And even if he did use "higher-ups" logins, that doesn't demonstrate the had them illicitly. "Need this sooner than I can get you official access, here's my login, underling, get it done now" has to be in the Top 10 most-common management directives to IT in a bureaucratic (e.g. government) organization.

Though I am neither Catholic nor do I want to defend the Inquisition in any way, it is not clear that atheism per se was much of a target. The Inquisition was apparently much more interested in suppressing -other forms of theism-, than direct non-belief.

In fact, when it did happen, people making anti-religion statements were typically accused as "Protestants"!

Most of them were in no sense Protestants...Irreligious sentiments, drunken mockery, anticlerical expressions, were all captiously classified by the inquisitors (or by those who denounced the cases) as 'Lutheran.'...

If looked at from the perspective of the Inquisition's political objectives rather than theological ones, this makes sense--a competing political party is a much more "dangerous" thing in all forms of politics than those not participating.

Your "get murdered" characterization is a bit of an oversimplification as well, there was opportunity to recant and only a very small percentage of times were the "crimes" considered to be worthy of the death penalty in the first place, but I'll leave that aside...

Er, kobold metal, per the original etymology, as one might guess from the word.

We don't want to unfairly give goblins a worse name than they already have, now...

Curious, in that although I was made quite aware of the "correct" punctuation in school here in the U.S., I refuse to use it as it is the absolute antithesis of "logical".

The end-quote ends the sentence's subsection of the word or phrase quoted, the period indicates the end of the entire sentence.

The "correct" punctuation is the logical equivalent of doing this in code...

if (instances == 0) IncrementInstances(;)

Which is entirely illogical. Surely someone could throw together a formal argument for this on the basis of Set Theory. The small box goes inside the large box--it shouldn't be "correct" for it to need to protrude out one side.

And, retraction: The evidence I stated was presented to you without challenge or acknowledgement, was actually presented via links to Black Parrot as the next respondent to my original post.

I suppose this calls for refinement of my stance of empirical perception being the absolute bedrock of all knowledge...

I'm asking *you* to tell me why the God hypothesis is worthwhile, when infinitely many other hypotheses that are equally (un)supported are not. (I presume you'd agree that it's not worth seriously considering the existence of a teapot orbiting the sun).

Because it is simply not the case they are equally supported. The "Solar Teapot" has no track record of successfully predicting any future events whatsoever. People who die do not see the Solar Teapot appearing before them, or if you do not accept the validity of this perception, we are not left to wonder why human neurology is such that we see the Solar Teapot upon brain failure--because we don't. There are no records of people willingly being put to death rather than recant their claimed experiences during the (non)visit to Earth of the Solar Teapot. It is simply not the case that all religions are equally plausible--and, I might add, as someone who has studied nearly all of them, it strikes me as the height of intellectual laziness to simply declare equivalency of plausibility by default.

There are infinitely many potentially true things, and you only have finite time to consider them. How do you distinguish between the potentially true things you consider, and the ones that you don't?

I would say that this has been driven by my perception of plausibility and relative significance of the subject matter. Many people have an interest in philosophical issues per se, given their scope of applicability, thus their potential "significance". Religion overlaps to a high degree with this domain of inquiry. There may indeed be an unbridgeable gap in terms of focus selection here between us, though, in that I have had what I would consider "compelling spiritual events", so that from my perspective, I -am- "following the evidence". To be fair, I did not have any until some 15 years into my participation in my religion, and previous to that, one could fairly say my selection was largely driven by cultural influence, rather than experience. As you have not had such an experience as those that have formed my degree of certainty, I cannot fault your focus being elsewhere based on your personal experience. What I can say is that, since you mention "limited time", I suggest that you consider the possibility that that factor is self-imposed, and that by default your worldview will make that time limited. If at a given point in time you wish to continue consideration, it by definition my be done in a context that allows continued consideration.

Relativity was prompted by the observation that the speed of light is constant in all directions. String theory was prompted by the observation that two extremely well supported models produce nonsensical results when combined.

Observations "prompt" a great number of possible explanations. What I'd like to know is how you know a hypothesis is testable before it is conceptualized, so that we know (per your apparent criteria) whether it should not even be conceptualized in the first place--because it's not testable by definition before tests are determined, and tests cannot be determined for a hypothesis before it exists. If Einstein "followed the evidence" (in some sort of abstractly pure sense) from the start, he would not have made any revisions to the model--as he did. Also, the predominate scope of evidence would lead one to staying with the Newtonian system. If he "followed the testable evidence", the theory would not have taken the form it did, as aspects of Relativity were still being tested decades after it was proposed. You seem to be glossing over a lot of missteps in the history of science and inferential conjectures that end up being fruitful, to present a hyper-simplified systematic model that doesn't represent the reality of the actual process of science, but does (hopefully) meet your actual overarching objective--exclusion of "religion" at any cost. I would suggest Thomas Kuhn for a more encompassing, real-world appraisal of what science "is" and how it proceeds.

Sure, but until you have something testable, it's just speculation.

Which of the Interpretations of QM (Copenhagen, Everett, etc.), then, are "speculation"? Are they science?

