Just so. But why is it more interesting? And why that particular incident?
Well it's more interesting because it's out of the ordinary. Day to day normal stuff tends to be less interesting if only due to repetition. That particular incident was his actual escape and the actual risks he went through to get free.
Exactly the same is true of the storytellers that Propp studied -- he studied traditional folk tales. The point is that he and others have found that there are recurring elements of stories that make them work as stories. You might not be aware of them, but if you don't use them at least subconsciously then your stories will be rambling and incoherent at best, not even recognisable as stories at worst. Being able to recognise and analyse those elements is a useful critical skill, and so quite reasonably forms part of Eng. Lit. and Eng. Lang. teaching.
OK, now I get what you're saying. That makes sense.
From a Feminist Theory perspective it may have represented the vagina dentata and his fear of the feminine or fear of castration.
Blagh;-) It was Latina vagina theory ( given the professor ). Of course that allowed the course to count for both "you suck because you're a man", and "you suck because you're white" general educaton requirements at the University of California;-) Granted it wasn't quite like that, unlike my poor friend who took History of Jazz because he was actually interested in music, which turned out to be nonstop whitey bashing;-)
even then Bungie is nothing without Halo and Halo 3 would be nowhere near the success it was without MS' resources.
Halo was possibly the most anticipated game ever back when it was cross platform (pre release). That's why MS bought them in order to make it an X Box exclusive.
Halo 3 would have been more of a success without MSs involvement because more people could have bought it were it available on more platforms. Everyone already knew about it, so there wasn't really anything positive MS added to the picture.
The alligator was an objective fact, with no meaning in a random universe. The selection of the alligator for inclusion in the narrative was a subjective act, with a meaning in the telling of the story.
Fair enough. A 100 page book (or whatever it was) is quite different than 12 years of raw video footage multiplied by the number of cameras.
It may have been subconscious, but the narrator certainly did "mean" something by choosing to include this incident.
But his "meaning" is most likely something along the lines of "this was one of the times I almost died". Which is more interesting than catalogging what he ate and how well he pooped each day during the extent of the narrative. He wasn't well versed in literary criticism, so he wasn't attempting to include recurring themes of common narrative or anything of the sort. He just wanted to tell his story and (probably) make a buck. He wasn't trying to use the alligator as a representation of the slave master or any of the other host of ridiculous nonsense my professor was either dishing out or lapping up. Sure, she was probably a crappy professor, but it still just seems it's attempting to saddle the author with the motivations of English PHDs ignoring the fact that the author has little if anything in common with them.
But, you see, that means that means that the correct answer is that there is not a correct answer.
There is a correct answer though. That answer is it's not intended to represent anything. It's an alligator plain and simple. Professors X,Y, and Z are wrong and just spouting silly nonsense to try and make themselves sound like they're insightful when they aren't.
All of it objective fact.
See, in some cases this might be true. In the example I gave all of that is meaningless nonsense since it is a *true* story. The Alligator was not in any way representational of anything. It was an alligator that the actual person who lived the events detailed in the story actually had to avoid having his butt chewed upon by.
So I mean in a case like that, most of that type of analysis is nothing but mental masturbation since the author clearly didn't intend anything of the sort.
In the case of James Joyce or similar, the whole point of his writing is to give English PHDs something to do. Most authors probably fall somewhere in between.
Alternatively, math is abstract, so it's hard, English is concrete so it's easy.
I really think it depends a lot on how you define "English" and "concrete". I had an upper division English class in college. We read a book called "12 years a slave" written by a guy who was born free in the north, was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the south. The book was an autobiography. As far as anybody knows it's a completely factual account of events. Maybe he exaggerated here and there, but no matter.
At one point in the book he's talking about running through a swamp after escaping and he sees an alligator.
Very concrete, right?
Now, the professor (Professor asshat-retard, I believe her name was) took half a class to discuss what the alligator was intended to represent. "But what does it *mean*" (gag)
So apart from bullshitting, testing bullshitting skills and general bullshittery, there's obviously no point to that because while this guy wasn't stupid and he wasn't uneducated he wasn't James Joyce either.
