Grats, your plan disallows booting to encrypted partitions, or for using updated, newer bootloaders; and if it does not, then it easily lets through updated, repacked mbr viruses.
What happens when that virus also goes after mapped drives, as many viruses do? What happens when it "super-hides" all the folders, and places look-alike exe's with a folder icon in their place (remember, by default the.exe extension is hidden)?
Takes a little more security than "disable autoplay"; to really secure from these sorts of nasties you need to be working with NTFS permissions and/or GPOs to control which directories are executable.
Grab ubuntu CD. Boot to live mode. Install "ms-sys". Issue command "ms-sys -m/dev/sda", or whatever the proper switch is for your edition of windows. Browse/dev/sda1, removing all executables from %appdata% and any suspicious drivers. Reboot, and perform a cleanup from safe mode.
No need for specialized disks, and if you really cant stand having to download ms-sys every time you can just re-roll your own custom ubuntu (or mint, or whatever) based distro.
I have never read the Pensees so I cannot really comment on them. I am very confident that they do not offer very good reasoning and fall into the same category as most arguments for god.
Why are you certain of that? It sounds like you are presupposing there can be no good argument for God, despite no rational basis for that belief.
Makes the jump from logic to morality and nobility then back to logic. Concepts of morality are, by definition, irrational.
You are giving this premise, and you clarify what you mean by it, but offer no real logical argument for it other than opinion ("[i think] they are fuzzy by nature"). Most of the arguments I have seen along the lines of morality (technically ethics, as morality is the "acted-out ethical system of a people") are based on the assumption that all men share some portion of the natural law on their hearts; this is an argument that can be tested by looking within oneself. CS Lewis gives a pretty good explaination of this in the very first page of Mere Christianity I will not post it here, as it is a fairly large paragraph (about 20 or so sentences), but I think it would be relevant to read: http://www.truthaccordingtoscripture.com/documents/apologetics/mere-christianity/Book1/cs-lewis-mere-christianity-book1.php#a
In a nutshell, Lewis observes that most people DO seem to have some innate sense of "fair", as evidenced by their attempts to justify themselves whenever someone else claims to have been wronged. I do not think Lewis is imagining things, nor do I think an honest individual can deny that people really do do this.
The arguments generally proceed from there with the premise that the universe is understandable; if it is not, of course, there is neither an explanation for that "natural law", nor any use to attempting scientific inquiry into the universe at large..
So we have no linear scale of morality; no morally best, no morally worst.
Your words go against every inclination of every person I have ever met. Most would agree that one who murders children is worse on an ethical scale than one who shoplifts (I have met a scarce few who have argued for infanticide based on how they assign human value, but thats neither here nor there).
5 - We know today that nothing is being directed to its end.
That is a fallacy of the first order: Begging the question. The VERY ISSUE in question is, "is there a guiding purpose behind things". Noone can or has proven that with empirical evidence, and any claim to do so will always revert back to either circular reasoning or begging the question (for instance, "we know there is no God, because there is no purpose to things; and we know there is no purpose to things because random chance caused all things; and we know it was random chance because, since there is no God, it must be so").
God doesn't instruct the clouds, the trees or the squirrels.
No reformed christian I know denies free will, or God's action through means. Just because there is an observable natural cause, does not mean there are not other causes (whether natural or supernatural). For instance, water that you see boiling on the stove is assumed to be doing so because of the heat; but there may have also been an unobserved drop in pressure which was also at work; and that completely leaves out whether there were antecedent causes to the heat.
A good illustration of this is the book of Habakkuk, where Habakkuk prays to the lord to "do something" about the evil in his nation. The Lords response is that the nation WILL be punished, by the Assyrians; when Habakkuk further asks how Israel can be punished by a more wicked nation, the response is that the Assyrians, too, will be punished, as they are later invaded by
I didn't see any of that here. I saw two jumps from "morality", "good" and "evil" to "therefore there must be a god". The most famous idea from pascal's pensees seems to be Pascal's Wager which is one of the worst arguments for God I have ever heard.
Not all of Pascal's Pensees are directly "arguments for God" in and of themselves, and I dont think the Wager falls into that category; the version of the Pensees I have with commentary notes "..Yet it is not his central concern, the thing closest to his heart. It is only one step on the way, one possible means to an end." The wager is IMO (as Pascal really didnt give intros to his Pensees) an argument for why considering belief in God is rational; He doesnt say that "therefore belief in God is proven". This IS, I think, an example of you misunderstanding the Pensee-- particularly as you do not seem to be aware of the context, or even the full Wager as Pascal wrote it.
