I understand that you'd like these things to be real because they underpin your religious beliefs, which clearly mean a lot to you. It'd be painful therefore to realise that they're imaginary - too painful I suspect for you ever to concede the point. The fact remains though that all you have here is faith, and faith moreover that often contradicts the evidence we do have. Now that's fine for you if you find it persuasive, but it gives you nothing whatever in the locker that's persuasive for anyone else.
And that's a problem because you opened up here by proselytising and evangelising on the basis we now know only of your faith.
BIB - Something I've said many a time here before. Alan is so deeply and intensely invested emotionally in his (needless to say, entirely unevidenced) belief system that he can't even concede that it's only faith, or that he uses, repeatedly, utterly fallacious, invalid, illegitimate arguments (#139 being the most recent instance). To do that might open an initially tiny crack of critical rational scepticism, and who knows where that might ultimately lead? I've long thought that Alan is one of those sorts of people who, if they lose their emotional life support system, would have their entire world come crashing down around their ears, so it has to be fortified and defended at all costs, even to the extent of ignoring being told that he's deploying bad arguments and invalid logic, time after time after time.
This is why the flow of - well, I was going to say information, except that it isn't information, is it? Let's call it the flow of discussion - with Alan is one way only: everything out (i.e. assertion and fallacy), but absolutely nothing in. Sad, really.