So there is no correct answer because the question itself doesn't even make any sense. If you had 2 different professors asking the same question, the "right" answer is entirely dependent on what they consider quality bullshit. Contrast that with a math class, where there is an absolutely correct answer (sqrt(2) is irrational) even though there might be multiple different ways to arrive at that answer.
And as such it should be left alone. Who on Earth do these clowns think they are? Why is anybody treating them like they deserve any consideration? And how are they going to enforce their decision, for that matter?
It's really amusing to see such incredible doublethinking in action.
"These clowns" are the ones trying to make sure that the market is left alone. It's the US that is interfering in the free operation of the market in this case.
They're being treated like they deserve consideration because the US (and a lot of other countries) helped create the organization for the purpose of being given consideration in trade disputes like this.
They have a lot of avenues open to them to enforce their decision. Not all of them are practical, of course, but we did sign on to the treaty that gives them the authority to do exactly what they're doing for the purpose that you claimed to support in your first sentence before demonstrating in the rest of your post that you completely disagree with yourself.
Truly an amazing display of doublethink. I'm curious though. Does it hurt when you do that? I mean the level of cognitive dissonance necessary to think something as crazy as what you posted makes it seem like it must.
"I know that this story is true. I believe that the witnesses and the documents are authentic. We wouldn't have gone to air if they would not have been." - Dan Rather, referring to the forged Killian documents
And apart from the fact that one document wasn't the official document even though the person who typed the original official document has stated that the words on the document (you know the actual important element) were accurate, he was right. The story was true and nobody has yet stepped up with anything to refute the facts of the matter.
Going ahead with the story was the right thing to do. It would have been better had he figured out that the document wasn't the actual piece of paper that the words were written on, but nobody's disputing that the words were accurate. It's pathetic that wingnuts like yourself keep harping on this as if it in any invalidated way the story, but it didn't.
I am not saying belief makes something fact, I am saying that we disagree about which things are facts.
Look, you have a right to your own opinion. You do not have a right to your own facts. The absolute fact is that you do not know, nor do you have a single valid reason to believe that there ever was a person such as Jesus let alone a magical fairy as you're claiming. So, no, we're not disagreeing about which things are facts. You are claiming that things which are not facts are. There is a huge difference.
I believe that, for instance, on several occasions Jesus supernaturally healed people of diseases. You do not. Neither of our beliefs affect whether he did so or not (the underlying fact).
Except that you're the only one in this conversation with a belief about any of that. I don't "believe" that there never was a Jesus. I know for a fact that there is no evidence at all for any such thing, so I reject it as a worthless idea. Again, those are fundamentally different things. Whether he did magical fairy stuff or not isn't even the underlying question. Pretending it is is merely begging the question. Whether or not he ever lived is the underlying question and not one single shred of evidence backs up that position. I have no belief about the question. There is no valid reason to even consider it, so it's silly from the get go to pretend that he ever did.
The relevant point is that I have no "facts" to give you, not because "miracles never occur", but because you believe they don't
Nonsense. Complete and total nonsense. The sun rises in the morning whether or not I believe it's going to happen. My thoughts or beliefs about something have no bearing whatsoever on whether or not it did does or will happen. You have no facts to give me because there are no facts to support your belief. That's what makes it faith. If there were facts to support it it would be rational, not faith.
you believe that my facts are not facts, and are based on faulty history, or idiocy. So, no number of things I can give you will convince you, not because my list is short, but because you are asking me to make you believe in something while excluding any data which you don't already believe in.
You facts are not facts because they are merely your desperately needed beliefs. You keep avoiding honestly dealing with that critical aspect of faith. You have no data at all which is the fundamental problem with faith. I'm not excluding data, that i don't "believe" in, you are failing to present any data whatsoever because none exists.
And where would one look for records of these facts?
