Mod parent down. Hate speech.
I attend an Orthodox Synagogue where some of the most intelligent people I've ever met worship. Including doctors, mathematics professors, a nuclear engineer, a programmer for IBM, etc. Genuine genuis-level intellects. You should hear the arguments. If you think that only the gullible and weak-minded can be religious, then you're the one who must be gullible and weak-minded.
Considering that the creation story was being dictated to people who had no concept of relativity, it's pretty damned safe to assume that when they were told that an event occurred within "a day", that that "day" was the 24 hours that said people were familiar with. These people couldn't even comprehend that their pork wasn't creating maggots via spontaneous generation, and you're trying to tell me that the almighty was all "fuck those guys, I'll tell'em all this shit happened in a day cause that's just how I roll?"
god could have just as easily said "a billion years", so what's the logical choice of not doing so? As an omniscient being, you'd think he'd be, I dunno, aware of the issue this would pose to us 2010 earthly inhabitants.
Well, you said it yourself: it was being dictated to people who had no concept of relativity. But it had to be relevant to them as well as to us, thousands of years later. So it can be in a sense literally true for them with a simpler understanding and we can also figure it out with some math.
But also the Bible isn't a science book, it only spends like 30 lines describing the creation of the entire universe. The really important bits come later.
No, because Theistic-Evolution is self-refuting. If God said he created in 6 days, but actually took billions of years, then that would make him a liar. If he's lying about how he created, then there's a good chance he's not telling the truth about being God either (basically the inverse of John 3:12).
Six days from what reference frame, though? I'm sure you don't have to be reminded that time is relative. The perception of time of someone sitting at the beginning of the universe when the energy density was ridiculously high is going to be a lot different than ours is on Earth's surface here and now. I've seen figures that estimate the relationship between the rate of time-passage at nucleosynthesis compared to today is something like 10^12. Which, if you multiply it by 6 days, you do get about 16.4 billion years. So God's not lying, he's just using a different frame of reference. It can be literally both 6 days and billions of years simultaneously, no lying required.
I doubt you'd hear that argument out of an actual creationist, but there you go.
Okay, so first of all I never said that there were never any attacks on Palestinians by settlers. I said that Israelis are not swarming into Palestinians' houses and murdering the residents en masse as you previously claimed they were.
Aside from which, you're blurring things beyond recognition. Most of the articles you've cited are ridiculously biased. One refers to Israelis living in Jerusalem as "settlers," and as all Jewish settlement beyond the Green Line as "illegal under international law," which it isn't. One speaks of Israeli "settlers" in Hebron, implying that any Jews living there must be illegitimate (are there Jewish Hebronites who aren't settlers?), but to a house in which Palestinians were living as "disputed," trying in that case to appear fair. Reading between the lines it sounds like this Palestinian family either sold their house to some Israelis and then made a big show of not turning it over to them (because under Abbas's Fatah selling property to a Jew is a capital offense), or the Jews owned the property in the first place and these Palestinians were renting it, stopped paying the rent, and the owners were trying to evict them.
I admit that's speculation, but the point is that neither of those scenarios are either implausible or unheard of; the problem is we'll never know what actually happened because the article is totally devoid of context. All the articles rely almost completely on "Palestinian sources" for descriptions of events, which, who knows what that even means?
The NYT piece is slightly better, and it even shows that the Israeli government is opposed to those people who actually ARE building outposts illegally, if sometimes slowly. But even this relies on what some anonymous "villagers said" about murderous Jews on a rampage. They do not cite legitimate sources or provide any actual evidence for the alleged atrocities.
"Israeli settlers in the West Bank invading the homes of random Palestinians and murdering them all as an act of terrorism."
Source? I'm sorry, this is simply a lie. Israel has demolished houses in the West Bank that were being used to harbour terrorists or make bombs, and they've demolished houses that were built illegally without permits, but there is nothing like what you're accusing them of. You may be thinking of Hamas, because that IS what Hamas has been doing in Gaza.
"The Allies after the war who decided it would be a good plan to take away the country where jews and moslims had been living for many years in peace and make it jew-only."
I was going to give you the benefit of the doubt with your posts, because I figured that English was not your first language, but this is so totally divorced from any historical reality that it's obviously not just a language issue making you seem this ignorant.
But for your information, far from being "Jew-only," 20% of Israel's population is not Jewish, mostly Arab Muslims, and they live better than Palestinians live in any Arab country except perhaps Jordan.
You do realize that the suicide bombings predate the wall, right? You do realize that Palestinian terrorism and violence against Jews predates not only Israel's capturing the West Bank and Gaza, but predates even the existence of Israel? Way to confuse cause and effect.
