I thought John Lithgow did a good job in the later movie version, though I'm not sure whether I preferred the bad CGI alien in that version or the el-cheapo guy in a shag rug suit from the TV episode.
Um, there was no CGI in the Twilight Zone movie. Look up "Andre and Wally B" if you want to see what the state of the art in CGI was like in 1983.
True enough. The story doesn't actually say there was no death before the fall - God just says they will die if they eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, implying that they already know what death is.
When God banishes them from the Garden, he gives the reason as to prevent them from eating from the Tree of Life and living forever. Interestingly, he didn't command them not to eat of that tree, so presumably it was okay for them to be immortal as long as they didn't know good from evil.
Obviously the story came before modern science, so it can't be expected to be consistent with what we now know about biology. It was meant to explain where we came from and why we are the way we are - why we raise our own food, dress in clothing, have only one mate, etc. I leave it to the fundamentalists to work out how it could literally be true.
To suggest that we must die because individual cells die is to assume an awful lot.
Not really - life can and does continue indefinitely through cell division. Every child is a continuation of the lives of the parents, and all of our biosphere is essentially one big branching life - a continuation of the first metabolizing, reproducing cells.
Whether you want to interpret "no death" as meaning organisms can live indefinitely despite the continuing death of most of their cells is up to you, but there really is no quantifiable difference in one cell dying vs. all of a body's cells dying.
Also you'd have to have some explanation for such creatures to be impervious to drowning, suffocating, starving, dehydrating, fires, lightning strikes etc. etc. which is still compatible with living cells necessarily dying to perpetuate growth and reproduction.
The Book of Genesis clearly shows life before the fall was intended to reproduce. Seed-bearing plants were created on the third day, and on the fifth day God told the creatures of the sea and the birds to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.
Of course, perpetual exponential growth is impossible in a finite world, so inevitably some must die for others to be born. In a world with no death, ever-multiplying creatures is a plan destined to fail.
Actually, the Bible doesn't say "apple," it just says "fruit," but that's neither here nor there.
One problem with this story is that death is actually necessary for living organisms to eat, grow, and reproduce. Any time you eat a plant or animal, it dies. In the case of fruit, of course, the bush or tree can go on living, but the potential trees and bushes borne in the seeds will die.
Cells die all the time as a normal part of your body's growth and metabolism. The death of an organism is simply the death of all its cells.
Take a look at your hand. You have five fingers, yes? In the womb, your hand grew in a sort of flipper shape until the fingers were separated by the death of the cells in between them!
I suppose there's some science-fiction way for a world to be free of death, but it would not resemble our world and I'm not even sure you could call Adam and Eve "human" if there was no death. Their bodies would have to work very differently from ours.
Actually, R2 speaks perfect English (or Standard, or whatever they speak in a galaxy far, far away...) It's just that he's constantly cussing in the movies.:)
You mean like FVWM or IceWM or WindowMaker or E or any of the other WMs that experts love and newbies hate? Gosh, I don't know--when will we get something like that?:)
Okay, maybe I should have been more specific! When will every computer come with an easily configurable interface built-in?:)
When are we going to get an interface that is totally configurable to user preferences?
Someday, I'd love to sit down at a computer, point it to the URL where my interface preferences live, and presto - it instantly becomes the desktop I'm most familiar with.
Think of it as the GUI equivalent of setting your shell in.profile.
I never understood the rationale behind the drag the floppy to the bin to eject it functionality on the old Apple Macs (late 80's, early 90's) - made no sense to me at all, suggested formatting rather than ejecting. Is it the same for CD/DVD, I haven't used Apple for many years?
The Trash now changes to an "Eject" icon when you drag a volume on the desktop.
Originally, the "Trash to eject" behavior was just a shortcut for the "Eject disk" menu item. Unfortunately, in order to transfer files from one disk to another with only one floppy drive and no hard drive, the Mac had to leave the disk mounted and eject it so you could swap floppies and drag the files between disk icons. That led to the confusing "Put away" command to unmount and eject the disk.
You misunderstand: God is the one that defines what sin is, and what the penalty will be. The wages of sin is death, the free gift of God is eternal life.
I don't think I misunderstand at all. God defines sin as behavior prohibited by him. Setting aside the question of whether God prohibits behavior because it is immoral, or whether it's immoral because he prohibits it, it still amounts to the same question: why would an omnipotent, omniscient God create a world in which things he does not want to happen, happen?
