Or why is two modes to interface with the machine to begin with. I just got my wife a new computer yesterday and used Win8 for the first time and find myself lost. I am wondering why Metro? Which corner is magic and why? How do I close IE that when started from metro runs as full screen and provides no way to close the application. I hate it... and wish I could backdrop to Win7.
The vast majority of Western Christians do not really "put the afterlife ahead of this life". They live this life in as much luxury and comfort as the next guy. I will agree with you though that giving up this life for the next is the message of the New Testament, which is largely ignored or muted. I will also agree that this sort of thinking can be dangerous and harmful. The chances of success of any endeavour (such as human society) depends greatly upon how well "mental maps" correspond to reality.
I wonder though if Buddhism doesn't have a similar issue with a complete focus on personal "enlightment" which can cause people to become reclusive and self-focused. For example, what are the significant buddhists contributions to science?
I've seen someone resurrect, amongst numerous other things we won't even go into..
Have you ever seen someones amputated limb restored? Isn't it odd how such claimed miracles always happen within that gray area where unequivocal documentation just isn't avaliable.
I would likely ignore any further comments that try to discredit things I believe, which is not ignorance because I know nearly every side to that argument.
Sounds like a preemptive statement of wilful ignorance with an armour plating of dunning kruger.
Personally I would make a statement almost 180 degree opposite of yours. I will listen to and consider all evidence and welcome critiques of what I believe. I known full well my limitations as a finite creature and do not know every side of any argument and have positioned myself to accept possible changes in my beliefs or worldviews in accordance with the availble data.
Again, another human being applying their petty knowledge and understandings against God. God could create a diamond in front of your face that science could test to be older than anything tested in creation, yet you witnessed with your own eyes that it is only days old.
You are begging the question.
Cosmology is better left to explain how God has set things in motion and the rules He has established regarding them, however it should not be used to explain things God has done out of order or contrary to the laws of creation. Those are one offs and it neither disproves or competes with cosmology.
One offs... wtf. Claims the earth was created 4 days before the stars? That women was created from man's rib? Your ignorance is appalling.
Your attribution of clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel is really just your own opinion and is only an example of your ignorance.
I have found that every person against God has zero hesitation in blaming God for everything that goes wrong, but seems silent regarding God when things go right. The incoherency is within you and your ability to hold a double standard is in obvious view.
I am not against God but your very twisted and primitive concepts of God.
I never understood why faith and evolution stand so far apart from each other. I'm a devout Catholic, and evolution makes sense, both scientifically and theologically. The Bible talks about God creating humans, but it doesn't say exactly how, other than that he was formed from the dust of the earth... which sounds a lot like evolution.
The Bible claims that the earth was formed before the stars and the sun? Does that sound a lot like modern cosmology or early iron age myths. Does women being a secondary after thought and was formed later from the rib of man sound a lot like evolutionary history?
Further do you really believe that an Omni God would resort to a process that has been accurately described "'clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel works of nature" as a means to produce creatures in his likeness? You don't find any incoherency in this view.
You're right here. However if one takes the time and understands simple evidences such as ring species, biogeography, vestigial structures, primate ERV distribution between related species, etc. there just isn't any controversy.
However those that use the argument of divine simplicity engage in rampant equivocation. First they will argue for a divinely simple god and then will refer to god as a complex personal individual with a will, desires, wrathful, loving, etc.
Secondly the invoking of immaterial substance as a means to describe god is nothing short of invoking magic... evidently this supposed uncomposite immaterial substance is somehow capable of infinite power? Would any rational person really argue this in public?
Thirdly the concept of God as a "simple in structure" without "bits and pieces" implies that God contains NO information as per information theory. For some Being (material or immaterial) to possess information it has to have some sort of differentiation. So this theory ludicrously proposes a Being with infinite information (Omniscience) and yet is incapable of possessing any information.
I'm interested to hear Dawkin's answer to this as I frequently discuss with Christians who say that evolution poses no issue to being Christian. I still haven't heard a satisfactory answer to my question when I find people who hold this view:
Evolution as currently understood precludes a real Adam and Eve and therefore a literal Fall. If there was no Fall, then what need is there for a Savior? If the Fall is not literal but symbolic, then why not a symbolic Savior (i.e. God could just forgive)? If there is no need for a literal Savior, then Christianity has no foundation and can be discarded as untrue. The apostle Paul certainly seemed to belive that Adam was a real literal person and supports the need for a literal Christ (1 Corinthians 15)
How do you square the non-existance of a real Adam and Eve with your Christian beliefs?
Bump this one.
Further combining evolution and Christianity has to cause one to wonder why a good and omni-powerful God would resort to such a horribly cruel and inefficient process where pain/suffering is pervasive just to produce humans - beings created allegedly in the image of God?