Think about *why* there haven't been any suicide bombings for the last few years. It's not because the Palestinians (both Hamas and the Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigade which is a wing of Fatah, by the way) have stopped trying. It's because of Israel's anti-terrorist tactics like checkpoints and especially the West Bank security barrier.
According to Wikipedia: "From the beginning of the Second intifada and until the construction of the "first continuous segment" of the barrier in July 2003, 73 Palestinian suicide bombings were carried out from the West Bank, killing 293 Israelis and injuring over 1,900. During the 11 months of construction, only 3 suicide attacks were successful. Since the erection of the fence, the number of attacks has declined by more than 90%."
Suicide bombers haven't come out of Gaza because there's been a barrier there for the last 16 years (and one along the border between Gaza and Egypt for the last 6).
So when was the last time Hamas blew up a bus? A long time ago, maybe. When was the last time they fired a missile into Israel for no reason? Uh, YESTERDAY. Since the end of the Gaza war, almost a thousand missiles have landed in Israel.
You wouldn't have any clue that humans "weigh decisions" or have any kind of mental life whatsoever either, except that you know from your first-person experience that we do.
Gravity is physical insofar as reductivist materialism (to which, in most cases, the philosophy of science adheres) requires that all physical effects must have physical causes, and that everything that meaningfully can be said to exist is therefore physical. The problem is that this leads to an infinite regress of causes: everything is physical, all physical effects must have physical causes, therefore the chain of causality necessarily extends back forever. Except that we know that it doesn't, we know there was a beginning in the Big Bang. If you don't adhere to reductivist materialism you have a way out, philosophically; you can say that not everything that exists is physical, and while most physical things have physical causes, some physical things have non-physical causes. The non-physical cause doesn't have to be God, but it could (logically) be.
The problem is that materialist science takes as one of its axioms a priori that nothing non-physical exists. There's no proof of this, nor can there be. It's a base assumption. Not saying it's wrong, but it is unprovable.
I'm not convinced that this has anything to do with free will in the sense that we mean it when we speak about humans having it, but...
Give up determinism, or give up free will.
What if we give up reductivist materialism?
in '48, jews owned no more than 7% of Palestine... and in case you are not aware, Israel covers more than 7% of Palestine.
And in 1948 Israel accepted the Partition Plan that gave them 12% of Palestine to become Israel -- with almost all the rest of it having gone to form Transjordan in 1922. Even today, if you exclude the West Bank and Gaza, Israel only covers 18% of Palestine. I'm sure you know what happened to change those lines since then.
If I walk into a house, kick their owner out, and their neighbors don't really want them to move in, then it's their neighbors that are jerks, not me for kicking people out of their own house.
Again, first of all, that's not what happened. And second -- what about the almost one million Jews who were forcibly expelled from Arab countries following the establishment of Israel? They had absolutely nothing to do with anything, and yet most of them went to Israel and became citizens and fully integrated into society. Unlike the Palestinians, who, even if you believe that they were expelled, have been treated like lepers in practically every Arab country, and rather than attempt to integrate them like every other refugee everywhere else in the world, they've been denied virtually all rights in Arab countries and forced to live in refugee camps for generations. Can you really justify this? What on Earth makes Israel the bad guy when the Arabs who remained after 1948 were given full citizenship and have more rights in Israel than they would in any Arab country?
Israel Arabs are, by and large, pretty reluctant to join the army of a country that many of them consider to be at best unfriendly to them and at worst an enemy that they hope to see destroyed. Is it really surprising that so few of them choose to volunteer? Is the only possible reason for the low Arab enlistment rate because of discrimination against them? Is it really the most likely possibility? Come on now.
As for homosexuals -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Israel#Military_service
Of course there is still discrimination and harassment -- find one place where there's none -- but Israel tends to be way ahead of the curve on these things. Don't be so fast to assume the worst.
I'm not saying this database isn't a stupid idea -- it is, and almost certainly the law won't pass -- it just has nothing to do with what this thread has predictably degenerated into.
Absolutely untrue. Anyone is free to join the IDF. Muslims included. Few choose to, but they are by no means forbidden. Even homosexuals are welcome, which puts Israel a step ahead of America.
The degree of ignorance in this thread is ridiculously, though unsurprisingly, high. The Big Bad Jews did not swoop into the Glorious and Peaceful Nation of Palestine en masse in 1948, slaughter the poor innocent indigenous Palestinian population, force the survivors to live in refugee camps and ruin their lives for three generations. Okay?
