I do have to jump on this bandwagon

I do certainly want you to listen to the interesting part of this the most...  But if you spend too much time listening to the motorcycle, you won't catch the absurdity here...

1:50 Ok, sounds good.  Seriously though, if my position is invalid I would want to know so I could adapt it.  Anyway let's get to this ownage here, this intellectual rape of atheism.

Yaddah yaddah....

2:58 The atheists were going ballistic because of how atheism contradicts itself?  Let's see...

It is possible that God exists, it's also possible that fairies exist.  Please, make your point shock.

People who assume that no-way-no-how is there a god are perhaps closed-minded, but this isn't a contradiction.

Most rational people will concede that there is the possibility of pretty much anything, however remote.  The term tooth-fairy-agnostic is what most rational atheists know themselves as.  The outright rejection of any idea is irrational, but again, not a contradiction.

It's not an Achilles heel, it's a disagreement.

Not believing in a god and believing there is certainly no god are not mutually exclusive.  I could not believe in god and adamantly believe that there certainly is no god, but I could not think highly of myself for doing so.

4:24 That's a random point.  Christians need to believe in God to be Christians, so?

5:20 Here we go again...

If the atheist states affirmatively and certainly that there is no supernatural, shock at least has arrogance and irrationality to use again him/her.

If the atheist states that a god is possible, they have lost no ground.  They'd no be arguing against themselves, I return to fairies.  Fairies are possible, yet I'd argue against anyone that they don't exist.  Why?  Lack of evidence.  I do not contradict myself in saying that.

It doesn't embarrass me to say that a god or gods are possible.  Science is always trying to learn, thus we cannot dismiss something out of sheer improbability.  I ask the reader, can you imagine all of the technology we would not currently have were we to have dismissed it as impossible due to lack of knowledge?  Everything!  Everything would have been ignored.  That's the argument I hear from the other side of the argument, ignorance seems key.

7:09-9:58 Maybe this one will be good?

Sure, parts of the Bible are "true"...  Some of the social, geographical observations line up and the like...  I could write a book with true parts too, but in it's whole it could still be crazy.  Oh no!  He's got me now!

"Then you could say"Which parts of it [the Bible] are not true?" and you could expand it." So admitting that Israel is a real country and place and that the other nations in the Bible existed is tantamount to accepting it's entirety?  That's the epitome of logical FAIL.

There's actually no proof that Jesus ever did exist, nor any proof beyond that that he was divine (other than the Bible).  So you got him...how?  Ok, Lord of the Rings time.  Gandalf is real folks!  Because PARTS of the Lord of the Rings are true...  Sword fighting, ranged weaponry, mining industry...  It must all be real!  Thanks, shock for clearing that up.

I couldn't hope to defend that atheists never lie, but that doesn't prove shit about atheism being full of "crapola"(see what I did there).  In the same fashion, Christians lie.  Does that inherently make Christianity full of crap?  Well...no, that specifically doesn't.

10:00-12:18 Objective moral values...  Like the (original) ten commandments, half of which (besides the insecure desert deity ones at the beginning) God either broke or commanded their breaking?  Let's take a look.

Honor thou parents...or be stoned. (Deut 21:18-21)
Well in Luke 12:53 "The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother; the mother in law against her daughter in law, and the daughter in law against her mother in law."

Thou shalt not kill...unless you're god, then genocide is all in a day's work (old testament).

Thou shalt not FUCK unless thou hast the paperwork for it.
Adam and Eve couldn't have been married, but we can let that slide.  How about when God tells the Israelite army that they can rape the virgins of the Midianites. Numbers 31:18 "But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves."

Thou shalt not take shit which is not thine...unless you're God.
Looting villages, stealing their women, livestock and possessions.

Thou shalt nor bear false witness against thy neighbor.
God telling Moses to lie to Pharaoh counts I assume?  Exodus 3:17&18

Thou shalt not WANT shit which is not thine.
So the "promised land" inhabited by several other tribes?  Hmm...

Anyway, back to objective morality.

