Ask a Theist, cont'd

Why do good people who suffer misfortune need praying for?

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The Law of Identity is Rubbish

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The Impossibility of Illogical Thought

Thought can never be of anything illogical, since, if it were, we should have to think illogically. It used to be said that God could create anything except what would be contrary to the laws of logic. The truth is that we could not say what an 'illogical' world would look like. It is as impossible to represent in language anything that 'contradicts logic' as it is in geometry to represent by its a coordinates a figure that contradicts the laws of space, or to give the coordinates of a point that does not exist.... In a certain sense, we cannot make mistakes in logic.... Self-evidence, which [Bertrand] Russell talked about so much, can be dispensable in logic, only because language itself prevents every logical mistake.--What makes logic a priori is the impossibility of illogical thought. --Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus   3.03, 3.031, 3.032, 5.473, 5.4731 (H/T: Roderick T. Long )      
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Logical Atheism: Neither Materialism nor Spiritualism

I’ve been an atheist for over 50 years. It took one lecture to convince me. I don’t just disbelieve in the existence of the supernatural. I believe in the  non existence of the supernatural. The natural universe is it. How do I know? (That’s always the appropriate question but with the caveat below). The wrong answer to that question is that we have no or too little evidence. (The “new atheists” seem to like that answer.) But that gives theism credit it does not deserve. Before you ask for evidence, you need to know what an assertion means. Otherwise, you cannot know if something qualifies as evidence or not. If I say, “Crooly blurps,” the right question is not “How do you know?” but “What are you talking about?” I submit that the same applies to the assertion “God exists.” God is always defined incoherently (it can’t be all-knowing and all-powerful, etc.), and since God is said to be literally out of this world, I don’t know what the word  exists  means in the supposed s...
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