I can't even be bothered to lay it all out here because anyone who wants to be against Israel will accuse me of bias, but suffice it to say that before 1967 nobody had ever heard of "Palestinians" -- the vast majority of Arabs living on that land were those (or descendants of those) who emigrated there from surrounding Arab countries starting in the late 19th Century when the influx of Jewish immigrants inspired by Zionism or fleeing persecution, and later spurred on by the Balfour Declaration, were making the place livable again for the first time in two thousand years and creating a growing economy. The Arabs living in "Palestine" were actually OPPOSED to the very idea of any sovereign Arab state there, they considered the whole thing part of Syria. The Jews didn't steal the land, either. They BOUGHT it. Mostly from absentee Arab landowners, and mostly at exorbitant prices. The Palestinians are not aborigines, okay? They're just better at propaganda.
That's just the beginning. Mod me down if you want, but it's the truth. The Palestinians have suffered terribly over the last 60 years, no doubt about that, but not because of Israel -- because of the Arab governments who have always used the Palestinians as a political football to score points in the propaganda war against Israel by intentionally keeping them living in squalor (and check out how nicely the Arab countries treat the Palestinians living within their borders; every single one of them has been WAY worse in their treatment of Palestinians than Israel has -- even Jordan killed more Palestinians in ONE WEEK in 1970 than Israel has in 60 years), and because of their own incompetent and grossly corrupt leadership that has never failed to incite violence against Jews (not even against Israelis -- there were numerous massacres against Jews by Arabs even before the end of the British Mandate), when if they had EVER tried ANYTHING except violence at any point in the past century to get what they want (whatever the hell that is), they would have had it for a very long time by now.
There is not and has never been any tit-for-tat "cycle of violence." There's a line that goes: if the Palestinians put down their weapons there would be no more violence. If the Israelis put down their weapons there would be no more Israel.
Slashdot Mirror
True... But I can study for a decade or two and attain the same knowledge and verify it for myself.
You simply cannot do that with religion. Ever.
Have you tried?
Mod parent down. Hate speech. I attend an Orthodox Synagogue where some of the most intelligent people I've ever met worship. Including doctors, mathematics professors, a nuclear engineer, a programmer for IBM, etc. Genuine genuis-level intellects. You should hear the arguments. If you think that only the gullible and weak-minded can be religious, then you're the one who must be gullible and weak-minded.
Sorry, I just have to ask...your sig is horribly wrong on purpose, right? It made me physically wince twice, reading it.
Considering that the creation story was being dictated to people who had no concept of relativity, it's pretty damned safe to assume that when they were told that an event occurred within "a day", that that "day" was the 24 hours that said people were familiar with. These people couldn't even comprehend that their pork wasn't creating maggots via spontaneous generation, and you're trying to tell me that the almighty was all "fuck those guys, I'll tell'em all this shit happened in a day cause that's just how I roll?" god could have just as easily said "a billion years", so what's the logical choice of not doing so? As an omniscient being, you'd think he'd be, I dunno, aware of the issue this would pose to us 2010 earthly inhabitants.
Well, you said it yourself: it was being dictated to people who had no concept of relativity. But it had to be relevant to them as well as to us, thousands of years later. So it can be in a sense literally true for them with a simpler understanding and we can also figure it out with some math.
But also the Bible isn't a science book, it only spends like 30 lines describing the creation of the entire universe. The really important bits come later.
No, because Theistic-Evolution is self-refuting. If God said he created in 6 days, but actually took billions of years, then that would make him a liar. If he's lying about how he created, then there's a good chance he's not telling the truth about being God either (basically the inverse of John 3:12).
Six days from what reference frame, though? I'm sure you don't have to be reminded that time is relative. The perception of time of someone sitting at the beginning of the universe when the energy density was ridiculously high is going to be a lot different than ours is on Earth's surface here and now. I've seen figures that estimate the relationship between the rate of time-passage at nucleosynthesis compared to today is something like 10^12. Which, if you multiply it by 6 days, you do get about 16.4 billion years. So God's not lying, he's just using a different frame of reference. It can be literally both 6 days and billions of years simultaneously, no lying required. I doubt you'd hear that argument out of an actual creationist, but there you go.
Okay, so first of all I never said that there were never any attacks on Palestinians by settlers. I said that Israelis are not swarming into Palestinians' houses and murdering the residents en masse as you previously claimed they were.
