This isn't even strictly true. You can violate global speed-of-light travel times without violating local speed-of-light travel times by making space itself move - see the inflationary period, or the Alcubierre metric for more info.
You can imagine it as a speed limit placed on people walking, but there is no such speed limit on moving walkways (like in airports).
And the problem with particles traveling faster than light (tachyonic) is the fact that as they *lose* energy, they go faster, which makes them lose more energy, so they spiral out to infinite speed. Tachyonic modes are unstable, so a theory containing them typically undergoes tachyonic condensation (spontaneous symmetry breaking) and the tachyons gain a positive mass squared.
Releativity states that the speed of light is as fast as it gets.... for matter. Relativity makes no such claims as to the speed limit of space itself.
There are quite a number of valid GR metrics which describe space which expands faster than the speed of light, and in fact, it's thought that it did expand faster than the speed of light during the inflationary period.
Those same metrics are the basis of the Alcubierre metric, one of many ways to generate faster-than-light travel without multiply-connected spacetimes (wormholes). Like most "violate the speed of light" metrics, it requires negative energy density matter, though variations on the metric allow for very tiny amounts of negative energy matter to generate it.
The ISS would not have "plummeted to the earth" without Progress/Soyuz launches. Good grief, we can boost it with Atlas rockets if it came to that.
Robotic unmanned Atlas rockets, with an unmanned station?
Without the Russians, we would've had to abandon the station, and then constantly shove it upwards (for over a year now!) with technology we don't have. Keep in mind that several portions of the station have failed already, and needed repair.
Don't mock the Russians. We have three shuttles left - Atlantis, Endeavour, and Discovery. The reason NASA's not willing to use them isn't insane - we've almost lost half the fleet already. You wouldn't want to keep losing them, especially as you still need to last 6 or 7 more years.
We desparately needed the Russians to keep the ISS up. They had the technical expertise, and they had the technology ready to go. Could we have done it without them? Maybe - definitely a maybe.
As an aside...
Despite all this, Congress was still a total bunch of jerks, and refused to actually pay the Russians even when they went above and beyond what their responsibilities were. No wonder the Russians started talking to the Chinese rather than continuing to talk with us.
If you define God as an omniscient, omnipotent object, it exists by construction (it's the Universe).
If you define God as an omniscient, omnipotent being, it's unprovable (will is unprovable outside of the object in question).
The problem is the poor definition of God. If you construct "God" as 1, then "God exists" is an axiom inasmuch as "The Universe exists" is an axiom. If you construct "God" as in 2, then "God exists" is an axiom inasmuch as the person believes it, and a completely self-consistent Universe can be built on top of either axiom: "God exists" and "God does not exist."
In other words, either side should just believe what they want, and leave the other side alone, because neither of them could ever be proven to be "more right" than the other, within their own frame of reference.
Their language supposedly consists of referring to historical events, but you're using standard language symantics to do the referring.
I don't think they were really using standard language semantics - I think that was the Universal Translator recognizing certain language constructs. One can draw a parallel to people with aphasia (... in Wernicke's area? Broca's produces gibberish, wheras Wernicke's produces sentences that have word structure, but no grammatical meaning), with recognizing the form, but not the function.
Their own language semantics would probably have been made highly efficient for describing metaphors (like a suffix for possession, etc.).
If everything is stated in terms of historical reference, then you're recursing infinitely; you have to use a historical reference to say what a wall is, and what the action "to fall" is, and so on.
Not really - what humans do is use functional representation in vocabulary - we create poor representation of thought in words, and use those words to describe things. In other words, we feel the emotion of failure, and create the word "failure" - this isn't a perfect thing, though, because there are an almost uncountable number of variations of the emotion of "failure", and so you'd need an uncountable number of words to represent all of those. Or you just accept that it's a poor representation, to limit it to a finite number. Note that I'm not describing a grammatical structure here - I'm describing a vocabulary.
So, as cultures evolve, their vocabulary grows and grows, far past what's necessary for basic grammatical structure. We use words to expand our vocabulary (English, in particular, has an absolutely huge amount of words that most people never use, but which are very important if you want to express subtle nuances in language) - in that example, they used metaphors. So they still might have some basic grammatical structure, and a very basic language, but the complicated subtleties are expressed metaphorically.
It's not crazy, though some would say that it's unnecessarily complicated, which is probably true. But some could also argue that Kanji - Oriental pictographs - are also unnecessarily complicated compared to an alphabet, but they survived as well.
You argue, "If you have faith in Jesus, then you will do those five works." By what verses in Mat 25:31-46 do you conclude that? Be specific.
Why do I have to use any verses to back that up? Faith in Jesus would simply mean that you would live your life as he did.
See the word "like"?
I'm sure it was the word "like" in Aramaic, Hebrew, or whatever language it was originally said in.
This is silly. You're arguing that an object that's already interpreted can't be interpreted again. I don't believe the people who translated the Bible were perfect. The Bible has to be interpreted, because the words written down were already an imperfect match for the thoughts and experiences that the people who wrote them had.
The Bible was written by aliens. Prove this is impossible.
Your mind mind is controlled by evil spirits. Prove this is impossible.
Both of those are provably wrong - if you search through history and find the original authors of the Bible, you can prove the first wrong. Don't know why you listed this one...
The second is, at least, provably wrong by me. I am. From your perspective, though, it's not provably wrong. You've just given an excellent example of a conjecture which will always be possible, at least from your point of view.
But that's all immaterial - I said "could be". I was stating a possibility - a conjecture, a hypothesis. A hypothesis doesn't need evidence - a hypothesis is what allows you to construct experiments to support or disprove it.
I then offered one experiment (implicitly) - something that's common to many societies could be considered divine, so look and see if there are any portions which are common to all societies, and there is one.
That doesn't prove that the Bible's divine - there's still a "could be" there. Unfortunately, as I've stated, that supposition ("Common elements in religions are divine") is unprovable, because you're in a human reference frame.
If this is evidence that the Bible is divine, then all ten of those (probably mutually-exclusive) religions are true as well.
Mutual exclusivity only applies if the full extent of the religions is known. Considering the beliefs reside within the minds of human beings, it's impossible to know the extent of the religions in any context that we currently have.
In other words, yes, they're all true. And no, I don't believe they're all mutually exclusive. You're welcome to try to prove that they are. I've never seen any evidence that shows that the disagreements between the religions aren't the result of anything except overly rigid human thinking.
Furthermore, even atheistic philosophies contains something similar to the golden rule. I have a better explanation for your observation: perhaps many philosophies contain the golden rule because it is self-evident that human society works better when we are not spending every waking moment ripping each other to shreads.
Sigh. Isn't that exactly what I said you were going to counter with? Which is why I said that offering a counterargument in this case doesn't change the point. You can't distinguish between self-evidence and divinity - you're stating that the Golden Rule allows society to exist, which is correct. The question of whether or not the Golden Rule was inspired by divinity or is just an emergent behavior of societies is an unanswerable question.
You're stating "the Golden Rule is what allowed society to exist", but that doesn't answer the question of why the Golden Rule exists.
Your explanation isn't "better", because the two explanations are expressed in different reference frames, and contain different assumptions, so Occam's Razor wouldn't apply - things are not equal.
Ad hominem.
OK, OK, true. Remove the ad hominem attack and just keep "Yes" there. It's a good enough answer anyway.
No, it isn't. You argued that if people have similiar works, then they must
Suppose you met a being who could take you outside of our universe, show you the large collection of neat universes he has made, and demonstrate the heaven he created for our particular universe.
