Saying that the existence of Reality confirms the existence of God is a specious argument that bites it's own tail.
Are you trying to pull my chain, or just plain dumb? I didn't say that, and nor was it my argument. Go back and read it again. Oh... hang on, there's a third realistic option: if you have a previous commitment to agnosticism (`God cannot be known' or `God is separate from the material world') that would just about do it. If so, reboot and reinstall. Let's get this show on the road...
I haven't seen anything on Yellowstones forests - but I can well imagine a mechanism that would explain it (like repeated volcanic eruptions that flattened and covered the forests).
The forests weren't flattened, that's the whole point, and the surrounding rock is alluvial, not metamorphic, which rules out lava flows. The dendrochronology shows that the trees pertaining to hundreds of feet of rock were related, ergo, grew at the same time, ergo, the whole lot was laid down before the trees could significantly rot.
This is not an isolated datum, there are manythings which have to havehappenedveryquickly. And if these things which have been upheld as taking aeons took minutes or months, what of other measures? (Follow the links, there are deeper explanations and you get to read about eagles with 25-foot wingspans, ancient engineering done with 2000-tonne blocks of stone, and all manner of other spectacular stuff)
one reason is that while he is (supposedly) omniescent, Nature has rules and limitations. The reality I observe follows those rules, not Gods Ten Commandments.
That's exactly how it's supposed to be. The Commandments are for us, not for jellyfish or leopards. You'll also find that the decayed and decaying state of life on earth is as predicted. God is not nature, nature is not God. Uh, surprise, that means they work differently? The Bible specifically mentions nature obeying God's rules for it.
show me a burning bush and I'll look for evidence of matches and starter fluid
OK, let me tell you about my friend Dave Hatch.
Dave was born with a split face; he'd be about 70 now, so as you can imagine the surgical techniques of the day were pretty shoddy. In fact, what they did was crush up some of the bones of his face, push them around like plasticene into a `better' shape, splint them, wait for them to heal, and repeat. Naturally enough, one day that stopped working, and as Dave put it `all I knew was that they were suddenly buying me lots of toys and being really nice to me' - they were preparing for Dave to die.
A miracle-working evangelist came to town, and having little to lose, his parents took him along, presented his case, brought him him, followed the directions, and nothing happened.
Very early the following morning, Dave's face started to feel `funny' so he went in and woke up his parents. They were petrified because they thought it meant he was about to die on the spot or something like that. They grabbed a torch and watched, gobsmacked, as Dave's face healed and grew out to where it was supposed to have been, over the course of about two hours.
Perhaps understandably, their MD got very angry and confused and refused to deal with the situation when they went in to see him. Now exactly what you attribute that healing to is another question, but it certainly wasn't natural. Not even a salamander can do that.
Basically, you are saved solely by your faith, but it does take deeds, or at least trying to abstain from sin, to keep that faith.
As usual, it's even simpler than that. As James says, if your faith is not working (producing righteous deeds) then it is dead, ie, not faith in the living One.
It's all around you. You are proof, too. Every feature of you, but for the existence of God, is at the end of a very long chain of water-flowing-uphill-style materialistic miracles. Occam's Razor says: the simplest explanation wins. The God Hypothesis requires many orders of magnitude fewer miracles than the No God Hypothesis, so it is much more reasonable to accept it.
Alternatively, take the opposite approach, and simply disprove the No God Hypothesis. Conventional science is just plain wrong in many areas. All of the `proofs' for long ages and slow development suffer each one of the following fatal flaws:
based on a priori commitment to (and so contextual assumptions based on) one side of the point in question
unrepeatable
mutually contradictory with other such `proofs'
contradicted by what we can observe
For an example of those latter two, Dendrochronolgy as a device to establish long ages has been called into question within the feild, yet has been able to establish that the many layers of the Yellowstone Fossil Forests were all laid down together, or at least in very quick succession (a matter of a few decades at the very most). Spirit Lake is demonstrating a suitable mechanism for us now. Similar examples abound.
Actually, they aren't going to suffer unendingly; Sodom and Gomorrha's smoke rose `for ever' too...
Not unendingly? I'm not sure if I understood correctly what you're saying - English is not my native language, so pardon me if I misunderstood, but surely you aren't saying the damned will not be in Hell for eternity?
Their remains will be destroyed, their punishment will be forever. As it was with Sodom and Gomorrha, so with the unrepentant,
Perhaps this is some difference in the views of our respective Christian branches? If so, I'd really like to know.
Not so much a difference between denominations, as a difference between schools of thought. Once Luther himself exited stage left, the wind went out of Lutheranism's theological sails, and the remaining leadership, however well intended, stalled theologically and are now in caretaker mode. So much so that they're willing to sell the farm to the fox in order to be able to afford to feed the chickens (ie slowly merge with the Roman Catholic Church).
