OK, now to continue to the bitter end.
Remember that new maxim I invented quoted at the end of my last post? 
Dann said:
And now you've become so patronizing that you actually start giving me advice about how I ought to argue. Very interesting, except for the fact that I don't agree with your argument: Your "testimonies" from good Christians who once were lost but now are found don't primarily show what some people do when they're "dissatisfied with their lives in some way". Some dissatisfied people do turn to religion and similar superstitions, some to drugs, some to drink, some resign and kill themselves, some find a hobby to invest their spare time in, others get a divorce or a new job. And some actually sit down and analyze what might cause the conditions that make them dissatisfied and some of those actually decide to do something about these causes.
Your arguing style and the way you interpret what your opponent just said can be astonishingly literalistic. An advantage in some circumstances, but not in all of them. ... No, there's something else going on. It's a thing of curiosity to me that someone who argues against religion on the grounds that it is illusionary happiness - a sop that people turn to because of their suffering - should totally miss the point when I tell him he could have seen the Christian testimonies I linked to as proof of just that principle, triumphantly saying: "Yes, those are clearly people who were disatisfied with their lives before they turned to religion -
no wonder they did, religion being what it is and all!" I wasn't suggesting all dissatisfied people turn to religion, or I'd probably have converted you by now.
I was saying you could have seen the testimonies as evidence that religion is a delusion being dissatisfied probably made those people vulnerable to. No, it wouldn't have been a good argument.
I didn't say it would have been. It would simply have been more imaginative than what you did resort to, and thus just a little bit more challenging for me.
And giving you advice on how to argue is not "patronising". Actually it's enlightened self-interest.
You know, that devilish old Capitalist principle! There you go - now you've got
two more reasons to dislike what I said.
Actually, what I mean is that I'm disappointed by the way you've been arguing; I prefer a challenge, an opponent who raises issues that cause me to think: "That was a good point! Could there be something slightly wrong with my position there? Well, obviously not, because my position's always infallibly correct; but still, let's think this through a bit".
You know.
Dann said:
That you are a fan of religious delusion does not make the boredom that your testimonials make me experience "reactionary".
I'm surprised you should say those testimonies "bored" you. It's like being bored by stories of people in developing countries working their way out of poverty by being given the means to start small businesses that they'd made profitable. ... But given that would be an endorsement of Capitalism, perhaps you'd experience just the same feeling of boredom you suggest you did when reading about people who left lives of violence and crime. I imagine such an experience might be a bit like this:
A person reads from
Breaking Free From Shoplifting
Stealing became one of life's exciting challenges. As a juvenile I was caught on two occasions and had dealings with the police. In my mid-teens, I was
ashamed and distressed when my parents were brought into the picture and I determined not to offend again. However it was not to be, despite my best intentions
and after a few months of restraint, I continued in my old ways. That small weed had taken root and now had a strangle hold on my life. ...
(Becomes Christian and reads the Bible)
I spent the best part of two years and thousands of dollars seeking out and apologising to those that I had stolen from. Some were small businessmen that I knew personally. Some were managers of nationwide retail stores. ... On each occasion those that I had offended against received me graciously. Many were amazed. Some even refused to be compensated for their losses. In these cases I donated the money to charity. Some of the accounting systems of major stores couldn't cope with the situation, as it was that foreign to them.
The person reading that thinks, "Oh, how
Boring!!"
Then they read another: From
The life of a former gang boss in New York
As I walked along the streets of New York the people were scared of me because I had a bad reputation. I was a gang leader of 205 BOYs and 175 girls. They
did everything I told them to. I controlled them! We did lots of things from murder to bad little delinquents. We did not have any respect for life nor for anything else. ...
I went to hear David Wilkerson preaching. [Oh crikey, please, not Wilkerson again!]
I went to a Christian meeting for the very first time. I hadn't been in a church in my life and didn't know what these buildings looked like from inside. I took 75 blokes along with me, we had loaded guns with us. I was in a very dangerous area. There were around 2.000 people there. They saw how these animal-like blokes stormed in. They wrecked everything, pushed the people aside, started to swear and made all possible threats. ... [Later]
This preacher had reached me. He had ripped my old heart out and my new heart beat for Jesus! I felt something that I had never felt before: "This bad atmosphere had left me." ...
