You know it's going to be good when the very first item is complaining about something that happens in a metaphorical vision being scientifically absurd...
Yes, you can. It's the only way to deal with a Gish Gallop.
The very first item I clicked was an item where apparently saying one group can do nothing right, and then later saying a different group can do right, is a contradiction.
This could have been an interesting resource, but as it stands, there's too much manure to sieve through.
Sadly though, most religious people take the writings about that "metaphorical vision" to be literal. Personally I think religion should be open to ridicule. The fact that some of the most powerful decision makers in the world (all US presidents so far, for example) believe / believed in some big man in the sky and allow teachings from 2000+ years ago (when the world was incredibly less civilised) to influence their decisions and behaviour, is quite frankly terrifying.
Any conversation about religion ends in frustration, anger and indifference for me. It's like a trap I fall in from time to time. The time in between conversations is equal to the time it takes to forget how awful last time was.
These 'neo-atheists' like Dorkins, Hitchens, Rich-white-guy Gervais and Reddit really disgust me. Yes, religion is in general an oppressive, patriarchal, hierarchical bundle of nastiness. But so is imperialism. Guess which one's killed more people.
I looked this up several years ago as reply in an IRC argument. Before I posted the reply I went though an actually looked at many of the quotes in detail (because I knew my interlocutor would do the same - I had been burned before!).
Disappointingly every one I looked at turned out not to be a "contradiction" at all - at least in the logical sense. But given the least charitable interpretation, could be construed as one. This isn't good enough if you're addressing well-read Christians (, and have any intellectual integrity).
The contradiction concerns who the father of jesus was:
Two "contradicting" quotes are:
"Concerning his son Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh. "
"When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost."
There are valid interpretations of these two quotes.
Talking about "contradictions" is pointless. What we need to be asking is, "what is the best explanation".
The best theory of a non-historical Jesus (a greek euhemerized tale about a jewish demi-god) interprets the first quote about "god taking the sperm* of david" as god having used the sperm of david to create a demi-god called Jesus. The later story about him being born to Mary is a euhemerization.
Historical interpretations "interpret" sperm to signify "part of a lineage"... that Jesus is descended from David somehow.
*the original text says sperm, "seed" is an english euphemism
Personally, since we're in PG's House I chose to filter out the actual content and focus on the pretty sweet visualization.
As an awesome UI for navigating large datasets where context and metadata edges of the graph are more relevant and useful than the nodes
Of course, that's always been known at Google (we just don't think of PageRank and AdRank/Quality Score as edge operators since GOOG has been our primary mode of edge traversal for at least a decade)
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 36.8 ms ] threadThe very first item I clicked was an item where apparently saying one group can do nothing right, and then later saying a different group can do right, is a contradiction.
This could have been an interesting resource, but as it stands, there's too much manure to sieve through.
or what's the connection to imperialism there, are we supposed to pick one or the other?
http://www.armageddonconspiracy.co.uk
Disappointingly every one I looked at turned out not to be a "contradiction" at all - at least in the logical sense. But given the least charitable interpretation, could be construed as one. This isn't good enough if you're addressing well-read Christians (, and have any intellectual integrity).
I clicked on one just now, by way of example, http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/jesus_dad.html
The contradiction concerns who the father of jesus was:
Two "contradicting" quotes are:
"Concerning his son Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh. "
"When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost."
There are valid interpretations of these two quotes.
Talking about "contradictions" is pointless. What we need to be asking is, "what is the best explanation".
The best theory of a non-historical Jesus (a greek euhemerized tale about a jewish demi-god) interprets the first quote about "god taking the sperm* of david" as god having used the sperm of david to create a demi-god called Jesus. The later story about him being born to Mary is a euhemerization.
Historical interpretations "interpret" sperm to signify "part of a lineage"... that Jesus is descended from David somehow.
*the original text says sperm, "seed" is an english euphemism
As an awesome UI for navigating large datasets where context and metadata edges of the graph are more relevant and useful than the nodes
Of course, that's always been known at Google (we just don't think of PageRank and AdRank/Quality Score as edge operators since GOOG has been our primary mode of edge traversal for at least a decade)