Semantics. The Universe has no "outside". The collection of objects that you refer to as the Universe isn't what I'm describing as the Universe. All you're describing is some being who's figured out the way the Universe works really, really well.
If you've reached that level of potence, does the difference between that level of potence and omnipotence matter for the purposes of acceptance that the being in question is the god to which some human religion might refer?
To me it does!
The reason's pretty simple - a being that's far more powerful than me, yet not God, can easily fool me into thinking that it is "my God", or something like that, for its own ends.
(I've seen enough Star Trek to comprehend the manipulative powers of humans on lesser developed civilizations.)
A real deity, omniscient and omnipotent, is, of course, immune from that effect by construction.
Only some Imperial units are base-12; look at pounds and ounces or feet and yards. (And never mind that Americans think a pound is a pint for some reason.)
Oh, come on. The metric system does not prevent you from confusing a liter and a kilo, and it happens often enough. People just happen to be lucky that water got defined as 1 kg/L.
And you, are, of course, correct - I won't try to justify any portion of the Imperial system other than the basic units.
1/3 of a metre is on your ruler, you have bigger problems than the Imperial system can help you with.
I could easily say if you can't remember what certain units are, you've got bigger problems as well, and if you really can't deal with fractions, you've got bigger problems also. I pointed out an advantage - pointing out that it's a weak advantage is poor. Metric is convenient because it's consistent - Imperial is convenient because it's divisible. I never suggested that Imperial was better, only that it had an advantage.
Imperial tends to be fraction-based, and metric tends to be decimal-based. Decimal-based trades ease for precision, whereas fraction-based trades precision for ease.
Try splitting a meter into fifths. Easy: 20cm. Now try that with a foot. Or a yard.
Hence the reason that time is base 60.
You are, of course, correct. But splitting something in thirds and fourths is more common than 5ths. Splitting something in half is probably the most common.
Incorrect. According to Jesus, you must do those five things if you want to get into heaven. Those are the only requirements. (Not that he doesn't contradict himself later, but that's a separate point.)
Well, since he didn't say "You must do these five things to get into heaven" anywhere in the quoted passages, you're interpreting as well, and I don't agree with your interpretation. I'm not going to argue language semantics anyway - this is stupid.
I'm also pretty sure that Jesus didn't say anything in English, either, so it's all interpretation anyway. And if you're going to say "well, yes, but it's canon", I don't give a crap. Canon religions are human constructs, and therefore can be flawed.
I want you to speak in sentences that are just long enough to be accurate and complete in expressing your point. If that requires five sentences, then so be it. "Boiling things down" is a way of making something say something that it doesn't.
You boiled things down in the beginning of your very last post! You just did it in a different way that stresses your own points and interpretations.
James agrees with you, Paul does not. You have asserted that faith==works, but you have not given any evidence to support it. For instance, why do the five requirements that Jesus lists for salvation imply faith in anything?
Because if you do those things, you believe in Christ.
Previous statement, also said elsewhere - you don't need to know you believe in something to believe in it. Most people don't know they believe that they exist. They don't think about it. Yet they do believe it.
Paul argues semantics in large portions of his letters, and I don't agree with him. *shrug*
Bible states it's a parable.
Bull! There's no "This is a parable!" in bold before each of them, and there are plenty of dramatic exaggerations. If you think that Jesus told you that you have to forgive your neighbor 490 times and then you can say "go screw yourself" to him, you're nuts, and there's no point in having a discussion, as you're interpreting where it's to your advantage, and not allowing interpretations to others when it would not be to your advantage.
The burden of proof lies on he who alleges.
You don't need to prove a possibility - it remains possible until it is disproved. I never suggested what I said was true. I suggested it was possible. You argued with it and said that I needed to prove that it was possible. I don't. You need to prove that it's impossible.
Not everything is possible to prove, nor is it possible to have evidence for everything. It is not possible, for instance, to prove whether or not there is a God, as any evidence you obtain will equally support either conjecture.
(As for any evidence that the meaning of the Bible could be divine, I think the mere existence of the Golden Rule in ten world religions, completely independently, is good evidence for the possibility of it. The counter that you may offer would be that it's basic ethics, and anyone would come up with it. And you'd be correct. See above statement - all evidence for the existence of God can equally support his non-existence. All evidence for the non-existence of God can equally support his existence. It's unprovable)
That makes no sense. If I have good works, then I must necessarily believe the same thing as someone who has similar works?
Yes. If it doesn't make sense to you, it's because you're trying to rigidify human thought into language, which is a poor filter. Two people can believe the same thing while stating it in a completely different way. It can, in fact, sound completely different, yet be the exact same thing - it's the story of the blind men and the elephant.
I disagree. If people can be saved, then how do you argue that they don't need to be saved?
Because what someone needs is something that is personal to them, and I won't impose my beliefs or needs on someone else, because I wouldn't want someone doing it to me. Also something that no church would ever teach, but still correct - the best missionary is one that never preaches, but simply helps.
So instead of using a system which has more fundamental benefits (base 12 vs. base 10), we use one which allows stupid people to try to build things.
Hm, what am I missing?:)
OK, that's a little harsh, but suggesting that base 10 is good because people count on their fingers is crazy. Base 10 is good because it's what people are taught in school, that's all. (Interesting that we're basically saying that metric's advantage over imperial is essentially legacy support - I say we all move into the modern era, chuck base 10, go with base 12, and move on.:) )
And if base 10 is what everyone uses to count - what about time, which is still in base 60? (which is, of course, even better than base 12, as it's divisible by 2,3,4,5 and 6.) Metric time never seems to catch on. I wonder why.:)
When you discuss the advantages of metric, it really is about convenience[1]. There's nothing that you can do with metric that you can't with the English system; it is just, generally, more difficult to do with the English system. If you don't care about convenience, and you live in the USA, then you probably don't have any reason to use metric.
That's not quite true - one of the reasons that the Imperial system is moderately convenient for building is that base 12 is divisible by 2,3,4 and 6, so you'll encounter less rounding error if you need to split things up into common numbers. Base 10 is only divisible by 2 and 5. (Incidentally, this is of course why one of the older civilizations used base 60 - it's divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, and it's the reason we have 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour).
So, for instance, if you want to break a 1' object into thirds, you can do it exactly. Try doing it with meters - it's 33 and a third centimeters. Most people would say "screw it, it's 333 mm" - but if you now take those "1/3 m" sticks and put 300 of them end to end, you don't have 100 m - you have 99.9 m, and you're a full ten centimeters short. In imperial, 1/3 of a yard is 1 foot. No rounding errors.
There really *are* advantages to the Imperial system - most people, however, simply assume that Imperial sucks and leave it at that.
Metric paper, however, is better designed than US. Being able to print 2 A4 on 1 without much work really kicks.
I think I have to agree with your conclusion: that at some level of (2), *I* cannot distinguish between (1) and (2).
Exactly. Unless you yourself *are* God, you can't tell if the other being is God or not. I'm pretty sure this is strictly provable with a bit of math and logic - the only way you can create a complete mapping (i.e. everything in your target set is mapped by something in the source set - there's a better term in mathematics for this) with a set of cardinality aleph(0) is with a set of cardinality aleph(0) or higher.
However, I am comfortable accepting an entity that satisfies (2) as God.
You're more trusting than I am. Given the blind following that accompanies belief in a God, I'd be more inclined to believe that it's a being who intends to use my belief for its own subversive purpose. I've seen enough Star Trek for that.:)
"Later on"? Hillel lived 50 years before the alleged lifetime of Jesus.