I'm Lutheran myself, but basically my view is just that the Bible is the entire divine revelation (so that's where I differ from at least Catholics, AFAICT) and if my church takes some position which is clearly against what the Bible says, it's the church who is wrong.
The church is wrong. Given the state of the world, you can say that with some degree of confidence about any church (or individual). But unless the church believes that it is wrong, it won't repent, it won't accept change, it cannot progress - but natural attrition ensures that it will backslide. And watch the RCC doctrines be slid in, slowly but surely, as has happened to the Anglicans.
Back at the theology: the `second death' - the price of which Christ has paid for every single individual on the planet, whether they refuse it or not - is permanent and final. How could the Universe be holy, all peace and righteousness, with an oasis of perpetually tortured sinners somewhere in it?
Email me for chapter and verse, 99% of this audience don't want to know.
Ignorant people do not slice up and cart around 2000-tonne blocks of stone
Ignorance is about not knowing things.
Yes, like how to slice and move 2000 tonne blocks of stone. We need stuff like braced, pressurised skirts and a fleet of bulldozers. How did they do it? Please don't be ignorant enough to suggest ant-power, rollers, greased planks or ice; stick to answers with at least a hint of practical engineering in them.
it should have been obvious that the context was not about all the ancient peoples, but specificly those that wrote the bible's creation story. THEY obviously didn't know, since they believed an earth-centric creation story.
The tablet footnotes indicate that the initial part of the records was dictated to Adam. Starlight and Time is another geocentric creation story, sort of. But you can't call Russell Humphries ignorant, since he's made major contributions to all manner of physics fields, and Sandia aren't in the habit of hiring idiot researchers and keeping them on for 30 or so years.
I personally believe that God would rather have an honest follower that examined the facts, than a sycophantic follower that "believes" because s/he's afraid of Hell.
Respect, rather than terror. FWIW, a sensible God would arrange things that way, but when the rubber meets the road `sensible' is only our opinion. Until you find a way of refining your picture of God (eg, RTFM instead of relying on opinion) you have no way of knowing that your opinion has value.
So, a psychological understanding of religion is helpful in trying to figure out what is going on in the world, but not out of some misguided attempt to disprove religion.
Just remember that you have no way of showing that the tangible is all that exists.
You believe in electricity (-: I presume:-) but cannot sense it directly (the closest you can come is feeling your muscles react involuntarily to it). Others believe in hadrons with considerably less personal evidence.
For a God to be any use, He cannot fulfil your expectations of Him, cannot be reliably controlled by you.
I didn't bother getting bogged down in philosophy at first, I just looked for things (mainly prophecy and miracles, both `mundane' and spectacular) and added them up.
Materialism requires billions upon billions of miracles to explain life as we see it, miracles of the water-flowing-uphill variety, Creationist Christianity can get by on a few hundred or thousand, which means that Occam's Razor picks it as the winner every time. There are other things to explain besides life, too! (-:
I'd been personally involved in some supernatural stuff before I did my comparisons, which I suppose helped make my transition gentler, but it was still not an easy thing.
They need the assurance that there is no God - or at least that the existence of God is very unlikely. Otherwise the thought that they are going to suffer for eternity after death gets unnerving.
Actually, they aren't going to suffer unendingly; Sodom and Gomorrha's smoke rose `for ever' too... but that's beside the point. Human nature won't submit to any restraint if it can be avoided.
When they blind themselves to God, atheists blind themselves to the need to obey Him. So-called Christians who see no particular need for obedience are simply taking one less step out of the process. In the end, of course, every knee shall bow, even knees worn by God-haters.
> only a small percent of all programs make it to the Mature stage
> [...]. Therefore, choosing products in this category allows us to > focus on the products with the best chance to build a community > around them.
Um, no?
Try interpreting things this way `Products in this category are least in need of help'. Or this: `Project leaders for this category tend to have above-average regard for the maturity of their projects, a regard which is shared by fewer others than projects with less ambitious ratings' (or `, which correlates with other `lone wolf' practices').
It would be interesting to shove a few other categories through the statistical mill and see how they compare. It would also be helpful to include mailing list numbers in the comparison, although quite a number of fixes tend to get emailed direct to developers.
Cheers; Leon
Assuming that everyone uses SourceForge according to the directions on the label is a bit naive.
Three statisticians are out duck-hunting. Here comes a duck! BLAM! The first fires, the shot goes above the duck. BLAM! The second fires, the shot goes below the duck. Excitedly, the third leaps about yelling, `we got him! we got him!'
I didnt' say people back then were dumb. I used the word "ignorant".
Oh, well, yay, there's a big improvement. Not.
Ignorant people do not slice up and cart around 2000-tonne blocks of stone as a hobby. Note that the 1100 tonne stone pictured cannot be moved by any number of sweating slaves, since no known material would make strong enough staves to get the required number of slaves near it, and the stone would break if they tried stuff like rollers.
