good friday?

christians call it good friday because jebus being crucified is aparently good. its this sort of thinking which led to the crusades.

i also notice that easter ocured around april fools day. its a shame they werent both on the same day.

jonah debunked

as you probably know, a killer wale recently killed somebody. it recently ocured to me that this debunks the story of jonah as it shows that wales dont let people hide inside of them

r.i.p richarddawkins.net

im sure you all know who richard dawkins is and have heard about his website and how it was once a place for rational and logical discussion. well richard dawkins has decided to shut his message board down. He doesnt seem to care that it had 2 million posts and a comunity that put christian efforts such as theolgoy web to shame. he even claims that there is something rong with his most loyal fan base. how dare he say such a thing. you can read what richard dawkins wrote here and read an explanation here.

how can somebody as rational and intelligent as richard dawkins be such a dick?

dinesh vs loftus

the debate between john loftus and dinesh dsosa is online for people to listen to. Now john didn't do as bad as some people are saying, however i will try and give a fair review:

John
Johns opening speech was amazing - my only critisim is that he quotes a beker person who says that history is all in the mind. later on in the debate loftus claims that he doesnt agree with beker which makes me wonder why he used arguments in his opening statement which he himself doesnt agree with. Surly there are enough good arguments for athism without having to use arguments you dont like.

John says that history is an invalid subject but then claims he can know that jesus was a doomsday prophet, that the spanish inqisition took place etc. you cant claim history is invalid only to use it yourself. if i were john i would have accepted history and then brought up the similarities between jesus and mithras.

John understandably sounded pissed of. rather than calling dinesh brainwashed (even if thats true) he should have answerd his non-arguments.

loftus claimed that he became an atheist after reading lots of books. this is not true - he became an atheist after comiting adultery and getting pissed of with his church. John claims that was once a top apologist and if he was then john must have read lots of atheist books before becoming an atheist and had no problem with these books when he was a christian.

Johns closing statment was incoherent and i didnt undertstand what he was saying.

Dinesh
he was comiting logical fallacys left right and center. his jokes werent funny and he had no arguments. he misquoted steven hawking because hawking does not believe in a singularity model. Dinesh also acused john of lying which is unfair - ok john was overstating his case in saying that all cosmologists agree with his quantum tuneling model of the universe but this isnt lying.

So to conclude. john didnt win the debate but dinesh lost it.

logical fallacies on tekton

JP Holding (aka bob turkel) really needs to learn some basic logic. His website is full of examples of text book examples of logical fallacies. To demonstrate this i went through his homepage and found ten on the home page alone:

1.by naming the authors of the articles on tekton he is comiting the apeal to authority falacy. for example 'william lane craig on preterism' is a classic example of this
2.loaded language. 'trusting the new testament' assumes that the new testament is trustworthy.
3.the subtitle 'education and pologetics ministry' is an equovication between the words education and apologetics.
4.having a last updated date is example of cronological snobbery. something is true independantly of when it was written so making out bob turkel regualy updates the website is irelevant.
5.there is a cartoon picture of a scholar, this is a false analogy
6.the apologetics encyclopedia is an appeal to ignorance as if falls back on bob turkels ignroance of stuff
7.boasting aabout the fact tekton have 1500 articles is an appeal ad populum
8.the bullet point 'how personable is god' is a loaded question as it presposes god exists
9.describing theologyweb as an exclusive place for debate is a hasty generalisation (and indeed there are plenty of other places for debate)
10.the tekton e-block bullet points form a non-sequiturd

now seeing as this is the home page, im sure the articles themselves contain far more logical errors. Now lets ignore that and be generour and assume there are ten logical falacies on a page. thats 10x1500 which for those who arent any good at maths is 150000 errors. So the bottom line is this:

Tekton apolgetics website contains 150000 textbook examples of logical fallacies

Can angels fly?

Its official - angles dont exist!

everything needs a cause?

now theists will claim that the universe must of been created by something because universes dont apear out of nowhere and for no reason. They say that everything apart from there sky daddy must have a cause. apart from begging the question - who made their sky daddy? - the claim that everything must have a cause is also false. Things often happen for no reason and without a cause. For example computers will stop working without a cause or my house keys will go missing when i most need them only to turn up later without any aparant cause