Judaism, like Catholicism, (and especially at the time!) is certainly far slower than 50 years in moving current people's ideas into official canon.
The "later on" meant that it took a while for Judaism to incorporate that idea as canon doctrine. According to the Bible, Jesus shocked the surrounding Jewish rabbis when he healed someone on the Sabbath - certainly fine by any interpretation of the Golden Rule, but not by a strict interpretation of the Ten Commandments.
This is, of course, somewhat of an unfair statement, but it was a minor point in the above anyway.
Out of curiosity, do you know why? I saw one link on the Web once that had it as a homework problem for a class ("Why do plants reflect in the green when the Sun puts out the most power in the blue-green?") but never found an answer anywhere.
It drives me nuts. I have *no idea* why it happens.
Just because god knows (omniscience) how he did something (perhaps via omnipotence) doesn't mean its possible to explain it to your mushy earthling brain.
Did I mention humans? At all?
No - the argument doesn't require humans, nor does it require *anything* other than basic logic. Regardless of whether or not it's possible to explain it to me, it must be possible to explain it, because it happened within this universe. Therefore, that person therefore need not be God, and could simply be someone who knows the Universe better than I do.
The best way to imagine this is to consider yourself going back in time thousands of years and "playing" God, and now consider a person who comes up to you and uses the beforementioned script. That person won't believe you're God, because they know how you did it.
I'm omnipotent, I can cause anything to happen. Where would you be in the argument then?
It's the same argument. You simply say, "Prove it." The being does something. You say "How did you do that, precisely?" Then that being no longer needs to be a deity - they're just someone who knows the Universe better than you do. Repeat, ad nauseum.
Alternatively, if you accept omnipotence as an acceptable answer, and acknowledge that this being is omniscient and omnipotent, then perhaps he has met the requirement of being god, I mean really, what more do you have to be than omniscient and omnipotent to be god?
The problem is that you can't prove omniscience and omnipotence. The only possibility would be to exhaust all possibilities (show that the abilities and knowledge of that being comprise the sum total of all knowledge and ability), and even that's not exhaustive, because you don't *know* all of the possibilities (unless you're God, too!).
It's like Spock said in Star Trek IV, regarding death. "It would be impossible to discuss the situation without a common frame of reference." Same deal.
If he was God, then he'd be omnipotent, and proving it would be one of the infinity of things he can do easily.
This relates to "The Problem of Disbelief". "If God is omnipotent and wants us to believe in Him; and If some people don't believe in him; then God can't exist"
The infinity that you're speaking of is a human fallacy - "omnipotent" does not mean "capable of everything human language can construct" - it means "capable of all that is capable."
It's not possible to prove that there is a God. This does not limit God - it simply limits the human concept of "everything".
God cannot, for instance, fix the statement "This statement is false".
(Nor can he generate a rock that he can't lift, nor can he generate the most popular movie from the 1850s, etc., nor can he know the position and momentum of an electron with infinite precision, because those objects and concepts do not exist so asking about them is meaningless)
The solution to the problem of disbelief is simple, of course - God wouldn't care what happens - he already *knows* everything that could, can, did, and will happen - what he doesn't know is what choices you will make, and not believing in God is one of those choices. Free will, and all that.
I call my belief "atheism" because it's very strong, akin to my belief in conservation of mass-energy. I find it useful to distinguish between an extremely strong belief which would take super-extraordinary evidence to dispute ("atheism") versus a genuine significant doubt ("agnosticism").
Careful - atheism isn't a logic term, it means "no God." You can't be "atheistic" towards telepathy - come up with a different term for that.
Anyway, it's very curious that you can actually believe "there is no God, but it's possible that I could be proven wrong."
In actuality, there is no possibility that you could be proven wrong - so it is not falsifiable. It still could be wrong - it's just not capable of being proven wrong.
Think about it. How could someone prove to you that there is a God?
Let me take one example - the same argument follows for most others, but it's easiest to show this way.
Imagine a being plops down right in front of you, and says "I'm God."
You, being atheist, say "I don't believe you. Prove it."
Now, let's assume he tries to prove it. So he does something. I don't care what. Anything - literally, anything.
You then say "OK. If you're God, then you're omniscient. So how specifically did you just do that?"
If he can tell you, he no longer needs to be God to have done what he did - he's just someone who knows how the Universe works better than you do. (Here's a hint: "I'm God" is not an answer to a 'How' question. It would be like a doctor, after saving someone's life, saying "I'm a doctor" when asked how he did it.)
If he can't tell you, he's not omniscient, and not God.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Note that I did not just prove God doesn't exist. Only that you can't prove God exists.
The existence of God is something that is a real, pure belief. Believe what you want, believe it for whatever reasons you want, but you'll never be proven wrong, either way.
Wrong. He didn't say, "What you didn't do for everyone," he said, "whatever you did not do for one of the least of these...."
My typo. Should've said "anyone", not everyone. I changed the wording and mistyped. Feel free to argue that "the least of..." is not "anyone", but if you do, I'll ignore you, as you're arguing semantics.
I work form the understanding that the Bible means what it says and says what it means
The problem is you're taking more "meaning" than what was there. The fallacy is this:
X, Y, Z happened, you get in ~X, ~Y, ~Z happened, you go to hell.
If you state both of those things, the only conclusion you can make is that ~X, ~Y, ~Z cause you to go to hell, not that you must do X, Y, and Z to get in. (This is assuming that A causes B means B requires A, which is not true).
It does mean that doing X, Y, Z will get you in (it's the contrapositive), but it does not mean that you must do X, Y, Z.
I don't think so. What is "the divine" lives in the imaginations of humans and I have yet to see any evidence to the contrary that is even remotely convincing.
I said can, not is. You haven't given proof that it can't, just said that you haven't seen proof that it is.
Jesus did not say anything about "denying giving help."
Do you want me to speak in sentences that are five lines long? This is the entire point of boiling things down. And boiling down is not interpretation - it's reduction (I wish that symbolic logic representations of language was a more fleshed-out science... sigh). The people who did not do X, Y, and Z (all of which were descriptions of helping people in need) go to hell. Reducing that to "those who do not help people in need go to hell" is presumptive, yes, but it is a logical extension.
You know, arguing against the Bible by strict interpretation is just as bad as arguing for it - the simple fact is that certain things that we're saying now could not even be said then. Did they even have words for some of the concepts we're talking about?
Clearly they weren't said in English, either, so the only way to strictly interpret what the Bible said is to go back in time to when it was written, and live the lives of the people who wrote it, and then read it.
And then, of course, you completely throw out any possibility of metaphors, examples, and parables, where the meaning has to be inferred no matter what.
Jesus states that the final judgement will be based on works and works alone
Faith and works are the same thing - that's what I said. If you believe, then the works will follow. Thus, if A=B, and B=C, A=C, so faith gets you in as well. Same thing.
This assumes that Hindus, Muslims, Jews, etc. need to be saved, and I certainly disagree with that assumption
No, you assumed that. I assumed nothing. There is a common argument in Christian dogma and a common argument from outside the religion asking if all people outside of the religion are damned. The usual answer is "yes, because they must believe in Christ", and it's flawed, because of what I said before - belief, faith, and works are the same thing.
What people need is an entirely different argument that I won't even begin to touch. And that was a red herring fallacy, by the way.
I disagree with you on a few points. Defining god as the universe sounds kind of neat, but it doesn't really work on a few levels. First, there are many in the scientific community who believe the the universe is very large, but still finite.