They just didn't know any better to realize such things as "the sun is the center of the solar system and the earth goes around it."
...and speaking of ignorance... yes, they did. That was pretty clever of them because without excellent telescopes it is basically impossible to distinguish between a model involving Earth orbiting the Sun, and one involving the Sun orbiting the Earth and dragging the planets with it. Tycho Brahe proposed just such a model.
There's obviously a few gaping holes in your understanding of history. They not only understood heliocentrism, they knew enough to promptly adjust their calendars to track changes in astronomical conditions.
Because modern astronomy (and other sciences) is generally sold on gradualism, a consequence of a priori committment to materialism, they have a hard time even admitting that serious changes could take place within a historical timescale in our own solar system. A similar a priori commitment dooms atheistic Egyptologists to using the broken Sothic Cycle for dating, which throws their results out to the tune of up to 1000 years, and we're only talking maybe 4000 years ago.
Another flaw is your failure to understand tha atheism isn't a claim, nor a belief. It's the default hypothesis when evidence is lacking, and there hasn't been enough evidence yet to sway from that default hypothesis.
That's not a failure. You're describing agnosticism. Atheism is not a default condition, it is the deliberate denial of theism. You will find that your arbitrarily atheistic stance is a consequence of assuming materialism without proof.
We don't often see it as a default hypothesis because we are indoctrinated to believe in a god since early childhood, such that anything else now seems like a deviation from the norm.
Neither position can be a default. Each position is a definite statement, ergo cannot be taken until it has been considered - except ignorantly.
I'm not calling them dumb. I'm calling them ignorant.
That's very, uh, brave of you.
So... your hypothesis is apparently that mankind existed for millions of years in intelligent ignorance, and only in the last few thousand years or so has knowledge rushed in to fill the void? What evidence do you call in support of this assertion?
It contains no pigs, crayfish or other scavengers/carnivores, only references to them. AFAIK it hasn't seen a rabbinical blessing, but you could print it out on kosher paper using kosher ink and probably get that formally approved.
How long is a "day" when there isn't even a rotating earth or a sun yet?
I'll let the text explain it to you, the first words of the Bible: `In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.'
In case you missed it: before creation, there were no days. Note that God made days on day one. LILO for worlds! Note also that days were created before the sun was, and very probably for a good reason.
Of course, as an atheist, I don't see this as evidence of creationism and evolution being compatable. I see it as evidence of the story being likely made up by ordinary humans at a time when people didn't realize what causes days and nights
This is your tautology: I believe there is no God, therefore no evidence I see can be evidence of God.
Ignoring your tautology, for the sake of a good rant, it's still a pretty vacuous statement to make, given how deeply many very ancient civilisations were into astronomy. These guys built stuff like Baalbek and Sacsauaman, they weren't dumb bunnies.
Back in this century, did you know that dendrochronology has shown the Yellowstone forests to have grown contemporaneously? That WW2 aircraft were found under 200m of ice layers on Greenland after only 50 years (ta ta ice core interpretation, not that self forming O2 varves had done that idea any good)? That fresh wood has been found deep in Sydney sandstone? Peppered moths are a furphy like the horse sequence? Stanley Miller has proven his own `primitive atmosphere' experiments to be dead ends? And so on.
AFAICT, every single `evidence' for long ages has seen more than one counterexample implying extreme youth. Robert Gentry's unrefuted (no, they're not Radon 222) Polonium haloes imply a metter of seconds-to-minutes for huge amounts of base granite, which is much more in line with creation in days than `creation' in gigayears.
It's probably also time to find out about genetics and statistics. (-:
As far as I can tell, there's a big loophole in Genesis that allows for Evolution. Essentially, the loophole can be summed up in the question "how long is a day?"
Genesis 1 consistently uses a form which reads, transliterated, `and the evening was, and the morning was, day N'. You can't read this, in a straightforward manner, as thousands, millions or billions of years. Genesis 2 reiterates the creation from a different POV: Adam's instead of G-d's, which is de rigeur for ancient Hebrew. God tells us, `evening and morning,' who are you to say, `no, millennia or aeons?'
I've read the Bible, but I recall that there was enough ambiguity and strangeness in Genesis to allow room for things like Evolution if the reader was willing to put some though[t] into it
Yah, like Hebrews 4:4 `For he spake in a certain place of the seventh day on this wise, And God did rest the seventh day from all his works.' Unsurprisingly, this is referenced to Genesis 2:2 in every version I can find. Even if you stick to the OT, you regularly run aground on definite, enumerated statements like Exodus 20:8-11.
...as long as it is science being done, and not religion.
Sadly, most science is undertaken with an a priori committment to materialism: first, we assume that there is no G-d, then working from this assumption, we do science which `proves' that there is no G-d. Like, d'oh? Many leading scientists, like Shapiro, and the late Gould, have clearly stated in a variety of ways that this is the process which they use. Which means that they're doing religion, not science.
