Where Does It Stop?
I was going to give these topics a rest, but something came up. On a previous post, Zach made a comment, and I am excerpting it here. His first sentence is an answer to a question I had asked him. Hope you're not embarrassed, but I want to give you a more complete response than the comments section would allow: My lack of belief in the supernatural is pretty much complete - I have never seen any reason to attribute a supernatural cause to phenomena. I suppose I rule out supernatural explanations because once you let one in, where do you stop? I look at an event I do not understand and go immediately to natural causes. Even if I can't figure it out, I still would assume it had a natural explanation. I'm worried that if someone started attributing causes to supernatural events, they would skip over the whole 'natural cause' thing and go straight for the supernatural, because technically everything is potentially explainable by an omnipotent being, no? ...
Comments
"Shermer made a valid point that the Bible refers to Jesus as 'Jesus of Nazareth' which would be correct if he was from Nazareth, it doesn't call him 'Jesus of Bethlehem', and the answer given by the Christian in the discussion was pretty weak as well.
"At the very WORST Shermer misunderstood the Bible, but as he used to be a fundamentalist Christian himself, I find that unlikely."
No, the guy who should have known better flat-out lied. Your misunderstanding of Scripture does not help your case in defending a fellow atheist. Especially your second sentence, you made the case worse.