Which is exactly how I said these arguments are defended. Claiming the refuter just doesn't understand them. Just get your mindset into the beliefs of these backwards people (ignore logic)
Thats true, but doesnt take away the fact that he really doesnt understand the argument that Aquinas is making; and that if one does not understand the argument nor has offered a refutation of its specific claims, then it is fair to call that out. It seems like he (the slashdot poster, not Dawkins) read over it and in 5 minutes thinks he grasped the extent of Aquinas argument, which he clearly doesnt if he is asking "what caused God"; Aquinas specifically mentions that he is discussing an "unmoved mover".
I do NOT intend to defend Feser or refute Dawkins, as I have neither read Feser's book nor Dawkins' arguments, so I really cannot comment on that at all. It is entirely possible that Dawkins really didnt get Aquinas, and it is entirely possible that he did, and Feser was wrong. If you havent read their books, then honestly you cant comment on it either, as it would be pure speculation.
As with Pascal's wager above, I think it is common for people to hear a phrase, do a few minutes of research on the internet, and think they understand the things being said. It is often enough far more complicated than that, and requires looking much deeper to get what is being said. I would imagine that most people who read John 1 "In the beginning was the word, and the word was God, and the word was with God", and dont really get what the author was saying, because they do not understand the context nor have a firm grasp of the Bible (for the curious, it is partly a reference to Gen1, and a reference to a notion in Greek philosophy, the "logos", since the gospel was directed partly at the Greeks).
All that aside, my recommendation was to read the Pensees, not the Wager-- I suspected that people would read "the Wager" into my post, but I think there are a number of other Pensees that are far more relevant to "what is the rational grounds for God" (since, again, I dont think the Wager was meant to address that).
But from cursory glance they all break down to needing the person to go outside logic for a second (assume there is an objective scale of morality or something similar) then jump to a conclusion from there.
I think that if you come to that conclusion, you are saying either that you cannot find a logical misstep in the argument, OR that you do not think that they are arguments in the field of logic at all. I can say with certainty that the second premise is not correct, the arguments give very clear premises and walk towards a conclusion.
Again... the conclusions must be that either god has always existed, or something else has which effectively "predates" the universe to have spawned it... something that we have absolutely *NO* evidence of, and I can think of no remotely compelling reason to believe it,
No scientific evidence, that is true; to gather information from outside or from before the universe is impossible by very definition. It is nevertheless fair to look at what we have and posit several explainations of what could have caused it, look at what we have now, and try to infer the most likely cause.
Presumably, some people choose the former option because their own experiences in life convince them of the veracity of that notion, in much the same way as one's sensibilities convince them of the reality that they experience in a day-to-day basis. It's hardly scientific, but it's still a lot more to go on than the alternative.
Properly applied, it is perfectly valid. This is part of what I am saying, yes. I find a number of examples where I have found the Bible to be more in line with reality than the notion that I exist without a purpose and will die without one, that natural law does not exist, that and man is perfectable, and so on. In every observable instance I have found the second two notions to be absolutely untrue; where many secular humanists would push for perfecting man, the Bible insists that it is a fools errand, and I know of no scenario where man has actually pulled himself above his corruptible nature.
It sounds like I have communicated at least some of the rational basis for why belief in God makes sense, which is in fact what I was setting out to do. I do think Pascal's Wager at this point would indicate that people should be willing to consider such basis, and hear the claims of christianity; not to do so would to be to brush aside as irrelevant what might be the most important piece of information as "trivia"-- whether or not there really is a God, and what he has to say to you. I would be happy to continue the conversation via email at any time, email address slashdotincoming.20.ronin2040@spamgourmet.com.
Strange how for two days now I have challenged you with MORE accurate knowledge of the bible than you yourself held,
Were you to be more knowledgeable than I about the Bible, that would have absolutely no relevance to your correctness or mine. You could know the Bible from cover to cover and still make inaccurate statements about it.
And I do not think your knowledge has been "more accurate"; for two days you have tried to insist that, because the Bible was utterly silent on an issue (big central government, enforced tithes, etc), and in fact gives COUNTER-examples (warnings about the dangers of a single man in authority), we should therefore read an endorsement of big central government into the Bible. Im sorry, that is irrational, inaccurate, and does not display a superior knowledge of the Bible.
