Three weeks ago, only July 16th, I received a PM from Bryan. Normally, I wouldn't post this without his permission but after having asked twice if I would have his permission to reproduce his PM either in part or full, I simply could not get a "yes" or a "no" out of him. I will only reproduce here and reply here in due time.
His first PM reads:
| Hi Ben, I saw your post a few days ago, just before your message, but didn’t have time then. I’m glad you did well on your tests. I read/skimmed both of your posts (need to reread again though as I have more time) and will try to post by next week if possible. Frankly I expected a lot better from you (and any who are helping you), but it was the only response possible that could keep atheism superficially tenable, a response that rejects following where the evidence leads and instead puts a prison around science and history telling them where they can and cannot point, regardless of the evidence or the normal ways science and history have been used for centuries. Many of your arguments prove that whether you admit it or not, that BEFORE you study evidence, your commitment to atheism and materialism decides what conclusions you will allow that evidence to point to or not point to. In practice you are deciding a priori the possible conclusions before you even look at the evidence, which can NEVER be reconciled with objectivity or following the evidence wherever it leads. PERIOD. This is the typical atheist approach that I know well and one that is diametrically opposed to every fiber of rational thought. A couple brief points and I'll speak a bit strongly because the tactics you are using are the antithesis of objectivity and if applied to other fields, would destroy much legitimate knowledge and they WILL damage your life in THIS world if you continue to follow them. That's a guarantee. And I would like you to avoid quite a bit of unnecessary pain in THIS life if possible instead of learning the truth the hard way, by experience. But, we all err, and I've made big errors at times and had to correct/rethink them. So, it's part of living and learning and no matter what I still wish the best for you. 1) I’m not a proponent of telepathy, more of a skeptic of it for the most part, although some accounts and studies make me wonder a bit. The telepathy part wasn’t the reason I asked you to listen to Sheldrake at all. I listed the reason you should listen to it, and you proceeded to straw man that with the bit about telepathy, smearing a Cambridge scientist who DOES have peer reviewed evidence even for telepathy . smh. To refuse to listen and read just 10 minutes, esp. something I had said was important regarding materialism, a foundational area of our discussion (the important part came AFTER the telepathy part) is completely anti-rational, putting you on the level of those who mocked Pasteur for claiming that bacteria couldn’t possibly kill a human being since they just knew that couldn’t be true. That’s the level that you are unfortunately consistently operating at, being enslaved by the tyranny of your own lack of knowledge instead of following the evidence where it leads, something that is another way that atheism is diametrically opposed to rational thought. Anyone can dismiss any evidence they like using that technique. Sheldrake and others have published peer reviewed evidence of telepathy…and whether you and I like it or not, it IS EVIDENCE. PERIOD. That is indisputable. Here are just a couple I found at pubmed in just a couple minutes. **Meta-analyses of "ganzfield" studies as well as "card-guessing task" studies provide compelling evidence for the existence of telepathic phenomena.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21829287 **50 participants (29 women and 21 men) were recruited through an employment web site. Of 552 trials, 235 (43%) guesses were hits, significantly above the chance expectation of 25%. Further tests with 5 participants (4 women, 1 man, ages 16 to 29) were videotaped continuously. On the filmed trials, the 64 hits of 137 (47%) were significantly above chance. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16491679 **Evidence for a communal consciousness. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21724158 **http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19733813 and there are quite a few others. I'll save you time and post the part from the 10 minute portion of the video that you should have watched if you had any objectivity at ALL in this area. Cambridge Scientist Rupert Sheldrake, PhD. in an interview: “Materialists believe that the mind is nothing but the brain….This is a theoretical definition (that telepathy, consciousness, etc. can’t happen outside the brain) and in science, we’re meant to look at evidence. If we look at the evidence, we get a very different picture. Things like telepathy are common. The majority of the population say they’ve experienced it. So, it happens. There’s a lot of evidence, scientific evidence, it happens. So, it’s normal, not paranormal. It’s only paranormal from the point of view of a particular theory. And science isn’t committed to particular theories. It doesn’t have to adopt the materialistic ideology as its basis. Science is a method of inquiry where we can find out by looking at evidence and constructing hypotheses and understand the world better through proper investigation, not dogma. What he says is true whether it is telepathy, the paranormal, religion or whatever. Science can't be banned from following the evidence where it leads, to ANY conclusion, including religion and other things that don't match well with my worldview, but that have evidence. 2) Correlation proves causation beyond any reasonable doubt in 1000s if not millions of scientific studies. Rejecting this fact will destroy a large swathe of science that is very important for human life NOW. This is only one of many ways that atheism is completely anti-science whenever the evidence points in a different direction from it’s a priori prison. 