God had presented me with the biggest and most important gift: love. ... In the world I had come from there was no peace for me. Everything was mixed up. There was lots of loneliness and bitterness. However he gave me his deep and wonderful peace with which he filled my soul. ...
I have experienced it! Now I could close my eyes and say my last prayer - and I could sleep again. God even cared for me in my sleep; there was no more drug addiction, prostitution and no more criminality for me! I did not have to run away anymore or move from one place the next because people could not stand me. No, I had peace and joy all of a sudden! I could go everywhere I wanted and laugh from the heart.
Then the person reading thinks again, with more fervour, "
Oh, how boring!!! I can't tolerate any more of this!"
Is that what it's like?
[Actually, that testimony
is a "sob story" literally!
Lots of icky crying in it! Gangsters crying!) So maybe you were right about the "sob story" bit after all.
Perhaps this was equally boring:
From
Testimony of Carl Dutton - A Captive Set Free
At the age of 16,I was arrested for public drunkenness.* I began drinking to be sociable with the men I worked with and to feel good, never dreaming I would become a drunk. Not long after the drinking began, I started smoking pot and taking pills to feel even better. In a very short time I was a drug addict. Since my wages were only $1.00 an hour, I started dealing drugs and buying and selling stolen property to feed the habit. Every addict in town knew how to find me, to buy drugs and sell stolen property.
Although I was married, I was continually in and out of jail and went to prison twice. Soon I had lost everything, my home, wife, children, humanity, and dignity. ...
Since that time I have not been tempted with drugs and all the thanks goes to Jesus, who set me free!
You could have used This testimony to back up your case that religion is like a drug addiction, saying it demonstrates that a drug addict who becomes a Christian will simply be swapping one addiction for another. ... You Could have used that as an argument, but as you pointed out, my advice to you on how to argue isn't very good.
No, that wouldn't have been a good argument either. I mean, it's not as if religion, or religious services, put one on a continuous high. Some church services do just the opposite. :eke:
And if you're a Christian who thinks it's their duty to do charitable work because the New Testament instructs that people do, doing that, though it may give one a sense of fulfilment, is unlikely to put one on a high.
"Some opium this is!" they might say. Or if you're a Christian teenager being ridiculed for refusing to go along with the crowd and go to drunken parties, well, sure that's addictive! Or if you're living in a country where you're being persecuted for your faith and some are even being killed, either you have to have an extremely strong addiction for it to be worth holding onto through all that, or your faith means a whole lot more to you than a drug would, for maybe several reasons.
Dann said:
Yes, they will be promiscuous, Christian or not, but unlike you I would never say that ”they're going to be promiscuous anyway” since I don’t have anything against promiscuousness per se. If people want to have sex with many partners, I don’t see the harm – except in the sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted
pregnancies.
And that can be harm enough. But there are also other risks. Here are a few examples:
Part one of this article describes the feelings often suffered by husbands or wives who find out their partner's been having an affair:
Healing a Marriage After an Affair.
Another problem is that if teenagers focus all their spare-time energies on sexual encounters, they're losing out on getting involved in activities which could make them more accomplished as well-rounded individuals, and possibly on giving adequate attention to studying. See more on this type of rationale here:
Cutting Down the Risk of Getting Into a Bad Relationship.
Having sex with partners without regard for the emotional impact the relationship might have on them can also be harmful. See, for example,
Neglected Heart: The Emotional Dangers of Premature Sexual Involvement.
Dann said:
You need only look at reality to find out that the Christian (etc.) ideal of abstinence as a way of fighting the spread of AIDS just doesn’t work for the simple reason that people want to have sex. So the preaching of abstinence doesn’t help ”reduce their chances of catching AIDS.” Condoms, however, do!
