God Loves you enough to BURN YOU WITH FIRE!: Transcript

Many thanks to Linda for providing this transcript!

[0:00] Thunderf00t: You know, I can put up with A LOT of fiction in a good story. Like blue god-like quantum men, or hundred year old girls fighting werewolves in subways. Or, people in computer games who can stop bullets if they believe it, and so on. However what I can’t take, even in a fantasy, is internal inconsistency. Like say, for instance when these agents—they can punch through walls—and they wanna kill everyone in this car, and this is what happens when he jumps on the first car; he utterly destroys it. And of course, that’s what happens when he jumps on the car with everyone in it he’s trying to kill, right? Nah, he just nimbly lands on the hood, merely making a mess of the paintwork, and so on.

[0:42] Or the time where the car he wasn’t trying to kill the people in is a mangled, bullet time wreck. In films, these are just kind of annoying and they’re called plot holes—it’s an internal inconsistency, and it’s the hallmark of bullshit. And people who can hold these internal inconsistencies in their mind in the real world—and even justify them—are idiots.

[1:05] So, let me just give you an example like: ‘my boyfriend only beats me because he loves me so much.’ Actually, no that’s a bad example because that’s pretty emotionally driven. Let me give you another example, that ‘God loves me so much, that he will torture me for eternity if I don’t do what he says.

[1:24] Huh, now that’s exactly the same thing just for the fictional character. Now it’s just come to me. I’ve got a famous example of this. Like when John Paul II claimed that it was a miracle that saved him from dying when he was shot, and that it was the Lady of Fatima who diverted the bullet away from a critical artery. To which Richard Dawkins famously retorted in The God Delusion that:

[1:48] clip from “Richard Dawkins Reads The God Delusion”: “When he suffered an assassination attempt in Rome, and attributed his survival to intervention by Lady of Fatima, “her maternal hand guided the bullet”. One cannot help wondering why she didn’t guide it to miss him altogether. Others might think the team of surgeons who operated on him for six hours deserve at least a share of credit.”

[2:19] Thunderf00t: Hell, if he wanted a miracle thing, why didn’t he just make like Neo? I mean believe me, if the Pope could do this, there would be a hell of a lot more Catholics in the wide world. But the reason I bring all this up is ‘cos this YouTube video I saw the other day.

[2:35] The creationist Kent Hovind is currently in jail after being convicted on a host of federal offenses mostly related to not paying his taxes. In fact, he’s been in jail for the best part of the last ten years. So some of the religious folks were discussing this:

[2:50] clip from “New 911 EMERGENCY! Dr. Kent Hovind 07/10/2014 Truth Serum Talk Radio Show Club Creation”: “And if you’re not everyone, priest [?] please lift him up in prayer. God has kept his hand of protection on Kent. Kent has been with some of the most violent offenders in this nation, and he’s not been harmed.”
“Mmhmm. Yes, exactly. And that just shows you the power of the Holy Spirit and the power of God at work here.”

[3:13] Thunderf00t: So did you get that? The fact that Kent has not been harmed in jail—just like tens of thousands of other prisoners who haven’t been harmed in jail—is actually the work of god. However, it would seem that even though god is powerful enough to keep Kent safe in prison, he’s not quite powerful enough to free him from prison.

[3:33] clip from “New 911 EMERGENCY! Dr. Kent Hovind 07/10/2014 Truth Serum Talk Radio Show Club Creation”: “But then again, you know, we do have an enemy and it’s not flesh and blood. Our adversary is the Devil and it’s his objective, um, to clearly to shut Dr. Hovind up and lock him away from the world so he can’t continue winning souls.”

[3:50] Thuderf00t: I mean, really, an all-powerful being who you think has personally intervened to keep you safe in jail, can’t get one man out of jail. I mean DAMN, the sheer self-centeredness of it all. If you’re gonna pray for something, DAMN pray for an end to childhood cancer! Not to get Kent Hovind out of jail. Or even better—get off your knees and actually DO something. ‘Cos as the old saying goes, a single pair of hands at work achieves more than a billion clasped in prayer.

Debating William Lane Craig….

    Can you debate William Lane Craig? Well my immediate response is whats the point?  It’s quite easy to show that William Lane Craig essentially delivers exactly the same ‘debate’ almost by rote.

 

   Popular debates favor style over substance, which is why the ‘debate’ is an irrelevance in the acquisition of knowledge.  In areas of contention, you propose experiments capable of distinguishing the various proposed models.  You then go and perform said experiments and the knowledge of mankind moves forwards.   Notably Craig will NEVER makes any testable predictions, which is why his arguments never change and he never moves forward.

    In this sense you might as well ‘debate’ a recording of William Lane Craig as William Lane Craig himself, as intellectually the physical presence of the man adds nothing to the forum.  Incidentally, I can also tell you from personal experience that this is why watching William Lane Craig debates gets so terribly monotonous.  It really is ‘pull the draw string’ and watch the man espouse the rigorous gold standards of the virtues of logic immediately prior to remorselessly and unproductively sodomizing them with a large, rusty and particularly unpleasant looking metal pipe.

   Now none of that would actually be a problem if Craig was presenting some devastating argument that no one could address, but that’s simply not the case. Craig merely rattles off his ‘5 pillars’, conveniently forgetting to tell people that none of these arguments actually convinced him that god exists, they just form a conformational bias on his ‘personal interaction’ with god.  In that sense the only argument that actually needs to be addressed is the one that convinced Craig, and boy how simple it is to address!

   People all around the world have these personal interactions with different ‘Gods’.

The ‘gods’ people people have personal relationships with seem to depend remarkably on where in the world you live!

   Now Craig will be the first to stand up and say ‘but that doesn’t logically prove my God doesn’t exist’.  Well yeah sure, but it does put Craigs personal relationship with ‘God’ into the exact same deeply unconvincing category that Craig puts everybody elses ‘God’s into.  Bizarrely it is this exact deeply unconvincing argument that is the very foundation of Craigs belief in ‘God’, and it is upon these foundation of sand he builds his pillars of conformational bias.