3) Your statement about no freedom if there's God and that eternal life can never be a good thing is wrong and anti-life and the principle applied on earth would mean there’s no freedom here either. I dealt with them already (shortly), but it seems you completely ignored that. 4) The demands of God by Aronra and others are a big sticking point for many atheists, but they miss many important reasons why He does not do what they are demanding. He could do all they wish easily and more. There are important reasons why He does not and this is a foundational issue that many atheists don’t comprehend, which I will address in the next post. 5) It’s very sad that you mostly or totally ignored what secular historians and scientists are saying about the Bible/SDA contributions to human rights/health. To deny the contributions of a philosophy/worldview and the only possible source of those contributions just because you think differently and have decided a priori where the evidence can or cannot point is not objective, mature or consistent in any way, esp. when you benefit from them a LOT. It's similar to white supremacists trying to deny all the accomplishments of blacks because of their a priori ideology. 6) There are many martyrs for many religions and political ideas and other ideas. Who doesn't know that? But, how often do people die for something they claim to have observed firsthand but know they didn’t? To compare someone who dies for what he has observed firsthand with someone who dies only for what he has been told is really irrational and grossly unjust. There is simply no comparison. The gigantic difference is that Jesus disciples died for supernatural events, a resurrection, that they had observed firsthand. Nobody in other religions died for a resurrection claim that they had personally observed. This is a massive difference that atheists continually misrepresent. Witnesses like this ARE evidence of the highest credibility PERIOD and many atheist experts have agreed. There is nothing you can say rationally that can validate the atheist claim that people who died for what they saw count as “no evidence” one of the most dishonest claims in all history. 7) You completely misunderstood why I posted pictures of Hitchens and my grandpa and made completely false accusations, even after I clarified it to the moderator. We all make mistakes...but this one is really egregious, as are several above: "You take one person who purposefully lived his life in such a way and you compare it to others who didn't. You disregard other people who live just as long or longer at much higher frequencies due to completely different lifestyles. In short, you cherry-pick like there's no tomorrow." I had already cited studies on 70,000 people over decades by Dan Buettner and others that are among the most sterling and respected studies in all of health science. Scientists and teachers all over the planet cite studies and then give real examples to help people see the results of scientific facts in real lives. HOW IN THE WORLD can you not know this? It's a basic form of education and that you ridicule that is just shocking. The pictures of my grandpa and Hitchens were just 2 examples reinforcing the point of NUMEROUS studies done on countless 1000s of people for decades. It was not cherry picking of ANY kind. PERIOD. To claim so is simply dishonest. Neither is it honest to say that I said anything about purposefulness, nor to smear my grandpa or anyone else as people who lived without purpose (I assure you he did not), nor that I ignore other groups (I didn’t, but there just aren’t any that live longer in America and few if any in the world). None of these accusations are based on any iota of fact. There are a lot of other problematic issues in your post...but I'll stop there. I respect your efforts in studying and researching, but when the foundational philosophy you have is an a priori bias, genuine science and rational thought are crippled and in history this practice has often led to pseudoscience, and much wasted money and lives. To err is human they say. I've done it and will do it in the future., sometimes egregious ones So, I can't expect you or anyone else not to make mistakes. It happens. But, hopefully we learn from it and avoid those same mistakes in the future. Bryan Last edited by TruthisLife7 on Mon Jul 16, 2012 4:42 pm, edited 1 time in total. |
After I asked him for permission, I got this in reply:
Hi Ben, Don't worry, this will be part of my reply in public, but with more documentation to show explicitly how atheist arguments shatter the concept of following the evidence where it leads and use double standards. So, you'll be able to quote from that. This is NOT only you by any means. It's the same fallacious, anti-objective reasoning methods I've been encountering for decades from atheism, and it's extremely harmful in many cases to them IN THIS LIFE, not to mention possibly the most valuable possible thing in the universe, eternal life (reread my short answers to your eternal life things and why they don't make sense....it was short, but that should be enough). Some do it with the best of intentions, but it's not possible to be objective using the reasoning you are...and I don't care if it's a religious topic or any other non-religious topic. The way you are reasoning is not possible to follow the evidence wherever it leads. It's an approach of "assume a bias first, then disregard all evidence that doesn't fit the bias" approach. I don't doubt that you and others are sincere, but this approach is the antithesis of being objective and the antithesis of the foundation of science. All the best, Bryan |
To which I replied:
Inferno wrote:Hi Bryan
Are you referring to this paragraph?