The universe is (almost definitely) finite in volume. Either way doesn't change what I said, because the concept of "space" outside of "space" doesn't make sense.
Omniscient? Now that's a stretch.
No it's not - it's a tautology, actually - true by construction. The Universe contains the totality of time (the Universe is all spacetime that exists), and therefore, everything that happened happened within the Universe. Therefore, the Universe contains the sum totality of occurences, and therefore, all knowledge.
(Don't pull the possibility of 'multiple Universes' into the argument at this point. It's semantics - you just need to sed s/Universe/Whatever you want to call it/ for the collection of what you now call 'universes'. Maybe 'existence' would be a good term to use?)
From a more scientific point, omniscient, for an object, would be "containing all information possible", which is equivalent to the sum total of entropy. The Universe contains all entropy, since it encompasses all space (and time), so therefore it is omniscient.
However, there is more to omniscience than calling something a set of all knowledge.
No, there isn't, and not even in the colloquial sense of the word. A computer with all knowledge would be considered omniscient, would it not?
The set doesn't 'know' anything at all, we just said we defined it as such.
You're anthropomorphizing, which is a separate argument. I said if you define God as an omniscient, omnipotent object, the Universe is God, by construction.
That's not the typical definition of God, which is an omnipotent, omniscient being. The question is not whether or not something can be omnipotent and omniscient (because, as just stated, the Universe is omnipotent and omniscient), but whether or not there exists a being with said characteristics.
Since will is something that is unprovable outside of the object with will, that question is ultimately one of belief.
If you do those things, you go to heaven. Otherwise, you roast in hell. If you disagree with this, then you are disagreeing with Jesus. Your likely response is to argue, "That's what Jesus said
Actually, that's not what he said. He was asked "'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?'" and replied "I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me."
Let's boil it down:
"Lord, when did we see you in need and didn't do anything?" "What you didn't do for everyone, you didn't do for me."
The implication is not "Help people in need", it's "Don't deny giving help to people in need". The two are strictly different - so be careful when making a strawman argument like that (and yes, it is a strawman - taking a statement and exaggerating it for dramatic benefit).
The words that I have my son repeat are, "I'm a good person and I deserve to be happy."
Ack! That's just as dangerous! You don't deserve anything. Not to be happy, not to be sad, not anything. Life is what it is. Believing that you deserve to be happy is dangerous, because when you fall on hard times, you blame life, rather than accepting the hard times and moving on. Life is about living, and believing that your life is inferior because of some preexisting ideal that you "deserve" is very dangerous.
Incorrect again. The majority of the New Testament is the creation of the "Christian" doctrine by Paul.
Not going to have an argument from me here. There's some good in what Paul said, but there's a lot of chaff. (Better not wear hats in church, and don't shave your beard. Yah. That's a good one.)
Not going to hear me argue the text of the Bible isn't flawed, either. Of course it is. Any language it's written in is imperfect, because all languages are imperfect mappings of thought into words. The meaning is different, however - the meaning *can* be divine, but if you hear the meaning through someone else, it won't be, as they're an imperfect mapping as well.
(No religion would ever espouse this, though, I imagine, because it would mean that a priest or preacher's opinion isn't divine)
The criteria is works and works alone.
You're presuming that works and faith in this case are separate, when they don't need to be. Faith is belief in something - *real* belief, and belief without any reason to believe. Obviously those who didn't get in didn't believe in Christ - because they sure as heck didn't act like they did.
This is a very common statement in most Christian doctrines, and it drives me nuts, just for the reasons you pointed out. You don't even have to know you have faith in something to have faith in it. To give an example, most people don't ever think about whether or not they exist - they just believe it, without even knowing they believe it.
(This, of course, solves the problem of whether or not Hindus, Muslims, Jews, etc. can be saved. Of course they can.)
I'm sorry, but I'm not going to start believing in a being that behaves worse than a spoiled child, threatens those he says he loves, posseses contradictory powers, and has the morals of a sociopath. Especially when there are several such, all claiming to be the only one. And each on is running a different racket than the next, with the only major items in common is that the head believers all get special privilages here in this life, and a series of directives that make not believing a good way to get killed, or in more 'enlightened' cultures/times, meerly treated like a second class citizen and a leper.
You know, normally I wouldn't reply here, because in general I agree with you.
However, you are being a bit harsh - it might be better to say that you're not going to go associating yourself with people who believe in something, yet so completely ignore what they say they believe in. You can't hold a deity responsible for the actions of its followers - especially when the deity has given them free will.
Humans suck. A lot. But the existence of a lot of sucky religions just means there are a lot of people that suck, not that a deity doesn't exist. If you don't want to believe that a deity exists, fine. Don't believe it. But don't try to justify it by the actions of sucky humans. Justify it on its own merits, and nothing else. (What's that fallacy? Non sequitur? Or Division?)
You did have one attack on the actual statement - "has contradictory powers". But God - that is, an omnipotent, omniscient being - does not have contradictory powers. That's poor logic - the concept of sets encompassing infinity fixes that problem. As proof, consider: If God were defined as an omniscient, omnipotent object, then it's provable that it exists - it would be the Universe, which, by construction, is omnipotent and omniscient. Omniscient implies knowing all that is knowable, and omnipotent implies capable of all that is capable, which is strictly true for the Universe. It's only when claiming that God is a being - that is, an object with will - that problems come into play, and that belief matters.
Everyone says what an excellent set of rules they are, but I don't know anyone that has managed to keep them.
Why do people keep pushing the Ten Commandments? Half the problem with Judaism at the time was that it was "function" lacking "form". After all, what happens when there's a conflict between two of the Ten Commandments (your parents tell you to kill someone, for instance)? That's why Christ simplified it in the New Testament.
Even Judaism realized that later on - What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellowman. This is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary.
(Yes, I know that Matthew 6 says that Christ said that the old rules still apply. Of course they do. They always will. The problem was that somehow people managed to miss the meaning of them - to God, they were obvious. To man, apparently it was too much.)
There's no difficult list of rules, either.
Yes there is - it's all through Matthew 5-7, though it boils down to the above - Love God above all others, and love your neighbor as yourself. That's it.
And those commandments are much easier to understand.
(So why are people pushing so hard for the Ten Commandments in courts? The Golden Rule is almost completely universal in almost all religions, and it has a lot less "wiggle room" - you're still a dork if you think about killing someone and don't do it, for instance)
Anyway, my point is that if you're pushing Christian doctrine, you shouldn't be pushing the Ten Commandments. You should be pushing the Golden Rule.
Note that I'm not commenting on what's necessary to get into heaven - that's a matter of belief in my eyes, though I firmly believe that any religion that believes that just saying the magic words "I believe in Jesus Christ" saves me, and the converse (not saying it means I can't be saved) is crazy - function without form. I can believe something without stating it. Heck, I can have faith and belief in something without knowing it.
Read the Ars Technica article on the PM - its main benefits are instruction grouping and a massively improved branch predictor. Intel claims that just the branch predictor alone improves the PM's performance by 6%, and a 6% jump in real-world performance is very impressive. All in all, with all of the PM's improvements, it's about 15-20% clock-for-clock faster than the P3 was.
Don't judge the PM by its roots - it's a much newer design than the old P3, and I can't imagine that clock-for-clock, the Athlon and the PM wouldn't be very competitive.
The PM is one of the highest IPC x86 processors out there. You can't just improve on it easily.
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Speed of light is the acceleration barrier.
This isn't even strictly true. You can violate global speed-of-light travel times without violating local speed-of-light travel times by making space itself move - see the inflationary period, or the Alcubierre metric for more info.