This is a restate of "Can God create a rock so big even he can't lift it?" The problem is you misunderstand both omniscience and omnipotence. Why do you assume that your definition of either is correct?
I'm just using standard definitions. Omnipotent = can do anything. Omniscient: knows everything.
Given those traits, God could create any kind of a world, knowing in advance how it would turn out. If the world has sin in it, it's because God wanted it that way. There is no way around this. Theologians have never solved the conundrum. Either God is not omniscient and omnipotent, or sin is something he chose to include in this world.
Incidentally, the inability of the clergy to explain this to me satisfactorily was instrumental in my conclusion that it had to be bullshit.
What I cannot do is reconcile the God presented in the bible with the one you disbelieve.
It is the God presented in the bible that makes no sense to me. The picture that book paints is of a small-minded, petty, jealous dictator who screws up the creation of the world and then changes his mind about how to deal with it. The fact that you Christians can't decide amongst yourselves how to interpret this agreeably is a good sign that it's a fundamentally flawed doctrine.
On the question of sin, it's Gods call how he wants to deal with it.
So you admit you can't answer that question? Why does sin exist if God doesn't want it to? What are we supposed to believe, that God created sin, or that there is in fact no sin? Given an omniscient and omnipotent God, sin (action against God's wishes) can't logically exist.
On the question of science, I think we may have more work to do.
You certainly do, because you don't understand the first thing about what science actually is.
"God did it" may explain the question of where all this complexity came from, but there is also the question of "Why does this not work better?"
Hopefully you will notice at some point that creationism has no answer for this type of question. It can only appeal to divine mystery.
If there is a design behind the whole thing that means there is the possibility of success in investigating how things work.
Science has had tremendous success in investigating how things work. Not so much in the question of why things work, but it's no worse off than religion on that score.
If what is behind the universe is random than science is ultimately doomed.
Fortunately for us, the laws of physics do not appear to be random. They also don't appear to be variable, but for whatever reason, they behave consistently through time and space, and science has a fair chance at explaining the "how" thanks to the reliability of cause and effect.
Nevertheless, some things in nature appear to be uncaused: virtual particles, beta decay, gravity... events are only "random" in the sense that they happen at unpredictable times, yet they are non-random in the sense that there is a statistical probability that they will occur.
Anyway, I hope you have enjoyed the discussion. It's obvious that you can't answer the problems with your religious worldview, so with any luck God will grant you some reassurance that your contradictory beliefs are justified.
Yep. I set mine up using aliases (shortcuts to you Windows users, soft links to you *nix folks) so that I don't have to remember the order of the path:
Perhaps God's question was to teach Adam and Eve something about themselves
Uh, yeah... "You don't realize you're wicked, sinful creatures, so I'm going to set you up to sin so you can learn not to be the way I made you." Makes perfect sense.
You forgot to mention that he offers to take the punishment himself.
So he's the self-flagellating type, then?
If God's intent is to give us free will, then he seems willing to accept that people will biff it.
"You have a choice: chocolate or vanilla. But you can't choose vanilla. I want you to choose chocolate. If you choose vanilla, you will suffer torture for all eternity. Go ahead, you're free to choose." Some freedom, that is.
The whole point of Jesus proving he was the messiah, dying and rising again was to pay for sins.
First of all, it never made sense to me that someone could "pay" for someone else's sin. That's fundamentally unfair and fails to make amends for the damage the sin did. Secondly, it makes no sense to hold the son guilty for the sins of the father. If you are condemned before you get a chance to choose between good or evil, why should you choose good? And if you are wicked by nature, you can hardly be held responsible for sinning. Thirdly, God sacrificing himself to himself is a hollow gesture. Fourthly, why would God wait several thousand years to bring the message of salvation when prior generations obviously needed it as well?
If that is an insult please go ahead and pay for them yourself.
I will gladly take responsibility for my own actions, you take responsibility for yours. Deal?
My failures are too much for me, so I will accept God's offer.
"I'm so sorry you made me an imperfect, wicked person. Please forgive me!"
I guess one thing that i prefer about the creationist model is that it offers a fully consistent framework in which to describe the world around us.
Yep. "God did it" explains everything. I can't argue with that.
