated time of the figure of Gilgamesh as per dating of walls of Uruk.
2100 BC: Apparent origin of the oldest Gilgamesh epic (Akkadian, AKA Old Babylonian). Alludes to the Flood, but does not specifically mention it.
Before Hammurabi (~1700 BC): Apparent time period of Atrahasis story, oldest Mesopotamian flood story
1830 BC: Oldest Estimated age of "CBM 13532" - also sometimes called the 'Nippur Flood Tablet'
1600 BC: Apparent origin of the known oldest copy of the Atrahasis story (but likely to have been assembled 1800 - 1700 BC)
1400 BC: Standard Babylonian version including all 12 tablets. Flood story complete as copy of Atrahasis.
1170 BC: Youngest Estimated age of "CBM 13532"
668-626 BC: King Assurbanipal of Assyria finds and stores the oldest preserved copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh in his library. Re-discovered in AD 1849

The approximate time of the writing / assembling of the Book of Genesis was between 600-300 BC in Babylonia.

It's clear that Genesis was written over an interval of many centuries by at least five author/editors. The universal flood story was derived from an earlier Babylonian myth by two of these authors. The Genesis flood myth is obviously based on an earlier Babylonian myth; there are many similarities between the two legends. The Babylonian myth appears to be based on an earlier legend that, in turn, might well have been based on dimly remembered memories of the Black Sea catastrophe, for which there is robust archaeoliogical evidence as having actually occurred.

end of ice age sea level rise seems to be a pretty robust theory of the origin of flood myths that stretch all the way to Australia.

 

[Total Power]

end of ice age sea level rise seems to be a pretty robust theory of the origin of flood myths that stretch all the way to Australia.

True but the ice age didn't end in an instant. It took thousands of years for different ice sheets to melt, and they didn't all melt at the same time. For example, ice cover reached a peak over Europe around 20,000 years ago, a period known as the last glacial maximum, but ice sheets over west Siberia didn't reach peak until about 15,000 years ago, a time when the European ice sheets had already significantly melted

This is an important feature of climate change though, although global temperature as a whole may rise or fall, it doesn't mean that ALL parts of the Earth are getting warmer or cooler.

 

[sdfc]

True but the ice age didn't end in an instant. It took thousands of years for different ice sheets to melt, and they didn't all melt at the same time. For example, ice cover reached a peak over Europe around 20,000 years ago, a period known as the last glacial maximum, but ice sheets over west Siberia didn't reach peak until about 15,000 years ago, a time when the European ice sheets had already significantly melted

This is an important feature of climate change though, although global temperature as a whole may rise or fall, it doesn't mean that ALL parts of the Earth are getting warmer or cooler.

You're right the effects were different across geography and time periods. The younger dryas event appears to have been particularly quick, the final flooding of Doggerland even quicker.

The book Edge of Memory deals largely with Aboriginal myth and is fascinating.

 

[Total Power]

You're right the effects were different across geography and time periods. The younger dryas event appears to have been particularly quick, the final flooding of Doggerland even quicker.

The book Edge of Memory deals largely with Aboriginal myth and is fascinating.

If you take sea level rise as a proxy for the global extent of ice sheets, then you can see that this rise has happened over a long period.

If people don't insist on a global flood and are satisfied with many local floods instead, then sure, that happened.

 

[sdfc]

If you take sea level rise as a proxy for the global extent of ice sheets, then you can see that this rise has happened over a long period.

If people don't insist on a global flood and are satisfied with many local floods instead, then sure, that happened.

I think they were mainly localised floods, tied to a global event. Us humans like to live near the coast, rising seas levels are bound to have had an impact. Oral histories are quite powerful.

This may be the inspiration for Sodom and Gomorrah.

An Ancient Middle Eastern City Destroyed by a Meteor May Have Inspired the Bible's Tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, a New Study Says

The ancient city of Tall el-Hammam was destroyed by a meteor, and may have inspired the Bible's tale of Sodom and Gomorrah.

news.artnet.com

 

[Total Power]

I think they were mainly localised floods, tied to a global event. Us humans like to live near the coast, rising seas levels are bound to have had an impact. Oral histories are quite powerful.

This may be the inspiration for Sodom and Gomorrah.

An Ancient Middle Eastern City Destroyed by a Meteor May Have Inspired the Bible's Tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, a New Study Says

The ancient city of Tall el-Hammam was destroyed by a meteor, and may have inspired the Bible's tale of Sodom and Gomorrah.

news.artnet.com

Thanks for the article, very informative. Roylion what are your thoughts on the article above?

 

[Total Power]

I don't subscribe to the idea that atheists and theists are on one end of a spectrum holding certainty about their positions while agnostics are in the middle undecided. Theism and atheism are about belief while gnosticism/agnosticism are about knowledge.

Most honest believers will admit that they believe god exists though they don't know it. In that case they're agnostic theists.

View attachment 1265513


The issue with agnosticism as a separate position is that you're forced to hold the same view about anything that you can't disprove if you want to be consistent. Since we don't know for sure whether Bill Gates is putting mind-control nanoparticles in covid vaccine, should we be agnostic about the claim? It can lead to a lot of silliness.

It's far easier to dismiss claims until adequate supporting evidence is provided and call yourself a disbeliever in hypothesis xyz. That's how most atheists see religion. As much as I loathe organised religion, I'd be forced to believe if adherents could provide enough supporting evidence for their claims.

Further to our discussion, Prof Cox beautifully sums up my view. I absolutely love and admire Brian Cox, a great scientist and so humble as well.

 

[SBD Gonzalez]

How we react to traumatic events is dependent on the coping mechanisms we develop, most of this development occurs in childhood.
If you're an atheist struck by a trauamatic event and you find yourself praying for divine intervention it doesn't make you not an atheist. So you can relax. It is a result of a coping mechanism you developed as a child. You have no control over it.

It's like all those dudes that go to Thailand and accidentally spend a night or two with a ladyboy, doesn't mean they're gay.

But you were way more categorical that that. No “if” or “you find yourself” in your original claim:

“we all know that when push comes to shove they're praying as hard as anyone for divine intervention.”

This is horseschitte.

Or at best, just the sort of unfalsifiable red herring that religious believers love to bandy about like it’s actual proof.