I don't see how Christianity can comfortably co-exist with evolution. The fundamental incompatibility is why Christians (theists in general) have railed against it from the release of the Origin of the Species.
So do you think God - a Being with a volition, desires, preferences, consciousness, personality, etc - can spring from said void?
The classic special pleading of theism. The way they often get out of this is to claim that God is simple and not complex... this usually involves some hand waving about immaterial substances but avoids information theory and all other principles that undercut their position. Even Plantiga distances himself from Divine Simplicity but then envokes a certain flavor of it to counter Dawkins complexity argument.
With respect to the improbabilities of life in this universe the grandparent has not done his homework and is just retreating to a camoflauged god of the gaps argument.
Evolution is caustic to Christianity. Do you really believe that an Omnipotent and Omniscient God would resort to a process that has been described as a 'clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel'? What sort of god is that? The Problem of Evil looms large.
I don't understand how anyone can hold evolution and Christianity in the head at the same time. Did God intend to create the bot fly and guinea worm or are these just artifacts of the messy process of creating beings in his own likeness? Bizarre.
Further what are the reasons behind Jesus' supposed sacrifice? To atone for what?
You know the story line: God sacrificed itself to itself to atone for the sins of his own faulty creation. Makes sense?
The other scam out there is the vanity textbook. This is where publisher takes a few pages from a professor inserts them into chapter appendixes and voila the prof gets the ego boost as a textbook publisher, these textbooks can't be use on the open market as they are custom, the textbook companies make more money, and the poor student pays for it all.
he creates disease, pain, suffering. he's quite the DNA expert.
That is the problem with this contrived new-age approach (ie old earth creationism) is that God comes out looking very limited or evil entity. Of course the traditional explanation for these things you mention are the Fall. However these defects have been in existence long before there were any humans to "Fall". The gloss approach express in the grandparent is flawed on so many different levels.
It is myth people! Attempting to find coherence of a myth to reality is a fools errand.
For example, if you look at the creation account in Genesis, and take into account that the word that translates as "Day" can also mean "period of time", "Age", or "epoch", and not necessarily a defined period of time, then you can easily interpret it as mirroring what science tells us about how the Earth was formed and life evolved.
Genesis is hopelessly flawed, It is a earth and human centered creation account.
According to Genesis earth was created "epochs" before the Sun and stars! Also it is (as is religion in general) very ego-centric in that it teaches that all this (that is the universe) is created for humans... hog wash. Ego-centric religions must go the way of animal sacrificing religions... in the dust bin where they belong.
God is quite capable of using DNA and RNA and quantum mechanics and other theories which we have yet to learn about to make people and the world.
What sort of God do you refer to?
Do you really think that a good God would resort to 4 Billion years of "clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel works" to make people? This positions imagines a malevolent God more akin to a devil.
Two months of fixes and tweaks is reasonable. I generally allow for that also... however if something comes up, even years later that I consider a negligent defect I fix for free and don't look back. One recent example that came up is bug for not escaping special characters in a XML text field.
I'm admittedly not religious, but I don't follow your argument (well, not yours but the one you're relating). If 'the fall of man' is defined as mankind disobeying god why does the fall have to happen precisely in the way genesis describes? Is there a man alive who has followed all of God's rules (as defined in by the Bible since our discussion is already centered on Christianity)? I doubt it. We all disobey so logically we have all fallen (I'm sure an apologist could argue that even being tempted to disobey is a sign of having falling), where would the contradiction exist in that scenario?
For one thing the "fall" is often used as a way to account for the death and destruction in the natural world. God did not design the parasites/predators/deformities/etc. these are just the result of the fallen world.... a world that is fallen from that which was good.
Secondly, If humans are evolved apes then how can you hold people accountable for what is really just part of their evolutionary history? Why would a creator God require "blood atonement" in order to rectify the sins of creatures that are the way they are based on genetics and culture? The whole free-will defense falls apart because humans were not created fully formed but are part of a slow evolutionary process (both biologically, socially and culturally).
Finally, the whole blood atonement thing on which Jesus' sacrifice is based-on certainly should cause one to rethink the whole Christian story to begin with... some have noted the bizarre notion of a God that sacrifices itself to appease itself of the deeds of its own faulty creation. Even just the notion of a God that requires mammal blood sacrifice should be enough to raise a concern or two?
BTW, the "rules defined in the Bible" are incredibly archaic and even permit things we find abhorrent.. chattel slavery, women as property, genocide, etc. So to work from that angle is difficult unless you are very selective. IMHO these are obviously rules created by men and NOT a divine overload.
Slashdot Mirror
Or why is two modes to interface with the machine to begin with. I just got my wife a new computer yesterday and used Win8 for the first time and find myself lost. I am wondering why Metro? Which corner is magic and why? How do I close IE that when started from metro runs as full screen and provides no way to close the application. I hate it... and wish I could backdrop to Win7.