The evidence from Genesis is that Eve knew about the penalty for sin before she sinned, and that Adam was right there alongside her for the whole episode. Eve quoted the rule, even going beyond it a little.
Strike "evidence" and replace it with "testimony."
Of course, God being omniscient, he must have known what would happen and he went ahead and made the Garden, Adam, Eve, and the serpent anyway. It's a contradiction to say an omnipotent, omniscient god created a world that was not exactly as he wanted it to be.
Unless, of course he is not omniscient and had no idea what would happen. Read the story carefully, and it's hard to escape that conclusion - that's the picture of God that Genesis paints. It even describes him entering the Garden and looking for Adam and Eve. It even says God called out "where are you?" as if he didn't know!
It seems fairly obvious from the story that omniscience is a trait that God acquired later.
I don't believe in a personal god, but if there is such a being, he is clearly not necessary to explain the things the Bible claims to explain through him.
What a compliment God pays to us, however, to create us so that what we do matters.
What an insult he pays to us, to blame us for doing what he planned for us all along!
It was and still is acronym called "PC" which stands for "Personal Computer". Everybody however misuse it when they mean combination of IBM-PC/Intel specific hardware and Microsoft software platforms such as MS-DOS and Windows. I am having hard time with people whom use "This software is available for PC/Linux/Mac" tagline. First of all PC is general computer type, something which all Macintosh branded personal computers are, something what all Commodore Amiga branded personal computers are, and so on. IBM didn't invent "PC".
Sorry, but that ship sailed LONG ago.
IBM didn't invent the term "PC," but AFAIK it was the first to name a product "PC," and became the de facto standard. From then on, "PC" became short for "IBM PC." When the clones hit the market, it became short for "IBM PC-compatible."
Presumably you are aware that just after Windows 95 came out, 97 out of every 100 computers sold was an x86/Windows machine, right? Chances were good that when someone said "PC," that was the type of machine they were referring to.
God gives the reason for the flood: mankind was wholly given over to violence. What would you do?
Well, for one thing I'd recognize my own responsibility for the mess. For another, I'd pick someone other than Noah, who turned out not to be so righteous in the end. Also I wouldn't punish the innocent with the guilty - there's no reason all those blameless animals had to die.
I might be tempted to wipe out humankind and start over...but I'd do it with a wave of my hand instead of using a flood to try to make it look like an accident.
One mans unwarranted rationalization is another mans well considered argument.
No, a well-considered argument is when you ask "how could this be done?" and examine the credibility of the claim. You ask zoologists. You ask botanists. You ask naval engineers. You ask veterinarians. You do everything you possibly can to test it and see if it holds water (pardon the expression).
Rationalization is when you confront a challenge with a speculative hypothesis that sounds good and you say "okay, I have an answer for that." Problem solved...except you've convinced nobody but yourself and other True Believers.
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How fucking dare anyone out there make fun of C++ after all it has been through!?
What you don't realize is that C++ is making you all this money, and all you do is write a bunch of crap about it!
Leave Bjarne alone!! You're lucky he even publishes an FAQ for you BASTARDS!!
Speaking of professionalism, since when is it professional to publicly bash a language whose standard is going through a hard time?
Anyone that has a problem with C++ you deal with ME, because it's not well right now!
"Don't mess with us, because we're all you've got!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dktVJ3qRGS0
There's an app for that!
Um, there was no CGI in the Twilight Zone movie. Look up "Andre and Wally B" if you want to see what the state of the art in CGI was like in 1983.
"Don't tell me how to count my years. It sickens me."
"This guy is a top scientist, dummkopf."
True enough. The story doesn't actually say there was no death before the fall - God just says they will die if they eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, implying that they already know what death is.
When God banishes them from the Garden, he gives the reason as to prevent them from eating from the Tree of Life and living forever. Interestingly, he didn't command them not to eat of that tree, so presumably it was okay for them to be immortal as long as they didn't know good from evil.
Obviously the story came before modern science, so it can't be expected to be consistent with what we now know about biology. It was meant to explain where we came from and why we are the way we are - why we raise our own food, dress in clothing, have only one mate, etc. I leave it to the fundamentalists to work out how it could literally be true.
Not really - life can and does continue indefinitely through cell division. Every child is a continuation of the lives of the parents, and all of our biosphere is essentially one big branching life - a continuation of the first metabolizing, reproducing cells.
