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Beware the Wrath of God!

Hosea 13:16: Samaria shall become desolate; for she hath rebelled against her God: they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up.

GTA has NOTHING on the Bible. GTA never encouraged the wholesale slaughter of whole countries (it stopped at slaughtering a 25 person gang at a time),

Someone mod this guy up. Heck, that's just the tip of the iceberg. If there's ANY hate filled medium that'll cause people to go out and kill, it's the Bible. Don't believe me? read it yourself! or for the lazy have a look at this , this, and this
Like Penn & Teller said - Read the damn bible. We need more atheists.

GTA has NOTHING on the Bible. GTA never encouraged the wholesale slaughter of whole countries (it stopped at slaughtering a 25 person gang at a time),

Someone mod this guy up. Heck, that's just the tip of the iceberg. If there's ANY hate filled medium that'll cause people to go out and kill, it's the Bible. Don't believe me? read it yourself! or for the lazy have a look at this , this, and this
Like Penn & Teller said - Read the damn bible. We need more atheists.

GTA has NOTHING on the Bible. GTA never encouraged the wholesale slaughter of whole countries (it stopped at slaughtering a 25 person gang at a time),

Someone mod this guy up. Heck, that's just the tip of the iceberg. If there's ANY hate filled medium that'll cause people to go out and kill, it's the Bible. Don't believe me? read it yourself! or for the lazy have a look at this , this, and this
Like Penn & Teller said - Read the damn bible. We need more atheists.

"the New Testament is true (in terms of events)"

You're a riot.

http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/science/long .html

Metaphorically true, possible. You'd have to be an idiot to find it to be word-for-word truthful.

Ex.12:14, 17, 24
"And this day shall be unto you for a memorial; and ye shall keep it a feast to the LORD throughout your generations; ye shall keep it a feast by an ordinance for ever. ... And ye shall observe the feast of unleavened bread; for in this selfsame day have I brought your armies out of the land of Egypt: therefore shall ye observe this day in your generations by an ordinance for ever. ... And ye shall observe this thing for an ordinance to thee and to thy sons for ever."

Lev.23:14,21,31
"It shall be a statute for ever throughout your generations."

Ps.119:151-2
"Thou art near, O LORD; and all thy commandments are truth. Concerning thy testimonies, I have known of old that thou hast founded them for ever."

Ps.119:160
"Thy word is true from the beginning: and every one of thy righteous judgments endureth for ever."

Mal.4:4
"Remember ye the law of Moses."

Mt.5:18-19
"Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or tittle shall nowise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven."

Lk.16:17
"It is easier for heaven and earth to pass, than one tittle of the law to fail."

Yeah, "will be called Immanuel" and quite a few more. You need really serious "stretching of the facts" to make them agree 100%.
Please debunk all this. 100% of these please.

Yeah, "will be called Immanuel" and quite a few more. You need really serious "stretching of the facts" to make them agree 100%.
Please debunk all this. 100% of these please.

Actually it's the Bible that says so - and the Bible was written by man, not by God. (admittingly, this was taken from an Islam site, but this same evidence can be found elsewhere.) The old testament was passed via oral tradition many many times before being recorded. Most of the new testament (with the exception of Matthew, Mark, Luke, etc) was recorded in the same manner.

Let's see about homosexuality... Hmmm, nothing in the bible says it's wrong. In fact here is a site that addresses it:

McChurch.org

And another:

In-my-opinion.org

Then let's take a look at what else the Bible tells us:

Numbers 31:17 "Now kill all the boys [innocent kids]. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man."

Revelation 2:22-23 "So I will cast her on a bed of suffering, and I will make those who commit adultery with her suffer intensely, unless they repent of her ways. I will strike her children dead. Then all the churches will know that I am he who searches hearts and minds, and I will repay each of you according to your deeds.

Psalm 137:8-9 "O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us- he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks."

Isaiah 13:16 "Whoever is captured will be thrust through; all who are caught will fall by the sword. Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses will be looted and their wives ravished."

Please open your bible to 2 Kings, 2:23-24

23: And he (Elisha) went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head.
24: And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them." Damn children, making fun of a bald guy!

Now turn your books to Exodus:
12:29 And it came to pass, that at midnight the LORD smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle.
12:30 And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead.

It sounds to me like God really hated kids!

See http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/int/long.htm l for more light reading!

Imply all you want, no one aside from the God of the bible can ever change my faith and I know that as a fact (even if you think its not). No offese.

None taken, and likewise, I hope you won't be offended if I point out that your reasoning here is circular (also known as "begging the question").

You say that the "only thing that would change your faith is God Himself", a statement which assumes from the get-go that God is both real and infalliable.

Basically what that boils down to is:
"I know God exists because He said so"

Let's say I write a book. It contains three pages, which contain the following
1: Everything written in this book is true
2: Oranges are purple.
3: This book is never wrong

I now know for a fact that oranges are, indeed, puple - it says so right there in the book, and as we can see, the book is always true and never wrong!