Note here that the methods of science do NOT compel us to accept a material explanation of the world. If you think they do, please explain how the scientific method forces us to accept MD (but do it AFTER we’ve finished the definitions section). But, Lewontin is absolutely wrong in claiming that if you believe in God you can believe in anything. We can test many religious claims just like we do many scientific claims and 1000s have been confirmed, many conclusively. The emotional wish to dismiss miracles and the supernatural as possible is the motivation behind MD. Why do people wish this? Usually this is because they don’t like the restrictions of God that they don’t understand. But, a jet has more restrictions than a hot air balloon and this actually is precisely why it has more freedom in speed, maneuverability, etc. Wise restrictions are actually extremely empowering and even life saving. Science restricts us in very specific ways, but these restrictions empower enormous freedoms and advances. Wise restrictions are the foundation of incredible growth and freedom and pleasurable rewards. Nowhere is that more true than of God’s restrictions. Atheists who refuse to follow God’s restrictions are ironically only harming their own enjoyment in THIS world. Here’s just one short example:
Or this one?
2) There is free will in heaven, but after the experiment with sin on this earth recorded for all history, no one will even dream of trying such a horrific experiment again & thus God says sin will not rise a second time.
I've debunked the first one and rejected the second one as absurd on the following grounds:
Inferno wrote:2) So there's free will... but there isn't?
In any case, I ask again: May I, yes or no, quote what you wrote a few days ago?
Cheers
Ben
His last reply was the following:
TruthIsLife7 wrote:Hi Ben,
Sorry for delays, I suddenly had 2 unexpected research papers to edit for doctors for publication and a couple other things. I've done some work on the response, but still a bit more to do.
You haven't been able at all to reconcile materialism a priori assumptions with following the evidence wherever it leads and it is not in any way possible (and YES, a priori materialism IS what you claimed your position was and it is the position of most atheists and most importantly in practice you are following it to the letter, using it to claim any evidence that conflicts with it as invalid regardless of how good it is, no different from how birthers discard any evidence Obama was born in America).
There is no problem with free will in heaven. Just like Americans don't give free will for child abuse and serial murder, and that makes us freer and happier, but there is much freedom in countless other areas, the same thing will be true in heaven. The difference is that people will have a much deeper of the destruction and cruelty that all sin causes and it will be abhorrent to them just like child abuse is to anyone now.
Even if you WERE right on this, it would still be a really, really foolish argument and frankly an anti-human one. People can and are happy in all kinds of environments on this earth that are horrible, ranging from the slums of India to dictatorships. And heaven with all that gone, will be a paradise, from which you can explore the entire universe. Nothing on earth will ever compare with that, even if there weren't freedom. But, the whole point of God allowing this contest in the first place is so that the universe can make a free choice about which government is best, God's or some alternative.
If you followed your principles consistently, then you should give up living on this planet, because there's no freedom to be a serial killer, a communist president, a child abuser and quite a few others without serious consequences.
Bryan