Whether you want to interpret "no death" as meaning organisms can live indefinitely despite the continuing death of most of their cells is up to you, but there really is no quantifiable difference in one cell dying vs. all of a body's cells dying.
Also you'd have to have some explanation for such creatures to be impervious to drowning, suffocating, starving, dehydrating, fires, lightning strikes etc. etc. which is still compatible with living cells necessarily dying to perpetuate growth and reproduction.
The Book of Genesis clearly shows life before the fall was intended to reproduce. Seed-bearing plants were created on the third day, and on the fifth day God told the creatures of the sea and the birds to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.
Of course, perpetual exponential growth is impossible in a finite world, so inevitably some must die for others to be born. In a world with no death, ever-multiplying creatures is a plan destined to fail.
Actually, the Bible doesn't say "apple," it just says "fruit," but that's neither here nor there.
One problem with this story is that death is actually necessary for living organisms to eat, grow, and reproduce. Any time you eat a plant or animal, it dies. In the case of fruit, of course, the bush or tree can go on living, but the potential trees and bushes borne in the seeds will die.
Cells die all the time as a normal part of your body's growth and metabolism. The death of an organism is simply the death of all its cells.
Take a look at your hand. You have five fingers, yes? In the womb, your hand grew in a sort of flipper shape until the fingers were separated by the death of the cells in between them!
I suppose there's some science-fiction way for a world to be free of death, but it would not resemble our world and I'm not even sure you could call Adam and Eve "human" if there was no death. Their bodies would have to work very differently from ours.
Blatant karma whoring here...
Make a Family Disaster Plan, from the National Severe Storms Laboratory: http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/edu/safety/disasterplan.html
Note: plans described by this site cannot help you mediate disasters in your professional and personal lives.
Actually, R2 speaks perfect English (or Standard, or whatever they speak in a galaxy far, far away...) It's just that he's constantly cussing in the movies. :)
Okay, maybe I should have been more specific! When will every computer come with an easily configurable interface built-in? :)
Pardon me for asking, but how is this a problem when you can use the same mechanism to restore the default settings in one click?
But can I load a configuration in one step, without having to click through control panel options every time?
I hope KDE takes that direction, it would be a joy to use.
When are we going to get an interface that is totally configurable to user preferences?
Someday, I'd love to sit down at a computer, point it to the URL where my interface preferences live, and presto - it instantly becomes the desktop I'm most familiar with.
Think of it as the GUI equivalent of setting your shell in .profile.
The Trash now changes to an "Eject" icon when you drag a volume on the desktop.
Originally, the "Trash to eject" behavior was just a shortcut for the "Eject disk" menu item. Unfortunately, in order to transfer files from one disk to another with only one floppy drive and no hard drive, the Mac had to leave the disk mounted and eject it so you could swap floppies and drag the files between disk icons. That led to the confusing "Put away" command to unmount and eject the disk.
I don't think I misunderstand at all. God defines sin as behavior prohibited by him. Setting aside the question of whether God prohibits behavior because it is immoral, or whether it's immoral because he prohibits it, it still amounts to the same question: why would an omnipotent, omniscient God create a world in which things he does not want to happen, happen?
I'm just using standard definitions. Omnipotent = can do anything. Omniscient: knows everything.
Given those traits, God could create any kind of a world, knowing in advance how it would turn out. If the world has sin in it, it's because God wanted it that way. There is no way around this. Theologians have never solved the conundrum. Either God is not omniscient and omnipotent, or sin is something he chose to include in this world.
Incidentally, the inability of the clergy to explain this to me satisfactorily was instrumental in my conclusion that it had to be bullshit.
It is the God presented in the bible that makes no sense to me. The picture that book paints is of a small-minded, petty, jealous dictator who screws up the creation of the world and then changes his mind about how to deal with it. The fact that you Christians can't decide amongst yourselves how to interpret this agreeably is a good sign that it's a fundamentally flawed doctrine.
So you admit you can't answer that question? Why does sin exist if God doesn't want it to? What are we supposed to believe, that God created sin, or that there is in fact no sin? Given an omniscient and omnipotent God, sin (action against God's wishes) can't logically exist.
You certainly do, because you don't understand the first thing about what science actually is.