I don't for a moment think that this is going to shake the foundations of your faith (indeed, if it has, you might want to have a serious look at your beliefs), but I hope you will at least acknowledge the cognitive disonnance you must engage in to hold certain beliefs.

If you are really prepared to examine your beliefs, may I suggest you take a trip over to The Skeptic's Annotated Bible which details many of the flaws, holes, contradictions, and other errors the bible contains.

Sure.. here's two invaluable resources for you:
Firstly, talkorigins.org - it'll tell you everything you ever wanted to know (and more!) about evolution, and how/why it can stand up to all the claims and accusations creationism throws at it.

Also, the Skeptic's Annotated Bible is a wonderful resource, detailing all the flaws, errors, contradictions, fallacies, and other nonsense in the bible. Critically, the actual bible part is a 100% genuine, unaltered King James Version bible, so nobody can pick fault with it saying it's "not a real bible", etc. I'm not sure how much use this will be in the case of a Jehova's Witness (I don't know much about how their beliefs differ), but it's a great resource at any rate.

Finally, you might want to ask around in the forums at Infidelguy's site which is a site dedicated to these sorts of issues.

There's a nice overview of the two contradicting creation stories here.. the rest of that site is also well worth checking out as well

Yeah, but hang on, aren't you missing something?

What about the two contradictory creation accounts in Genesis?

If you think for one second that the Bible can somehow be accepted as not clashing horribly with science, I suggest you look at this

Oh, I'm sorry.. I just noticed this This passage could be chalked up to editorial flurish, or maybe a scribe got his notes

For a moment I thought you were trying to pretend the bible had some credibility. My bad.
Remember, when it says "There is a god", it's just an editorial flourish, or a notes mixup, and what it actually means is "Don't eat hotdog buns on a Tuesday"

Yeah, but hang on, aren't you missing something?

What about the two contradictory creation accounts in Genesis?

If you think for one second that the Bible can somehow be accepted as not clashing horribly with science, I suggest you look at this

Oh, I'm sorry.. I just noticed this This passage could be chalked up to editorial flurish, or maybe a scribe got his notes

For a moment I thought you were trying to pretend the bible had some credibility. My bad.
Remember, when it says "There is a god", it's just an editorial flourish, or a notes mixup, and what it actually means is "Don't eat hotdog buns on a Tuesday"

Here ya go.

http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/accou nts.html

the freedom to choose

But if your hypothesis is accurate, we don't have the freedom to choose, only to live as God predestined us to. This pretty much kills any concept of sin. Even if my computer crashes from a bug, I blame the programmer not the machine. In my case that doesn't stop me hitting the damn thing upside the monitor, but I'd expect a perfect God to be more restrained than that. So why Hell?

Also, if I follow your hypothesis, why should I bother to try to believe? Whether I end up being redeemed or not is entirely up to God, so why make an effort, or try to convince other people (ref. intelligent design) that God exists? Your hypothesis suggests that life has no more meaning than a carpet's pattern has to the threads.

Naturally, it is harder to believe something that we have never physically experienced, so God introduced the idea of Grace to fill in the gaps.

I confess I'm not 100% sure what you mean by this. Any chance you could elaborate? Cheers.

or even (gasp) post regularly on Slashdot.

HERESY! Shame on you :)

the knowledge of good and evil, and the freedom to choose and be redeemed for the bad choices, is what makes humanity different from the rest of creation... His goal for us in this life is to recognize his affection for us and, in our own limited way, return it to him.

So variety is the spice of Godliness? That makes some sort of sense (would I be correct in comparing this to the themes of C.S. Lewis: Mere Christianity?) and is a fairly internally consistent theory. However it still has major conflicts with religious practices. For example, apart from fear of Hell and desire for Heaven, what reason is there for us to accept God as our saviour? Certainly not love; what love does the pot have for the potter? What love does an ant farm have for the kid who keeps it, especially if he's a little too handy with the magnifying glass on sunny days?

Additionally, your argument still has the same issue of evidence as Lewis' book. For example, what evidence is there that any one faith is true (and incidentally, how does one decide between them)? If there's all this supernatural gunk floating about in the background, you'd expect some of it to show up in, for example, subatomic experiments. Why should it only show up on the large scale when, in our experience, large-scale actions ultimately have their roots in small-scale actions? If God is keeping away to avoid tainting the experiment, why send us one manual on how to live? And why make it internally inconsistent? (examples available on request or at the Skeptic's Annotated Bible)

As a side note, we're getting rather sidetracked... this has turned into a discussion of Christianity, not of Intelligent Design. Not that I have a problem with that.