In the massive amount of histories written by people at that time and place who make no mention of either Jesus or any of the mass of events the Bible claims happened. It's not like we're digging up some scraps of bones in a cave and trying to reconstruct a whole society from it. We have a huge amount of documents chronicling that time and no mention of Jesus, no mention of mass killing of first born, no mention of a huge earthquake, no mention of a Census and no mention of any of the other claims made in the bible. So, it's quite obvious where one would look. It's as obvious that there is nothing to be found.
Perhaps in historical records of facts made by eyewitnesses and their contemporaries? Like say, the Greek texts Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and the string of letters sent between communities of believers at that time?
Look, you're a pretty pathetic Christian if you haven't even bothered reading the bible. Had you bothered you would have noticed that none of Mark, Luke, or Matthew (which were just later versions of Mark added on to by different people,much later) are either first person or eyewitness accounts. Also, nobody knows who the authors were just that they weren't contemporary with the supposed Jesus. Seriously, dude. If you can't even be bothered to learn the facts about your own freaking religion how can y
The jury's job is to determine if she broke the law, not determine if the law makes sense.
Actually determining if the law makes sense is the most important job the jury has. If it doesn't make sense they need to acquit. It's known as jury nullification and is the most important reason to even have jury trials.
I never said Fox wasn't like the others. NPR does the same thing for the Democrats, sure they change the structure so it makes them feel more intelectual.
Laughable. NPR is the closest thing we have in the mainstream to an unbiased news source. If you'd said CNN, you'd at least be in sane territory, but seriously. Their hate mail generally is from both right and left wing extremists about the same freaking stories.
They tend to be easier on the right wing nutters due to that whole nonsense "liberal media" campaign the wingnuts came up with, but they're still far more neutral than any of the other major media outlets.
For those who believe the accounts of God interacting with people in history, those accounts ARE factual.
So if I believe that you're a left handed porcupine then you are? You might want to take a basic logic class before you say anything else that stupid.
There is no more evidence for the existence of Caesar, Cicero or Shakespeare than there is for God.
Too late. There is *no* evidence for god. Go ahead, try and find some. There is plenty of evidence for the people you mentioned. We actually have books they wrote. We have nothing of the sort from god.
That most scientists expect to overcome the latter two but not the first speaks to presuppositions (all that is real can be seen today, using 5 senses or lenses and film) rather than fact-or-fairy-tale.
No, it speaks to the fact that there have been plenty of gods proposed and nothing coming out of those proposals. Given that you consider all the gods you don't believe in to be fairy tales, consider that it's just as reasonable to consider yours the same.
You presuppose there is no God, so accounts of miracles will always be fairy tales to you, regardless of fact.
No, I don't presuppose anything of the sort. Nobody can provide anything to support such a stupid assertion except their own desperate need to have such a thing. You are the one presupposing silly nonsense. If it weren't silly nonsense, you'd be able to provide evidence. Believing some shit some ancient desert dwellers made up when even their fairy tales are full of direct contradictions is just stupidity.
So, for me, accounts of Jesus doing-things-humans-can't and claiming to be God are historical facts.
That just demonstrates you to be a weak willed fool. They are not historical facts to anybody. You can only say that because you don't know what a fact is. If your idiotic assertion were true, then surely there would be some actual *historical* *facts* to back you up, right? Pity there are none.
For you....you would have to have been there. And even then you probably would swear it was a trick.
Yes, and Jesus would have had to have been there as well. Too bad there is neither any evidence or no reason to believe that.
So -- for you, I've got nothing, for me, I've got plenty.
Which just means you will believe what you want to believe no matter how stupid, nonsensical, or contradictory. That's fine if you're happy living like that but keep it to yourself and quit pretending it's anything besides that. In short if you're happy being an ignorant fool unable to think rationally at least about that subject, knock yourself out. Don't lie through your teeth about "facts" that you know damn well are nothing but your own desperate desire.
Religious faith is not ever nor can it be supported by evidence or *valid* arguments.
I think before we continue, you should explain what you mean, here.
I mean exactly what I said. If you think it's not true, then all you have to do is provide one single valid argument to demonstrate it. As you, like everybody else in the entire history of the world who ever tried, will fail, my point stands. I'm sorry you're not happy with that fact, but reality has no need to comply with your desperate desire to beleive in one particular silly fairy tale.
