We get email

I imagine everybody's good and fatigued by two solid weeks of playing philosophical word games with professional word gamers, so let's dial it back and enjoy a more typical theist email.

You don't get the full effect of these two messages by "J" (full name withheld by me) because they originally arrived as giant unbroken paragraphs, and I'll be breaking them up in order to respond.

hey , while you're so busy trying to get people to prove the existence of God to you on your little low budget talk show, why not prove to us that God does not exist. you can't can you? it's called a stalemate. there is no way for either side to prove anything concerning the subject.

Perhaps you have misunderstood the meaning of the word "atheism." What it means is that we don't believe in the existence of any gods, not that we regard it as a certainty. I also don't believe in, for example, Spider-Man – but I would never claim to conclusively prove that he doesn't exists.

Do you believe in Spider-Man?

i know he exist because of the things i prayed for and other thing i have seen in my life. i have a bulging disc in my lower back which pressed relentlessly against my sciatic nerve. it caused me pain every single hour of everyday for months. i tried multiple medicines, physical therapy, and hot/cold compresses. nothing worked for long. one day my mother convinced me to get prayed for by my sister who had just gotten saved. {laugh if you like} my sister prayed for me over the phone from beaumont, tx to seattle, wa long distance and the very next day all that excruciating pain was gone. you could say it was all a coincidence or it would have stopped on it's own that day anyway. you could also say what my atheist buddy travis said and claim it was the power of positive thinking. whatever. all i know is the day after i got prayed for, after MONTHS of severe pain, it was gone.

There are two fallacies in this argument. One is known as "post hoc ergo propter hoc." Just because one event happened after another event, it does not follow that one caused the other. People experience severe pain all the time, and that pain goes away all the time. People pray all the time. Odds are very high that at some point, somebody who will be praying for their pain to go away and it will go away shortly afterwards. Odds are also high that many people pray for pain to go away and it doesn't.

This leads to the other fallacy, which is called confirmation bias. When you pray for something and it happens, it looks like the prayer did the job. When you pray for something and it doesn't happen, you can dismiss it as not praying hard enough, or "It wasn't God's will." When something good happens without your prayer, you don't notice it. Thus, if you already believe in prayer, then of course your belief is confirmed over time.

the things in this world are to perfectly planned out for it all to be a result of some random asteroid crashing into earth while it was still in it's molten stage and cooling. to perfectly organized for humans to derive from sea sludge to reptile to ape to man. male and female; the ability to mate and reproduce. all random, right?

No. These things are enabled through regular behavior by natural patterns, which makes matter behave in a non-random way. Undirected, but that isn't the same thing.

a woman's clitoris being a focal point of extreme pleasure and the underside near the head of a mans penis being his is all a huge case of random coincidences. i guess our genitalia evolved to experience pleasure. couldn't be because God wanted us to experience these sensations to make us happy and strengthen the bond with your mate while we reproduce.

Look, I um...

Gee.

Er.

Did you seriously just present the clitoris as proof of God? I uh...

I have to confess that's a new one on me. For once, I'm completely speechless.

i could give you example after example, but i know it would not convince a mind as closed as yours. all i can say to you if you desire proof is. die. after that, you and every proud, arrogant, and uplifted human who thinks so highly of themselves will know there is a God. However, it will be a pointless revelation while you are burning.

Nice. When your arguments are this ineffective, I suppose threatening people with imaginary torture is one kind of backup plan. Not a GOOD backup plan, mind you. The clitoris was better, I think.

i guess making yourself feel better by just erasing God from your existence is the thing to do since you will have no restriction on taking part in whatever hedonistic behavior you desire. do you have any idea of the types of thing i would do if i didn't believe in God. i'm bi-polar with an extremely bad temper. if i didn't have God to keep me in check i know i would hurt anyone who pissed me off and kill anyone who did anything bad enough for me to want to kill them. and screw the police since i would not care about jail or the death penalty because there is no after-life. right? i'd probably kill myself afterwards anyway just to prevent them from locking me up.

It's always fascinating to learn what kind of crazy psychopaths are drawn to Christianity. You set a shining example for your religion to live up to, buddy, I can tell you that.

i'd just be going back to the dust right? no judgement. no heaven or hell. point is, what's the meaning of anything if God is not involved in the lives of earth's inhabitants? sorry this email is so long.

i'm j**** by the way.

Nice to meet you, J. I don't think I'll be getting together with you for coffee anytime soon. You might want to talk to a decent psychiatrist about that angst you're feeling... it doesn't sound like the religion is cheering you up much.


That was just one of the two messages. The second is just as bad, but I'm not in the mood anymore.