Nope the Bible clearly states that Adam lived 800 years and then died in Genesis 5:1.
Genesis 5

Do you eat shrimp? According to the bible, that's http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/dt/14.html forbidden

Being gay is wrong. It says so in the Bible.

The Bible also says that it is alright to sell women into slavery and other ludicrous things. I understand that you believe strongly in the documents of your faith, but I really doubt that Jesus would approve of discrimination towards anyone for any reason, or any form of hate, even if they are a "sinner"

Being gay is wrong. It says so in the Bible.

The Bible also says that it is alright to sell women into slavery and other ludicrous things. I understand that you believe strongly in the documents of your faith, but I really doubt that Jesus would approve of discrimination towards anyone for any reason, or any form of hate, even if they are a "sinner"

Oh wow, that's funny. God is as strong as a unicorn!

Do you think he's as quick as an elf too? And as light as a fairy? And as canny as a leprechaun?

The Bible, while not a scientific document (and it does not intend to be one) does hold some VERY accurate, simple scientific truths. While his contemporaries believed the world to be flat (along with science at the time), the prophet Isaiah spoke of "the circle of the earth"

Circle != Sphere.
And just for good measure, here's another 200-odd science facts according to the Bible

Fair enough...
And here's another quote from the Bible:
"Behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces." - Malachi 2:3

If you want to see how much sense the bible really makes, check out www.skepticsannotatedbible.com - It's a totally legit King James Bible, it just has extra annotations on the content

Be warned that the Bible claims that insects have four legs and that bats are birds. Relying on the Bible to provide literal truth is like relying on Microsoft to compete fairly in the software market. It has some good stuff, but sometimes you really have to read between the lines, especially when you get into the God-ordered genocides of the Old Testament.

Be warned that the Bible claims that insects have four legs and that bats are birds. Relying on the Bible to provide literal truth is like relying on Microsoft to compete fairly in the software market. It has some good stuff, but sometimes you really have to read between the lines, especially when you get into the God-ordered genocides of the Old Testament.

Quite right - I assume that anyone who had ever approached Christianity with a critical, inquiring attitude - even if they ultimately concluded it was right - would have some tolerance for others who doubt it, rather than spout religious zealotry at them.

It's only good if I'm right. And if I'm right, then it would be good for everyone else to trust in that authority.

Fine, but how about demonstrating that authority rather than simply asserting it. If you are a physicist, then you ought to know the value of evidence.

I believe in the authority because of the self-consistency, the relevancy, the the self-evident truthfulness and the historical reliability of the Bible.

You've got to be joking. There are about a zillion places where the Bible contradicts itself. Whole chunks of the Bible are completely irrelevant to modern life (try Leviticus 15:19-30 on menstruation, for example, or all the advice on what to do about errant oxen at the end of Exodus 21). And if you think the Bible has been proven to be historically accurate - well, lucky you're not an historian then. Two of every species being preserved from a worldwide flood in Noah's ark? 600,000 Israelites wandering around the Sinai for 40 years? All the accounts of the kings and so forth are riddled with political and religous bias, just as one might expect from a historical document. It's just another historical source, no more authoritative than any other. In fact, less so.

Oh yes, nearly forgot: self-evident truthfulness! ROTFL. No, it's not self-evident. Really.

Given that Jesus is God, he condones that.

This is precisely what I was on about in my original post. If you want to convince a non-Christian of the truth of your argument that Jesus wasn't a pacifist, then you cannot assume "Jesus is God" as an initial premise - because I don't accept that as a premise. You'll need to argue it a different way. Is this really so difficult to understand?

Looks as though someone else been reading Mark 12:42-44 .....

Of course, Bill Gates does not deserve most of this money in the first place. The whole concept on which Microsoft was founded stinks, and the correct response to this (in)famous document should have been a dragging into the nearest toilet followed by a thorough beating. What can't be owned can't be stolen.

Gates and co. might actually have earned a little respect from me if they had bought out the patent rights on a few life-saving drugs {is this another crazy concept, or what? ..... they have the right idea in Cuba ..... the Cuban NHS is empowered to synthesise any life-saving drug, and patent encumbrances be damned, on the basis that saving a human life is more important than earning royalty fees for some fatcat corporation} and turned them over to the Public Domain. Or maybe bribed the Roman Catholic Church to install a woman Pope {who would naturally approve of birth control and the ordination of women into lower orders of the Priesthood, and hopefully seek a reunification with the Church of England reversing the Bull[s**t] of Pope Leo XIII in 1896}. That would have been a worthy gesture.

Really, this is no different than some ordinary working-class person buying a copy of the Big Issue.

Most people that understand it recognize that it is still a theory.

• explains, and is consisten with, the vast majority of data
• makes predictions about what should occur or what has occured that can be tested
• has survived numerous tests to prove it wrong, and
• can be proven false

Cancer, according to evolution, is the engine of progress. Truth is, you'd leave everything just the way it is. Nobody wants their DNA fooled with because they know intuitively that it's a bad thing.