The founding fathers didn't want to take religion out of government. They didn't want the government telling YOU what religion you had to be.
But you contradict yourself. The one isn't possible without the other.
You have to look at WHY they put that in the Constitution to begin with.
Indeed you do, and you're only looking at a tiny piece of it. Apart from good old King Hank, there were the preceding 1000+ years of religious rule over Europe and it was brutal, disgusting, and completely oppressive. Then even in the colonies, torture murder and oppression were the role of religion. Given that a lot of the settlers were thrown out of their native countries for their ignorant murderous hatred of anyone that didn't agree with them on trivial details of their interpretations of fairy tales.
There was a lot more to it than the C of E. It had to do with the fact that they were Liberals ( as in what the word actually means, not how it's used in the US these days) who believed in freedom (for white men at least) and knew that allowing religion into government had no possibil;ity of ever working toward that end as the history of the world testifies to quite clearly.
You're welcome to quote what people said (without any mention as to whether they actually believed it or were just spinning to get the loonie vote), but that's meaningless. I quoted an actual *treaty* which was approved *unanimously* stating *absolutely* that the US government was in no way founded on the Christian religion.
Thoughts, beliefs, and actions are very different things. Actions are the only things that matter in this issue.
The fact is that that treaty was approved unanimously by the congress of that time stating exactly that. How many votes do you suppose anything in congress with that wording would get today? How quick would a massive hate fueled campaign to oust anyone voting for it be put together by religious extremists?
That proves absolutely that your original statement that America has gotten less religious is wholely without merit or any reasoning behind it.
But I have a problem when people start trying to take down Christmas lights on the town square, because someone was offended.
If they're paying for them, they have a right to do so. Those things don't really happen nearly as often as you'd like to believe though... as in hardly ever.
I have a problem when Halloween and Christmas are canceled because someone was offended
Yeah, I was in England for Christmas last year so I must have missed how it was canceled here. I didn't get the memo about Halloween apparently neither did a lot of people as my party was a hit and hopefully will be again this year. Of course, nobody is trying to cancel Christmas and it's only the religious nutters trying to cancel Halloween, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
Of course, the fact that these hate mongering extremists did manage to shove their filth into the pledge of allegience in order to help brainwash the youth of the nation (not that the pledge itself was a good idea even without that trash).
I have a problem when a local judge is forced to remove a statue of the Ten Commandments from the rotunda, even though the VAST majority of the local population wants it there because someone from out of town was offended.
There is no justification or excuse for having religious nuttery in a fucking court house. People's lives are at stake based on having a fair impartial justice system. Having crap from one of the most violent, murderous, intolerant religions in history staring them in the face is pretty fucking disgusting. Why do you have a problem keeping your religious artifacts in your church where they belong? Why would you want them shoved in the one place they have the least reason to be?
It doesn't matter at all if all of the people of that area want them there. Just like if all the people in your town voted to lock you in a cell to be tortured because t
In a nutshell, Christian faith is belief in and reliance on Christ for salvation.
That is arguably what Christians have faith in, but it has nothing to do with what faith is.
A person's faith might be supported by evidence and arguments, or it might not be. The definition simply doesn't address that question.
Absolutely false. Religious faith is not ever nor can it be supported by evidence or *valid* arguments. The definition you gave demonstrates this. If you really believe that you're correct, then please provide an actual valid argument for it. You will be the first person in history to have ever done anything of the sort.
Anyway, it is emphatically not the case that a belief only amounts to faith when it is held without evidence or good reasons.
Except for the fact that that is the case. If that were not the case then it would be reason, not faith. That's why there are two different words with vastly different meanings.
The bible is full of reasoning. See in particular Paul's epistles. You might not think any of the arguments are any good, but that's beside the point.
Twaddle. The quality of the arguments are exactly the point. Every argument ever given in support of Christian faith has been shown to be fallacious reasoning. I could claim that the Goldbach conjecture (a particular unproven mathematical conjecture) is true because I really want it to be, or because it holds in all known cases or something like that, but those are not valid arguments. They are complete crap and examples of fallacious reasoning that lead to contradiction. That does not in any way make them useful, meaningful or in any other way anything but ignorant nonsense.