You can imagine it as a speed limit placed on people walking, but there is no such speed limit on moving walkways (like in airports).
And the problem with particles traveling faster than light (tachyonic) is the fact that as they *lose* energy, they go faster, which makes them lose more energy, so they spiral out to infinite speed. Tachyonic modes are unstable, so a theory containing them typically undergoes tachyonic condensation (spontaneous symmetry breaking) and the tachyons gain a positive mass squared.
Releativity states that the speed of light is as fast as it gets. ... for matter. Relativity makes no such claims as to the speed limit of space itself.
There are quite a number of valid GR metrics which describe space which expands faster than the speed of light, and in fact, it's thought that it did expand faster than the speed of light during the inflationary period.
Those same metrics are the basis of the Alcubierre metric, one of many ways to generate faster-than-light travel without multiply-connected spacetimes (wormholes). Like most "violate the speed of light" metrics, it requires negative energy density matter, though variations on the metric allow for very tiny amounts of negative energy matter to generate it.
The ISS would not have "plummeted to the earth" without Progress/Soyuz launches. Good grief, we can boost it with Atlas rockets if it came to that.
Robotic unmanned Atlas rockets, with an unmanned station?
Without the Russians, we would've had to abandon the station, and then constantly shove it upwards (for over a year now!) with technology we don't have. Keep in mind that several portions of the station have failed already, and needed repair.
Don't mock the Russians. We have three shuttles left - Atlantis, Endeavour, and Discovery. The reason NASA's not willing to use them isn't insane - we've almost lost half the fleet already. You wouldn't want to keep losing them, especially as you still need to last 6 or 7 more years.
We desparately needed the Russians to keep the ISS up. They had the technical expertise, and they had the technology ready to go. Could we have done it without them? Maybe - definitely a maybe.
As an aside...
Despite all this, Congress was still a total bunch of jerks, and refused to actually pay the Russians even when they went above and beyond what their responsibilities were. No wonder the Russians started talking to the Chinese rather than continuing to talk with us.
Define God.
If you define God as an omniscient, omnipotent object, it exists by construction (it's the Universe).
If you define God as an omniscient, omnipotent being, it's unprovable (will is unprovable outside of the object in question).
The problem is the poor definition of God. If you construct "God" as 1, then "God exists" is an axiom inasmuch as "The Universe exists" is an axiom. If you construct "God" as in 2, then "God exists" is an axiom inasmuch as the person believes it, and a completely self-consistent Universe can be built on top of either axiom: "God exists" and "God does not exist."
In other words, either side should just believe what they want, and leave the other side alone, because neither of them could ever be proven to be "more right" than the other, within their own frame of reference.
Their language supposedly consists of referring to historical events, but you're using standard language symantics to do the referring.
I don't think they were really using standard language semantics - I think that was the Universal Translator recognizing certain language constructs. One can draw a parallel to people with aphasia (... in Wernicke's area? Broca's produces gibberish, wheras Wernicke's produces sentences that have word structure, but no grammatical meaning), with recognizing the form, but not the function.
Their own language semantics would probably have been made highly efficient for describing metaphors (like a suffix for possession, etc.).
If everything is stated in terms of historical reference, then you're recursing infinitely; you have to use a historical reference to say what a wall is, and what the action "to fall" is, and so on.
Not really - what humans do is use functional representation in vocabulary - we create poor representation of thought in words, and use those words to describe things. In other words, we feel the emotion of failure, and create the word "failure" - this isn't a perfect thing, though, because there are an almost uncountable number of variations of the emotion of "failure", and so you'd need an uncountable number of words to represent all of those. Or you just accept that it's a poor representation, to limit it to a finite number. Note that I'm not describing a grammatical structure here - I'm describing a vocabulary.
So, as cultures evolve, their vocabulary grows and grows, far past what's necessary for basic grammatical structure. We use words to expand our vocabulary (English, in particular, has an absolutely huge amount of words that most people never use, but which are very important if you want to express subtle nuances in language) - in that example, they used metaphors. So they still might have some basic grammatical structure, and a very basic language, but the complicated subtleties are expressed metaphorically.
It's not crazy, though some would say that it's unnecessarily complicated, which is probably true. But some could also argue that Kanji - Oriental pictographs - are also unnecessarily complicated compared to an alphabet, but they survived as well.
You argue, "If you have faith in Jesus, then you will do those five works." By what verses in Mat 25:31-46 do you conclude that? Be specific.
Why do I have to use any verses to back that up? Faith in Jesus would simply mean that you would live your life as he did.
See the word "like"?
I'm sure it was the word "like" in Aramaic, Hebrew, or whatever language it was originally said in.
This is silly. You're arguing that an object that's already interpreted can't be interpreted again. I don't believe the people who translated the Bible were perfect. The Bible has to be interpreted, because the words written down were already an imperfect match for the thoughts and experiences that the people who wrote them had.
The Bible was written by aliens. Prove this is impossible.
Your mind mind is controlled by evil spirits. Prove this is impossible.
Both of those are provably wrong - if you search through history and find the original authors of the Bible, you can prove the first wrong. Don't know why you listed this one...
The second is, at least, provably wrong by me. I am. From your perspective, though, it's not provably wrong. You've just given an excellent example of a conjecture which will always be possible, at least from your point of view.
But that's all immaterial - I said "could be". I was stating a possibility - a conjecture, a hypothesis. A hypothesis doesn't need evidence - a hypothesis is what allows you to construct experiments to support or disprove it.
I then offered one experiment (implicitly) - something that's common to many societies could be considered divine, so look and see if there are any portions which are common to all societies, and there is one.
That doesn't prove that the Bible's divine - there's still a "could be" there. Unfortunately, as I've stated, that supposition ("Common elements in religions are divine") is unprovable, because you're in a human reference frame.
If this is evidence that the Bible is divine, then all ten of those (probably mutually-exclusive) religions are true as well.
Mutual exclusivity only applies if the full extent of the religions is known. Considering the beliefs reside within the minds of human beings, it's impossible to know the extent of the religions in any context that we currently have.
In other words, yes, they're all true. And no, I don't believe they're all mutually exclusive. You're welcome to try to prove that they are. I've never seen any evidence that shows that the disagreements between the religions aren't the result of anything except overly rigid human thinking.
Furthermore, even atheistic philosophies contains something similar to the golden rule. I have a better explanation for your observation: perhaps many philosophies contain the golden rule because it is self-evident that human society works better when we are not spending every waking moment ripping each other to shreads.
Sigh. Isn't that exactly what I said you were going to counter with? Which is why I said that offering a counterargument in this case doesn't change the point. You can't distinguish between self-evidence and divinity - you're stating that the Golden Rule allows society to exist, which is correct. The question of whether or not the Golden Rule was inspired by divinity or is just an emergent behavior of societies is an unanswerable question.
You're stating "the Golden Rule is what allowed society to exist", but that doesn't answer the question of why the Golden Rule exists.
Your explanation isn't "better", because the two explanations are expressed in different reference frames, and contain different assumptions, so Occam's Razor wouldn't apply - things are not equal.
Ad hominem.
OK, OK, true. Remove the ad hominem attack and just keep "Yes" there. It's a good enough answer anyway.
No, it isn't. You argued that if people have similiar works, then they must
Suppose you met a being who could take you outside of our universe, show you the large collection of neat universes he has made, and demonstrate the heaven he created for our particular universe.
Semantics. The Universe has no "outside". The collection of objects that you refer to as the Universe isn't what I'm describing as the Universe. All you're describing is some being who's figured out the way the Universe works really, really well.