And I might also point out that evolution relates to how organisms morph across specie [sic] boundaries, not how life appears in the first place. That is the providence of abiogenesis vs. panspermia.

As far as the Earth being flat, the Bible pointed out it is a sphere some 3,000 years ago (Isiaih 40:22), some 250 years before Pythagoras.

You are, however, very much correct (as far as I know the Bible), that there are no statements stating that the earth was ever the center of the universe, much less is so now.

Lastly, how does ANY of this relate to RFIDs?

Most people that understand it recognize that it is still a theory.

• explains, and is consisten with, the vast majority of data
• makes predictions about what should occur or what has occured that can be tested
• has survived numerous tests to prove it wrong, and
• can be proven false

Cancer, according to evolution, is the engine of progress. Truth is, you'd leave everything just the way it is. Nobody wants their DNA fooled with because they know intuitively that it's a bad thing.

And I might also point out that evolution relates to how organisms morph across specie [sic] boundaries, not how life appears in the first place. That is the providence of abiogenesis vs. panspermia.

As far as the Earth being flat, the Bible pointed out it is a sphere some 3,000 years ago (Isiaih 40:22), some 250 years before Pythagoras.

You are, however, very much correct (as far as I know the Bible), that there are no statements stating that the earth was ever the center of the universe, much less is so now.

Lastly, how does ANY of this relate to RFIDs?

For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death. (Lev 20:9)

My, we're certainly going to be killing a lot of people. How many people have cursed their father or mother in a fit of teenage pique? Surely the mountains of hundreds of millions of corpses will have a "sweet savor to the Lord".

And the man that committeth adultery with another man's wife, ... the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.

I guess that disposes of another 20% or more of the population. I'm glad the lord likes the smell of burning corpses, because there's going to be a lot of it if people ever start following the bible literally.

Is it any wonder the bible is a perenial favourite of mass-murderers? Pol Pot has nothing on this guy.

Mind you, this is the same God that supposedly killed thousands of Egyptian children in cold blood, because he disliked the policies of their monarch. Being all-powerful he could have trivially killed or punished only the monarch, so clearly this genocide was intentional.

This can only be the actions of a muderous psychopath, and I'm not at all inclined to take his advice on "Love".

Some of the posts on this thread disturb me. They imply that people aren't taking intelligent design (ID) seriously enough as a threat to science. The posts say that maybe ID is compatible with science after all: maybe it only applies to speciation; or maybe a god started things off at a certain point, and evolution took over from there; or if you interpret "day" to be some indeterminate length of time, maybe you can make the bible's creation story match facts (hint: you can't -- the creation story has plants appearing before the sun, for example).

The point is not whether it's possible to somehow reconcile ID with fact if you try hard enough. The point is that ID is being presented as a science, when it is clearly nothing of the sort. Are there unanswered questions in evolution? Of course. But saying "god did it" answers a small mystery with an enormous, or even completely unknowable one (god). It explains nothing, and encourages intellectual laziness. If we accepted "science" like this, we'd all still think thunder was the sound the gods make when they're angry.

I don't care if people choose to believe in god or ID based on faith; that's their right. What terrifies me is when it is presented as science -- especially in our schools. There is absolutely no doubt about it: if it weren't for the fact that ID puts a pseudo-scientific face on a certain demonstrably false and contradictory "holy" book, and the fact that proponents of that book fund ID well, it would have long since been thrown out as crackpot nonsense. Instead, it is being accepted by some school districts as science. Teaching ID as science undermines our entire theory of knowledge.

So discoveries like this possible explanation for the eye are important! They can potentially narrow the gaps in our scientific knowledge, which is the only attack against "god of the gaps" arguments like ID (the fact that ID is almost impossible to completely falsify is another big "tell" that it is not scientific).

p.s. [political rant]
Defending science is especially important with Bush in the white house. This is a man who says the "jury is still out" on evolution. This is an administration that approves a National Park Service booklet saying that the Grand Canyon was caused by Noah's flood. This is an administration with the worst environmental and scientific record in recent memory.
[/political rant]

It's not. Please go dredge for new converts somewhere else.

And for a revelatory look (pun intended) at the bible, please see skepticsannotatedbible.com. You should probably take a lok at that site and actually investigate some of the crazy crap in the bible, instead of just feeling good with your glossed-over Daily Inspirational Calendar.

I'm able to be sarcastic, just not detect it.

Here's a political assassination.
Ehud, a left-handed man of god slays Eglon, a very fat king.
Judges 3:15-22

"It doesn't make it our personal responsbility, because, a child should not be held accountable for his/her parents' crimes"

Psssh, that's not what the bible says.