Youve also been called by numerous posters on your wild accusations towards republicans and bible thumpers and who knows what else, when pretty much any 8th grade civics student could tell you that the republican core belief is NOT "outlawing homosexual marriage'. Apparently that does not matter, however, the fact that some people who are republicans hold some beliefs somehow sets me up to be placed in the dock and charged with defending them. How about if I ask you to defend the actions of every democrat, now and past? How about Obama's utter hypocrisy in accusing Bush of military action without congressional approval (which he had), and then mobilizing our armed forces...without congressional approval? Would it be fair to ask you to defend that, or accuse all democrats of being hypocrits based on the one man's actions?
Your manner of discussion has made you seem more raving and irrational and unwilling to have a levelheaded conversation than the very bible-thumpers you so decry. You have resorted to ridicule (my mistaken use of the word "parable", when everyone else seemed to get from the context that I understood it was an event), you have resorted to broad non-sequiturs, you have tried to paint all christians with the same brush, you have appealed to emotion (with your out-of-context rape remarks), and you have generally jumped from old point to new point as soon as I give am adequate reply. Your entire posture has been unpleasant and your posts drip with sarcasm and hostility.
This entire discussion has become an exercise in unpleasantness and-- given how you twist every word I say and seem to try to misunderstand me--futility, and I rather assume that anyone who happens across this thread will understand why I no longer will give a reply to you in particular.
You're saying that the fact that one guy changed churches means that it's all right for another guy to force schools to teach the Book of Genesis as scientific fact equal to Natural Selection?...When you put it that way...
No, I dont believe I said that at all. Nowhere in my post do I see that statement. Are you going to continue putting words in my mouth, is there any point to responding?
I will withdraw my comments about the church he attended-- I dont think they are right for me to make remarks on the sincerity of the man's faith based solely on who his pastor was, however troubling the pastor's comments may have been. That particular remark is really tangential to the main point I was making anyways.
But the real hypocrisy im getting at is, if the man is honestly a christian, and christians honestly believe in an inerrant bible, why is HE, a democrat, not getting any flak for his wacky beliefs? Why only the "bible-thumping" republicans? You yourself illustrated this in your post: You are pointing the finger at the "religious right" and its crazy belief in Genesis, when Obama has claimed to believe in the supernatural and in a risen Christ.
So either you believe the man not to be sincere in his faith-- in which case I think one should lose a great deal of respect for the man for being dishonest with his words and intellectually dishonest to himself-- or you DO believe the man to be sincere, and dont really mind when someone has "wacky beliefs", so long as they completely ignore what said beliefs demand and implement the policies YOU like.
I always felt uncomfortable saying Norfolk in polite company, half afraid I was mispronouncing it. It is good to hear that I am not, and that Va really does have some crazy location names.
Your appeals to "what percentage" and "How many" right away sink your ship. If it is not a uniting view among all republicans, it is manifestly not a core belief.
I'm not a bible scholar and I can't give you pointers off the top of my head, but anyone whose been to seminary and is comfortable with his beliefs should be able to give some significant ones.
A large number of my friends have gone through or are attending seminary; a handful have studied biblical hebrew and greek. They have offered me no such pointers, but only indicated that generally to take Greek and Hebrew is a waste unless you intend to be a pastor-- they advised that most translations today are remarkably good and reliable (there are some questionable ones, like new NIV that tries to excise all mention of gender from the bible).
And when I get super curious, of course, I can fire up E-Sword, and view the original Hebrew OT and Greek NT with strongs notes (basically, word translations covering all meanings of a particular word), the Vulgate, and the Septuagint with notes.
"translated from their hebrew... sources" -- sorry, don't exist. Greek, and bad greek at that, yeah.
We have the dead sea scrolls, the masoretic text, the septuigint. We have the Tanakh as it has been preserved by Jews over the last few thousand years. You can call it "bad greek", but it was more commonly known as Koine Greek, and there are a number of places to learn it in a year or two. You might as well call Latin "bad"; we can still learn it today.
You also seem to be under the (very common) misapprehension that there is a codex that was treasured and preserved by the early church that is The Bible.
What we have has been validated as being largely identical with newly found texts. In that regard it remains possibly the best preserved set of documents of that age. I really know of no scholars who would disagree with that.
There is no such thing as The Bible. "Religious authorities" have held conventions to decide which writings to include and which to exclude from their religious teachings. These decisions, by humans, have determined what is The Bible. Catholics and protestants disagree on some of these. Both believe The Bible to be the Word of God. Can't both be right...
Neither am I a biblical scholar, but I can answer some of these charges. Most of the Bible is in agreement with most of the commonly recognized "orthodox" branches. Modern protestantism uses the same text for the OT as historical Jews did. We also use the same NT that was used for the first several hundred years; we identify the books partly because they identify themselves (for instance, going by what Christ regarded as scripture, or what Peter and Paul called scripture). There are several other criteria, but I do not know them all.