If you've reached that level of potence, does the difference between that level of potence and omnipotence matter for the purposes of acceptance that the being in question is the god to which some human religion might refer?
To me it does!
The reason's pretty simple - a being that's far more powerful than me, yet not God, can easily fool me into thinking that it is "my God", or something like that, for its own ends.
(I've seen enough Star Trek to comprehend the manipulative powers of humans on lesser developed civilizations.)
A real deity, omniscient and omnipotent, is, of course, immune from that effect by construction.
Besides, what kind of genius, knowing he wants a 300m stick, and starting with 1m sticks, chops them all up into three first?
The genius that doesn't want a stick, but wants a 100 meter brick wall, and wants three bricks per meter.
Only some Imperial units are base-12; look at pounds and ounces or feet and yards. (And never mind that Americans think a pound is a pint for some reason.)
Oh, come on. The metric system does not prevent you from confusing a liter and a kilo, and it happens often enough. People just happen to be lucky that water got defined as 1 kg/L.
And you, are, of course, correct - I won't try to justify any portion of the Imperial system other than the basic units.
1/3 of a metre is on your ruler, you have bigger problems than the Imperial system can help you with.
I could easily say if you can't remember what certain units are, you've got bigger problems as well, and if you really can't deal with fractions, you've got bigger problems also. I pointed out an advantage - pointing out that it's a weak advantage is poor. Metric is convenient because it's consistent - Imperial is convenient because it's divisible. I never suggested that Imperial was better, only that it had an advantage.
Imperial tends to be fraction-based, and metric tends to be decimal-based. Decimal-based trades ease for precision, whereas fraction-based trades precision for ease.
Try splitting a meter into fifths. Easy: 20cm. Now try that with a foot. Or a yard.
Hence the reason that time is base 60.
You are, of course, correct. But splitting something in thirds and fourths is more common than 5ths. Splitting something in half is probably the most common.
Incorrect. According to Jesus, you must do those five things if you want to get into heaven. Those are the only requirements. (Not that he doesn't contradict himself later, but that's a separate point.)
Well, since he didn't say "You must do these five things to get into heaven" anywhere in the quoted passages, you're interpreting as well, and I don't agree with your interpretation. I'm not going to argue language semantics anyway - this is stupid.
I'm also pretty sure that Jesus didn't say anything in English, either, so it's all interpretation anyway. And if you're going to say "well, yes, but it's canon", I don't give a crap. Canon religions are human constructs, and therefore can be flawed.
I want you to speak in sentences that are just long enough to be accurate and complete in expressing your point. If that requires five sentences, then so be it. "Boiling things down" is a way of making something say something that it doesn't.
You boiled things down in the beginning of your very last post! You just did it in a different way that stresses your own points and interpretations.
James agrees with you, Paul does not. You have asserted that faith==works, but you have not given any evidence to support it. For instance, why do the five requirements that Jesus lists for salvation imply faith in anything?
Because if you do those things, you believe in Christ.
Previous statement, also said elsewhere - you don't need to know you believe in something to believe in it. Most people don't know they believe that they exist. They don't think about it. Yet they do believe it.
Paul argues semantics in large portions of his letters, and I don't agree with him. *shrug*
Bible states it's a parable.
Bull! There's no "This is a parable!" in bold before each of them, and there are plenty of dramatic exaggerations. If you think that Jesus told you that you have to forgive your neighbor 490 times and then you can say "go screw yourself" to him, you're nuts, and there's no point in having a discussion, as you're interpreting where it's to your advantage, and not allowing interpretations to others when it would not be to your advantage.
The burden of proof lies on he who alleges.
You don't need to prove a possibility - it remains possible until it is disproved. I never suggested what I said was true. I suggested it was possible. You argued with it and said that I needed to prove that it was possible. I don't. You need to prove that it's impossible.
Not everything is possible to prove, nor is it possible to have evidence for everything. It is not possible, for instance, to prove whether or not there is a God, as any evidence you obtain will equally support either conjecture.
(As for any evidence that the meaning of the Bible could be divine, I think the mere existence of the Golden Rule in ten world religions, completely independently, is good evidence for the possibility of it. The counter that you may offer would be that it's basic ethics, and anyone would come up with it. And you'd be correct. See above statement - all evidence for the existence of God can equally support his non-existence. All evidence for the non-existence of God can equally support his existence. It's unprovable)
That makes no sense. If I have good works, then I must necessarily believe the same thing as someone who has similar works?
Yes. If it doesn't make sense to you, it's because you're trying to rigidify human thought into language, which is a poor filter. Two people can believe the same thing while stating it in a completely different way. It can, in fact, sound completely different, yet be the exact same thing - it's the story of the blind men and the elephant.
I disagree. If people can be saved, then how do you argue that they don't need to be saved?
Because what someone needs is something that is personal to them, and I won't impose my beliefs or needs on someone else, because I wouldn't want someone doing it to me. Also something that no church would ever teach, but still correct - the best missionary is one that never preaches, but simply helps.
So instead of using a system which has more fundamental benefits (base 12 vs. base 10), we use one which allows stupid people to try to build things.
:)
:) )
:)
Hm, what am I missing?
OK, that's a little harsh, but suggesting that base 10 is good because people count on their fingers is crazy. Base 10 is good because it's what people are taught in school, that's all. (Interesting that we're basically saying that metric's advantage over imperial is essentially legacy support - I say we all move into the modern era, chuck base 10, go with base 12, and move on.
And if base 10 is what everyone uses to count - what about time, which is still in base 60? (which is, of course, even better than base 12, as it's divisible by 2,3,4,5 and 6.) Metric time never seems to catch on. I wonder why.
When you discuss the advantages of metric, it really is about convenience[1]. There's nothing that you can do with metric that you can't with the English system; it is just, generally, more difficult to do with the English system. If you don't care about convenience, and you live in the USA, then you probably don't have any reason to use metric.
That's not quite true - one of the reasons that the Imperial system is moderately convenient for building is that base 12 is divisible by 2,3,4 and 6, so you'll encounter less rounding error if you need to split things up into common numbers. Base 10 is only divisible by 2 and 5. (Incidentally, this is of course why one of the older civilizations used base 60 - it's divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, and it's the reason we have 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour).
So, for instance, if you want to break a 1' object into thirds, you can do it exactly. Try doing it with meters - it's 33 and a third centimeters. Most people would say "screw it, it's 333 mm" - but if you now take those "1/3 m" sticks and put 300 of them end to end, you don't have 100 m - you have 99.9 m, and you're a full ten centimeters short. In imperial, 1/3 of a yard is 1 foot. No rounding errors.
There really *are* advantages to the Imperial system - most people, however, simply assume that Imperial sucks and leave it at that.
Metric paper, however, is better designed than US. Being able to print 2 A4 on 1 without much work really kicks.
I think I have to agree with your conclusion: that at some level of (2), *I* cannot distinguish between (1) and (2).
:)
Exactly. Unless you yourself *are* God, you can't tell if the other being is God or not. I'm pretty sure this is strictly provable with a bit of math and logic - the only way you can create a complete mapping (i.e. everything in your target set is mapped by something in the source set - there's a better term in mathematics for this) with a set of cardinality aleph(0) is with a set of cardinality aleph(0) or higher.
However, I am comfortable accepting an entity that satisfies (2) as God.
You're more trusting than I am. Given the blind following that accompanies belief in a God, I'd be more inclined to believe that it's a being who intends to use my belief for its own subversive purpose. I've seen enough Star Trek for that.