Sins of your parents

The author's lack of Biblical knowledge would be amusing if he didn't take his work so seriously. It's a huge project and there's talk about putting it in book form. But it's fatuous. I would've thought it was a parody of an atheist site (as landoverbaptist.org is a fake church site) if it wasn't so thorough and well-planned and touted by non-Christians.

This annotated Bible presents no challenge to Biblical inerrancy or Christian doctrine.

Are you saying that people who belive there are absolutes and that there is a differnce between right and wrong, lack critical thinking skills?

Anyone who can't recognize that the Christian Bible has numerous internal contridictions, even on basic theological issues, lacks critical thinking skills.

Are you saying that people who belive there are absolutes and that there is a differnce between right and wrong, lack critical thinking skills?

Anyone who can't recognize that the Christian Bible has numerous internal contridictions, even on basic theological issues, lacks critical thinking skills.

Are you saying that people who belive there are absolutes and that there is a differnce between right and wrong, lack critical thinking skills?

Anyone who can't recognize that the Christian Bible has numerous internal contridictions, even on basic theological issues, lacks critical thinking skills.

Are you saying that people who belive there are absolutes and that there is a differnce between right and wrong, lack critical thinking skills?

Anyone who can't recognize that the Christian Bible has numerous internal contridictions, even on basic theological issues, lacks critical thinking skills.

Are you saying that people who belive there are absolutes and that there is a differnce between right and wrong, lack critical thinking skills?

Anyone who can't recognize that the Christian Bible has numerous internal contridictions, even on basic theological issues, lacks critical thinking skills.

Are you saying that people who belive there are absolutes and that there is a differnce between right and wrong, lack critical thinking skills?

Anyone who can't recognize that the Christian Bible has numerous internal contridictions, even on basic theological issues, lacks critical thinking skills.

Again, I must respectfully disagree. However, because this is somewhat offtopic, I will restrict my disagreement to only your first point (concerning evolution), and if you wish to pick up the discussion, we can do so via email. (Unless the /. community doesn't really mind)

Ok. You said:

Now, we're talking about the equivalent of 6 billion bits. I don't care how many billions of years you give for things to evolve, you can't get to 2^6,000,000,000. The complexity simply exceeds the abilities of our brains to grasp.

Note that the assumption that things will just evolve on their own is a charitable one. If my '66 Wagoneer had done any evolving in the 40 years it's been around, it might get better gas mileage and put out less harmful emissions than it does. But only more newly designed vehicles have those features.

I agree with you that an organism needs to be designed to their environment to be able to produce the 6 billion bits, but I think you misunderstand evolutionary theory, because that's exactly what it advocates. Evolution is design, not randomness, as it is commonly misunderstood. Mutations and/or adaptations introduce new variants, and the pressures of the environment naturally select (i.e., design) the animal most fit for survival.

Let me give an example that shows how the mathmatics of cryptography do not apply to evolution. The analogy is admittedly oversimplified, so please don't take it beyond the point which I'm trying to make.

Ok. Say you've got 20 quarters - they represent the genes of a certain animal we're going to speed-evolve. Heads are good genes, tails are bad genes. According to probability, if you were to flip all the coins at once, you would have B^N (2^20) different possible combinations (about a million). Likewise, your chances of getting all heads (a.k.a., a designed animal), would be (50%)^20, or 1 in a million. It would take a lot of flips to get that gene combination!

However, that's not the way evolution works! Natural selection takes the "right" genes of a population and passes them on genetically to the next. If we wanted to "evolve" this quarter-gene-species, we would do the following:

1. Flip them all at once (1st generation).

2. Find all the heads, those genes are good and get passed on to the next generation, so they get moved aside (nautrally selected).

3. Re-flip all the remaining coins (next generation), and go back to Step 2.

You can easily see that it'll only take a few "generations" to get a completely designed gene structure!

That is a simplified analogy to evolution, but it is easily extendable. If you had 6 billion 4-sided dice (A,C,F,G), and you could roll all of them, and then select and pass on the ones that were "right", it wouldn't take you very long to come up with a perfectly constructed 6-billion-bit gene sequence.

Though I don't presume to be any judge of God's ways, what better way for the Creator to deliver a message about himself than to offer a part of him as a widely predicted and historically recorded sacrifice for his created humanity?

As a quick nod to your second point, I believe a better way to reveal oneself would be to not have any contradictions, bad science, absurdities, and cruelty in the same document as the good stuff. And if we were truly designed from the s

Again, I must respectfully disagree. However, because this is somewhat offtopic, I will restrict my disagreement to only your first point (concerning evolution), and if you wish to pick up the discussion, we can do so via email. (Unless the /. community doesn't really mind)

Ok. You said:

Now, we're talking about the equivalent of 6 billion bits. I don't care how many billions of years you give for things to evolve, you can't get to 2^6,000,000,000. The complexity simply exceeds the abilities of our brains to grasp.