Aside from which, you're blurring things beyond recognition. Most of the articles you've cited are ridiculously biased. One refers to Israelis living in Jerusalem as "settlers," and as all Jewish settlement beyond the Green Line as "illegal under international law," which it isn't. One speaks of Israeli "settlers" in Hebron, implying that any Jews living there must be illegitimate (are there Jewish Hebronites who aren't settlers?), but to a house in which Palestinians were living as "disputed," trying in that case to appear fair. Reading between the lines it sounds like this Palestinian family either sold their house to some Israelis and then made a big show of not turning it over to them (because under Abbas's Fatah selling property to a Jew is a capital offense), or the Jews owned the property in the first place and these Palestinians were renting it, stopped paying the rent, and the owners were trying to evict them.
I admit that's speculation, but the point is that neither of those scenarios are either implausible or unheard of; the problem is we'll never know what actually happened because the article is totally devoid of context. All the articles rely almost completely on "Palestinian sources" for descriptions of events, which, who knows what that even means?
The NYT piece is slightly better, and it even shows that the Israeli government is opposed to those people who actually ARE building outposts illegally, if sometimes slowly. But even this relies on what some anonymous "villagers said" about murderous Jews on a rampage. They do not cite legitimate sources or provide any actual evidence for the alleged atrocities.
"Israeli settlers in the West Bank invading the homes of random Palestinians and murdering them all as an act of terrorism." Source? I'm sorry, this is simply a lie. Israel has demolished houses in the West Bank that were being used to harbour terrorists or make bombs, and they've demolished houses that were built illegally without permits, but there is nothing like what you're accusing them of. You may be thinking of Hamas, because that IS what Hamas has been doing in Gaza.
"The Allies after the war who decided it would be a good plan to take away the country where jews and moslims had been living for many years in peace and make it jew-only." I was going to give you the benefit of the doubt with your posts, because I figured that English was not your first language, but this is so totally divorced from any historical reality that it's obviously not just a language issue making you seem this ignorant. But for your information, far from being "Jew-only," 20% of Israel's population is not Jewish, mostly Arab Muslims, and they live better than Palestinians live in any Arab country except perhaps Jordan.
You do realize that the suicide bombings predate the wall, right? You do realize that Palestinian terrorism and violence against Jews predates not only Israel's capturing the West Bank and Gaza, but predates even the existence of Israel? Way to confuse cause and effect.
Think about *why* there haven't been any suicide bombings for the last few years. It's not because the Palestinians (both Hamas and the Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigade which is a wing of Fatah, by the way) have stopped trying. It's because of Israel's anti-terrorist tactics like checkpoints and especially the West Bank security barrier. According to Wikipedia: "From the beginning of the Second intifada and until the construction of the "first continuous segment" of the barrier in July 2003, 73 Palestinian suicide bombings were carried out from the West Bank, killing 293 Israelis and injuring over 1,900. During the 11 months of construction, only 3 suicide attacks were successful. Since the erection of the fence, the number of attacks has declined by more than 90%." Suicide bombers haven't come out of Gaza because there's been a barrier there for the last 16 years (and one along the border between Gaza and Egypt for the last 6). So when was the last time Hamas blew up a bus? A long time ago, maybe. When was the last time they fired a missile into Israel for no reason? Uh, YESTERDAY. Since the end of the Gaza war, almost a thousand missiles have landed in Israel.
You wouldn't have any clue that humans "weigh decisions" or have any kind of mental life whatsoever either, except that you know from your first-person experience that we do.
Gravity is physical insofar as reductivist materialism (to which, in most cases, the philosophy of science adheres) requires that all physical effects must have physical causes, and that everything that meaningfully can be said to exist is therefore physical. The problem is that this leads to an infinite regress of causes: everything is physical, all physical effects must have physical causes, therefore the chain of causality necessarily extends back forever. Except that we know that it doesn't, we know there was a beginning in the Big Bang. If you don't adhere to reductivist materialism you have a way out, philosophically; you can say that not everything that exists is physical, and while most physical things have physical causes, some physical things have non-physical causes. The non-physical cause doesn't have to be God, but it could (logically) be. The problem is that materialist science takes as one of its axioms a priori that nothing non-physical exists. There's no proof of this, nor can there be. It's a base assumption. Not saying it's wrong, but it is unprovable.
Um...The Force?
"If you come in peace, surrender or be destroyed. If you're here to make war, we surrender."
FLAGRANT SYSTEM ERROR Computer over. Virus = Very Yes.
I only hope that the new Google comments will be as sharp and insightful as the ones found on YouTube.
I'm not convinced that this has anything to do with free will in the sense that we mean it when we speak about humans having it, but... Give up determinism, or give up free will. What if we give up reductivist materialism?