But they were all still wrong! What kind of hubris does it take to make you think that your eyes don't lie, when everyone else's eyes do?

I think you may misunderstand my argument here. If my sense data is unreliable, then so is my perception of people around me saying they saw something else. If I do not have a basis to think my original perception was correct, I do not have a basis to think there are actually-existing people around me forming the challenge to my perception. Direct empirical perception to me is the bedrock of knowledge. If one cannot rely on that being true, one can rely on nothing being true. In fact, I would say it is, for all practical purposes, impossible for multiple people to directly observe an event and hold different stances as to what basically (perceptually) happened, without one side of the question simply lying. If this is not the case, there is no "truth", and certainly no functional science, if "observe the results of the test" is a fundamentally unreliable step in the experimental process.

Right. But the issue is not how English is, it is how reality is.

God on the other hand is not needed to explain any natural phenomena. If there is a phenomenon we cannot currently explain, saying "god did it" does not actually increase our understanding.

You seem rather persistent in insisting that what you consider "necessary" or "worthwhile" is objectively so, demonstrated simply because you say it is. The scope of "worthwhile" is tautologically defined by the reality you already accept--if it is an extension of philosophical naturalism, it is worthwhile, if it is not, it is not worthwhile. You don't see this stance as rather... limiting?

To address the simple form of the claim directly, it is simply untrue that knowing "God did it" tells us nothing. At minimum, it tells us God did it. This is just a variant of the persistent "god of the gaps" argument that steadfastly refuses to acknowledge we do not have to choose between something's proximate and less-proximate causes, and if we determine a proximate cause, the less-proximate ones do not cease to exist or become irrelevant. Knowing that Hiroshima was destroyed by nuclear fission, and describing that physics process precisely, does not negate, nor make unimportant, the less-proximate cause of Truman ordering it.

It matters if you care about accuracy. If I weigh an object, and get 5 kilos, then you weigh the same object and get 8 kilos, we'd throw away the scale. It's not a reliable tool.

So, your answer is to conjecture up some countervailing experiences? My experiences are consistent with many others' as per the expectations of the religion. If there is disparity, you haven't demonstrated it. Indeed, my religion is quite careful to "test all things" (per the Apostle Paul's statement) regarding experiential claims that have objections based on logical consistency with the religion's premises.

On the other hand, if you ask your deity how old the Earth is, and a Hindu asks his deity how old the Earth is, you'll get different answers.

So what? You get "different answers" asking anything from any diverse group, whether it be in politics, art, or for that matter, physics. From this we infer none of the positions is correct?

Not at all. That was not a claim that religion is false because I have not seen evidence. That was an invitation for you to present evidence.

Remarkable, given it was presented in this very thread, to you. You neither challenged the evidence nor acknowledged it. "Not seeing it", however, seems remarkably unlikely.

You posted a peer reviewed paper supporting the existence of subjective experiences during extreme hypoxia. That is entirely consistent with a naturalistic explanation of consciousness.

This is categorization, not explanation. You have not explained how or why hypoxia results in these specific experiences, consistently.

Again, just because the scientific method can't address a question doesn't mean it's OK to make things up.

Which, ironically, is precisely what you just did. Conjecturing and asserting your conjecture regarding the writings is true.

You don't. You follow the evidence. You observe the world and make a model of it based on those observations. Then you look for predictions made by that model, and see if they match further observations.

Again, selective application of criteria that are unworkable in broader application outside religion (to put it less-tactfully, "hypocrisy"). "The evidence" is for the dominant model of the time, in science in particular. For it to expand, someone has to propose a model contrary to the known evidence, and initially, their hypothesis-formation is highly speculative. This is precisely how we came to accept Einstein's Relativity. This will be how we will determine whether String Theory is ultimately correct. This is how we will determine which of the Interpretations of QM is correct--and one of them is, and none of them are differentiable by testing.

What if a billion people claimed to see Bill shoot Steve? And another billion people claimed to see Steve shoot Bill? And yet another people claimed that Andy shot both Steve and Bill? And another billion people claimed that no one shot anyone at all?

Then people are correct or incorrect based purely and exclusively on whether or not they are correct, based on what actually happened. Conjecturing what might have happened, or noting a lack of knowledge as to what happened, does not alter what happened. If someone saw what happened, they know what happened, regardless of the lack of knowledge of others.

Wouldn't you start to doubt that your eyes are a reliable instrument for observing reality?

No. If my direct empirically-derived direct-experience knowledge is questionable, my experience of others who have no reason to know, telling me otherwise, is equally questionable on the same perceptual basis. It is more questionable when adding the fact they'd have no reason to have experienced the actuality of the situation.

Your personal subjective experience of God cannot be a valid experiment because billions of people have done the same experiment and gotten different results.

You are saying they did, or did not, get validating results? Triangulating doesn't work forever, eventually you need to have a position.

I'm saying that you can't use observation X as evidence to support your explanation of observation X.

Yes, you can, in this and every topic. If my explanation is that gasoline burns when ignited, and I observe burning gasoline, that is support of the premise that it is doing so because I ignited it. You'll have to clarify what weird twists of logic make religion a special-case contrary to what everyone does with everything every day.