Note that the assumption that things will just evolve on their own is a charitable one. If my '66 Wagoneer had done any evolving in the 40 years it's been around, it might get better gas mileage and put out less harmful emissions than it does. But only more newly designed vehicles have those features.

I agree with you that an organism needs to be designed to their environment to be able to produce the 6 billion bits, but I think you misunderstand evolutionary theory, because that's exactly what it advocates. Evolution is design, not randomness, as it is commonly misunderstood. Mutations and/or adaptations introduce new variants, and the pressures of the environment naturally select (i.e., design) the animal most fit for survival.

Let me give an example that shows how the mathmatics of cryptography do not apply to evolution. The analogy is admittedly oversimplified, so please don't take it beyond the point which I'm trying to make.

Ok. Say you've got 20 quarters - they represent the genes of a certain animal we're going to speed-evolve. Heads are good genes, tails are bad genes. According to probability, if you were to flip all the coins at once, you would have B^N (2^20) different possible combinations (about a million). Likewise, your chances of getting all heads (a.k.a., a designed animal), would be (50%)^20, or 1 in a million. It would take a lot of flips to get that gene combination!

However, that's not the way evolution works! Natural selection takes the "right" genes of a population and passes them on genetically to the next. If we wanted to "evolve" this quarter-gene-species, we would do the following:

1. Flip them all at once (1st generation).

2. Find all the heads, those genes are good and get passed on to the next generation, so they get moved aside (nautrally selected).

3. Re-flip all the remaining coins (next generation), and go back to Step 2.

You can easily see that it'll only take a few "generations" to get a completely designed gene structure!

That is a simplified analogy to evolution, but it is easily extendable. If you had 6 billion 4-sided dice (A,C,F,G), and you could roll all of them, and then select and pass on the ones that were "right", it wouldn't take you very long to come up with a perfectly constructed 6-billion-bit gene sequence.

Though I don't presume to be any judge of God's ways, what better way for the Creator to deliver a message about himself than to offer a part of him as a widely predicted and historically recorded sacrifice for his created humanity?

As a quick nod to your second point, I believe a better way to reveal oneself would be to not have any contradictions, bad science, absurdities, and cruelty in the same document as the good stuff. And if we were truly designed from the s

Again, I must respectfully disagree. However, because this is somewhat offtopic, I will restrict my disagreement to only your first point (concerning evolution), and if you wish to pick up the discussion, we can do so via email. (Unless the /. community doesn't really mind)

Ok. You said:

Now, we're talking about the equivalent of 6 billion bits. I don't care how many billions of years you give for things to evolve, you can't get to 2^6,000,000,000. The complexity simply exceeds the abilities of our brains to grasp.

Note that the assumption that things will just evolve on their own is a charitable one. If my '66 Wagoneer had done any evolving in the 40 years it's been around, it might get better gas mileage and put out less harmful emissions than it does. But only more newly designed vehicles have those features.

I agree with you that an organism needs to be designed to their environment to be able to produce the 6 billion bits, but I think you misunderstand evolutionary theory, because that's exactly what it advocates. Evolution is design, not randomness, as it is commonly misunderstood. Mutations and/or adaptations introduce new variants, and the pressures of the environment naturally select (i.e., design) the animal most fit for survival.

Let me give an example that shows how the mathmatics of cryptography do not apply to evolution. The analogy is admittedly oversimplified, so please don't take it beyond the point which I'm trying to make.

Ok. Say you've got 20 quarters - they represent the genes of a certain animal we're going to speed-evolve. Heads are good genes, tails are bad genes. According to probability, if you were to flip all the coins at once, you would have B^N (2^20) different possible combinations (about a million). Likewise, your chances of getting all heads (a.k.a., a designed animal), would be (50%)^20, or 1 in a million. It would take a lot of flips to get that gene combination!

However, that's not the way evolution works! Natural selection takes the "right" genes of a population and passes them on genetically to the next. If we wanted to "evolve" this quarter-gene-species, we would do the following:

1. Flip them all at once (1st generation).

2. Find all the heads, those genes are good and get passed on to the next generation, so they get moved aside (nautrally selected).

3. Re-flip all the remaining coins (next generation), and go back to Step 2.

You can easily see that it'll only take a few "generations" to get a completely designed gene structure!

That is a simplified analogy to evolution, but it is easily extendable. If you had 6 billion 4-sided dice (A,C,F,G), and you could roll all of them, and then select and pass on the ones that were "right", it wouldn't take you very long to come up with a perfectly constructed 6-billion-bit gene sequence.

Though I don't presume to be any judge of God's ways, what better way for the Creator to deliver a message about himself than to offer a part of him as a widely predicted and historically recorded sacrifice for his created humanity?