G-d has some interesting properties, from a scientific POV. He is often measurable, but not predictable. He manages the predicting, says Torah in no uncertain terms. The mistake most people make in looking for evidence of creation is in looking for perfection (`the problem of evil' is a common term for it). In light of explicit statements from G-d that this world is damaged (and as a consequence of our actions, no less), one would expect this to be an exercise in futility. Nevertheless, the evidence that people run across is occasionally too clear and direct to ignore.
My question for Moshe (Moses, Musa) is: given that significant intervention in history is an essential consequence of any effective G-d, and in particular the G-d of Torah, where do you stand on the question?
In particular, because unlike, say, Windows... a sysadmin won't be asked to `tend the fire' as often.
The bottom line for whether something fits observance of Shabbat is `does it distract me from G-d?'
Stricter flavours of Judaism hew to a massive collection of rules about how far you can walk with/without shoes, blah blah, but G-d says nothing so fine-grained or picky. Liberal Jews might rock up to the synagogue on that day - or not - but the rest of the rules are basically ignored, IMHO they're evicting the baby with the bathwater, but that's their choice. IIRC, the rule says `no touch fire on Shabbat.' Presumably this includes dealing with arson. Non-Shabbat holy days are less strict.
The only way OSS can get MS to change is to demonstrate how it can rival the profits made by MS, or give them more power, so then they can rival the profits.
Given that they already use, and admit to using (there's at least one credits list in XP somewhere thst duly lists all of their copyrightish contributors, including many, many BSDish contributors.
The _real_ trick would be getting them to correctly employ GPLed code. This unlikely scenario could, IMHO, eventually come to pass under some combo these (and other?) influences:
they really, really need the `brownie points', e.g. to head off some nasty legal or political backlash)
as a neat way of turning an albatross into gain
as a way of keeping a non-control-freak product (er, but do they have any?) alive without going to the trouble of supporting it
Bill dies and Jennifer secretly hates him.
I personally would like to deal with less sucky default system tools (telnet, ftp, find, many more) when forced to use Windows, and Microsoft could provide these pretty much instantly if they were willing to ship GPLed code.
I've often wondered why so many evolutionists are reluctant to question their foundations. Thanks for clearing that up for me!
Maybe I can clear it up a little further.
Or not....
"Questioning my foundations" is what led me to reject creationism, and favor evolution, in the first place.
And so what happened? You seem to have either stopped questioning too early, or to have based your conclusion on the strength or weakness of some individual's position, rather than on the strength or weakness of the available evidence itself.
I started my thinking life as an evolutionist. I upset Mum badly one day (but she didn't show it then or ever) by mentioning some one-line wisdom I'd heard to her in a 'phone conversation: `a man needs religion like a fish needs a bicycle.' She started praying for me that day (and asked her church to as well), said nothing to me, and within two months I was studying the Bible, history and science with a variety of people and within six months was a committed Christian - although in such a completely different branch of Christianity to hers that I think Mum died not completely convinced that her prayers had been answered.
One advantage that I've had is in directly witnessing several supernatural events, through my association at the time with a `white' witch (the basic difference is in purpose, not in methods). One of those takes a while to describe, involved two other sober people, and was deeply shocking. Another was watching some books leap out of a book-case unaided (I checked the book-case and books (and wall) all over, inside and out, carefully, and made sure that there was no mechanical trickery here) and several meters across the room. Even without that advantage, you can turn to one of the verymanyevents which were clearly supernatural, witnessed by many people, and well documented (Lloyds subsequently came back at $500 PA and extended coverage to Guyana).
I suspect that such events are not more prevalent today for several reasons, foremost among which are (1) any diety interested in wholehearted allegience would probably want it to depend on that nature of that diety, rather than on a `sugar-daddy' stream of miracles, and (2) there is apparently more than one source (direct or indirect) of supernatural effects, which opens the field more widely to fraud.
I'd presumed upon the millions-of-years thing myself, and polystratic fossils are one of the more graphic and convincing observations which overturned that presumption for me. Of course, sans millions of years, materialism doesn't even give the appearence of being in the running.
For example: the Yellowstone trees (so often cited as evidence of life over millions of years) combined with dendrochronology (also so often cited as proof of excessive amounts of time) are actually a fairly clear witness to the absence of those years, for the Yellowstone fossils are not only polystratic and bedded on different strata but also grew contemporaneously and show strong symptoms of having been emplaced by a mechanism essentially identical to that observed in Spirit Lake after the eruption.
There are many, manyothergoodpolystraticexamplesto hand, including inclined trees, and also many half-hearted attempts to explain them away. One of the common `counterexamples' is a set of lycopods with root systems; an examination of the available samples indicates that these trees grew floating, or at least on an extremely spongey substrate, so it is reasonable to expect them to be disturbed and embedded complete with roots. Even ignoring this, it is still most unreasonable to expect even relatively short (1.2m, in the worst case) stumps to be fossilised upright and intact in an evolutionary scenario.
