Sounds like some people just don't want to acknowledge the Law of Parsimony or Occam's Razor ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor )  which posits that if you have simple, rational explanations for things, then there's no need to attach a faith-based / supernatural explanation to them.

In effect since every claim that has ever been put forth as correct by Fundamentalist Bible believers has been found to be in error since Gallileo demonstrated that the earth isn't the center of the universe, Darwin and his successors demonstrated that all the animals didn't pop up fully formed in seven days but only reached their present state after millions of years of evolution, and geologists and astronomers demonstrated that the earth is far older than 6,000 years of age;

Or were found to have never happened eg. no archaeological evidence for Hebrew slaves in Egypt, no real mention in the earliest written Christian accounts that Jesus ever resurrected and its being demonstrated since the time of Julius Welhausen ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_hypothesis) that The Bible was not literally handed down from God to Moses as believers long believed but  "The Bible"took over 1,000 years to write with much scribal editing being put into the mix to remove or insert whatever parts various groups of priests wanted stressed over the 1,000 year time period;

And all of the miracles of the book like those in Egypt being found to have perfectly rational scientific explanations or can be explained by inferring that various prophets were on drugs or never even existed or were greatly expanded upon by different authors eg. "Isisah" actually having been written by 3 or more authors over a lengthy time period;

Then if Occam's Razor holds true as it is generally accepted that it should, it's illogical for anyone to have faith. 

it's not flaming though, it's an observation based on how you act.  Look through the OP, I'm more than capable of criticizing religion appropriately and civilly.  You're not being civil.  By being deliberately dense in an effort to frustrate your opponent, you 'won' by making him lose his cool.  I think the term for this is "ignorance Ad Nauseum."  Repeated ignorance.  While I agree his wording was harsh, his point was valid and your repeated failure to see the logic in his statement would drive anyone to curse.  

How do you know that? You're employing a prosecution of intent, and it's that assumption that causes the unjustified flaming (though flaming is never justified).

Flaming is simply a personal attack on a user. By that definition, there is no way that the two posts that I reported were not flaming. The first was hostile, the second was using my religious background to call me a cry-baby and a taddle-tale. The personal attacks are not warranted.

I was asking a simple question, I ask for nothing other than a civil response.

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 was being unreasonable (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.  

Sounds to me like someone can't think about the concepts of religion without assuming that the stories in the Bible should be interprented as literal truth.

Let me try to cut through many layers of retoric and emotion to try to make my point very simple:

At the core, the question of religion to me boils down to thoughts like: Where does an emotion come from? Is an emotion 'real'? Does it exsist and can be measured? Is is simply a certain configuration of electrons in a brain, and that's it? Or is there something in the world that can not be quantified and measured that lends quality to our minds? This question is (so far at least) impossible to solve using science and the experimental method bacause it deals with issues that are potentionaly unobservable. It becomes a question of faith. The way I see it, reducing the world to a purely mechanical system is just as much a leap of faith as putting some sort of spiritual properties into the metaphysics.

Well, I'll stick with the scholars on this one. As I said, it just leads to a lot of of unneeded confusion to use agnosticism as a synonym for skepticism and leads to a whole mess of issues....particularly that all people who lack belief are now called atheists......which just seems misleading and confusing. Its something the video actually just laughed off with the whole rocks and dogs comment. The point is, people who have never even thought about God ot just don't care are now considered atehist, which seems wrong to me.

There's a reason why scholars use the definitions they do:

1. As I mentioned, its just misleading to use the defintions you do.

2. Your defintions are not mutually exclusive and mutually exhaustive, which is a huge problem when defining catgeories.

3. They don't have an objective to shift the burden of proof, which these defintions are clearly intended to do, as can be seen with your first video. The definition is clearly intended to shift the burden to the religiious believer by making atheism the default position....which as I said is a misleading use of the term because of the fact that atheism is now ascribed to everyone who has never even thought about the issue. As the artcile I gave you said, atheism is the rejection of theism......its actually pretty standard etymology.

I'll just say this in closing.....I never even claimed the final sentence. My point was that people use the term in a misleading and confusing way....one that I would also argue is inaccurate. I never thought all self-proclaimed atheists believe God does not exists. I think they identify as atheists when they are actually more accurately classified as agnostics, as I made clear throughout my posts.

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:

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.

Anybody who has ever thought seriously about this stuff should realize that pulling a definition out a dictionary doesn't really get you anywhere because.....in all honesty....they tend to be flat-out wrong when looking at complex topics. For example, look at the definition of science:

"the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment."

Not that it isn't a good start, but I think anybody who has done any reading knows that a proper definition of science requires a much more nuanced definition that takes into account verification, falsification, scientifc progress, scientific relevancy, quality of work, etc.

Another example, democracy,

"a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives."

Once again, it overlooking some important compenents of democracy, particularly contested elections, among many others. I could keep posting examples, but the main point is that these definitions actually end up resulting in many things that are not science or democracy being classified as such. Same thing with that definition of agnostic. Truth is, there are huge literatures on these subjects, however, the people truly grappling with these issues are not writing dictionaries.