Arantheal  

A friend tells you about a free counseling service which has never failed to aid and comfort many others. You call the counselor. The phone rings and rings with no answer and you finally hang up. What is the most likely explanation?

A) The counselor is sitting by the phone but not answering in order to test your faith in him

B) The counselor is qualified and able to help you but just doesn't feel like it right now

C) The counselor will not answer because he wants you to profit by the spiritual strength that only comes through suffering

D) The counselor will eventually help you, first you have to die though.

E) The counselor is not home

Point out an example of something that ISIS does that Mohammed didn't do. Sam Harris claimed in a recent podcast that there isn't such a thing.

Would it perhaps be mostly empty and inhospitable to human life? Would it be confusing and strange to our intuitions which only evolved to deal with things close to our everyday lives? Would it contain evil since animals and people who came about naturally would have had in their evolutionary development evolutionary incentives to do harm for gain? Would supernatural entities, since they don't exist in this scenario, be limited to people's imaginations, vague old stories and unverifiable anecdotes?

Nine million children die each year, a large part of them going to hell due to them not being Christians. And this is praised as just. Name me any moral system less moral than this because I can't think of one.

http://www.economist.com/news/international/216237...

When people are, say, addicted to smoking is it really descriptive of the situation that they're freely choosing to continue smoking?

What does free will mean in circumstances where just being born in Ecuador will make you 95% likely to choose to become a Christian while being born in Yemen will make you 95% likely to choose to become a Muslim? If external circumstances can within 5% determine your choices for you what does it mean to say that you have a free decision?

At first this might seem like a strange question but bear with me. Imagine you were at an auditorium. Suddenly out of thin air a pig materialises onto the stage. You point this out to the person next to you but he comments he isn't seeing a pig, he sees a cow. People in the front row say they see a dog, a bunch of people in the corner think they see a moose and a whole bunch of people say they see nothing at all on the stage.

This is kind of how religion is. Many people think that because a lot of people have had some kind of supernatural experiences that means there's got to be something out there. But in fact as in the above scenario because a lot of people had mutually contradictory experiences it's not a reason to think the supernatural is real it's a reason to think something else is going on.

You wouldn't think that a pig actually had materialised onto the stage just because you saw it happen since lots of other people saw something different or saw nothing. You would probably doubt all of their experiences including your own and think that some kind of hallucinogen had been released into the auditorium.

http://www.pewforum.org/2014/09/22/public-sees-rel...

This is a new low in usability.