"Later on"? Hillel lived 50 years before the alleged lifetime of Jesus.
Judaism, like Catholicism, (and especially at the time!) is certainly far slower than 50 years in moving current people's ideas into official canon.
The "later on" meant that it took a while for Judaism to incorporate that idea as canon doctrine. According to the Bible, Jesus shocked the surrounding Jewish rabbis when he healed someone on the Sabbath - certainly fine by any interpretation of the Golden Rule, but not by a strict interpretation of the Ten Commandments.
This is, of course, somewhat of an unfair statement, but it was a minor point in the above anyway.
Thanks for the rest of the info, though!
Out of curiosity, do you know why? I saw one link on the Web once that had it as a homework problem for a class ("Why do plants reflect in the green when the Sun puts out the most power in the blue-green?") but never found an answer anywhere.
It drives me nuts. I have *no idea* why it happens.
Just because god knows (omniscience) how he did something (perhaps via omnipotence) doesn't mean its possible to explain it to your mushy earthling brain.
Did I mention humans? At all?
No - the argument doesn't require humans, nor does it require *anything* other than basic logic. Regardless of whether or not it's possible to explain it to me, it must be possible to explain it, because it happened within this universe. Therefore, that person therefore need not be God, and could simply be someone who knows the Universe better than I do.
The best way to imagine this is to consider yourself going back in time thousands of years and "playing" God, and now consider a person who comes up to you and uses the beforementioned script. That person won't believe you're God, because they know how you did it.
I'm omnipotent, I can cause anything to happen. Where would you be in the argument then?
It's the same argument. You simply say, "Prove it." The being does something. You say "How did you do that, precisely?" Then that being no longer needs to be a deity - they're just someone who knows the Universe better than you do. Repeat, ad nauseum.
Alternatively, if you accept omnipotence as an acceptable answer, and acknowledge that this being is omniscient and omnipotent, then perhaps he has met the requirement of being god, I mean really, what more do you have to be than omniscient and omnipotent to be god?
The problem is that you can't prove omniscience and omnipotence. The only possibility would be to exhaust all possibilities (show that the abilities and knowledge of that being comprise the sum total of all knowledge and ability), and even that's not exhaustive, because you don't *know* all of the possibilities (unless you're God, too!).
It's like Spock said in Star Trek IV, regarding death. "It would be impossible to discuss the situation without a common frame of reference." Same deal.
If he was God, then he'd be omnipotent, and proving it would be one of the infinity of things he can do easily.
This relates to "The Problem of Disbelief". "If God is omnipotent and wants us to believe in Him; and If some people don't believe in him; then God can't exist"
The infinity that you're speaking of is a human fallacy - "omnipotent" does not mean "capable of everything human language can construct" - it means "capable of all that is capable."
It's not possible to prove that there is a God. This does not limit God - it simply limits the human concept of "everything".
God cannot, for instance, fix the statement "This statement is false".
(Nor can he generate a rock that he can't lift, nor can he generate the most popular movie from the 1850s, etc., nor can he know the position and momentum of an electron with infinite precision, because those objects and concepts do not exist so asking about them is meaningless)
The solution to the problem of disbelief is simple, of course - God wouldn't care what happens - he already *knows* everything that could, can, did, and will happen - what he doesn't know is what choices you will make, and not believing in God is one of those choices. Free will, and all that.
I call my belief "atheism" because it's very strong, akin to my belief in conservation of mass-energy. I find it useful to distinguish between an extremely strong belief which would take super-extraordinary evidence to dispute ("atheism") versus a genuine significant doubt ("agnosticism").
Careful - atheism isn't a logic term, it means "no God." You can't be "atheistic" towards telepathy - come up with a different term for that.
Anyway, it's very curious that you can actually believe "there is no God, but it's possible that I could be proven wrong."
In actuality, there is no possibility that you could be proven wrong - so it is not falsifiable. It still could be wrong - it's just not capable of being proven wrong.
Think about it. How could someone prove to you that there is a God?
Let me take one example - the same argument follows for most others, but it's easiest to show this way.
Imagine a being plops down right in front of you, and says "I'm God."
You, being atheist, say "I don't believe you. Prove it."
Now, let's assume he tries to prove it. So he does something. I don't care what. Anything - literally, anything.
You then say "OK. If you're God, then you're omniscient. So how specifically did you just do that?"
If he can tell you, he no longer needs to be God to have done what he did - he's just someone who knows how the Universe works better than you do. (Here's a hint: "I'm God" is not an answer to a 'How' question. It would be like a doctor, after saving someone's life, saying "I'm a doctor" when asked how he did it.)
If he can't tell you, he's not omniscient, and not God.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Note that I did not just prove God doesn't exist. Only that you can't prove God exists.
The existence of God is something that is a real, pure belief. Believe what you want, believe it for whatever reasons you want, but you'll never be proven wrong, either way.
Wrong. He didn't say, "What you didn't do for everyone," he said, "whatever you did not do for one of the least of these...."
My typo. Should've said "anyone", not everyone. I changed the wording and mistyped. Feel free to argue that "the least of..." is not "anyone", but if you do, I'll ignore you, as you're arguing semantics.
I work form the understanding that the Bible means what it says and says what it means
The problem is you're taking more "meaning" than what was there. The fallacy is this:
X, Y, Z happened, you get in
~X, ~Y, ~Z happened, you go to hell.
If you state both of those things, the only conclusion you can make is that ~X, ~Y, ~Z cause you to go to hell, not that you must do X, Y, and Z to get in. (This is assuming that A causes B means B requires A, which is not true).
It does mean that doing X, Y, Z will get you in (it's the contrapositive), but it does not mean that you must do X, Y, Z.
I don't think so. What is "the divine" lives in the imaginations of humans and I have yet to see any evidence to the contrary that is even remotely convincing.
I said can, not is. You haven't given proof that it can't, just said that you haven't seen proof that it is.
Jesus did not say anything about "denying giving help."
Do you want me to speak in sentences that are five lines long? This is the entire point of boiling things down. And boiling down is not interpretation - it's reduction (I wish that symbolic logic representations of language was a more fleshed-out science... sigh). The people who did not do X, Y, and Z (all of which were descriptions of helping people in need) go to hell. Reducing that to "those who do not help people in need go to hell" is presumptive, yes, but it is a logical extension.
You know, arguing against the Bible by strict interpretation is just as bad as arguing for it - the simple fact is that certain things that we're saying now could not even be said then. Did they even have words for some of the concepts we're talking about?
Clearly they weren't said in English, either, so the only way to strictly interpret what the Bible said is to go back in time to when it was written, and live the lives of the people who wrote it, and then read it.
And then, of course, you completely throw out any possibility of metaphors, examples, and parables, where the meaning has to be inferred no matter what.
Jesus states that the final judgement will be based on works and works alone
Faith and works are the same thing - that's what I said. If you believe, then the works will follow. Thus, if A=B, and B=C, A=C, so faith gets you in as well. Same thing.
This assumes that Hindus, Muslims, Jews, etc. need to be saved, and I certainly disagree with that assumption
No, you assumed that. I assumed nothing. There is a common argument in Christian dogma and a common argument from outside the religion asking if all people outside of the religion are damned. The usual answer is "yes, because they must believe in Christ", and it's flawed, because of what I said before - belief, faith, and works are the same thing.
What people need is an entirely different argument that I won't even begin to touch. And that was a red herring fallacy, by the way.