As for "cant both be right", that is of course what the reformation was about-- Catholicism did not hold to "sola scriptura" and added to the word (and not just apocrophya, but tradition), which is why the two broke off. We do in fact believe the other to be wrong, and they us. If we are correct, sincere Catholics are possibly unsaved, and if they are correct they would regard us as rebellious heretics.
It is not terribly helpful to lump Catholocism together with Protestantism, a number of their practices and beliefs are deeply troubling-- such as veneration of Mary, belief in her perpetual virginity (despite language such as "James the brother of Jesus"), transubstantiation, regenerative baptism, and the rest. Commonly it is viewed as "just another denomination", but that probably brings more confusion to the table than it helps.
Pin someone down as to why they're so against it and they make vague references to someone somewhere being killed or something by a Scientologist.
5 minutes on wikipedia or operation clambake turns up some worrying things on them. Of course thats true for most organizations, but then while you ponder that you can watch as the CoS fires off a C&D to wikipedia and operation clambake.
Thats basically it, they react violently to any criticism, bringing the law and whatever else they can muster down on the heads of anyone who dares criticize them. That seems to make them worthy of "a reaction".
I gave a number of arguments for why I do not think the universe can be self existant, and I have yet to hear anyone reconcile them except for one fellow who mentioned "Ergodic theory" as a way of trying to explain why a perpetual bang-crunch cycle is plausible. I would have to research that more, but he is the only one I would give a bye to in this discusion. Everyone else seems to completely avoid the topic of entropy and the impossiblity of a perpetually in-motion universe that has always been.
If people want to ignore my premise and my defense of my premise, and then claim that because there is no premise my conclusion is wrong, then quite frankly there is not much more I can say. Taking half of one's arguments and then claiming they lack foundation is pretty terrible debate technique.
All of the provided "arguments" have had people explain why they are incorrect. The credible response from that would be to either explain why the refutes are incorrect or to fix the arguments. This never happens, however.
Um, thats flat out not true. If you cared to do some research you would see refutations of theologians, and then the theologian responding, and back and forth. Off the top of my head I know Lewis had back-and-forth discussions with a large number of people, and gave public talks where he responded to such "refutations".
The means have been provided. If you want to say the belief is rational then you have to use reason to show that.
What happens when said refutations are themselves flawed, as is quite often the case?
Oh I forgot.. rape victims should marry the scumbags right?
Um, not only are your political views grossly misinformed (not all republicans-- nor any that I have EVER met-- believe that), but your knowledge of the bible is also grossly inaccurate.
For starters, I know evangelicals who are democrats, and I know athiests who are republican. Right off the bat, your attempting to paint all R's as religious is ridiculous and laughable.
Further, one of the major examples of rape in the Bible has the woman begging that her rapist marry her to alleviate some of the wrong he has done (Amnon and Tamar)-- in those days to be raped meant the end of marriageability, and forcing the rapist to marry her, take care of her, and pay a hefty dowry was a way of undoing some portion of the wrong he had committed. This would hardly be relevant today, and I have never heard anyone suggest it.
Once again you continue to speak with no knowledge of the subject. You may be as militantly anti-religion as you please, but it certainly helps if you actually take the effort to understand what you are discussing.
Is it not Republicans who believe that who I like to fuck is somehow a government concern?
Some people who are republicans believe that homosexuals should not be married.
A, that is hardly a core republican belief. It is a belief that some republicans hold; but your statement would exclude any kind of humanist from ever being a republican, and thats just flat out not true.
B, that does not mean that they are saying that the government has a say in who you have intercourse with. It is saying that the government has a say in who it provides otherwise withheld incentives that go along with marriage-- these incentives are not and never have been rights.
Interesting how the moral majority won't even make an exception for rape victims.
Interesting how the Moral Majority is not the republican party, and your entire post is a gigantic non-sequitur. Grats for derailing the conversation with irrelevance.
Slashdot Mirror
Grats, your plan disallows booting to encrypted partitions, or for using updated, newer bootloaders; and if it does not, then it easily lets through updated, repacked mbr viruses.
Truecrypt, OS installation /repair, changing partition table, etc.
What happens when that virus also goes after mapped drives, as many viruses do? What happens when it "super-hides" all the folders, and places look-alike exe's with a folder icon in their place (remember, by default the .exe extension is hidden)?