It is the height of arrogance to assume that someone is closed minded just because they have reached a conclusion different from yours.
Yah, and the height of stupidity as well. Given the number of viewpoints in the world, simple arithmetic tells you that most or all of your (and my) opinions are globally wrong in some way. (-:
...and don't get me started on `contextually wrong'! (-:
After all, if we hold a view, it's usually because we think it is correct. Each side would do well to remember that this is true of the other side as well. I can't count the number of times I've been guilty of this error myself.
If I was a Wemmick, I'd give you at least three stars for that statement. (-:
Food-for-thought time.
Five-year-old Mary was obliged to undergo an operation, and lost so much blood that it was necessary to resort to blood transfusion. The blood of thirteen-year-old brother Jimmy was found by test to match exactly the little patient's. "Will you give your sister some of your blood, Jim?" asked the doctor. Jimmy set his teeth. "Yes, sir, if she needs it." He was prepared for the transfusion. In the midst of the drawing of the blood, the doctor observed Jimmy growing paler and paler. "Are you ill, Jim?" he asked. "No, sir, but I'm wondering just when I'll die." "Die?" gasped the doctor. "Do you think people give their lives when they give a little blood?" "Yes, sir," replied Jimmy. "And you are giving your life for Mary's?" "Yes, sir," replied Jimmy.
Mary and Jimmy are pseudonyms, but the story is true. If you had been Jimmy, would you have done the same?
While I myself would argue that an example such as this does not necessitate a "God-based worldview" I admit that that item is up for debate.
Excellent! I'm eagerly waiting to hear about a worldview which encompasses non-intrusive, non-weathered large-scale polystratism, but is not at least supernatural. (-:
I think I can say with certainty that it does not require [...] any other god that has been created by man.
Agree, an artificial God is utterly pointless, for by definition it has no more power or use than that bequeathed upon it by the hand of its creator. The basis for Christian, Muslim or other dieties is a separate question and should not be rolled into your statement as an implied assertion, when in reality it is a question which has apparently not been examined in enough detail to provide any conclusive or even substantial answers.
any attempt to convince me that you have any idea what that thing looks like or what its motiviation are is well... silly.
I reiterate, a God that you could completely understand (and so, in principle, control) is by definition a useless one.
Thankfully, we don't need to either have a description in hand, control, or even basic understanding of a putative creator in order to know that one is required in order to explain the existence of nature as we see it today.
Once you have escaped the trap of materialism, that is, once your reasoning can encompass naturalistic asymptotes, you can begin to look for more detailed explanations than `life as we know it required drastic supernatural intervention of some kind'. IMHO, such details are available to science.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, wha'd'ya know? His testimony (a slightly different telling) got archived. The rest of that page make for some fancy reading, too.
Are you trying to pull my chain, or just plain dumb? I didn't say that, and nor was it my argument. Go back and read it again. Oh... hang on, there's a third realistic option: if you have a previous commitment to agnosticism (`God cannot be known' or `God is separate from the material world') that would just about do it. If so, reboot and reinstall. Let's get this show on the road...
The forests weren't flattened, that's the whole point, and the surrounding rock is alluvial, not metamorphic, which rules out lava flows. The dendrochronology shows that the trees pertaining to hundreds of feet of rock were related, ergo, grew at the same time, ergo, the whole lot was laid down before the trees could significantly rot.
This is not an isolated datum, there are many things which have to have happened very quickly. And if these things which have been upheld as taking aeons took minutes or months, what of other measures? (Follow the links, there are deeper explanations and you get to read about eagles with 25-foot wingspans, ancient engineering done with 2000-tonne blocks of stone, and all manner of other spectacular stuff)
That's exactly how it's supposed to be. The Commandments are for us, not for jellyfish or leopards. You'll also find that the decayed and decaying state of life on earth is as predicted. God is not nature, nature is not God. Uh, surprise, that means they work differently? The Bible specifically mentions nature obeying God's rules for it.
OK, let me tell you about my friend Dave Hatch.
Dave was born with a split face; he'd be about 70 now, so as you can imagine the surgical techniques of the day were pretty shoddy. In fact, what they did was crush up some of the bones of his face, push them around like plasticene into a `better' shape, splint them, wait for them to heal, and repeat. Naturally enough, one day that stopped working, and as Dave put it `all I knew was that they were suddenly buying me lots of toys and being really nice to me' - they were preparing for Dave to die.
A miracle-working evangelist came to town, and having little to lose, his parents took him along, presented his case, brought him him, followed the directions, and nothing happened.
Very early the following morning, Dave's face started to feel `funny' so he went in and woke up his parents. They were petrified because they thought it meant he was about to die on the spot or something like that. They grabbed a torch and watched, gobsmacked, as Dave's face healed and grew out to where it was supposed to have been, over the course of about two hours.