Uh huh. That website also calls the US a Fascist state and says that Dick Cheney was behind 9/11. I think you need more tinfoil in your hat.
in '48, jews owned no more than 7% of Palestine... and in case you are not aware, Israel covers more than 7% of Palestine.
And in 1948 Israel accepted the Partition Plan that gave them 12% of Palestine to become Israel -- with almost all the rest of it having gone to form Transjordan in 1922. Even today, if you exclude the West Bank and Gaza, Israel only covers 18% of Palestine. I'm sure you know what happened to change those lines since then.
If I walk into a house, kick their owner out, and their neighbors don't really want them to move in, then it's their neighbors that are jerks, not me for kicking people out of their own house.
Again, first of all, that's not what happened. And second -- what about the almost one million Jews who were forcibly expelled from Arab countries following the establishment of Israel? They had absolutely nothing to do with anything, and yet most of them went to Israel and became citizens and fully integrated into society. Unlike the Palestinians, who, even if you believe that they were expelled, have been treated like lepers in practically every Arab country, and rather than attempt to integrate them like every other refugee everywhere else in the world, they've been denied virtually all rights in Arab countries and forced to live in refugee camps for generations. Can you really justify this? What on Earth makes Israel the bad guy when the Arabs who remained after 1948 were given full citizenship and have more rights in Israel than they would in any Arab country?
Israel Arabs are, by and large, pretty reluctant to join the army of a country that many of them consider to be at best unfriendly to them and at worst an enemy that they hope to see destroyed. Is it really surprising that so few of them choose to volunteer? Is the only possible reason for the low Arab enlistment rate because of discrimination against them? Is it really the most likely possibility? Come on now. As for homosexuals -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Israel#Military_service Of course there is still discrimination and harassment -- find one place where there's none -- but Israel tends to be way ahead of the curve on these things. Don't be so fast to assume the worst.
I'm not saying this database isn't a stupid idea -- it is, and almost certainly the law won't pass -- it just has nothing to do with what this thread has predictably degenerated into.
Absolutely untrue. Anyone is free to join the IDF. Muslims included. Few choose to, but they are by no means forbidden. Even homosexuals are welcome, which puts Israel a step ahead of America.
Since 1948.
The degree of ignorance in this thread is ridiculously, though unsurprisingly, high. The Big Bad Jews did not swoop into the Glorious and Peaceful Nation of Palestine en masse in 1948, slaughter the poor innocent indigenous Palestinian population, force the survivors to live in refugee camps and ruin their lives for three generations. Okay?
I can't even be bothered to lay it all out here because anyone who wants to be against Israel will accuse me of bias, but suffice it to say that before 1967 nobody had ever heard of "Palestinians" -- the vast majority of Arabs living on that land were those (or descendants of those) who emigrated there from surrounding Arab countries starting in the late 19th Century when the influx of Jewish immigrants inspired by Zionism or fleeing persecution, and later spurred on by the Balfour Declaration, were making the place livable again for the first time in two thousand years and creating a growing economy. The Arabs living in "Palestine" were actually OPPOSED to the very idea of any sovereign Arab state there, they considered the whole thing part of Syria. The Jews didn't steal the land, either. They BOUGHT it. Mostly from absentee Arab landowners, and mostly at exorbitant prices. The Palestinians are not aborigines, okay? They're just better at propaganda.
That's just the beginning. Mod me down if you want, but it's the truth. The Palestinians have suffered terribly over the last 60 years, no doubt about that, but not because of Israel -- because of the Arab governments who have always used the Palestinians as a political football to score points in the propaganda war against Israel by intentionally keeping them living in squalor (and check out how nicely the Arab countries treat the Palestinians living within their borders; every single one of them has been WAY worse in their treatment of Palestinians than Israel has -- even Jordan killed more Palestinians in ONE WEEK in 1970 than Israel has in 60 years), and because of their own incompetent and grossly corrupt leadership that has never failed to incite violence against Jews (not even against Israelis -- there were numerous massacres against Jews by Arabs even before the end of the British Mandate), when if they had EVER tried ANYTHING except violence at any point in the past century to get what they want (whatever the hell that is), they would have had it for a very long time by now.
There is not and has never been any tit-for-tat "cycle of violence." There's a line that goes: if the Palestinians put down their weapons there would be no more violence. If the Israelis put down their weapons there would be no more Israel.
Don't swallow the press.
</frustrated rant>
That's interesting; I've been combating Global Warming by adding lime to gin and tonic. It's worked pretty well so far.