Takes a little more security than "disable autoplay"; to really secure from these sorts of nasties you need to be working with NTFS permissions and/or GPOs to control which directories are executable.
Pretty sure XP and Vista will refuse to boot once you do that. NT and especially 7/vista have very different bootloaders than 95.
Yall are doing it the hard way.
Grab ubuntu CD. Boot to live mode. Install "ms-sys". Issue command "ms-sys -m /dev/sda", or whatever the proper switch is for your edition of windows. Browse /dev/sda1, removing all executables from %appdata% and any suspicious drivers. Reboot, and perform a cleanup from safe mode.
No need for specialized disks, and if you really cant stand having to download ms-sys every time you can just re-roll your own custom ubuntu (or mint, or whatever) based distro.
What, have they decided to break into the market of effective Antivirus scanners?
I have never read the Pensees so I cannot really comment on them. I am very confident that they do not offer very good reasoning and fall into the same category as most arguments for god.
Why are you certain of that? It sounds like you are presupposing there can be no good argument for God, despite no rational basis for that belief.
Makes the jump from logic to morality and nobility then back to logic. Concepts of morality are, by definition, irrational.
You are giving this premise, and you clarify what you mean by it, but offer no real logical argument for it other than opinion ("[i think] they are fuzzy by nature"). Most of the arguments I have seen along the lines of morality (technically ethics, as morality is the "acted-out ethical system of a people") are based on the assumption that all men share some portion of the natural law on their hearts; this is an argument that can be tested by looking within oneself. CS Lewis gives a pretty good explaination of this in the very first page of Mere Christianity I will not post it here, as it is a fairly large paragraph (about 20 or so sentences), but I think it would be relevant to read:
http://www.truthaccordingtoscripture.com/documents/apologetics/mere-christianity/Book1/cs-lewis-mere-christianity-book1.php#a
In a nutshell, Lewis observes that most people DO seem to have some innate sense of "fair", as evidenced by their attempts to justify themselves whenever someone else claims to have been wronged. I do not think Lewis is imagining things, nor do I think an honest individual can deny that people really do do this.
The arguments generally proceed from there with the premise that the universe is understandable; if it is not, of course, there is neither an explanation for that "natural law", nor any use to attempting scientific inquiry into the universe at large..
So we have no linear scale of morality; no morally best, no morally worst.
Your words go against every inclination of every person I have ever met. Most would agree that one who murders children is worse on an ethical scale than one who shoplifts (I have met a scarce few who have argued for infanticide based on how they assign human value, but thats neither here nor there).
5 - We know today that nothing is being directed to its end.
That is a fallacy of the first order: Begging the question. The VERY ISSUE in question is, "is there a guiding purpose behind things". Noone can or has proven that with empirical evidence, and any claim to do so will always revert back to either circular reasoning or begging the question (for instance, "we know there is no God, because there is no purpose to things; and we know there is no purpose to things because random chance caused all things; and we know it was random chance because, since there is no God, it must be so").
God doesn't instruct the clouds, the trees or the squirrels.
No reformed christian I know denies free will, or God's action through means. Just because there is an observable natural cause, does not mean there are not other causes (whether natural or supernatural). For instance, water that you see boiling on the stove is assumed to be doing so because of the heat; but there may have also been an unobserved drop in pressure which was also at work; and that completely leaves out whether there were antecedent causes to the heat.
A good illustration of this is the book of Habakkuk, where Habakkuk prays to the lord to "do something" about the evil in his nation. The Lords response is that the nation WILL be punished, by the Assyrians; when Habakkuk further asks how Israel can be punished by a more wicked nation, the response is that the Assyrians, too, will be punished, as they are later invaded by
I didn't see any of that here. I saw two jumps from "morality", "good" and "evil" to "therefore there must be a god". The most famous idea from pascal's pensees seems to be Pascal's Wager which is one of the worst arguments for God I have ever heard.
Not all of Pascal's Pensees are directly "arguments for God" in and of themselves, and I dont think the Wager falls into that category; the version of the Pensees I have with commentary notes "..Yet it is not his central concern, the thing closest to his heart. It is only one step on the way, one possible means to an end." The wager is IMO (as Pascal really didnt give intros to his Pensees) an argument for why considering belief in God is rational; He doesnt say that "therefore belief in God is proven". This IS, I think, an example of you misunderstanding the Pensee-- particularly as you do not seem to be aware of the context, or even the full Wager as Pascal wrote it.
