"...any sensory perception...." And how would you distinguish a sound, from an hallucination? Even a sight? Is that what Saul experienced, turning him into Peter? Maybe!

@BirdMan1 I would not really be able to distinguish between a hallucination a real sensory perception, but I don’t normally have to consider that with any other thing that I use my judgement on. As I said, it is a first step.

@indirect76 As a first step,it's cool, but there must be further steps, of course.

@indirect76 My mistake, though, it was Saul to Paul.

"the existence claim of your particular god."

which does not "exist," at least for YHWH, unless you can Quote some?
but you don't care about that part, i take it

@bbyrd009 I leave that problem to the person making the existence claim. Not my claim, not my circus, not my monkeys.

@anglophone gotcha

Good idea and since the mythical Jeebus Crust was also a carpenter then your dog can be doing his/her 'odd jobs' around the yard for you every day.....LOL.

The J.W. God? I guess. She want to give me a watchtower comic book.

@MrDragon Then I would say that many things could make me believe in a lot of gods, but not hers. Because her god is not logically consistent, and if I saw evidence for something that was not logically consistent, then I am more likely to assume that I have gone mad.

ha ya, as soon as you define It i am no longer a believer

Hard to tell, she didn't bring anyone.

@MrDragon not sure how that might change the point wadr, but i would say that her mistake was to suggest that God “existed,” when that requires “objective evidence,” right?

So, believe what you like imo, but personally i would take all believers with a grain of salt, atheists included

@bbyrd009 ... and just how do you lump atheists into the "all believers" group?

" ... but personally i would take all believers with a grain of salt, atheists included "

@AtheistInNC ah well...i am hardly the first to compare atheists to fundamentals, they are usually pretty similar in their thought processes i guess. An atheist is really just a believer in no God, whether they would appreciate the semantics or not

@bbyrd009 if you want to make a broad generalisation of “an atheist”, it’s important to understand that all atheists, simply lack belief in those theist claims. There is no position of belief required.

@Mvtt ya, ive heard that a lot, but it strikes me as a form of denial tbh

@bbyrd009 I would justifiably deny the ignorance of semantics, yes. It’s illogical to do so, mis-communicates and misrepresents atheism.

@Mvtt i have no idea what you just said, sorry

you either believe there is no God or you do not, seems to me?
seems like an aversion to the term "believe"

@bbyrd009 seems like you like semantics because you have no good answer.
"I believe I'll have another coffee this morning." Now I'm a coffee worshiper.
Uh-huh.

@AtheistInNC ya, so it seems the term "believe" is the sticking point, which i guess i kinda understand...but i have been having this discussion for about twenty years now, and not once has a professed atheist allowed that they might possibly "believe there are no gods"

so i try to keep an open mind there, but the weight of the evidence is becoming overwhelming tbh; if you choose to believe that "i don't believe in __" and "i believe there are none" are in any material way any different, that is certainly your right, but understand that the similarity can be mathematically proven, yet you don't care about that much i guess; a frequent reply is that I suddenly "like semantics" even though it is invariably the atheist/gnostic who is employing it in their argument...which i gotta say i don't get that part at all? Is "semantics" bad, iyo?

so, you might check out one of the many comparisons of fundies to atheists, and understand that i can get along with either, but either one are necessarily gnostic in their beliefs, it seems like anyway; you might note the number of gnostic statements in your last post, or any post

i mean does every "belief" manifest in "worship," iyo?

@bbyrd009 Well how would one know??? And it also reminds me of a story in the NT that JC disciples asked him that if a blind man born blind was blind because of his sins, or his parent's sin, and JC said that he was blind so he can be part of the glory of god and then JC healed him. That is of course a paraphrase version, so why can't that be the case of the amputee???

@MrDragon well, i could of course bring you an amputee that could grow its limb back w/o prayer...only it would be a frog or something lol...but this seeking of miracles, i dunno; i mean the amputee got amputated via some choice, right, so i dunno about the escape from consequences there, which seems to be what is being asked for?

anyway, to your question, "blind" has a symbolic meaning in the bible, and i seriously doubt any literal restoration of literal sight took place tbh; literal reading of the Bible generally misses the actual story being told, in my experience

@bbyrd009
You stated: "An atheist is really just a believer in no God, whether they would appreciate the semantics or not"

You equate "believer" into both sides ... a believer of god, a believer in no god ... therefore atheist and theist are both "believers" when the connotation of the word "believer" has a certain meaning which leaves atheists out.

So, my friend, you are the one who incorporated "semantics" into the conversations first, and insinuate things which are not - and then argue both sides with different people online just to hear the sweet melody of empty words dripping from you lips.

Crawl back under your bridge; we are tired of you.

@AtheistInNC ok, have a nice day then, and my apologies ok, i don’t blame anyone for wanting to avoid that one connotation, and i just kinda ignorantly assumed that the other connotations might still be universally valid

i was more focused on the gnostic/agnostic part

@bbyrd009 We seem to have this conversation in here about twice a year.
Whatever happened to Frank ??
(actually there is no "we"; I don't partake in it anymore)

@twill ha ya, I was gonna ask about the “we” thing, but i guess im already being antagonizing enough?
Near as i can tell it’s mostly an aversion to being associated with “believer,” which i can respect, but it makes it harder to have a convo on it.

Maybe if i started replacing “believe” with “think?”

@bbyrd009
I just read an opinion in the NY Times....the poster called something an "Atheist Religion"....oh boy.
Just accept atheists as non-believers in gods. There's nothing more to it....except maybe some wicked humor. It's pretty simple

@twill well, from one perspective it might be, but atheists have a spectrum just like any other group i think?

@bbyrd009 I suppose they do. No matter where you go, you end up in the same place

@twill ha well as long as you do the same things anyway, i guess. Changing your mind is hard, yeh

The following seems to be a useful formulation:

"Where's your evidence?"

"The Buy Bull is the claim, not the evidence."

"It is trivial to show that the God of the Buy Bull cannot exist."

"Your God made me an atheist. Who are you to question His wisdom?"

@anglophone you're making it pretty obvious that you have spent no time whatsoever in the bible, wadr; ezackly what "bull" have you been asked to buy? What if thats not in there? Then what?

@bbyrd009 A Torah, a Koran, a Book of the Dead, and the Tales of Odin, Thor and Loki ( [booktopia.com.au] )

@anglophone so you don't wanna reply to the q, no problem

@bbyrd009 Your failure to see my reply for what it is is not my problem.

@anglophone well i mean none of those are the "buy bull," and thus irrelevant to the q, arent they?

@bbyrd009 That is precisely the point. All those books are exactly as irrelevant as the Buy Bull.

@anglophone ah, so

Yes, the universal cop-out, the adamant refusal to use their brains.

Well....there is a little bit of that "fucking for jesus" goin' around

That was a long read.

@MrDragon I assumed that's where you had gotten that...

@JeffMurray
Ahh, no, it was something that I had thought of by myself, well, I thought I had, would seem like someone had beat me to it, I just didn't know it, until now.

@MrDragon It is a pretty good question to ask.