You beat me to it. Even sweeter.
From the article "Just 60W of power – just enough for a lightbulb – is needed to operate one tower per day."
Why is do journalist always mix-up the notions of instantaneous power and quantity of energy?
Does it have \r\n or just \n?
The vast majority of Western Christians do not really "put the afterlife ahead of this life". They live this life in as much luxury and comfort as the next guy. I will agree with you though that giving up this life for the next is the message of the New Testament, which is largely ignored or muted. I will also agree that this sort of thinking can be dangerous and harmful. The chances of success of any endeavour (such as human society) depends greatly upon how well "mental maps" correspond to reality.
I wonder though if Buddhism doesn't have a similar issue with a complete focus on personal "enlightment" which can cause people to become reclusive and self-focused. For example, what are the significant buddhists contributions to science?
I've seen someone resurrect, amongst numerous other things we won't even go into..
Have you ever seen someones amputated limb restored? Isn't it odd how such claimed miracles always happen within that gray area where unequivocal documentation just isn't avaliable.
I would likely ignore any further comments that try to discredit things I believe, which is not ignorance because I know nearly every side to that argument.
Sounds like a preemptive statement of wilful ignorance with an armour plating of dunning kruger.
Personally I would make a statement almost 180 degree opposite of yours. I will listen to and consider all evidence and welcome critiques of what I believe. I known full well my limitations as a finite creature and do not know every side of any argument and have positioned myself to accept possible changes in my beliefs or worldviews in accordance with the availble data.
Again, another human being applying their petty knowledge and understandings against God. God could create a diamond in front of your face that science could test to be older than anything tested in creation, yet you witnessed with your own eyes that it is only days old.
You are begging the question.
Cosmology is better left to explain how God has set things in motion and the rules He has established regarding them, however it should not be used to explain things God has done out of order or contrary to the laws of creation. Those are one offs and it neither disproves or competes with cosmology.
One offs... wtf. Claims the earth was created 4 days before the stars? That women was created from man's rib? Your ignorance is appalling.
Your attribution of clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel is really just your own opinion and is only an example of your ignorance.
I have found that every person against God has zero hesitation in blaming God for everything that goes wrong, but seems silent regarding God when things go right. The incoherency is within you and your ability to hold a double standard is in obvious view.
I am not against God but your very twisted and primitive concepts of God.
Jesus said there will always be the poor among you.
I never understood why faith and evolution stand so far apart from each other. I'm a devout Catholic, and evolution makes sense, both scientifically and theologically. The Bible talks about God creating humans, but it doesn't say exactly how, other than that he was formed from the dust of the earth... which sounds a lot like evolution.
The Bible claims that the earth was formed before the stars and the sun? Does that sound a lot like modern cosmology or early iron age myths. Does women being a secondary after thought and was formed later from the rib of man sound a lot like evolutionary history?
Further do you really believe that an Omni God would resort to a process that has been accurately described "'clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel works of nature" as a means to produce creatures in his likeness? You don't find any incoherency in this view.
You're right here. However if one takes the time and understands simple evidences such as ring species, biogeography, vestigial structures, primate ERV distribution between related species, etc. there just isn't any controversy.
No doubt. Education is caustic to religious fantasies that are outdated and primitive. Science undercuts the traditional religious foundations.
However those that use the argument of divine simplicity engage in rampant equivocation. First they will argue for a divinely simple god and then will refer to god as a complex personal individual with a will, desires, wrathful, loving, etc.
Secondly the invoking of immaterial substance as a means to describe god is nothing short of invoking magic... evidently this supposed uncomposite immaterial substance is somehow capable of infinite power? Would any rational person really argue this in public?
Thirdly the concept of God as a "simple in structure" without "bits and pieces" implies that God contains NO information as per information theory. For some Being (material or immaterial) to possess information it has to have some sort of differentiation. So this theory ludicrously proposes a Being with infinite information (Omniscience) and yet is incapable of possessing any information.
The challenge of course will be for the post to get a "5 Informative"
I'm interested to hear Dawkin's answer to this as I frequently discuss with Christians who say that evolution poses no issue to being Christian. I still haven't heard a satisfactory answer to my question when I find people who hold this view:
Evolution as currently understood precludes a real Adam and Eve and therefore a literal Fall. If there was no Fall, then what need is there for a Savior? If the Fall is not literal but symbolic, then why not a symbolic Savior (i.e. God could just forgive)? If there is no need for a literal Savior, then Christianity has no foundation and can be discarded as untrue. The apostle Paul certainly seemed to belive that Adam was a real literal person and supports the need for a literal Christ (1 Corinthians 15)
How do you square the non-existance of a real Adam and Eve with your Christian beliefs?
Bump this one.
Further combining evolution and Christianity has to cause one to wonder why a good and omni-powerful God would resort to such a horribly cruel and inefficient process where pain/suffering is pervasive just to produce humans - beings created allegedly in the image of God?
