Quote preview background for Michael A. Wood Jr.
Why anyone__ argument for god(s) is fallacious, especially as a causal agent:Imagine Michael and Jessica are at Jimmy__ house sitting at the kitchen table. Jessica steps outside to take a phone call. When she returns her drink is spilled. Jessica asks, __ow did my drink get knocked over?_ Michael replies, __t was a SnickerDoodle.__: __hat__ a SnickerDoodle?__: __t looks a little like an elephant but it is small, pink, and invisible.__: __s it invisible or pink? It can__ be both.__: __ell, it is. You can__ understand what the SnickerDoodle looks like.__: __ip it. SnickerDoodle__ are not real. How did my drink get knocked over?__: __ell, it was Jimmy__ cat, but it was because he was chasing the SnickerDoodle, so the SnickerDoodle made him do it.__: __top with the SnickerDoodle, you weirdo.__: __ust kidding, it was Jimmy__ cat, I don__ know why.__e have no reason to believe that SnickerDoodle__ are real. Without SnickerDoodles being established as possible causes to drinks being knocked down, then there is no point to discussing them as the cause of Jessica__ drink being knocked over. In similar fashion, we have to establish that cats are a possible reason that drinks get knocked down. Okay, we have established that cats are real and capable of doing so. It is now a viable option, but in order for Michael__ story have any plausibility, we not only have to establish that a cat did it, we have to establish that it was Jimmy__ cat, or that Jimmy even has a cat.Believers cannot get to step one, establishing that any god is even a viable option on the list of possibilities. Then even if gods were proven to be real, you still have to prove that it was your particular god, or that your particular god exists. To argue that your god is real, is like Michael arguing that Jimmy__ SnickerDoodle knocked over Jessica__ drink. Can grown-adults take that argument seriously? Really?
Michael A. Wood Jr. Eliot
Turn into a Quote Card

Quote Detail

Why anyone__ argument for god(s) is fallacious, especially as a causal agent:Imagine Michael and Jessica are at Jimmy__ house sitting at the kitchen table. Jessica steps outside to take a phone call. When she returns her drink is spilled. Jessica asks, __ow did my drink get knocked over?_ Michael replies, __t was a SnickerDoodle.__: __hat__ a SnickerDoodle?__: __t looks a little like an elephant but it is small, pink, and invisible.__: __s it invisible or pink? It can__ be both.__: __ell, it is. You can__ understand what the SnickerDoodle looks like.__: __ip it. SnickerDoodle__ are not real. How did my drink get knocked over?__: __ell, it was Jimmy__ cat, but it was because he was chasing the SnickerDoodle, so the SnickerDoodle made him do it.__: __top with the SnickerDoodle, you weirdo.__: __ust kidding, it was Jimmy__ cat, I don__ know why.__e have no reason to believe that SnickerDoodle__ are real. Without SnickerDoodles being established as possible causes to drinks being knocked down, then there is no point to discussing them as the cause of Jessica__ drink being knocked over. In similar fashion, we have to establish that cats are a possible reason that drinks get knocked down. Okay, we have established that cats are real and capable of doing so. It is now a viable option, but in order for Michael__ story have any plausibility, we not only have to establish that a cat did it, we have to establish that it was Jimmy__ cat, or that Jimmy even has a cat.Believers cannot get to step one, establishing that any god is even a viable option on the list of possibilities. Then even if gods were proven to be real, you still have to prove that it was your particular god, or that your particular god exists. To argue that your god is real, is like Michael arguing that Jimmy__ SnickerDoodle knocked over Jessica__ drink. Can grown-adults take that argument seriously? Really?

Quick Answer

What this quote page tells you

This canonical quote page keeps the full saying, the attributed author, any linked work, and the topic tags together so the quote can be cited from one stable URL.

Related Quotes

More quote cards from the same area

"

What?' He cried, darting at him a look of fury: 'Dare you still implore the Eternal's mercy? Would you feign penitence, and again act an Hypocrite's part? Villain, resign your hopes of pardon. Thus I secure my prey!'As He said this, darting his talons into the Monk's shaven crown, He sprang with him from the rock. The Caves and mountains rang with Ambrosio's shrieks. The Daemon continued to soar aloft, till reaching a dreadful height, He released the sufferer. Headlong fell the Monk through the airy waste; The sharp point of a rock received him; and He rolled from precipice to precipice, till bruised and mangled He rested on the river's banks. Life still existed in his miserable frame: He attempted in vain to raise himself; His broken and dislocated limbs refused to perform their office, nor was He able to quit the spot where He had first fallen. The Sun now rose above the horizon; Its scorching beams darted full upon the head of the expiring Sinner. Myriads of insects were called forth by the warmth; They drank the blood which trickled from Ambrosio's wounds; He had no power to drive them from him, and they fastened upon his sores, darted their stings into his body, covered him with their multitudes, and inflicted on him tortures the most exquisite and insupportable. The Eagles of the rock tore his flesh piecemeal, and dug out his eyeballs with their crooked beaks. A burning thirst tormented him; He heard the river's murmur as it rolled beside him, but strove in vain to drag himself towards the sound. Blind, maimed, helpless, and despairing, venting his rage in blasphemy and curses, execrating his existence, yet dreading the arrival of death destined to yield him up to greater torments, six miserable days did the Villain languish. On the Seventh a violent storm arose: The winds in fury rent up rocks and forests: The sky was now black with clouds, now sheeted with fire: The rain fell in torrents; It swelled the stream; The waves overflowed their banks; They reached the spot where Ambrosio lay, and when they abated carried with them into the river the Corse of the despairing Monk.

"

I saw the massive stone altar first begin to glow like a ruby; then it was a heart of liquid gold like a solid single-crystal chrysoprase: the gold intensified into ice-cold emerald and passed into the dark sapphire of an arctic sky; this again withdrew into a violet so deep that the visual purple of the eye itself seemed absorbed in that depth, that abyss of color in which sight was being drowned. And as this intensification of vibrancy seemed to sweep across the visible spectrum up to those ranges where energy absorbs all mass and that which can pierce the most solid is itself fine beyond all substance, so it seemed with hearing. That abyss of sound which I had been thinking of as only depth, it, too, seemed to rise or, rather, I suppose I was carried up on some rising wave which explored the deep of the height.As the light drew toward the invisible, I experienced a sound so acute that I can only remember feeling to myself that this was the note emitted when the visible universe returns to the unmanifest__his was the consummatum est of creation. I knew that an aperture was opening in the solid manifold. The things of sense were passing with the music of their own transmutation, out of sight. Veil after veil was evaporating under the blaze of the final Radiance. Suddenly I knew terror as never before. The only words which will go near to recreating in me some hint of that actual mode are those which feebly point toward the periphery of panic by saying that all things men dread are made actually friendly by this ultimate awfulness. Every human horror, every evil that the physical body may suffer, seemed, beside this that loomed before me, friendly, homely, safe. The rage of a leaping tiger would have been a warm embrace. The hell of a forest wrapped in a hurricane of fire, the subzero desolation of the antarctic blizzard, would have been only the familiar motions of a simple well-known world. Yes, even the worst, most cunning and cruel evil would only be the normal reassuring behavior of a well-understood, much-sympathized-with child. Against This, the ultimate Absolute, how friendly became anything less, anything relative.

GH
Gerald Heard

Dromenon: The Best Weird Stories of Gerald Heard