Lokmer said:Due to length restrictions, this reply will be in two parts:
Perhaps this is a miscommunication. I wasn't saying a thing about my church or the one I was a member of before deconverting.
Oh fine you talked about your church life. Quit nitpicking.
Again, compare with his in what sense? Finney's autobiography/testimony is quite a long read, what about him, his work, or his conversion impresses you particularly?
Just find me any non-Christian conversion testimony you think will impress as many people as Finney's. Is that simple enough for you.
Actually, yes they do. Buddhism promises it by achieving enlightenment, which is a state of mind rather than a program of works.
Yeah by meditation, going to the temple, burning incense in front of your llittle Buddha doll etc.. You never see them convert overnight. That's the point and you know it.
My interest here is in beating back your disingenuous bluster with some facts,
Anytime. After your wild claims about a man who fed a billion people with his own money and how Douglas was an atheist were repudiated, I'd think you'd hold back on the hyperbole. Boy did Douglas change after his speech, eh?
I'm already citing events and providing the occasional link, I'm not about to trudge down to the storage unit and dig through all the pagan scriptures that have wound up there to make room for new research projects.
I used Google and found four relevant links in a total of about ten minutes.
Besides, with your continual moving of the goalposts
That seems rather hypocritical, and it is really unecessary.
I have no way to tell what you'll consider a valid citation
Oh please. i really don't care what you consider valid. i post them anyway for those who do wish to hear both sides.
("chapter and verse" is a peculiarly western Christian concept
It's also a figure of speech every one understands. Just find the facts and give them to us and quit hedging.
of referencing documents, borrowed from the scribal conventions regarding the workds of Josephus and placed into the bible in approx the 10th-12th centuries to assist in ease of reference).
Way to move the goal posts when you lose a point.
Yes I should have said private. So what? Ingersoll said you guys would build more private hospitals than the Christians. Where are they now that we are done playing games?
Ingersol couldn't have (and didn't) forsee the fundamentalist revolution in the early 20th century. 100 years ago, a far smaller percentage of this country was Christian than it is now, and a MUCH smaller percent was anti-secular; there was no reason to predict a reversal of that trend.
Ar eyou freaking serious? That's your excuse?
Pasteur got opposition even from within his own order. The fact of theological and moral opposition of Christianity to the work of Pasteur and others who worked on the same problem (Christians and not alike) has nothing to do with the faith or lack thereof of the individual scientist.
it was you who started talking science because you were losing the other argument, and telling us the Christians were all holding up medical progress. Now you say it doesn't matter if they were Christians?
Another way of putting the issue: It took medical science in Christendom 1900 years to progress from tribal medicine (as they withheld even Galen and Hyppocrates from the public, on the rare occasion they actually preserved their works as did the Irish monks) to Lister and Pasteur (i.e. sterilization, thorough understanding of anatomy, successful surgeries, and drug therapy rather than fetishes, priestly witchcraft, and miracle cures). The Muslim world, at its height in the time of the crusades, had all of these things even without an understanding of germs, because their theology did not prohibit scientific inquiry (and, for the record, I'm no great lover of Islam for other reasons).
I said born again Bible savvy Christians, not Catholics. (although they preserved a tremendous amount of knowledge) I guess you don't get why Jefferson said that Christianity, "divested of the rags of the clergy, is the friendliest to liberty, science and the freest expansion of the human mind." Unlike you he could tell the difference between the baby and the dirty bathwater. You choose not to apparently. That's why you keep talking about what the Catholics, totally ignorant of the NT, did or didn't do.
You have documentation of prominent atheists, diests, or freethinkers opposing them? Put the snide sarcasm aside and show your evidence.
Hardly the point.
People can be enlightened on some scores and moronic on others. Moreover, it's already been pointed out to you what those degrees were *for.* Unless you are suggesting that the degrees obtained by the women were in a hard science or business arena, in which case I'd be delighted to read the records.
Look at the time, no women were getting degrees in anything. But I can see why you'd move the goalposts again. Let me give you a little insight. We only see in others what we do ourselves. When you learn that you have a chance of escaping the phenomenon.
All Christians guilty by association with Nazis simply because the Nazis were Christians? Hardly. You started with this rehtorical lumping game using your sermon-like argumentation, I played along. You can't have it both ways, using the rules when you win and disclaiming them when you lose. Science must bear the blame for the atomic bomb as well as the credit for all the wonderful things it's enabled us to do. Islam bears the blame for the WTC and clitorectomies and all the barbarism it commits today, as well as the credit for preserving the books and knowledge of the ancient world that modern civilization is built on. Christianity justly deserves credit for maintaining some semblance of civilization and collective culture after the fall of Rome, as well as the blame that it richly earned by establishing a brutal anti-semetic theology that gave rise to centuries of religious wars and culminating in Nazi Germany. Darwinism deserves the credit it has earned for the understanding it's given us of our history and makeup, for the advantage it gives us in fighting disease, as well as the blame for its application as a philosphical pseudoscience of eugenics on a lot of ego and very little data (which led to all sorts of atrocities and aided the Nazis along their road as well).
Yada yada I gave you historical facts and links. You give me atheist propaganda.
You, however, seem to be interested in trumpeting Christianitie's triumphs,
In the case of saving the world from Hitler, who would have easily defeated Britain without our help, yes. But otherwise I have spoken of the triumphs of a relatively small number of born again social and charitable activists you apparently knew nothing about untill I told you.
to the point of stealing from its idealogical neighbors, while completely ignoring its sins in order to comfort yourself that it really is better than everything else.
Speculating on motives is against the rules. Any idea why?
This is utterly nonsensical. Any good concert leaves people singing, some of them leave them singing hyms or adapted hymns because they were sung in the concert. A ridiculously flimsy criteria for changing one's faith: "who has better music that stays with you and inspires people?"
I thought we were talking changed, more moral and benevolent lives, which impressed a man like Franklin as the Great Awakening did. Then you started talking about rock concerts.
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