I personally don't know if there is objective morality.  I'm inclined to say no, the needs of the many (without special circumstances) outweigh the needs of the one/few.  I won't go so far as to say that the ends justify the means, because it's too general.  I think morality is a societal construct and is neither absolute nor entirely fluid.  Some things are just wrong, but I also think that it is possible to do the wrong thing for the right reason.  By saying that I don't mean to contradict myself, more to state an "All is well what ends well" sort of mentality.  And my definition of "ends well" is rather firm.

I like the sneer with which shock says "He's like a socialist I guess."  Not appealing to any particular group there, are we...Oh, wait that's a direct appeal to the Christian right!

The flaw with the starving family argument here is that there would be an impact.  Stealing money would impact the boss and make HIS family starve.  Don't want to go slippery slope all the way here, but there could be an effect.  Theft is normally wrong.  Let's say though that a catastrophe has occurred and there are limited supplies of food for a population.  One person is hoarding those supplies and effectively not letting anyone else have any.  I think it would be morally acceptable to steal enough food to make it by on, assuming the one person also has enough.  I think that socialism (sneer) would be the best way to run that.

12:18 Suffering in the world is a problem for the theist, but it seems in the video tied in with objective morality more than I can think it is in practice.

"Premise 1: If God existed...then we would not see suffering in the world.

Premise 2: There is suffering.

The conclusion they try to make is therefore God doesn't exist."

The way that goes is more like this...

Premise 1: If God were omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and omni-benevolent, there would be no suffering in the world.

Premise 2: There is suffering in the world.

Conclusion: God is not omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and omni-benevolent.

Conclusion 2: Since the Christian God has to be all of these things, we can reasonably rule him out.

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I am starting to think that shockofgod is the best person I've encountered at setting up straw men.  He does it so fast and easily that it's tempting to pass right over them and accept his conclusion.

---

You're going to bring Job up, really?  That was a bet.  God and the devil made a bet and Job's stuff was the collateral damage.  That is not a kind or just thing to do.

I'll just drag through this part...  Actually, we look at death as a disease.  One that may eventually be cured or put off anyway.  There's another straw man.

I live a life with purpose, without God.  My purpose is to be intellectual.  I'd rather have a lifespan of knowledge now than an eternity of kissing God's holy ass.  If the first option is unavailable, as shock demonstrates nicely...the second may be worth while anyway.  That's for a later post though.

The purpose of atheism is to tell "you" that "you" have no purpose?  On the contrary!  It's to be truthful and intellectually honest, to discover.  There's yet another straw man.

Design?

I do believe I've written on this before, but I will again.

     Position of the earth.  A creationist will claim that the universe was designed for us because of the position of the earth.  There are billions of galaxies, with at least trillions of stars/planets/moons in each.  How vain is humanity to suggest that it's all here for us?  So back to the position of the earth, which is perfect for life.  The earth is really a harsh environment for life.  We only do so well because we adapt and more yet, we adapt our environment.  The earth isn't naturally a good place for human life.
      Now, more literally on the celestial position of the earth and less on the planet itself.  There are billions of galaxies with trillions or quadrillions of celestial bodies in each to my knowledge.  Now think of earth as a candidate planet as I will call it.  A candidate planet is one which has the requirements to support life in a given form.  Keep in mind as well that this is based only on our carbon-based life and there may be many different kinds.  Can it be rationalized that earth is the only candidate planet in the universe/multiverse?  No, we can't rationalize that.  There can be so many candidate planets, not all of which will produce life.  What we wind up with is a grand dice roll.  We seem to have won that roll.
     Nature...  Can we call this cruel system designed?  Why would a designer make a prey animal fast, only to make the predator as fast or failing that, sneaky?  There's no clear reason why.  Natural selection has survival to account for on both sides.  But a designer has no motivation to make such a cruel game unless the designer is a sadistic bastard, to be polite.
     What evidence even suggests design?  Almost every science points to a materialistic origin.  I've come to the conclusion that either I am completely and horribly ignorant or there isn't much backing it up really.