I don't see how Christianity can comfortably co-exist with evolution. The fundamental incompatibility is why Christians (theists in general) have railed against it from the release of the Origin of the Species.
I resemble that remark.
So do you think God - a Being with a volition, desires, preferences, consciousness, personality, etc - can spring from said void?
The classic special pleading of theism. The way they often get out of this is to claim that God is simple and not complex... this usually involves some hand waving about immaterial substances but avoids information theory and all other principles that undercut their position. Even Plantiga distances himself from Divine Simplicity but then envokes a certain flavor of it to counter Dawkins complexity argument.
With respect to the improbabilities of life in this universe the grandparent has not done his homework and is just retreating to a camoflauged god of the gaps argument.
Evolution is caustic to Christianity. Do you really believe that an Omnipotent and Omniscient God would resort to a process that has been described as a 'clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel'? What sort of god is that? The Problem of Evil looms large.
I don't understand how anyone can hold evolution and Christianity in the head at the same time. Did God intend to create the bot fly and guinea worm or are these just artifacts of the messy process of creating beings in his own likeness? Bizarre.
Further what are the reasons behind Jesus' supposed sacrifice? To atone for what?
You know the story line: God sacrificed itself to itself to atone for the sins of his own faulty creation. Makes sense?
The other scam out there is the vanity textbook. This is where publisher takes a few pages from a professor inserts them into chapter appendixes and voila the prof gets the ego boost as a textbook publisher, these textbooks can't be use on the open market as they are custom, the textbook companies make more money, and the poor student pays for it all.
he creates disease, pain, suffering. he's quite the DNA expert.
That is the problem with this contrived new-age approach (ie old earth creationism) is that God comes out looking very limited or evil entity. Of course the traditional explanation for these things you mention are the Fall. However these defects have been in existence long before there were any humans to "Fall". The gloss approach express in the grandparent is flawed on so many different levels.
It is myth people! Attempting to find coherence of a myth to reality is a fools errand.
For example, if you look at the creation account in Genesis, and take into account that the word that translates as "Day" can also mean "period of time", "Age", or "epoch", and not necessarily a defined period of time, then you can easily interpret it as mirroring what science tells us about how the Earth was formed and life evolved.
Genesis is hopelessly flawed, It is a earth and human centered creation account.
According to Genesis earth was created "epochs" before the Sun and stars! Also it is (as is religion in general) very ego-centric in that it teaches that all this (that is the universe) is created for humans... hog wash. Ego-centric religions must go the way of animal sacrificing religions... in the dust bin where they belong.
God is quite capable of using DNA and RNA and quantum mechanics and other theories which we have yet to learn about to make people and the world.
What sort of God do you refer to?
Do you really think that a good God would resort to 4 Billion years of "clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel works" to make people? This positions imagines a malevolent God more akin to a devil.
Well great... publicize the time and location and you are just making the formidable Mars Homeland Security's job easy. Loose lips sinks ships.
Two months of fixes and tweaks is reasonable. I generally allow for that also... however if something comes up, even years later that I consider a negligent defect I fix for free and don't look back. One recent example that came up is bug for not escaping special characters in a XML text field.
Errr no. there are no such rule or commands. Distortions are never helpful.
I'm admittedly not religious, but I don't follow your argument (well, not yours but the one you're relating). If 'the fall of man' is defined as mankind disobeying god why does the fall have to happen precisely in the way genesis describes? Is there a man alive who has followed all of God's rules (as defined in by the Bible since our discussion is already centered on Christianity)? I doubt it. We all disobey so logically we have all fallen (I'm sure an apologist could argue that even being tempted to disobey is a sign of having falling), where would the contradiction exist in that scenario?
For one thing the "fall" is often used as a way to account for the death and destruction in the natural world. God did not design the parasites/predators/deformities/etc. these are just the result of the fallen world.... a world that is fallen from that which was good.
Secondly, If humans are evolved apes then how can you hold people accountable for what is really just part of their evolutionary history? Why would a creator God require "blood atonement" in order to rectify the sins of creatures that are the way they are based on genetics and culture? The whole free-will defense falls apart because humans were not created fully formed but are part of a slow evolutionary process (both biologically, socially and culturally).
Finally, the whole blood atonement thing on which Jesus' sacrifice is based-on certainly should cause one to rethink the whole Christian story to begin with... some have noted the bizarre notion of a God that sacrifices itself to appease itself of the deeds of its own faulty creation. Even just the notion of a God that requires mammal blood sacrifice should be enough to raise a concern or two?
BTW, the "rules defined in the Bible" are incredibly archaic and even permit things we find abhorrent.. chattel slavery, women as property, genocide, etc. So to work from that angle is difficult unless you are very selective. IMHO these are obviously rules created by men and NOT a divine overload.