It's the same with your assertions. If the arguments don't pass a basic sanity check, then making them anyway does nothing to forward your position. So, yes, absolutely the fact that the "arguments" for your faith are totally invalid is very much the point.
The point is, the bible never says, "Just take my word for it."
Though I am not a literalist, you could call me a fundamentalist, in that I believe the Word of God is just that, and there is none of it that should just be ignored.
So then, do you go around brutally murdering people with rocks for a variety of silly offenses against your God? If not, you're actively ignoring the direct commands of the god you're claiming shouldn't be ignored. Indeed, if you do not regularly murder heretics and the like, then you were lying in your above statement which is against one of the commandments as well.
There is no way to win when attempting to defend the Bible as god's word since it directly contradicts itself in so many particulars.
Although the Soviet Union had many important scientific discoveries, the independent discovery of the atom bomb wasn't among them. The soviets made their first atom bomb by stealing US designs through espionage. The earliest soviet bombs closely resembled early US bombs.
The Rosenbergs gave the soviets the H Bomb, but do we know they got the A bomb the same way?
Rather, God is a described entity, for which certain people accept certain accounts of as history, and others dismiss all accounts as fairy tale.
Let's see. From dictionary.com entity, first definition:
"something that has a real existence; thing: corporeal entities."
So, no, you are absolutely wrong about something very very simple. Your "argument" is nothing but begging the question which is a logical fallacy.
Sorry, god is a fairy tale and if you think otherwise perhaps you'd like to become the first person in the history of the world to provide *anything* factual to counter that?
So no, it's not the exact same thing that's going on in America. Others will chime in with their opinions of why it is, but they'll have a hard time finding comparable behavior amongst religiosos in the US.
That's just because the Christian nutters in America don't really believe whereas the Muslims do. The bible still says to brutally murder people for a whole host of inane crimes, it hasn't changed over the last several hundred + years, but the people who claim to believe it don't anymore.
Some of them do though, and if they continue to gain power it will come back into fashion. Theocracies are by their very nature brutal, authoritarian, and inevitably increase in those directions.
It seems to me that the US is moving away from religion, not towards it.
That just means that you don't have the foggiest clue what you're talking about. The US was founded on the idea that religion has no place whatsoever in the government of a free society. That is what set it apart.
Just go read the Treaty of Tripoli which was approved *unanimously* by congress when Thomas Jefferson was president. "As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."
So that's what the founding fathers thought about a religious basis for the US. Yet today, you'll hear people spout idiotic lies like "the founding fathers were fundamentalist Christians". Not only is that a bald faced lie, it's one that any effort at all would easily show to be a lie.
You'll even hear members of Congress repeat the same idiotic nonsense when they damn well should know better.
Then just look at all the God bullshit in the pledge of allegiance and on our money. Those were added in the 50s by pressure from religious extremists for the purpose of undermining the fundamental basis of America.
That nonsense wouldn't have flown back in the day when liberty was actually important to the people of this nation.
So the rest of your comment was just nonsense based on a badly broken premise.
Hope this helps. In future, try and think things through for a couple of seconds and you'll look less silly.
I'm far more puzzled about why the god of the Hebrews and Christians is a "plural" word.
Because, back in the day the Hebrews were polytheistic. When they went mono, they just promoted their wind demon to one true god status as opposed to inventing a new one.
Slashdot Mirror
But Linux has all the tools (except PuTTYgen) that you ever need already there.
ssh-keygen?
Just so. But why is it more interesting? And why that particular incident?
;-) It was Latina vagina theory ( given the professor ). Of course that allowed the course to count for both "you suck because you're a man", and "you suck because you're white" general educaton requirements at the University of California ;-) ;-)
Well it's more interesting because it's out of the ordinary. Day to day normal stuff tends to be less interesting if only due to repetition. That particular incident was his actual escape and the actual risks he went through to get free.