Which is exactly how I said these arguments are defended. Claiming the refuter just doesn't understand them. Just get your mindset into the beliefs of these backwards people (ignore logic)
Thats true, but doesnt take away the fact that he really doesnt understand the argument that Aquinas is making; and that if one does not understand the argument nor has offered a refutation of its specific claims, then it is fair to call that out. It seems like he (the slashdot poster, not Dawkins) read over it and in 5 minutes thinks he grasped the extent of Aquinas argument, which he clearly doesnt if he is asking "what caused God"; Aquinas specifically mentions that he is discussing an "unmoved mover".
I do NOT intend to defend Feser or refute Dawkins, as I have neither read Feser's book nor Dawkins' arguments, so I really cannot comment on that at all. It is entirely possible that Dawkins really didnt get Aquinas, and it is entirely possible that he did, and Feser was wrong. If you havent read their books, then honestly you cant comment on it either, as it would be pure speculation.
As with Pascal's wager above, I think it is common for people to hear a phrase, do a few minutes of research on the internet, and think they understand the things being said. It is often enough far more complicated than that, and requires looking much deeper to get what is being said. I would imagine that most people who read John 1 "In the beginning was the word, and the word was God, and the word was with God", and dont really get what the author was saying, because they do not understand the context nor have a firm grasp of the Bible (for the curious, it is partly a reference to Gen1, and a reference to a notion in Greek philosophy, the "logos", since the gospel was directed partly at the Greeks).
All that aside, my recommendation was to read the Pensees, not the Wager-- I suspected that people would read "the Wager" into my post, but I think there are a number of other Pensees that are far more relevant to "what is the rational grounds for God" (since, again, I dont think the Wager was meant to address that).
But from cursory glance they all break down to needing the person to go outside logic for a second (assume there is an objective scale of morality or something similar) then jump to a conclusion from there.
I think that if you come to that conclusion, you are saying either that you cannot find a logical misstep in the argument, OR that you do not think that they are arguments in the field of logic at all. I can say with certainty that the second premise is not correct, the arguments give very clear premises and walk towards a conclusion.
Again... the conclusions must be that either god has always existed, or something else has which effectively "predates" the universe to have spawned it... something that we have absolutely *NO* evidence of, and I can think of no remotely compelling reason to believe it,
No scientific evidence, that is true; to gather information from outside or from before the universe is impossible by very definition. It is nevertheless fair to look at what we have and posit several explainations of what could have caused it, look at what we have now, and try to infer the most likely cause.
Presumably, some people choose the former option because their own experiences in life convince them of the veracity of that notion, in much the same way as one's sensibilities convince them of the reality that they experience in a day-to-day basis. It's hardly scientific, but it's still a lot more to go on than the alternative.
Properly applied, it is perfectly valid. This is part of what I am saying, yes. I find a number of examples where I have found the Bible to be more in line with reality than the notion that I exist without a purpose and will die without one, that natural law does not exist, that and man is perfectable, and so on. In every observable instance I have found the second two notions to be absolutely untrue; where many secular humanists would push for perfecting man, the Bible insists that it is a fools errand, and I know of no scenario where man has actually pulled himself above his corruptible nature.
It sounds like I have communicated at least some of the rational basis for why belief in God makes sense, which is in fact what I was setting out to do. I do think Pascal's Wager at this point would indicate that people should be willing to consider such basis, and hear the claims of christianity; not to do so would to be to brush aside as irrelevant what might be the most important piece of information as "trivia"-- whether or not there really is a God, and what he has to say to you. I would be happy to continue the conversation via email at any time, email address slashdotincoming.20.ronin2040@spamgourmet.com.
See my reply to the lengthier posts. Do not expect further replies.
Strange how for two days now I have challenged you with MORE accurate knowledge of the bible than you yourself held,
Were you to be more knowledgeable than I about the Bible, that would have absolutely no relevance to your correctness or mine. You could know the Bible from cover to cover and still make inaccurate statements about it.
And I do not think your knowledge has been "more accurate"; for two days you have tried to insist that, because the Bible was utterly silent on an issue (big central government, enforced tithes, etc), and in fact gives COUNTER-examples (warnings about the dangers of a single man in authority), we should therefore read an endorsement of big central government into the Bible. Im sorry, that is irrational, inaccurate, and does not display a superior knowledge of the Bible.
Youve also been called by numerous posters on your wild accusations towards republicans and bible thumpers and who knows what else, when pretty much any 8th grade civics student could tell you that the republican core belief is NOT "outlawing homosexual marriage'. Apparently that does not matter, however, the fact that some people who are republicans hold some beliefs somehow sets me up to be placed in the dock and charged with defending them. How about if I ask you to defend the actions of every democrat, now and past? How about Obama's utter hypocrisy in accusing Bush of military action without congressional approval (which he had), and then mobilizing our armed forces...without congressional approval? Would it be fair to ask you to defend that, or accuse all democrats of being hypocrits based on the one man's actions?