While education programs that don't teach about condoms may be ineffective and even harmful, especially where they replace more comprehensive education and so deprive people of information that could save lives that was actually leading to a drop in the AIDS rate before, it would be even more foolish to leave teaching on abstinence out of education programs altogether. Here are a few reasons why:
From an article all about condoms:
On the reasons why using condoms as a method of contraception can be less reliable than it would be ideally:
Condom users may experience breakage or slippage of the condom due to faulty methods of application or physical damage (such as tears caused when opening the package), latex degradation (typically from being past the expiration date or being stored improperly), and from slipping off the penis after ejaculation.
While standard condoms will fit almost any penis, some men may find that use of 'snug' or 'magnum' condoms decreases the risk of slippage, leaking, and bursting.
Measuring yourself is thus important, it would seem. There can't be many people who do that.
Among couples that intend condoms to be their form of birth control, pregnancy may occur when the couple does not use a condom. The couple may have run out of condoms, or be traveling and not have a condom with them, or simply dislike the feel of condoms and decide to "take a chance." This type of behavior is the primary cause of "typical use" failure (as opposed to "method" or "perfect use" failure).
If it's assumed that people are going to have sex no matter what, and that no abstinence education can help them, the main cause of "typical use failure" will never be remedied.
It's an interesting educational article. It covers several reasons people don't use condoms despite having been educated about them, the contrast between the failure rates condoms would have if used perfectly according to all instructions and the failure rates condom use as a method of contraception actually does have, due to a range of reasons, including being the wrong size, being used by people not taking account of all instructions, and people sometimes not bothering to use them. The differences in failure rates between perfect use and typical use are quite wide, according to various surveys carried out by government and other organisations.
The method pregnancy rate of condoms is 2% per year. The actual pregnancy rates among condoms users vary depending on the population being studied, with rates of 10-18% per year being reported.
The article also covers information about sexually transmitted diseases condoms just won't protect against, because they're transmitted by skin contact.
In particular, these include STDs associated with ulcerative lesions that may be present on body surfaces where the condom doesn't cover, such as genital herpes simplex (HSV), chancroid, and syphilis. If contact is made with uncovered lesions, transmission of these STIs may still occur despite appropriate condom use. Additionally, the absence of visible lesions or symptoms cannot be used to decide whether caution is needed.
The article also covers the range of reasons people, even in places in the world where AIDS rates are highest like South Africa, simply refuse to wear condoms.
Condoms are more accessible in developed countries. In various cultures, a number of social or economic factors make access to condoms prohibitive. In some cases, cultural beliefs may cause some persons to shun condoms deliberately even when they are available.
Furthermore, regardless of culture and availability, many men shun condoms simply because they dislike using them. This dislike may be due to reduced sexual pleasure or to practical problems, e.g. difficulty in sustaining an erection hard enough for effective condom use.
It goes into quite a bit more detail about those and several other factors. It says only a small proportion of people worldwide use condoms.
Then there's the problem that even where condoms are available in the developing world, such as where they've been shipped over there as part of aid packages, many have been found to be of very poor quality in the past, at least according to this NY Times article:
Faulty Condoms Thwart AIDS Fight in Africa
Out of the depths of the AIDS epidemic sweeping Africa, an ugly truth is emerging: Some condom makers have been dumping their substandard wares here and Africans have been risking their lives on brittle, leaky or ill-fitting condoms. ...
There is no question that a scarcity of condoms and the refusal of many men to use them are to blame for far more of Africa's 23 million H.I.V. infections than faulty condoms are. And experts say most condoms are perfectly good and the influx of bad ones may finally have been stemmed. But the deviousness or sloppiness of some manufacturers and the failure of inspectors to catch them have contributed to the disease's spread.
The article's several years old, so maybe quality control has improved now, although the AIDS rate is still rising, so whether or not it has, there are obviously other factors involved. Later in the article, it says:
All over Africa, everyone from health officers to women's rights advocates to prostitutes complain that it is very difficult to get men to use condoms. Besides the usual complaints about sensitivity and lack of spontaneity, men argue that they are ''not part of African culture.''
