The Atheist Pocket Debater iPhone App Remains on Top Ten Best Selling Apps...

The Atheist Pocket Debater iPhone App Remains on Top Ten Best Selling Apps List in Book Category on iTunes

Is Atheism winning the battle of religion in iphone app world? Currently The Atheist Pocket Debater app is on the top ten book apps list competing with Holy Bible, and surpassing NIV bible, Book of Mormon, and Islam apps.

Forest Hills, NY (PRWEB) July 16, 2010

Author Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, says, "Atheist Pocket Debater is an excellent and useful tool for Atheists and Skeptics."

This iPhone app for Atheists provides many ways to argue and debate against Christians, Creationists, and Bible Thumpers. It is set up for very quick reference and memorization. In addition to the atheist debater section, the app contains two other complete sections: Skepticism, dealing with rational thinking, aliens, ghosts, psychics, and get-rich-quick schemes, and Humanism, which contains positive and uplifting humanistic articles including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Humanist Manifesto.

Roy Speckhardt, Executive Director of American Humanist Association says, "Atheist Pocket Debater provides smart, at-the-ready responses to critiques of atheism. It also includes a wealth of information about humanism and skepticism."

http://www.prweb.com/releases/iPhone_app/atheist_book_app/prweb3954134.htm

So there. That proves something.

He's deliberately motivating the faithful into creating one of their own.

God is nothing, if not wiley.

That's an important consideration for UNDECIDEDS

MAC users are Godless heathens. :)

TlalocW

our culture has its internet and iPhone apps

Perhaps the benefit of the answers from Delphi or the I Ching was simply this: the answers were at least cryptic and so required the seeker to think about what the answer might actually mean. Responses from our technological oracles are more likely to seem clear and clean-cut, but that means the user can lazily quit after less thought. So which would be better, if one regarded thinking as a salutary habit?

I do not see how an iPhone app could be of the slightest use for any philosophical conversation on any topic. A good philosophical comment is a comment that forces one to clarify one's own thought -- and perhaps this is most likely to occur if one disagrees strongly with the comment, but has great difficulty explaining why one disagrees. But the unclear confusedness of one's thought is a highly individual matter: so one cannot expect any real benefit by substituting mechanical rote responses for genuine conversation

Let's say for example, you are debating a point with someone. Someone says "B_ll_sh_t! Thomas Jefferson NEVER wrote such and such!" You go to the page, and voila, there it is for them to read with their own two eyes.

information more readily available but can also swamp one with a million links of misinformation diligently copied from one website to another: the old problem of misquoted or maliciously amended texts that plagued the ancient hand copyists is thus magnified many times over on the internet. Nothing is easier today than a quick search that produces a false factoid, or a false quote, or a fact or quote misleadingly lifted entirely from its context, that the search engine user is then free to thoughtlessly reproduce. A tool frequently may not produce results more intelligent than the worker who employs it.

Think Jesus was a socialist? There's a quote for that.
Think Jesus opposed socialism? There's a quote for that too.

Need supporting context? Interpretations can be engineered to fit any situation. Just ask either side of a schism or holy war.

:eyes:

In fact, your whole post there is in the app. You see, the first result I got was an argument that read, "Suppose you can: what of it?" and contained the text:
So you see the app contains a wide variety of common theistic arguments that lend themselves to mechanical rote responses. The response notes also recommended that my above comment be made to DU user "struggle4progress" in a thread about the app itself.

The above comment is likewise a mechanical rote response written months ago as an appropriate response to struggle4progress's likely response to the first rote response. You may think that what you have to say is original, but clearly it's little more than a series of statements already documented and available to anyone with an Internet connection. That's the value of the app.

"Just like the Bible" didn't actually seem to be related to anything I had said

So I figured you might have just cut and paste it from somewhere in the app

"Nothing is easier today than a quick search that produces a false factoid, or a false quote, or a fact or quote misleadingly lifted entirely from its context..."

Just like the Bible.

Look at this quote: "Drown cats and blind puppies!"

Just what kind of person was he, advocating that we drown poor animals?

"Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones."

"Thou hast also taken thy fair jewels of my gold and of my silver, which I had given thee, and madest to thyself images of men, and didst commit whoredom with them."

Violent AND perverted, that http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG1AWVLnl48#t=1m">Shakesman guy.

They ought by theory to have fallen in the time of 29 oscillations

Of course, whatever Newton said deserves thoughtful consideration, so I do hope you will contemplate the foregoing carefully, until it brings you some insight

And the LAST thing "philosophical comments" generally do is force one to clarify one's thought. Just the opposite.

Compared to most of the philosphical windbaggery I've had to puzzle over, the Delphic Oracle was as clear as a technical manual.

H.L. Mencken figured out the philosophizing breed years ago and nailed them perfectly:

Metaphysics is a refuge for men who have a strong desire to appear learned and profound but have nothing worth hearing to say.

Their speculations have helped mankind hardly more than those of the astrologers...

The thing that makes philosophers rspected is not actually their profundity, but simply their obscurity. They translate vague and dubious ideas into high-sounding words, and their dupes assume, as they assume themselves, that the resulting obfuscation is a contribution to knowledge.

would exist.

Points of view and methods of inspection are by no means philosophy, nor are a hundred other human behaviors that I haven't the time to list.

Some family members and I did some minor hiking around the Delaware Water Gap about twenty five years ago. Sadly, I had no idea Peirce's house was around there

A decade or so before that I had read through an old (four?) volume collection of his works. I know now it was very incomplete: it did include some of his diagrammatic logic but I don't think it had much else of his math in it. It did have a few great photographic plates: my favorite was one showing an impishly smiling Peirce with his big black beard shaved from half his face. I'd roughly guess it was taken somewhere around 1885, give or take a few years

Worth a side trip if you're ever back in the area.

philosophy is that it can seriously challenge the validity of their own ideas.

All the philosophy professors I knew from college were all atheists/skeptics.

Not a one of them believed in God, even if they used theologian's works (Aquinas, etc.) in their required reading materials, just to be fair and open-minded.

would be ridiculous.

Skepticism and the scientific methods aren't separate from philosophy, they are themselves particular philosophical approaches.

The reason why believers have such an aversion to science is that it can seriously challenge the validity of their own ideas.

I like it better this way.

"Atheist Pocket Debater provides smart, at-the-ready responses to critiques of atheism."

Does it have a special section on The Art of Historical Revisionism?

;-)

... would it be called the Mass Debater app?

:hide: