Posted by Gremlin [12.255.181.7 - 12-255-181-7.client.attbi.com] on 12 July 2002 at 01.46.54 ZuluTime:

In Reply to: my point...and no more games posted by whoami? Andy... on 12 July 2002 at 01.09.21 ZuluTime:

First of all, you've misdefined atheism

Atheism [from the Greek atheos]: without deital beliefs.

Beyond that: I've heard that far more than a hundred times. It's a pantheistic slant. It's also a bit of a strawman, based on your misunderstanding of atheism.
     Science is not an absolute truth. There is no absolute truth. The term knowledge is applied to a lot of things no one knows about. Again: there was knowledge--regarded as supreme truth--that the planet was a flat square at the centre of the universe, and that the universe was a curtain with little holes in it, and so on. What once passed for truth is now a sad joke. We don't deal in truth anymore. We look at what we can see, compare it to other things we can see, and develop hypotheses and theories based on that which we can test exhaustively enough to conclude to be evidence; then, when the evidence builds up to the extent that a theory appears to be correct at all times, we call it a fact.
     In cases--quite a few of them--facts are later expunged. It was a fact that entropy disallowed for order rising from chaos; but now, we have evidence that order can rise from chaos, and that causes can suceed effects, and that water runs up hills and things become newer with age. The field of nonlinear dynamics has slaughtered the fields of thermodynamics, physics, and everything else we knew for a fact twenty years ago.
     The bible is badly-written FanFic of older badly-written fiction. If you read it from cover to cover, bearing in mind everything you read, it becomes evident that forty different morons built this compendium of idiocy. We go from the prophesy of the messiah preventing him from performing miracles or reaching Earth before the destruction of Tyrus to the messiah showing up, perfoming miracles and strolling through the existing city of Tyre. We see in Ecclesiastes Nine that there is no afterlife after death, whither thou goest. We see--with a tiny element of conjecture--that anyone basing his belief in a deity on the bible has never actually read it; he's skimmed it, or heard about it from a minister, maybe; no one could read this thing inclusively, understand the most basic vernacular words, and consider it anything but badly-written fiction. They really shoulda used an editor.
     So. Your deity is some pantheistic anthropomorphism of science--where science is fallible and mutable as all hell--which shares a quality or two with the Great Biblical I Am Yhvh the Moron Who Can't Make a Decent Planet to Save My Holy Ass, and...if there's anything more to your argument so far, I guess I overlooked it.
     Was there more to it?