Your manner of discussion has made you seem more raving and irrational and unwilling to have a levelheaded conversation than the very bible-thumpers you so decry. You have resorted to ridicule (my mistaken use of the word "parable", when everyone else seemed to get from the context that I understood it was an event), you have resorted to broad non-sequiturs, you have tried to paint all christians with the same brush, you have appealed to emotion (with your out-of-context rape remarks), and you have generally jumped from old point to new point as soon as I give am adequate reply. Your entire posture has been unpleasant and your posts drip with sarcasm and hostility.
This entire discussion has become an exercise in unpleasantness and-- given how you twist every word I say and seem to try to misunderstand me--futility, and I rather assume that anyone who happens across this thread will understand why I no longer will give a reply to you in particular.
You're saying that the fact that one guy changed churches means that it's all right for another guy to force schools to teach the Book of Genesis as scientific fact equal to Natural Selection?...When you put it that way...
No, I dont believe I said that at all. Nowhere in my post do I see that statement. Are you going to continue putting words in my mouth, is there any point to responding?
I will withdraw my comments about the church he attended-- I dont think they are right for me to make remarks on the sincerity of the man's faith based solely on who his pastor was, however troubling the pastor's comments may have been. That particular remark is really tangential to the main point I was making anyways.
But the real hypocrisy im getting at is, if the man is honestly a christian, and christians honestly believe in an inerrant bible, why is HE, a democrat, not getting any flak for his wacky beliefs? Why only the "bible-thumping" republicans? You yourself illustrated this in your post: You are pointing the finger at the "religious right" and its crazy belief in Genesis, when Obama has claimed to believe in the supernatural and in a risen Christ.
So either you believe the man not to be sincere in his faith-- in which case I think one should lose a great deal of respect for the man for being dishonest with his words and intellectually dishonest to himself-- or you DO believe the man to be sincere, and dont really mind when someone has "wacky beliefs", so long as they completely ignore what said beliefs demand and implement the policies YOU like.
So which is it?
I always felt uncomfortable saying Norfolk in polite company, half afraid I was mispronouncing it. It is good to hear that I am not, and that Va really does have some crazy location names.
Your appeals to "what percentage" and "How many" right away sink your ship. If it is not a uniting view among all republicans, it is manifestly not a core belief.
I'm not a bible scholar and I can't give you pointers off the top of my head, but anyone whose been to seminary and is comfortable with his beliefs should be able to give some significant ones.
A large number of my friends have gone through or are attending seminary; a handful have studied biblical hebrew and greek. They have offered me no such pointers, but only indicated that generally to take Greek and Hebrew is a waste unless you intend to be a pastor-- they advised that most translations today are remarkably good and reliable (there are some questionable ones, like new NIV that tries to excise all mention of gender from the bible).
And when I get super curious, of course, I can fire up E-Sword, and view the original Hebrew OT and Greek NT with strongs notes (basically, word translations covering all meanings of a particular word), the Vulgate, and the Septuagint with notes.
"translated from their hebrew ... sources" -- sorry, don't exist. Greek, and bad greek at that, yeah.
We have the dead sea scrolls, the masoretic text, the septuigint. We have the Tanakh as it has been preserved by Jews over the last few thousand years. You can call it "bad greek", but it was more commonly known as Koine Greek, and there are a number of places to learn it in a year or two. You might as well call Latin "bad"; we can still learn it today.
You also seem to be under the (very common) misapprehension that there is a codex that was treasured and preserved by the early church that is The Bible.
What we have has been validated as being largely identical with newly found texts. In that regard it remains possibly the best preserved set of documents of that age. I really know of no scholars who would disagree with that.
There is no such thing as The Bible. "Religious authorities" have held conventions to decide which writings to include and which to exclude from their religious teachings. These decisions, by humans, have determined what is The Bible. Catholics and protestants disagree on some of these. Both believe The Bible to be the Word of God. Can't both be right...
Neither am I a biblical scholar, but I can answer some of these charges.
Most of the Bible is in agreement with most of the commonly recognized "orthodox" branches. Modern protestantism uses the same text for the OT as historical Jews did. We also use the same NT that was used for the first several hundred years; we identify the books partly because they identify themselves (for instance, going by what Christ regarded as scripture, or what Peter and Paul called scripture). There are several other criteria, but I do not know them all.
