If you think Mormonism is retarded, why you think the Bible is any different?

[Razgovory]

What a strange answer.  At least for you.  Man does not live on bread alone, I suppose.  Even the clear eyed man of the future.

[Maximus]

* My other belief is materalism, which is the belief that all things that exist are material.

Does materialism exist?

I am sure this is not a new question, but I have not studied this philosophy and I'm not sure how one reconciles it with abstract concepts.

[The Minsky Moment]

Why do you hold them?

Lex Parsimony. They are the fewest and least significant needed beliefs to make sense of the world.

Somehow I don't think Billy Ock would agree with your use of his principle.

[The Brain]

Why wouldn't the world make sense without those beliefs?

[The Minsky Moment]

The existence of god isn't some kind of magical fact that we can not know or understand or comprehend (insert more gobbeltygook). It is a fact like any other. The god you propose is one without attributes or effect (or is hiding the answer to the great multiple choice test in the sky to see if you get into heaven). If god has an effect he can be tested and these effects can be observed. If god has no effect he is irrelevant or functionally equivalent with a non-god.

I'm not proposing anything.
I am merely pointing out that if you want to refute a claim, you have to acknlowlege what that claim is.  If someone is making a claim in  "X", you can't refute claim Y and then simply announce that you are going to ignore claim X because it is "Goobelygook" and all claims related to the subject matter must take form Y.  Attaching a "goobelygook" label isn't an argument, it is an ipse dixit denial.

If you insist that any claim about God must be subject to empirical refuation upon pain of being deemed out of bounds, then you are simply defining away the problem, not solving it.

[Viking]

Why do you hold them?

Lex Parsimony. They are the fewest and least significant needed beliefs to make sense of the world.

How does that make sense of anything?  It sounds like a good philosophy for observing the world but it says little about the sense behind why things are the way they are it only says how they are.  I mean I am not saying there even is a way to make sense of the world...but maybe you meant something different than that by 'make sense'.

Belief does not make sense. I have looked at myself and what I hold to be true and found that these two ideas are beliefs I hold without any evidence to back them up. They are my Meta-Narratives the post-modernists rail against.

I hope you people are starting to understand that I do not live in a world of absolutes and certainties. Everything is tentative and uncertain. I object to certainty itself and those who claim to have it. With the exception of my meta-narratives the only ideas I accept are the ones that have consequences and can demonstrate their consistence with observed reality. Obviously the god hypothesis either has no consequences or cannot demonstrate consistency with observed reality, that is why I reject it.

I don't assert that I know that god doesn't exist. The only thing I assert is that you don't know either and you have no good reason to justify believing that he/she/it exists.

[Ideologue]

I was talking about the core text. After all, all religious collect commentary over the ages.

The "core text" we know today as the NT was at the time one of many. 

Sure but I already spoke to that. The key books weren't written thousands of years apart.

What's the cutoff number of years?  Do the latter books of the Tanakh get in under the wire?

[garbon]

I was talking about the core text. After all, all religious collect commentary over the ages.

The "core text" we know today as the NT was at the time one of many. 

Sure but I already spoke to that. The key books weren't written thousands of years apart.

What's the cutoff number of years?  Do the latter books of the Tanakh get in under the wire?

Actually that's kind of my point. You have one set of older books and when a new set of books was added much later - a new religion was declared.

[Ideologue]

I was talking about the core text. After all, all religious collect commentary over the ages.

The "core text" we know today as the NT was at the time one of many. 

Sure but I already spoke to that. The key books weren't written thousands of years apart.

What's the cutoff number of years?  Do the latter books of the Tanakh get in under the wire?

Actually that's kind of my point. You have one set of older books and when a new set of books was added much later - a new religion was declared.

They added the Ketuvim and declared a new Judaism?