God and free will

     God makes a race to worship and serve him.  He gives us free will.  He commands us to act a specific way, but makes doing so impossible.  When we fail to act this way, we're supposedly punished.  Not only slap-on-the-wrist sort of punishment either, eternal torture.

     Say I write a computer program, I write it to complete an equation.  I then give it several different types of equations to solve and expect it to always have the same result.  My analogy fails when we come to punishment, because nothing is less just than infinite punishment for finite crime.  The worst person who ever lived or will live could not possibly deserve that.

     So we've got the celestial "screw you" down.  Let's talk about God's plan for us.  God is supposed to have this divine plan for each of our lives.  That is not possible if we have free will.  Imagine you are commanding an army.  The catch is, none of your soldiers follow orders unless it suits their personal agenda.  Can you imagine commanding a free-willed army?  The only thing which holds a plan involving multiple people together is knowledge of how they will act.  If they change what they are to do, they can endanger the entire plan and screw it up completely.  The typical counter-argument to this is that God can work all things that happen into his plan.  The problem is that it's still a plan, which requires manipulation of at least several elements.

     Next, divine intervention.  Some people think God intervenes on a daily basis for them.  If God saves parking spaces and the like for the individual like some believe, he must deprive another of that parking space.  The other person would have to be swayed divinely to park somewhere else or not make that particular stop.  What does that do to free will?  I suppose God would have to make them want to not stop or not park there so that they'd freely choose to avoid it, but can that be considered free choice?  The educated person cannot believe in both the divine and free will simultaneously.  

     A friend of mine recently posted on facebook "If I had a time machine, I would go back to the Precambrian, throw a pebble in the ocean, and then fast forward to the present to see how much had changed.".  The result in this experiment could be catastrophic, or it could have almost no effect.  In the same way every time God meddles, he disrupts the entire natural order.  When he does that he could change almost everything and what does that say about free will?

     As a Christian, there can be no free will.  Without free will we're not responsible for our actions.  That removes sin, making us sinless.  We'd have no need for God to "save" us.  No hell to punish us for the sin.  If  one argues that we're still responsible without free will then God is a tyrant (which is a notion I wouldn't be above, I derive great pleasure from knowing that he doesn't exist).

Argument from design - Teleological argument

     The first error is in assuming that natural selection is a random unguided process.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Natural selection is the filling of a need via necessity.  Let's look at a few examples;

1. Foals can walk and nurse within an hour of being born, can trot and canter within several hours and can gallop within a day.  They need this ability to be able to move away from predators.  This ability can be confidently suggested to be rooted in natural selection.  A horse which is born and has to sit around for days will be killed more easily than a quickly mobile one.  That causes the more mobile horse to be more likely to pass along it's genes and as a result eventually cause horses in general to be able to move faster after birth.
2. Let's look at a predator.  Cheetahs are a rather optimized predator.  They are stealthy, accurate, fast and deadly.  These abilities came when the cheetah was hunting prey animals and I'll use gazelles as an example.  The gazelle is fast and can turn in an instant.  To be able to hunt and kill a gazelle the cheetah must be able to move very fast after stealthily hunting.  Any cheetahs which didn't have these traits wouldn't as easily catch their prey and would find survival and thus reproduction hard to sustain.
3. The crocodile looks rather like a log to the unsuspecting creature.  It sits still and watches until a creature wanders past or comes to drink and launches itself at the animal.  It then often drags the creature underwater, drowning it and allowing the crocodile to eat it's prey at leisure.  These traits have solid roots also in natural selection.  