As a quick nod to your second point, I believe a better way to reveal oneself would be to not have any contradictions, bad science, absurdities, and cruelty in the same document as the good stuff. And if we were truly designed from the s

Again, I must respectfully disagree. However, because this is somewhat offtopic, I will restrict my disagreement to only your first point (concerning evolution), and if you wish to pick up the discussion, we can do so via email. (Unless the /. community doesn't really mind)

Ok. You said:

Now, we're talking about the equivalent of 6 billion bits. I don't care how many billions of years you give for things to evolve, you can't get to 2^6,000,000,000. The complexity simply exceeds the abilities of our brains to grasp.

Note that the assumption that things will just evolve on their own is a charitable one. If my '66 Wagoneer had done any evolving in the 40 years it's been around, it might get better gas mileage and put out less harmful emissions than it does. But only more newly designed vehicles have those features.

I agree with you that an organism needs to be designed to their environment to be able to produce the 6 billion bits, but I think you misunderstand evolutionary theory, because that's exactly what it advocates. Evolution is design, not randomness, as it is commonly misunderstood. Mutations and/or adaptations introduce new variants, and the pressures of the environment naturally select (i.e., design) the animal most fit for survival.

Let me give an example that shows how the mathmatics of cryptography do not apply to evolution. The analogy is admittedly oversimplified, so please don't take it beyond the point which I'm trying to make.

Ok. Say you've got 20 quarters - they represent the genes of a certain animal we're going to speed-evolve. Heads are good genes, tails are bad genes. According to probability, if you were to flip all the coins at once, you would have B^N (2^20) different possible combinations (about a million). Likewise, your chances of getting all heads (a.k.a., a designed animal), would be (50%)^20, or 1 in a million. It would take a lot of flips to get that gene combination!

However, that's not the way evolution works! Natural selection takes the "right" genes of a population and passes them on genetically to the next. If we wanted to "evolve" this quarter-gene-species, we would do the following:

1. Flip them all at once (1st generation).

2. Find all the heads, those genes are good and get passed on to the next generation, so they get moved aside (nautrally selected).

3. Re-flip all the remaining coins (next generation), and go back to Step 2.

You can easily see that it'll only take a few "generations" to get a completely designed gene structure!

That is a simplified analogy to evolution, but it is easily extendable. If you had 6 billion 4-sided dice (A,C,F,G), and you could roll all of them, and then select and pass on the ones that were "right", it wouldn't take you very long to come up with a perfectly constructed 6-billion-bit gene sequence.

Though I don't presume to be any judge of God's ways, what better way for the Creator to deliver a message about himself than to offer a part of him as a widely predicted and historically recorded sacrifice for his created humanity?

As a quick nod to your second point, I believe a better way to reveal oneself would be to not have any contradictions, bad science, absurdities, and cruelty in the same document as the good stuff. And if we were truly designed from the s

Again, I must respectfully disagree. However, because this is somewhat offtopic, I will restrict my disagreement to only your first point (concerning evolution), and if you wish to pick up the discussion, we can do so via email. (Unless the /. community doesn't really mind)

Ok. You said:

Now, we're talking about the equivalent of 6 billion bits. I don't care how many billions of years you give for things to evolve, you can't get to 2^6,000,000,000. The complexity simply exceeds the abilities of our brains to grasp.

Note that the assumption that things will just evolve on their own is a charitable one. If my '66 Wagoneer had done any evolving in the 40 years it's been around, it might get better gas mileage and put out less harmful emissions than it does. But only more newly designed vehicles have those features.

I agree with you that an organism needs to be designed to their environment to be able to produce the 6 billion bits, but I think you misunderstand evolutionary theory, because that's exactly what it advocates. Evolution is design, not randomness, as it is commonly misunderstood. Mutations and/or adaptations introduce new variants, and the pressures of the environment naturally select (i.e., design) the animal most fit for survival.

Let me give an example that shows how the mathmatics of cryptography do not apply to evolution. The analogy is admittedly oversimplified, so please don't take it beyond the point which I'm trying to make.

Ok. Say you've got 20 quarters - they represent the genes of a certain animal we're going to speed-evolve. Heads are good genes, tails are bad genes. According to probability, if you were to flip all the coins at once, you would have B^N (2^20) different possible combinations (about a million). Likewise, your chances of getting all heads (a.k.a., a designed animal), would be (50%)^20, or 1 in a million. It would take a lot of flips to get that gene combination!

However, that's not the way evolution works! Natural selection takes the "right" genes of a population and passes them on genetically to the next. If we wanted to "evolve" this quarter-gene-species, we would do the following:

1. Flip them all at once (1st generation).

2. Find all the heads, those genes are good and get passed on to the next generation, so they get moved aside (nautrally selected).

3. Re-flip all the remaining coins (next generation), and go back to Step 2.

You can easily see that it'll only take a few "generations" to get a completely designed gene structure!