''The men dictate what will be done, and the women have very little power to say no,'' said Dr. Neil Miller, an AIDS-education expert with the British embassy in Zimbabwe.
And, because a vast majority of condoms here are handed out free, no choices of size are offered. The problem may sound silly, but condom distributors say it is not. Too-large condoms slip off, putting the user at risk of infection, while uncomfortably small ones discourage men from using them.
And from an article called
Beauty and the Brothel: Prostitutes and AIDS in India
Over 7,000 women and girls work as prostitutes in Sonagachi, Calcutta’s largest red-light district. Often forced into the trade by poverty, abandonment or the rampant trafficking business which forcibly transports young girls from Nepal and neighboring Bangladesh, they come from all castes, but have been pushed down the social scale to Sonagachi, a seedy landscape of narrow alleys, the next ground zero in the global AIDS epidemic.
World health officials are calling India the next Africa, forecasting more Indians will die from AIDS in the next decade than all the HIV-related deaths since the disease was discovered in 1981. With an estimated million prostitutes in India, prostitution is the lit match of the AIDS tinderbox. A host of local non-government organizations have collected millions of dollars in aid money to halt the transmission of the disease. Plagued by infighting and corruption, however, little of it has funneled down to the alleys of Sonagachi. There, cheap condoms are readily available, but women remain ignorant of their importance or powerless to make customers use them.
Even with awareness, the financial pressures are too great to refuse customers who won’t use condoms. As a prostitute, Beauty, put it, "So what if I’m afraid? If it’s not that way, they will go away. Some other girl will say, ‘Come, I’ll entertain you without a condom.’ Then it’s my loss."
Dann said:
Yes, if people never had sex nobody would die of AIDS. That’s what the pope says, isn’t it? So the reason why AIDS reached epidemic proportions wasn’t that
it is a sexually transmitted disease that people weren’t even aware of and therefore couldn’t protect themselves against. Now the reason is that lack of morality appears to spread HIV.
But it could be argued that even without knowledge of AIDS, there is a certain callousness in being unfaithful to partners.
And it's unhealthy to have an ideological aversion to the concept of moral living so dogmatic that it isn't prepared to countenance the possibility that behaviour change would help.
Dann said:
I hate many of Hans Christian Andsersen’s stories, in particular The Ugly Duckling. He was a pompous jerk – and actually owned stock in the Danish slave trade.
And, I’m sorry, but I still don’t think that it is a good idea to kill a woman because she was raped and then send the ”bits of her body” to ”rouse outrage among his countrymen” because of the foreigners’ abuse of his private property. And it is incredibly cynical and absurd to use the ”absence of gory television pictures” as an excuse for his behaviour. Christian apologetics make me sick.
Perhaps they'd make you less sick if you made a few more efforts to understand them. Of course it isn't a good idea! And there can't be many people in the world who'd suggest it was. That isn't even what the Bible says. It says she was dead when he found her. Still, of course his behaviour wasn't acceptable. Leaving aside your still-ignorant description of the mistress as private property, you fail to see the point I was making. So again, I'll say the fact that a story may have a moral in it does
not mean that everything in it has to be deemed acceptable or good. I don't understand why you're making that mistake. I once read a comment by someone who said that one mistake some people make is to think that if a story's in the Bible it must mean everything in it is supposed to be God-ordained, so for instance, they can imagine that Moses said that God was saying that people shouldn't oppress widows and orphans, and then later read a story about a widow and her children being oppressed, and call that a contradiction, even though the Bible says nothing about God actually ordering that oppression. Perhaps that's similar to what you're doing.
And I wasn't making "excuses" for the man, but simply pointing out that he was using a means of communication that seems gory to us but which he may have deemed the most effective means of communication given the medialess culture he lived in. The culture was vastly different to ours. I could illustrate. Though his actions seem abhorrent, frankly, it would be tempting to call for death and destruction on a great mob of gang rapists!
That's an interesting allegation you make against Hans Kristian Andersen. I didn't know that. I'd heard he was mentally ill, possibly suffering from OCD.