I disagree with you on a few points. Defining god as the universe sounds kind of neat, but it doesn't really work on a few levels. First, there are many in the scientific community who believe the the universe is very large, but still finite.
The universe is (almost definitely) finite in volume. Either way doesn't change what I said, because the concept of "space" outside of "space" doesn't make sense.
Omniscient? Now that's a stretch.
No it's not - it's a tautology, actually - true by construction. The Universe contains the totality of time (the Universe is all spacetime that exists), and therefore, everything that happened happened within the Universe. Therefore, the Universe contains the sum totality of occurences, and therefore, all knowledge.
(Don't pull the possibility of 'multiple Universes' into the argument at this point. It's semantics - you just need to sed s/Universe/Whatever you want to call it/ for the collection of what you now call 'universes'. Maybe 'existence' would be a good term to use?)
From a more scientific point, omniscient, for an object, would be "containing all information possible", which is equivalent to the sum total of entropy. The Universe contains all entropy, since it encompasses all space (and time), so therefore it is omniscient.
However, there is more to omniscience than calling something a set of all knowledge.
No, there isn't, and not even in the colloquial sense of the word. A computer with all knowledge would be considered omniscient, would it not?
The set doesn't 'know' anything at all, we just said we defined it as such.
You're anthropomorphizing, which is a separate argument. I said if you define God as an omniscient, omnipotent object, the Universe is God, by construction.
That's not the typical definition of God, which is an omnipotent, omniscient being. The question is not whether or not something can be omnipotent and omniscient (because, as just stated, the Universe is omnipotent and omniscient), but whether or not there exists a being with said characteristics.
Since will is something that is unprovable outside of the object with will, that question is ultimately one of belief.
If you do those things, you go to heaven. Otherwise, you roast in hell. If you disagree with this, then you are disagreeing with Jesus. Your likely response is to argue, "That's what Jesus said
Actually, that's not what he said. He was asked "'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?'" and replied "I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me."
Let's boil it down:
"Lord, when did we see you in need and didn't do anything?"
"What you didn't do for everyone, you didn't do for me."
The implication is not "Help people in need", it's "Don't deny giving help to people in need". The two are strictly different - so be careful when making a strawman argument like that (and yes, it is a strawman - taking a statement and exaggerating it for dramatic benefit).
The words that I have my son repeat are, "I'm a good person and I deserve to be happy."
Ack! That's just as dangerous! You don't deserve anything. Not to be happy, not to be sad, not anything. Life is what it is. Believing that you deserve to be happy is dangerous, because when you fall on hard times, you blame life, rather than accepting the hard times and moving on. Life is about living, and believing that your life is inferior because of some preexisting ideal that you "deserve" is very dangerous.
Incorrect again. The majority of the New Testament is the creation of the "Christian" doctrine by Paul.
Not going to have an argument from me here. There's some good in what Paul said, but there's a lot of chaff. (Better not wear hats in church, and don't shave your beard. Yah. That's a good one.)
Not going to hear me argue the text of the Bible isn't flawed, either. Of course it is. Any language it's written in is imperfect, because all languages are imperfect mappings of thought into words. The meaning is different, however - the meaning *can* be divine, but if you hear the meaning through someone else, it won't be, as they're an imperfect mapping as well.
(No religion would ever espouse this, though, I imagine, because it would mean that a priest or preacher's opinion isn't divine)
The criteria is works and works alone.
You're presuming that works and faith in this case are separate, when they don't need to be. Faith is belief in something - *real* belief, and belief without any reason to believe. Obviously those who didn't get in didn't believe in Christ - because they sure as heck didn't act like they did.
This is a very common statement in most Christian doctrines, and it drives me nuts, just for the reasons you pointed out. You don't even have to know you have faith in something to have faith in it. To give an example, most people don't ever think about whether or not they exist - they just believe it, without even knowing they believe it.
(This, of course, solves the problem of whether or not Hindus, Muslims, Jews, etc. can be saved. Of course they can.)
I'm sorry, but I'm not going to start believing in a being that behaves worse than a spoiled child, threatens those he says he loves, posseses contradictory powers, and has the morals of a sociopath. Especially when there are several such, all claiming to be the only one. And each on is running a different racket than the next, with the only major items in common is that the head believers all get special privilages here in this life, and a series of directives that make not believing a good way to get killed, or in more 'enlightened' cultures/times, meerly treated like a second class citizen and a leper.
You know, normally I wouldn't reply here, because in general I agree with you.
However, you are being a bit harsh - it might be better to say that you're not going to go associating yourself with people who believe in something, yet so completely ignore what they say they believe in. You can't hold a deity responsible for the actions of its followers - especially when the deity has given them free will.
Humans suck. A lot. But the existence of a lot of sucky religions just means there are a lot of people that suck, not that a deity doesn't exist. If you don't want to believe that a deity exists, fine. Don't believe it. But don't try to justify it by the actions of sucky humans. Justify it on its own merits, and nothing else. (What's that fallacy? Non sequitur? Or Division?)
You did have one attack on the actual statement - "has contradictory powers". But God - that is, an omnipotent, omniscient being - does not have contradictory powers. That's poor logic - the concept of sets encompassing infinity fixes that problem. As proof, consider: If God were defined as an omniscient, omnipotent object, then it's provable that it exists - it would be the Universe, which, by construction, is omnipotent and omniscient. Omniscient implies knowing all that is knowable, and omnipotent implies capable of all that is capable, which is strictly true for the Universe. It's only when claiming that God is a being - that is, an object with will - that problems come into play, and that belief matters.
Everyone says what an excellent set of rules they are, but I don't know anyone that has managed to keep them.
Why do people keep pushing the Ten Commandments? Half the problem with Judaism at the time was that it was "function" lacking "form". After all, what happens when there's a conflict between two of the Ten Commandments (your parents tell you to kill someone, for instance)? That's why Christ simplified it in the New Testament.
Even Judaism realized that later on - What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellowman. This is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary.
(Yes, I know that Matthew 6 says that Christ said that the old rules still apply. Of course they do. They always will. The problem was that somehow people managed to miss the meaning of them - to God, they were obvious. To man, apparently it was too much.)
There's no difficult list of rules, either.
Yes there is - it's all through Matthew 5-7, though it boils down to the above - Love God above all others, and love your neighbor as yourself. That's it.
And those commandments are much easier to understand.
(So why are people pushing so hard for the Ten Commandments in courts? The Golden Rule is almost completely universal in almost all religions, and it has a lot less "wiggle room" - you're still a dork if you think about killing someone and don't do it, for instance)
Anyway, my point is that if you're pushing Christian doctrine, you shouldn't be pushing the Ten Commandments. You should be pushing the Golden Rule.
Note that I'm not commenting on what's necessary to get into heaven - that's a matter of belief in my eyes, though I firmly believe that any religion that believes that just saying the magic words "I believe in Jesus Christ" saves me, and the converse (not saying it means I can't be saved) is crazy - function without form. I can believe something without stating it. Heck, I can have faith and belief in something without knowing it.
But I'll stop there.
Read the Ars Technica article on the PM - its main benefits are instruction grouping and a massively improved branch predictor. Intel claims that just the branch predictor alone improves the PM's performance by 6%, and a 6% jump in real-world performance is very impressive. All in all, with all of the PM's improvements, it's about 15-20% clock-for-clock faster than the P3 was.
Don't judge the PM by its roots - it's a much newer design than the old P3, and I can't imagine that clock-for-clock, the Athlon and the PM wouldn't be very competitive.
The PM is one of the highest IPC x86 processors out there. You can't just improve on it easily.