How does one keep score on fulfilled prophetic claims? Like, how does, say, the Bible stack up against Nostradamus or the Koran?

Pretty-much exactly as your own brain says it does when you aren't typing the opposite of what your own brain says. You have a link giving specific prophecies and approximations of the very-remote likelihood of the occurring by chance. Again, if you assert there is something comparable in other religions, start with the very basic step of providing something to compare with. I have to assume you aren't because you know yourself you couldn't produce anything from every other religion that is comparable. I do not have to give you an algebraic equation to calculate a "prophecy score" for it to be heuristically valid that it is not comparable.

To answer broadly, though, the bible is much more specific and more accurate that Nostradamus could be claimed to be by the most charitable assessment. The Koran is largely the same prophecies by the same prophets, so it is much closer (and no, two things having some correct things does not mean they are equally correct). I would say that the predictions regarding the control of monetary transactions and the political alliances between Islam and what is now Russia and China currently put it ahead by this metric.

The fact that people believe in something hard enough to die for it also isn't really very strong evidence that it's true. Are we saying that Islam is getting more plausible by the day?

This is why I specified "contemporaries". If you were actually around to know the events first-or-second-hand, you would know whether you are intentionally dying for what you know to be a lie. Most would choose not to under those circumstances, if they in fact knew one way or the other. That is what differentiates it from Islamic martyrdom. If 100 Muslims claimed that Mohammed showed up personally at the Dome of the Rock a month ago, and would willingly die rather than deny it, with no apparent gain if they were lying, that would indeed carry considerable argumentative weight.

Okay, so show me something peer-reviewed that demonstrates people who take LSD hallucinate things that "happen to be" specifically the core claims of a particular religion, and hallucinate -nothing else-.

Your argument would be plausible if what one experiences after death were the -sole- line of evidence for theism. It is not. Fulfilled prophetic claims are another. Willing martyrdom of contemporaries is another.

Given that, I suggest a simpler explanation.

What the religion says one experiences after death, and people experiencing what religion says they will after death, are explained by the fact the the religion is -true-.

Fine, then. Show me a peer-reviewed study quantifying that a large percentage of people see Helios riding a chariot across the sky when they die, and I'll give that metaphysical proposition additional consideration.

Odd, I feel curiously undevastated.

We have zero technology that could only have been created by faith.

Here is where we fundamentally disagree. I would assert that we have zero technology that could be created without faith. Leave aside your disdain for the term--what is it that you consider fundamentally different, epistemologically, between religious faith and, say, the "undemonstrated belief" that String Theory is valid? Do you advise dismissing all work and investigation of it, on the basis that we cannot currently test it?

Also, I do in fact fundamentally reject your notion it is testable. I have tested it using the recommended methodology for testing for spiritual phenomena, that is, asking the relevant entity to experience it. The test confirmed my "hypothesis". What you are saying in reality is not that it is not testable, but that it isn't testable according to -your preferred methodology-. Fair enough. How does that matter?

I'd like to see some of that information that leads you to be confidant about the existence of anything supernatural. I've never seen any.

What is true is contingent on what you've personally seen? I just posted peer-reviewed information supporting the veracity of theism. I also posted information regarding its predictions (i.e. "prophecy") along with a survey of proposed improbability if it were random guessing. While some of these are indeed debatable on a "deliberately creating the predicted outcome" (e.g. by allowing oneself to be crucified to "prove one's point"), by no means are all, or even the majority, open to such objections. A statement from Genesis giving a specific upper-bound of age for man, by a supposed uneducated nomad knowing perhaps a few hundred people, lacking any broad statistical information, has stood as accurate across billions of future-unknown people to the significant digits specified, to this very day--as one example. How does this not translate for you as evidence greater than null?

The problem with that is that "good" is not well defined.

True enough. That doesn't mean that it can't be, that is, that there is a correct resolution to the question, and that scientific method cannot address.

A better example concerning unprovably true statements would be Godel's theorems.

These are observations regarding the limits of the formal system of language. They do not demonstrate that there are actually things in reality that are neither true nor false.

That unprovable statements exist does not imply that they are all worth consideration.

And how do you make this determination of what is "worth consideration" a priori?

your opinion about objective reality is worth nothing if it is not supported by evidence.

I have been given evidence. It is in fact not necessary for evidence to be presented to you, or to be replicable, for it to be evidence--though your stance does indeed rely on this being the case. If I see Bill shoot Steve in a back alley, I have all the evidence I need that Bill shot Steve. I do not need to replicate the event for you or prove it for it to be evidence. You have no valid way to claim there is "no evidence" other than as a claim you have universal psychic powers to review the minds and lives of all -other- people on Earth, to verify the universal absence of events providing them evidence.

Hmm... yes, a Godelian argument. The long-form response to this is that it actually isn't a statement about reality, it is an example of the limitations of the formal system of language.

Similarly, "Bill is asdferrgcoarh" is not actually a statement about reality, it is an incorrect use of language. It is neither false nor true, not because there are things in reality that are neither false nor true, but because the assertion in meaningless (or otherwise self-contradictory, such as your statement).