Perhaps understandably, their MD got very angry and confused and refused to deal with the situation when they went in to see him. Now exactly what you attribute that healing to is another question, but it certainly wasn't natural. Not even a salamander can do that.
It's all around you. You are proof, too. Every feature of you, but for the existence of God, is at the end of a very long chain of water-flowing-uphill-style materialistic miracles. Occam's Razor says: the simplest explanation wins. The God Hypothesis requires many orders of magnitude fewer miracles than the No God Hypothesis, so it is much more reasonable to accept it.
Alternatively, take the opposite approach, and simply disprove the No God Hypothesis. Conventional science is just plain wrong in many areas. All of the `proofs' for long ages and slow development suffer each one of the following fatal flaws:
- based on a priori commitment to (and so contextual assumptions based on) one side of the point in question
- unrepeatable
- mutually contradictory with other such `proofs'
- contradicted by what we can observe
For an example of those latter two, Dendrochronolgy as a device to establish long ages has been called into question within the feild, yet has been able to establish that the many layers of the Yellowstone Fossil Forests were all laid down together, or at least in very quick succession (a matter of a few decades at the very most). Spirit Lake is demonstrating a suitable mechanism for us now. Similar examples abound.Their remains will be destroyed, their punishment will be forever. As it was with Sodom and Gomorrha, so with the unrepentant,
Not so much a difference between denominations, as a difference between schools of thought. Once Luther himself exited stage left, the wind went out of Lutheranism's theological sails, and the remaining leadership, however well intended, stalled theologically and are now in caretaker mode. So much so that they're willing to sell the farm to the fox in order to be able to afford to feed the chickens (ie slowly merge with the Roman Catholic Church).
The church is wrong. Given the state of the world, you can say that with some degree of confidence about any church (or individual). But unless the church believes that it is wrong, it won't repent, it won't accept change, it cannot progress - but natural attrition ensures that it will backslide. And watch the RCC doctrines be slid in, slowly but surely, as has happened to the Anglicans.
Back at the theology: the `second death' - the price of which Christ has paid for every single individual on the planet, whether they refuse it or not - is permanent and final. How could the Universe be holy, all peace and righteousness, with an oasis of perpetually tortured sinners somewhere in it?
Email me for chapter and verse, 99% of this audience don't want to know.
The tablet footnotes indicate that the initial part of the records was dictated to Adam. Starlight and Time is another geocentric creation story, sort of. But you can't call Russell Humphries ignorant, since he's made major contributions to all manner of physics fields, and Sandia aren't in the habit of hiring idiot researchers and keeping them on for 30 or so years.
Agree. However, it is possible to know enough states to get a meaningful answer. The answer is `God exists'.
ROFL! Thanks, made my day... (-:
Respect, rather than terror. FWIW, a sensible God would arrange things that way, but when the rubber meets the road `sensible' is only our opinion. Until you find a way of refining your picture of God (eg, RTFM instead of relying on opinion) you have no way of knowing that your opinion has value.
You believe in electricity (-: I presume
For a God to be any use, He cannot fulfil your expectations of Him, cannot be reliably controlled by you.
I didn't bother getting bogged down in philosophy at first, I just looked for things (mainly prophecy and miracles, both `mundane' and spectacular) and added them up.
Materialism requires billions upon billions of miracles to explain life as we see it, miracles of the water-flowing-uphill variety, Creationist Christianity can get by on a few hundred or thousand, which means that Occam's Razor picks it as the winner every time. There are other things to explain besides life, too! (-:
I'd been personally involved in some supernatural stuff before I did my comparisons, which I suppose helped make my transition gentler, but it was still not an easy thing.
Actually, they aren't going to suffer unendingly; Sodom and Gomorrha's smoke rose `for ever' too... but that's beside the point. Human nature won't submit to any restraint if it can be avoided.
When they blind themselves to God, atheists blind themselves to the need to obey Him. So-called Christians who see no particular need for obedience are simply taking one less step out of the process. In the end, of course, every knee shall bow, even knees worn by God-haters.
Good emulation of a standard Judaic argument. Shall I emulate Isaiah 63 in response? (-:
Assuming that everyone uses SourceForge according to the directions on the label is a bit naive.
Three statisticians are out duck-hunting. Here comes a duck! BLAM! The first fires, the shot goes above the duck. BLAM! The second fires, the shot goes below the duck. Excitedly, the third leaps about yelling, `we got him! we got him!'
Oh, well, yay, there's a big improvement. Not.
Ignorant people do not slice up and cart around 2000-tonne blocks of stone as a hobby. Note that the 1100 tonne stone pictured cannot be moved by any number of sweating slaves, since no known material would make strong enough staves to get the required number of slaves near it, and the stone would break if they tried stuff like rollers.