As for "cant both be right", that is of course what the reformation was about-- Catholicism did not hold to "sola scriptura" and added to the word (and not just apocrophya, but tradition), which is why the two broke off. We do in fact believe the other to be wrong, and they us. If we are correct, sincere Catholics are possibly unsaved, and if they are correct they would regard us as rebellious heretics.
It is not terribly helpful to lump Catholocism together with Protestantism, a number of their practices and beliefs are deeply troubling-- such as veneration of Mary, belief in her perpetual virginity (despite language such as "James the brother of Jesus"), transubstantiation, regenerative baptism, and the rest. Commonly it is viewed as "just another denomination", but that probably brings more confusion to the table than it helps.
You act as if it would be possible to have freedom without allowing others to practice religion....
Care to explain?
Pin someone down as to why they're so against it and they make vague references to someone somewhere being killed or something by a Scientologist.
5 minutes on wikipedia or operation clambake turns up some worrying things on them. Of course thats true for most organizations, but then while you ponder that you can watch as the CoS fires off a C&D to wikipedia and operation clambake.
Thats basically it, they react violently to any criticism, bringing the law and whatever else they can muster down on the heads of anyone who dares criticize them. That seems to make them worthy of "a reaction".
The chinese government isnt really a fan of any large, independent organization that it cannot directly control.
I was rather curious whether such an occurance-- 2 5.x quakes on the same continent within several hours-- is commonplace or not.
It was a little more worrying when initial reports suggested a third quake in Ny, but apparently it was the same one we had here.
I gave a number of arguments for why I do not think the universe can be self existant, and I have yet to hear anyone reconcile them except for one fellow who mentioned "Ergodic theory" as a way of trying to explain why a perpetual bang-crunch cycle is plausible. I would have to research that more, but he is the only one I would give a bye to in this discusion. Everyone else seems to completely avoid the topic of entropy and the impossiblity of a perpetually in-motion universe that has always been.
If people want to ignore my premise and my defense of my premise, and then claim that because there is no premise my conclusion is wrong, then quite frankly there is not much more I can say. Taking half of one's arguments and then claiming they lack foundation is pretty terrible debate technique.
All of the provided "arguments" have had people explain why they are incorrect. The credible response from that would be to either explain why the refutes are incorrect or to fix the arguments. This never happens, however.
Um, thats flat out not true. If you cared to do some research you would see refutations of theologians, and then the theologian responding, and back and forth. Off the top of my head I know Lewis had back-and-forth discussions with a large number of people, and gave public talks where he responded to such "refutations".
The means have been provided. If you want to say the belief is rational then you have to use reason to show that.
What happens when said refutations are themselves flawed, as is quite often the case?
Oh I forgot .. rape victims should marry the scumbags right?
Um, not only are your political views grossly misinformed (not all republicans-- nor any that I have EVER met-- believe that), but your knowledge of the bible is also grossly inaccurate.
For starters, I know evangelicals who are democrats, and I know athiests who are republican. Right off the bat, your attempting to paint all R's as religious is ridiculous and laughable.
Further, one of the major examples of rape in the Bible has the woman begging that her rapist marry her to alleviate some of the wrong he has done (Amnon and Tamar)-- in those days to be raped meant the end of marriageability, and forcing the rapist to marry her, take care of her, and pay a hefty dowry was a way of undoing some portion of the wrong he had committed. This would hardly be relevant today, and I have never heard anyone suggest it.
Once again you continue to speak with no knowledge of the subject. You may be as militantly anti-religion as you please, but it certainly helps if you actually take the effort to understand what you are discussing.
Is it not Republicans who believe that who I like to fuck is somehow a government concern?
Some people who are republicans believe that homosexuals should not be married.
A, that is hardly a core republican belief. It is a belief that some republicans hold; but your statement would exclude any kind of humanist from ever being a republican, and thats just flat out not true.
B, that does not mean that they are saying that the government has a say in who you have intercourse with. It is saying that the government has a say in who it provides otherwise withheld incentives that go along with marriage-- these incentives are not and never have been rights.
Interesting how the moral majority won't even make an exception for rape victims.
Interesting how the Moral Majority is not the republican party, and your entire post is a gigantic non-sequitur. Grats for derailing the conversation with irrelevance.
I dont think they can predict such things.
Incidentally, this WAS "another quake", as it looks like there was a 5.8 earlier today in colorado.
5.8 isnt tiny, and this one was felt over a rather large area.