That is a simplified analogy to evolution, but it is easily extendable. If you had 6 billion 4-sided dice (A,C,F,G), and you could roll all of them, and then select and pass on the ones that were "right", it wouldn't take you very long to come up with a perfectly constructed 6-billion-bit gene sequence.

Though I don't presume to be any judge of God's ways, what better way for the Creator to deliver a message about himself than to offer a part of him as a widely predicted and historically recorded sacrifice for his created humanity?

As a quick nod to your second point, I believe a better way to reveal oneself would be to not have any contradictions, bad science, absurdities, and cruelty in the same document as the good stuff. And if we were truly designed from the s

If you'll cite me some examples I'll be more than happy to discuss

You want specific examples of atrocities in the bible? There are hundreds! I recommend skipping down to Leviticus and starting there; that's where the fun begins. Numbers and Deuteronomy are even better. I'm also particularly fond of Second Kings, 2:23-24.

and all of the fulfilled prophecies in the Bible are 100% accurate

I won't get into further arguments with you, because you can just ignore the points you can't/don't want to refute, making real debate impossible (case in point: my comments demonstrating your circular logic, which went unanswered). Plus, on the topic of prophecy, skepticsannotatedbible.com has hundreds of examples of unfulfilled biblical prophecies. Since you're in contact with the site maintainer and plan on proving all of these prophecies correct, I'll wait for your masterwork on the subject. I will say two things regarding prophecies, though:
1. Swing enough times, and you're bound to get a few hits.
2. Even if you believe that every prediction the bible made is 100% accurate, its successes are dwarfed by the predictive power of the secular competition -- science.

There is one biblical prophecy that I'd like you to educate me on, though. To my mind, it's the single biggest, most obvious prophecy of the bible: Jesus' statements that the world would end within a generation. They're repeated in every gospel, but for reference, see Mark 9:1 and 13:30.

I understand that later NT books attempt to gloss over the fact that the world is still going, with no end in sight. But to be honest, I got sick of reading the bible and stopped before I got to the explanation. So I'd appreciate it if you could point me to the versus that explain how Jesus was anything but a doomsday prophet who, like all others so far, turned out to be wrong. Or if finding the verses is a pain, just give me the popular church line on the subject. That way I'll have learned something from this conversation, and hopefully you will have too (if nothing else, you should have learned that you need some better arguments for god's existence in the future; those circular ones won't do at all).

If you'll cite me some examples I'll be more than happy to discuss

You want specific examples of atrocities in the bible? There are hundreds! I recommend skipping down to Leviticus and starting there; that's where the fun begins. Numbers and Deuteronomy are even better. I'm also particularly fond of Second Kings, 2:23-24.

and all of the fulfilled prophecies in the Bible are 100% accurate

I won't get into further arguments with you, because you can just ignore the points you can't/don't want to refute, making real debate impossible (case in point: my comments demonstrating your circular logic, which went unanswered). Plus, on the topic of prophecy, skepticsannotatedbible.com has hundreds of examples of unfulfilled biblical prophecies. Since you're in contact with the site maintainer and plan on proving all of these prophecies correct, I'll wait for your masterwork on the subject. I will say two things regarding prophecies, though:
1. Swing enough times, and you're bound to get a few hits.
2. Even if you believe that every prediction the bible made is 100% accurate, its successes are dwarfed by the predictive power of the secular competition -- science.

There is one biblical prophecy that I'd like you to educate me on, though. To my mind, it's the single biggest, most obvious prophecy of the bible: Jesus' statements that the world would end within a generation. They're repeated in every gospel, but for reference, see Mark 9:1 and 13:30.

I understand that later NT books attempt to gloss over the fact that the world is still going, with no end in sight. But to be honest, I got sick of reading the bible and stopped before I got to the explanation. So I'd appreciate it if you could point me to the versus that explain how Jesus was anything but a doomsday prophet who, like all others so far, turned out to be wrong. Or if finding the verses is a pain, just give me the popular church line on the subject. That way I'll have learned something from this conversation, and hopefully you will have too (if nothing else, you should have learned that you need some better arguments for god's existence in the future; those circular ones won't do at all).

Oh, one of my favorite games to play: "The Bible is obviously contradictory in so many ways to itself and my religious beliefs that even the enormous latitude afforded me by the English language aren't enough to get out of some serious problems -- so I have to try to manipulate an old little-known language so that I can somehow sleep at night".

Yeah, that's a fun one.

Even with your definition of Tam of "fulfilling one's duties", Noah and Job has been referred to by God as being good people worthy of his favor. Trying to redefine Christian's own interpretations of Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic is lame in the extreme.

So, apart from all of these word games over "perfect" that you have to so tortuously go through to preserve your belief system, let's get down to another aspect of moral perfection... being able to get into heaven to be with "God". Obviously, "God" felt that some were perfect enough to get into heaven without the help of Jayyyzusss. Remember Enoch?