This is why I don't like debating religion

[happydolphin]

Alara317 said:

happydolphin said:

Alara317 said:

give an intelligent, well-rationed argument and you'll get a civil response.  You really have to wonder where the issue originates.  I've been watching this thread, and the only people getting uncivil responses are the ones who completely fail to present intelligent responses. 

If I've offered responses that are not to your liking, then you can report them. Let the moderators judge whether I'm being reasonable or not. It's their job after all.

And even so, even if I were not being reasonable (which I was not but let me bend to your thought for a moment), my crossing the line doesn't warrant yours. So if I'm being uncivil, those users still in replying to me  shouldn't be uncivil, lest they be banned.

That's one of the problems this thread was meant to address:  The fact that religion gets handled with kids gloves.  If anyone else was making the same nonsensical claims and were being as dense as some of the people in this thread regarding any other topic, they'd be laughed off the board.  But since it's religion, and religion is sacred, it's okay to use faulty arguments since they've been in existence for the better part of a millenium.  

It's not about your responses not being to my liking, some responses despite disagreeing with my point have been agreeable and mature.  Criticising science and evolution and the credibility of the group of most intelligent people on earth is not something that should be tolerated.  That's flaming a group (of scientists), which is no worse than me flaming a group (of religious people).  

I'm also noticing a huge problem with the mods responding negatively to semantics.  I can call you ignorant as long as I back it up with explanations as to WHY you're ignorant, but if I use the words stupid, moronic, imbecillic, or any other variation indicating you're less than intelligent, I will get banned, even if you had an IQ of 75 and my claims were entirely true.  Now, I'm not saying this about you, but some people in this thread certainly have shown an aggressive dedication to willful ignorance, and I can't think of any way to describe them other than 'flat out stupid'.  Not becuase they don't agree with me, but because they can't grasp the simplest ideas regarding logic and rationale.  Believe it or not, there is such a thing as a stupid person, modern culture has led us to believe everyone is special;  this is a falsehood, not everyone is special. 

I'll probably be banned for this, based on what I've seen.  

You will not get banned because you're expressing your opinion in a non-inflammatory manner imho.

It seems like you are legitimately interested in this topic, because you don't like seeing that religion is handled with kids gloves. As such, it's important that you realize that the mods are in charge of handling cases of trolling. If you believe I was trolling, you can report me.

However, seeing as this is the topic at hand, I am now interested to see exactly why you thought my initial question was a troll question, in hopes to demonstrate that I was actually trying to construct a proof by contradiction.

Let's do that. As we go along, it is my hope that you will realize that, rather than seeing my train of thought, using banned-person's logic to disprove his idea, I was considered to use blattantly ignorant tactics to infuriate him. I hope that that will help you take a step back, and be much slower to assume ill-intent in an interlocutor's posts in the future.

But for now, let's proceed. Here is my post, here was the original post:

happydolphin said:

dsgrue3 said:

What you fail to realize is that we have been observing the atom for eons, even before we knew about it. (Observation = existence)

"Actually, the thought about electricity came before atoms. In about 600 B.C. Thales of Miletus discovered that a piece of amber, after rubbing it with fur, attracts bits of hair and feathers and other light objects. He suggested that this mysterious force came from the amber. Thales, however, did not connect this force with any atomic particle.

Not until around 460 B.C., did a Greek philosopher, Democritus, develop the idea of atoms. He asked this question: If you break a piece of matter in half, and then break it in half again, how many breaks will you have to make before you can break it no further? Democritus thought that it ended at some point, a smallest possible bit of matter. He called these basic matter particles, atoms.

Unfortunately, the atomic ideas of Democritus had no lasting effects on other Greek philosophers, including Aristotle. In fact, Aristotle dismissed the atomic idea as worthless. People considered Aristotle's opinions very important and if Aristotle thought the atomic idea had no merit, then most other people thought the same also. (Primates have great mimicking ability.)

For more than 2000 years nobody did anything to continue the explorations that the Greeks had started into the nature of matter. Not until the early 1800's did people begin again to question the structure of matter.

In the 1800's an English chemist, John Dalton performed experiments with various chemicals that showed that matter, indeed, seem to consist of elementary lumpy particles (atoms). Although he did not know about their structure, he knew that the evidence pointed to something fundamental."

Tell me. You believe in evolution right? The moment we became capable of science as the human species, is that the moment everything came into existence?

The burden is on you.

The saddest part of all this is that I find myself having to bend myself backwards to show you and the others that I am intelligent because you have been led to have a predisposition to consider me stupid due to my religious beliefs. It is sad, and it's not something anyone can be banned on, but believe me it is a very sad thing. I constantly find myself having to prove myself in front of others here because many consider me inferior to them due to my religious background. But alas I digress, that's the flipside of the coin and not the topic at hand.