...and speaking of ignorance... yes, they did. That was pretty clever of them because without excellent telescopes it is basically impossible to distinguish between a model involving Earth orbiting the Sun, and one involving the Sun orbiting the Earth and dragging the planets with it. Tycho Brahe proposed just such a model.
There's obviously a few gaping holes in your understanding of history. They not only understood heliocentrism, they knew enough to promptly adjust their calendars to track changes in astronomical conditions.
Because modern astronomy (and other sciences) is generally sold on gradualism, a consequence of a priori committment to materialism, they have a hard time even admitting that serious changes could take place within a historical timescale in our own solar system. A similar a priori commitment dooms atheistic Egyptologists to using the broken Sothic Cycle for dating, which throws their results out to the tune of up to 1000 years, and we're only talking maybe 4000 years ago.
That's not a failure. You're describing agnosticism. Atheism is not a default condition, it is the deliberate denial of theism. You will find that your arbitrarily atheistic stance is a consequence of assuming materialism without proof.
Neither position can be a default. Each position is a definite statement, ergo cannot be taken until it has been considered - except ignorantly.
That's very, uh, brave of you.
So... your hypothesis is apparently that mankind existed for millions of years in intelligent ignorance, and only in the last few thousand years or so has knowledge rushed in to fill the void? What evidence do you call in support of this assertion?
It contains no pigs, crayfish or other scavengers/carnivores, only references to them. AFAIK it hasn't seen a rabbinical blessing, but you could print it out on kosher paper using kosher ink and probably get that formally approved.
I'll let the text explain it to you, the first words of the Bible: `In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.'
In case you missed it: before creation, there were no days. Note that God made days on day one. LILO for worlds! Note also that days were created before the sun was, and very probably for a good reason.
This is your tautology: I believe there is no God, therefore no evidence I see can be evidence of God.
Ignoring your tautology, for the sake of a good rant, it's still a pretty vacuous statement to make, given how deeply many very ancient civilisations were into astronomy. These guys built stuff like Baalbek and Sacsauaman, they weren't dumb bunnies.
Back in this century, did you know that dendrochronology has shown the Yellowstone forests to have grown contemporaneously? That WW2 aircraft were found under 200m of ice layers on Greenland after only 50 years (ta ta ice core interpretation, not that self forming O2 varves had done that idea any good)? That fresh wood has been found deep in Sydney sandstone? Peppered moths are a furphy like the horse sequence? Stanley Miller has proven his own `primitive atmosphere' experiments to be dead ends? And so on.
AFAICT, every single `evidence' for long ages has seen more than one counterexample implying extreme youth. Robert Gentry's unrefuted (no, they're not Radon 222) Polonium haloes imply a metter of seconds-to-minutes for huge amounts of base granite, which is much more in line with creation in days than `creation' in gigayears.
It's probably also time to find out about genetics and statistics. (-:
Genesis 1 consistently uses a form which reads, transliterated, `and the evening was, and the morning was, day N'. You can't read this, in a straightforward manner, as thousands, millions or billions of years. Genesis 2 reiterates the creation from a different POV: Adam's instead of G-d's, which is de rigeur for ancient Hebrew. God tells us, `evening and morning,' who are you to say, `no, millennia or aeons?'
Yah, like Hebrews 4:4 `For he spake in a certain place of the seventh day on this wise, And God did rest the seventh day from all his works.' Unsurprisingly, this is referenced to Genesis 2:2 in every version I can find. Even if you stick to the OT, you regularly run aground on definite, enumerated statements like Exodus 20:8-11.
...as long as it is science being done, and not religion.
Sadly, most science is undertaken with an a priori committment to materialism: first, we assume that there is no G-d, then working from this assumption, we do science which `proves' that there is no G-d. Like, d'oh? Many leading scientists, like Shapiro, and the late Gould, have clearly stated in a variety of ways that this is the process which they use. Which means that they're doing religion, not science.
G-d has some interesting properties, from a scientific POV. He is often measurable, but not predictable. He manages the predicting, says Torah in no uncertain terms. The mistake most people make in looking for evidence of creation is in looking for perfection (`the problem of evil' is a common term for it). In light of explicit statements from G-d that this world is damaged (and as a consequence of our actions, no less), one would expect this to be an exercise in futility. Nevertheless, the evidence that people run across is occasionally too clear and direct to ignore.
My question for Moshe (Moses, Musa) is: given that significant intervention in history is an essential consequence of any effective G-d, and in particular the G-d of Torah, where do you stand on the question?
In particular, because unlike, say, Windows... a sysadmin won't be asked to `tend the fire' as often.
The bottom line for whether something fits observance of Shabbat is `does it distract me from G-d?'
Stricter flavours of Judaism hew to a massive collection of rules about how far you can walk with/without shoes, blah blah, but G-d says nothing so fine-grained or picky. Liberal Jews might rock up to the synagogue on that day - or not - but the rest of the rules are basically ignored, IMHO they're evicting the baby with the bathwater, but that's their choice. IIRC, the rule says `no touch fire on Shabbat.' Presumably this includes dealing with arson. Non-Shabbat holy days are less strict.