     Chance is involved in the mutation used in evolution and defined by natural selection.  Take a boggle game and decide on a configuration you'd like to see.  The first thing you need to do is make sure that your dice have all of the sides required, if they don't, your metaphorical species will go extinct.  So assuming that you picked a possible combination, let's begin.  Each time a dice falls in the correct position, have it not change any more.  You'll find that eventually through dice rolls you get an incredibly unlikely configuration which for all intents and purposes would be nearly impossible to come to through chance.  Now think of each dice as a trait in a genome or a phenotype.  When one of them is beneficial, it goes on to be reproduced.  That's the dice you keep.  To take the boggle analogy to another level you could land the wrong dice on the right trait and by doing that lose the potential for another trait you need.  This has a couple of possible results.  The first is that your species cannot survive.  The second is that your species has to make another change.
     Let's take the native's watch.  The native living in a primitive culture finds a watch on a beach, he doesn't know what it is, but he knows that it was designed.  The watch is correlated with the universe and us with the native. Theists will take that to prove God.  The problem is that the watch has clear markings on it which indicate design, and that watches are to my knowledge only ever created by humans.  If I, right now found a machine with effects beyond our current level I would have to postulate a more advanced person than myself.  The tribesman, were he wise could do the same.  We should not aspire to be the ignorant tribesman, we don't see the clear markings of design (later post more based on lack of design).

IDiots

     ID of course, being the "Cheap tuxedo" of creationism, trying to make it sound vaguely scientific by coining the term "Intelligent Design", often amended with the word 'theory'.  This is insane for a few reasons.
     The most obvious reason is that ID isn't a theory.  It would be lucky to attain hypothesis status.  For a suggestion to become a hypothesis, it must be testable by the scientific method.  Creationism is not testable by the scientific method.  Evidence cannot be found which points to creationism, and evidence is key to the scientific method.
     At this point, the ID postulation is laughed out of the academic arena.  There's no historical, natural or philosophical evidence for ID.  The natural evidence which we have points to the earth being about 4.5 billion years old.  The historical evidence we have suggests naturalistic and materialist origin.  Lastly out of those three, our current philosophy correlates us nicely with evolved animals based on instinct.  This makes evolution and the big bang theories which to date survive the academic arena as opposed to ID, whose bloodied corpse is dragged out of the academic arena.
     To merely try to rename young earth ideology to make it sound scientific is dishonest.  There's no way to prove young earth theory, we have many dating methods which place the earth at 4.5 billion years.  There's no mistake here, no "Oops, turns out that the earth was only 6,000-8,000 years old.".  It's just so improbable at this point.  Young earth ideology is now entirely kept alive by the willfully ignorant, a Google search is a way to disprove that in under 10 seconds.

If a person manages to believe in ID, they have an Olympic level of ignorance, and to call them IDiots is fair.

“Five percent of the people think;
ten percent of the people think they think;
and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.”
― Thomas A. Edison

“We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“One of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.”
― Richard Dawkins

Have gay sex to improve chance of rapture!

Luke 17:34-35
I tell you, in that night there shall be two men in one bed; the one shall be taken, and the other shall be left.

Two women shall be grinding together; the one shall be taken, and the other left.

To be fair, in the NIV they added "grain" to that second sentence.  Also in the NIV, they substituted "men" for "people".  Because whatever happens, the Bible can't sound gay...at all!

This is a mostly jovial post.  Just saying, go gays and lesbians!  Even if you're atheists, you've got a 50/50 of being included in the rapture, the Bible says so.

Why is this real?

     Why do people still try to use the cosmological argument?  Let's take a look at it.

Premise 1: Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

Premise 2: The universe began to exist.

Conclusion: The universe has a cause.

Conclusion 2: The cause for the universe must be an uncaused cause, which is God.

     So special pleading aside...  Let's prove that you and I mean YOU can fly using this argument.

Premise 1: You are a mammal.

Premise 2: Bats are mammals.

Premise 3: Bats can fly.

Conclusion: Mammals can fly.

Conclusion 2: You, as a mammal, can fly independently.

     All of my premises are correct, demonstrably so.  My conclusion, like the cosmological argument's conclusion is false.  A major difference between the two is that I don't invoke special pleading.

    I know I've posted on this previously, but come on.  The logical fallacies should have people who use this argument weeping uncontrollably in corners.  Yet people use this argument proudly even now.  It diminishes my already very slight faith in humanity.