Comments by "Mat Broomfield" (@matbroomfield) on "" video.

  1. BLUEBIRD And I can never trust Christians because they're hypocritical and are only moral because they are ordered to be so under pain of death.
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  2. She added nothing of substance that might convince a non believer, or even cause a non believer to go through some rational steps that might consider her experience to be indicative of truth, but at least she was honest about the fact that all she brought was personal experience.
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  3. Emily Rose No, it's because all of the religious rhetoric is so tired and thoroughly debunked that it's almost impossible to come up with an argument that is fresh. So when someone simply tries to repackage the same, tired old dogma in new ways, with appeals to emotion, or worse still, personal anecdotes, it fails to impress. Imagine having an endless series of arguments with a seven year old about their bedtime. After a few months, you've heard every possible effort that they can offer, and even at their best they are not particularly convincing. That's how Christian apologetics sounds to me -an endless cycle child-like rhetoric and justifications.
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  4. Tim Trewyn That was a beautiful monologue Tim, and I don't dismiss experience the importance of her experience TO HER. However, eye witness experience is notoriously subjective and unreliable, which is why it counts for almost nothing in a court of law. and that's when people are even  willing to relate the details of that experience to others, which she is not! I'm sure that you can appreciate somebody saying to you, "I've had an experience that I  found completely transformative but I'm not going to tell you what it is" would not meet your scepticism in a casual conversation with a friend, but in a debate where you are functioning as an apologist it's utterly lacking in merit. As for what I would accept from my children, I would no more accept my children's word as true, than I would this woman. Children cannot distinguish imagination from fact very often, are notorious liars and fantasists, and their brains are as fallible in interpreting reality as mine is. That said, it would depend upon the stakes. If my son told me he saw a pixie, I would ask questions, maybe engage in the fantasy, and share some fun with him. If on the other hand, he told me that monsters were following him to hurt him, I would immediately discuss and get to the bottom of the real cause of his concerns, disassembling his belief to take its power away from him. I feel exactly the same about "Road to Damscus" type experiences and the beliefs of Christianity. In my experience, Christianity is a compensatory belief system used to take the edge off the pain of our mortality and the lack of justice and fairness in existence.
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  5. Tim Trewyn Tim, the eloquence and sincerity of your words, though pleasant to read, do not change the basic facts. Human testimony IS massively unreliable, and ALL memory is not a photographic snapshot so much as a reconstruction. The prisons are heaving with innocent people placed there by a jury's naïve believe in the credibility of memory. It is only when memories become corroborated by the recollections of others, preferably who have not had communication with each other, than one can start to increase one's optimism that they refer to the reality of what has occurred. But even then, group re-enforcement, and the simple unreliability of our senses makes it wise for the rationalist to question everything. You say that the idea of purposeful justice terrifies you, as well it should if the god of the Bible existed. Do you think that HIS actions have been just? For example, you say that in spite of its many flaws, one of the core principles in the Bible is "love of neighbour", yet nothing could be further from the truth. Time after time, neighbours have been destroyed, directly by God or by his agents, and even in stories such as Elijah and the bears, or the pricing of slaves and the sanctioned rape of the wives of enemies, we see a distinctly inhospitable attitude towards neighbours. Even the concept of the end times as referenced in Revelations portray an attitude towards those who choose not to believe, that is anything but the behaviour of a loving entity. Our senses and indeed the very functions of our brains and the way that we perceive reality is notoriously easy to manipulate, and whilst you describe your personally convincing experiences, I will require FAR more compelling evidence than the anecdotal experiences, no matter how sincerely believed, of a bunch of people  who are usually three quarters indoctrinated in the first place.
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  6. Tim Trewyn Insightful possibly, but personally I wonder is she actually wanted the credibility that she thinks comes from such an experience, without the risk of logical deconstruction that would come if she actually shared specifics? I agree completely that one's personal experience happens quite independently of science's ability to prove that it happened. I have always hated many atheists' pompous insistence that if it's not testable and replicable then it's of no interest to science. So that nice thing that a person said to Abraham Lincoln once as a child is of no interest, in spite of the fact that it changed the course of history? (made up example) But along with a prosaic understanding of the indisputable reality of personal experience, unprovable though it may be, must come the MASSIVE caveat that personal experience is a supremely unreliable litmus upon which others should base decisions. That's why studies of less than (I think) 1000 people are not considered to have any statistical merit. Thank you also for the civil and thoughtful conversation Tim.
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  7. No, it's my deduction based upon the lack of evidence.
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