To join the chorus: no, I'm not Jewish.
...you're labouring the obvious. (-:
There's a lot of them out there.
Collaborators wouldn't have to trust Microsoft, and if MS did anything too stupid, they'd only provoke a fork.
Given that they already use, and admit to using (there's at least one credits list in XP somewhere thst duly lists all of their copyrightish contributors, including many, many BSDish contributors.
The _real_ trick would be getting them to correctly employ GPLed code. This unlikely scenario could, IMHO, eventually come to pass under some combo these (and other?) influences:
I personally would like to deal with less sucky default system tools (telnet, ftp, find, many more) when forced to use Windows, and Microsoft could provide these pretty much instantly if they were willing to ship GPLed code.
Or not....
And so what happened? You seem to have either stopped questioning too early, or to have based your conclusion on the strength or weakness of some individual's position, rather than on the strength or weakness of the available evidence itself.
I started my thinking life as an evolutionist. I upset Mum badly one day (but she didn't show it then or ever) by mentioning some one-line wisdom I'd heard to her in a 'phone conversation: `a man needs religion like a fish needs a bicycle.' She started praying for me that day (and asked her church to as well), said nothing to me, and within two months I was studying the Bible, history and science with a variety of people and within six months was a committed Christian - although in such a completely different branch of Christianity to hers that I think Mum died not completely convinced that her prayers had been answered.
One advantage that I've had is in directly witnessing several supernatural events, through my association at the time with a `white' witch (the basic difference is in purpose, not in methods). One of those takes a while to describe, involved two other sober people, and was deeply shocking. Another was watching some books leap out of a book-case unaided (I checked the book-case and books (and wall) all over, inside and out, carefully, and made sure that there was no mechanical trickery here) and several meters across the room. Even without that advantage, you can turn to one of the very many events which were clearly supernatural, witnessed by many people, and well documented (Lloyds subsequently came back at $500 PA and extended coverage to Guyana).
I suspect that such events are not more prevalent today for several reasons, foremost among which are (1) any diety interested in wholehearted allegience would probably want it to depend on that nature of that diety, rather than on a `sugar-daddy' stream of miracles, and (2) there is apparently more than one source (direct or indirect) of supernatural effects, which opens the field more widely to fraud.
I'd presumed upon the millions-of-years thing myself, and polystratic fossils are one of the more graphic and convincing observations which overturned that presumption for me. Of course, sans millions of years, materialism doesn't even give the appearence of being in the running.
For example: the Yellowstone trees (so often cited as evidence of life over millions of years) combined with dendrochronology (also so often cited as proof of excessive amounts of time) are actually a fairly clear witness to the absence of those years, for the Yellowstone fossils are not only polystratic and bedded on different strata but also grew contemporaneously and show strong symptoms of having been emplaced by a mechanism essentially identical to that observed in Spirit Lake after the eruption.
There are many, many other good polystratic examples to
hand, including inclined trees, and also many half-hearted attempts to explain them away. One of the common `counterexamples' is a set of lycopods with root systems; an examination of the available samples indicates that these trees grew floating, or at least on an extremely spongey substrate, so it is reasonable to expect them to be disturbed and embedded complete with roots. Even ignoring this, it is still most unreasonable to expect even relatively short (1.2m, in the worst case) stumps to be fossilised upright and intact in an evolutionary scenario.
Yah, and the height of stupidity as well. Given the number of viewpoints in the world, simple arithmetic tells you that most or all of your (and my) opinions are globally wrong in some way. (-:
...and don't get me started on `contextually wrong'! (-:
If I was a Wemmick, I'd give you at least three stars for that statement. (-:
Food-for-thought time.
Mary and Jimmy are pseudonyms, but the story is true. If you had been Jimmy, would you have done the same?
Excellent! I'm eagerly waiting to hear about a worldview which encompasses non-intrusive, non-weathered large-scale polystratism, but is not at least supernatural. (-:
Agree, an artificial God is utterly pointless, for by definition it has no more power or use than that bequeathed upon it by the hand of its creator. The basis for Christian, Muslim or other dieties is a separate question and should not be rolled into your statement as an implied assertion, when in reality it is a question which has apparently not been examined in enough detail to provide any conclusive or even substantial answers.
I reiterate, a God that you could completely understand (and so, in principle, control) is by definition a useless one.
Thankfully, we don't need to either have a description in hand, control, or even basic understanding of a putative creator in order to know that one is required in order to explain the existence of nature as we see it today.
Once you have escaped the trap of materialism, that is, once your reasoning can encompass naturalistic asymptotes, you can begin to look for more detailed explanations than `life as we know it required drastic supernatural intervention of some kind'. IMHO, such details are available to science.