@TheMiddleWay I challenge you to find one scientific experiment, one logical argument, that direct and convincingly dismisses the very notion of a god

Well I want to point out that the party making the assertion is responsible for the proof, but I did state that god has been tested so I submit the following.

Of course these only test one god, so those who are agnostic to the world of deism would still have a valid argument. Then also deism really was born of a thought experiment and would struggle to have a following.

[nytimes.com]

[researchgate.net]

No issue with agnostics, just following up on my original post.

@TheMiddleWay I tend to agree. Let me hit you with this and tell me if it does not at least give valid data.

Christians believe prayer works.
Christians believe God heals those of faith.
The Amputee Coalition of America estimates that there are 2 million American amputees.
62% of Americans claim to be Christians.
There are around 1.24 million Christian amputees in America.
There are zero reported regrown limbs in America.

This does not disprove that a god exists, just the god most people here believe in.

@TheMiddleWay I got that about hard agnosticism, but in my case I have no doubt at all that there is an ultimate reality behind the sense world. I am almost totally ignorant about the nature of that reality, but if I start calling myself a hard agnostic that will imply that I don’t know if such a reality exists, which is not true.

To complicate matters, we ourselves are a part of that higher reality. It seems to me that our response need not include belief or faith or disbelief or the withholding of belief. That is settled. Nor do we have to refuse to deal in metaphysical questions because there are no rational answers and probably will never be rational answers.

The response that seems correct to me is continuous awareness, appreciation, awe and gratitude. Those are subjective reactions, not analyses of what is “out there”.

It’s all about me.

@TheMiddleWay This reminds me of a student’s response to Aristotle’s ethics of the “golden mean.” That view is that virtue lies on a mean between the extremes of excess and the deficiency. Accordingly, temperance lies between the excess of gluttony and the deficiency of starvation, courage lies between the excess of fool-heartedness and the deficiency of cowardice, etc. The student responded: Does that mean I should murder some medium number of people, because if I murder too many it would be excessive while if I murder too few it would be a deficiency?

@TheMiddleWay everything falls on SOME spectrum.

i am not sure what you mean by your comments about health care. i think everyone deserves to be taken care of according to their needs. no one deserves to die so an insurance company gets a profit. and while we're at it, employers do not get to control how an employee spends his/her salary, so why should they control how the employee spends his/her health insurance?

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@TheMiddleWay okay i understand what you mean by spectrum now.

i now also understand what you mean about healthcare but i disagree. you cannot predict who is going to waste what is given. you can't just say "i think this person will abuse his body anyway so fuck 'im." that is against the hypocratic oath, for one thing, and it's not fair (or even logical) for another. doctors are not judges, and doctors need to be allowed to help people.

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@TheMiddleWay my objection to that includes the very real possibility that this method of prediction will be, maybe already is, abused. there is already unequal treatment in some places of people on medicaid. i am not talking about what medicaid does or does not pay for. i am talking about whether a doctor will treat a poor patient with the same respect afforded a rich one. i have seen this with my own eyes.

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@TheMiddleWay i am not talking about people who can't pay. doctors on salary at clinics or hospitals get paid whether they treat a medicare or medicaid patient or a rich person with private insurance. some of them (and the nurses, and the other staff) are noticeably ruder to medicare and medicaid patients. i switched hospitals partly because of how badly i was treated at one.

helping people isn't about giving them everything they want. it's about making sure people get what they NEED.

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@TheMiddleWay i object to people being treated as assets. i am not someone who should be considered, or not considered, cost-effective. i'm a human being.

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@TheMiddleWay i would go case by case. but i am not in that position and have not made calculations to help me answer this, nor am i going to do so, since after i have done so, not only will i STILL not be in that position, the answer to that particular question will not be pertinent to health care for all. if we made gazillionnaires pay reasonable taxes, this would not be an issue. and by the way, why SHOULD a procedure cost as much as all that? things are jacked up so high here only because of greed. other countries do not charge as much for such things, and as far as i know, their doctors are not starving. it is perfectly possible to care for all without driving the country into the debt it is currently being driven into not by health care but by GREED.

g

@TheMiddleWay i disagree still. i especially disagree that the current situation has nothing to do with greed. how about air? isn't it extreme that everyone gets to breathe it? how about only half the population? sorry, i think trying to cut everything down to the center can be extreme.

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@TheMiddleWay What is "unlawful" is not absolute. Laws are made, not found. Even by definition, murder, rape, and pedophilia aren't necessarily bad to the murderer, rapist, and pedophile except if they are punished under the majorities' perception that those things should be unlawful, or if someone murders, rapes, or molests them. If society was made up of mostly murderers, rapists, and pedophiles then the majority viewpoint and laws would be based on their viewpoint. The law would be made by those who are in control or who was in power. What's to stop the majority in a society like that making a law that says that is all legal and helping those that are being murdered, raped, or molested would be punished with jail or death etc.? In my opinion it would be a very dreary and dark existence, but it would still stand to reason that it's all about perception.

Hitler believed what he was doing was good for the world, and I'm not just talking about his extermination of the Jews. He employed eugenics to many other people too, and his and other's philosophies about it were also espoused in parts of the United States including Virginia before he came to power too.

If a meteor took out all humans on Earth, it would be "bad" for humans, but nature wouldn't care one way or another. It just is what it is. The universe would be fine without us. Even if the universe ceased to exist, so what? It just is what it is in the grand scheme of things. It might not even mean that total existence would cease. There could be something outside of our universe too.

I think it's all relative. We really have no rights but those that are man made and enforced by the majority.