Hopefully you will notice at some point that creationism has no answer for this type of question. It can only appeal to divine mystery.
Science has had tremendous success in investigating how things work. Not so much in the question of why things work, but it's no worse off than religion on that score.
Fortunately for us, the laws of physics do not appear to be random. They also don't appear to be variable, but for whatever reason, they behave consistently through time and space, and science has a fair chance at explaining the "how" thanks to the reliability of cause and effect.
Nevertheless, some things in nature appear to be uncaused: virtual particles, beta decay, gravity... events are only "random" in the sense that they happen at unpredictable times, yet they are non-random in the sense that there is a statistical probability that they will occur.
Anyway, I hope you have enjoyed the discussion. It's obvious that you can't answer the problems with your religious worldview, so with any luck God will grant you some reassurance that your contradictory beliefs are justified.
Yep. I set mine up using aliases (shortcuts to you Windows users, soft links to you *nix folks) so that I don't have to remember the order of the path:
Music/Artist/MP3/Album
Music/Artist/Album/MP3
Music/MP3/Artist/Album
They all work fine.
Uh, yeah... "You don't realize you're wicked, sinful creatures, so I'm going to set you up to sin so you can learn not to be the way I made you." Makes perfect sense.
So he's the self-flagellating type, then?
"You have a choice: chocolate or vanilla. But you can't choose vanilla. I want you to choose chocolate. If you choose vanilla, you will suffer torture for all eternity. Go ahead, you're free to choose." Some freedom, that is.
First of all, it never made sense to me that someone could "pay" for someone else's sin. That's fundamentally unfair and fails to make amends for the damage the sin did. Secondly, it makes no sense to hold the son guilty for the sins of the father. If you are condemned before you get a chance to choose between good or evil, why should you choose good? And if you are wicked by nature, you can hardly be held responsible for sinning. Thirdly, God sacrificing himself to himself is a hollow gesture. Fourthly, why would God wait several thousand years to bring the message of salvation when prior generations obviously needed it as well?
I will gladly take responsibility for my own actions, you take responsibility for yours. Deal?
"I'm so sorry you made me an imperfect, wicked person. Please forgive me!"
Yep. "God did it" explains everything. I can't argue with that.
Strike "evidence" and replace it with "testimony."
Of course, God being omniscient, he must have known what would happen and he went ahead and made the Garden, Adam, Eve, and the serpent anyway. It's a contradiction to say an omnipotent, omniscient god created a world that was not exactly as he wanted it to be.
Unless, of course he is not omniscient and had no idea what would happen. Read the story carefully, and it's hard to escape that conclusion - that's the picture of God that Genesis paints. It even describes him entering the Garden and looking for Adam and Eve. It even says God called out "where are you?" as if he didn't know!
It seems fairly obvious from the story that omniscience is a trait that God acquired later.
I don't believe in a personal god, but if there is such a being, he is clearly not necessary to explain the things the Bible claims to explain through him.
What an insult he pays to us, to blame us for doing what he planned for us all along!
Sorry, but that ship sailed LONG ago.
IBM didn't invent the term "PC," but AFAIK it was the first to name a product "PC," and became the de facto standard. From then on, "PC" became short for "IBM PC." When the clones hit the market, it became short for "IBM PC-compatible."
Presumably you are aware that just after Windows 95 came out, 97 out of every 100 computers sold was an x86/Windows machine, right? Chances were good that when someone said "PC," that was the type of machine they were referring to.
Can somebody mod this informative and/or underrated? KTHXBYE!
Well, for one thing I'd recognize my own responsibility for the mess. For another, I'd pick someone other than Noah, who turned out not to be so righteous in the end. Also I wouldn't punish the innocent with the guilty - there's no reason all those blameless animals had to die.
I might be tempted to wipe out humankind and start over...but I'd do it with a wave of my hand instead of using a flood to try to make it look like an accident.
No, a well-considered argument is when you ask "how could this be done?" and examine the credibility of the claim. You ask zoologists. You ask botanists. You ask naval engineers. You ask veterinarians. You do everything you possibly can to test it and see if it holds water (pardon the expression).
Rationalization is when you confront a challenge with a speculative hypothesis that sounds good and you say "okay, I have an answer for that." Problem solved...except you've convinced nobody but yourself and other True Believers.