Dann said:
You are the one who claims that it’s ”abuse” since you want to distinguish between good (= real Christianity) and bad[/b] Christianity (= not really
Christianity but the abuse of Christianity).
You will see if you study the matter that Christianity followed according to biblical guidelines would be almost free from the abuses seen in the kinds of churches I linked to information about a few posts ago. So for you to say it's equally bad needs explanation, which you haven't given anywhere near adequately. You claim a psychopath could use religious belief to abuse believers. Then you appear to dodge the question when I ask for further explanation. If your view is correct that all religion no matter how well-intended leaves people open to exploitation by psychopaths, it should be possible to demonstrate that. It should be possible to read the New Testament and explain just how anyone who knows it well is open to exploitation.
For anyone who would like to accept that challenge, here are lots of quotes for starters that are actually protective against psychopaths misleading people familiar with the verses:
What The Bible Says About Violence, Anger, Jealousy, Arguments, And Living In Peace With Each Other.
What The Bible Says About Honesty And The Love Of Money.
A Short Story About Tackling Prejudice, And What The Bible Says About Despising People, Judging By Appearances, And God's Mercy.
What The Bible Says About Love And Caring.
What The Bible Says About Drunkenness and Why It's Wrong.
What The Bible Says About Lies, Gossip, Quarrelling, Insulting Language And Dirty Jokes.
What The Bible Says About Sex And Marriage.
What The Bible Says About Lustful And Nasty Thoughts.
What The Bible Says About Avoiding Sin And Loving One Another, God's Mercy, And The Return Of Jesus Christ.
What The Bible Says About The Life-Changing Power Of The Holy Spirit.
Don't stick to those though. Read the whole New Testament.
Earlier, you accused me of putting "carefully selected" Bible verses on here to illustrate my points, the implication being that my choice was deceptive. So I challenge you to show that's true, if you actually want to insist on it: Find and quote the New Testament verses that urge Christians to be violent, to go to war, to steal, to murder, to fight, to quarrel, to oppress, and so on. Find just one. One clear verse that tells Christians to do any one of those things. If you can't, then you have nothing to back up your suggestion that such things exist.
Even in the Old Testament with its gory stories, Jews were not permitted to invade random people whenever they felt like it with the justification that those people were wicked and deserved it. The closest anyone could get to using biblical justification for war would be to claim that Old Testament passages could be used as a precedent. This article explains why this would be unbiblical: An Attempt to Justify Gruesome Bible Passages. A truly shocking title, I know. A truly shocking article? Those who browse it will know.
And to think I wouldn't have said any of this stuff without provocation/opposition.
Me said:
But religion in itself doesn't make a person vulnerable to abuse. Believing in God doesn't necessarily make you vulnerable to the scam of someone telling you God's telling him you need to give him your money, for instance.
Dann said:
Of course it does. Have you ever tried to make an atheist give you money with this argument?
Another epic point-miss. As if religious people are anywhere near all vulnerable to being taken in.
Incidentally, if one were to try to scam an atheist by telling them one was collecting money for some atheist organisation, they'd probably almost all be vulnerable to the scam. Should we shut down atheist organisations because of it? That's the logical equivalent of the argument that religion needs to be eradicated entirely because psychopaths can use it as a means through which to abuse others. Much of it needs to be modified, certainly. But scrapped? Bearing in mind how much good it can inspire, there would have to be better reasons.
Dann said:
No, but it definitely helps. And who the hell is Cliff Richard trying to fool? How does he know that they hadn't all hear from God? Who is he to question their belief? Doesn't he know that God works in mysterious ways?
Well, if all the women had heard from God, it proves God's terrible at grammar and should possibly sit in on a few elementary school classes. He told all of them he wanted them to be Cliff Richard's housekeeper (singular??)
Ah, Luther again. Yes, I answered that one in an earlier post, didn't I.
Read what I wrote again, properly this time, and provided you have the intelligence to take in the arguments, you'll cringe in embarrassment at your first response.