Exactly the same is true of the storytellers that Propp studied -- he studied traditional folk tales. The point is that he and others have found that there are recurring elements of stories that make them work as stories. You might not be aware of them, but if you don't use them at least subconsciously then your stories will be rambling and incoherent at best, not even recognisable as stories at worst. Being able to recognise and analyse those elements is a useful critical skill, and so quite reasonably forms part of Eng. Lit. and Eng. Lang. teaching.
OK, now I get what you're saying. That makes sense.
From a Feminist Theory perspective it may have represented the vagina dentata and his fear of the feminine or fear of castration.
Blagh
Granted it wasn't quite like that, unlike my poor friend who took History of Jazz because he was actually interested in music, which turned out to be nonstop whitey bashing
even then Bungie is nothing without Halo and Halo 3 would be nowhere near the success it was without MS' resources.
Halo was possibly the most anticipated game ever back when it was cross platform (pre release). That's why MS bought them in order to make it an X Box exclusive.
Halo 3 would have been more of a success without MSs involvement because more people could have bought it were it available on more platforms. Everyone already knew about it, so there wasn't really anything positive MS added to the picture.
The alligator was an objective fact, with no meaning in a random universe. The selection of the alligator for inclusion in the narrative was a subjective act, with a meaning in the telling of the story.
Fair enough. A 100 page book (or whatever it was) is quite different than 12 years of raw video footage multiplied by the number of cameras.
It may have been subconscious, but the narrator certainly did "mean" something by choosing to include this incident.
But his "meaning" is most likely something along the lines of "this was one of the times I almost died". Which is more interesting than catalogging what he ate and how well he pooped each day during the extent of the narrative.
He wasn't well versed in literary criticism, so he wasn't attempting to include recurring themes of common narrative or anything of the sort. He just wanted to tell his story and (probably) make a buck.
He wasn't trying to use the alligator as a representation of the slave master or any of the other host of ridiculous nonsense my professor was either dishing out or lapping up. Sure, she was probably a crappy professor, but it still just seems it's attempting to saddle the author with the motivations of English PHDs ignoring the fact that the author has little if anything in common with them.
But, you see, that means that means that the correct answer is that there is not a correct answer.
There is a correct answer though. That answer is it's not intended to represent anything. It's an alligator plain and simple. Professors X,Y, and Z are wrong and just spouting silly nonsense to try and make themselves sound like they're insightful when they aren't.
All of it objective fact.
See, in some cases this might be true. In the example I gave all of that is meaningless nonsense since it is a *true* story. The Alligator was not in any way representational of anything. It was an alligator that the actual person who lived the events detailed in the story actually had to avoid having his butt chewed upon by.
So I mean in a case like that, most of that type of analysis is nothing but mental masturbation since the author clearly didn't intend anything of the sort.
In the case of James Joyce or similar, the whole point of his writing is to give English PHDs something to do. Most authors probably fall somewhere in between.
Alternatively, math is abstract, so it's hard, English is concrete so it's easy.
I really think it depends a lot on how you define "English" and "concrete".
I had an upper division English class in college. We read a book called "12 years a slave" written by a guy who was born free in the north, was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the south.
The book was an autobiography. As far as anybody knows it's a completely factual account of events. Maybe he exaggerated here and there, but no matter.
At one point in the book he's talking about running through a swamp after escaping and he sees an alligator.
Very concrete, right?
Now, the professor (Professor asshat-retard, I believe her name was) took half a class to discuss what the alligator was intended to represent. "But what does it *mean*" (gag)
So apart from bullshitting, testing bullshitting skills and general bullshittery, there's obviously no point to that because while this guy wasn't stupid and he wasn't uneducated he wasn't James Joyce either.
So there is no correct answer because the question itself doesn't even make any sense. If you had 2 different professors asking the same question, the "right" answer is entirely dependent on what they consider quality bullshit. Contrast that with a math class, where there is an absolutely correct answer (sqrt(2) is irrational) even though there might be multiple different ways to arrive at that answer.
How the hell do you strip-mine a gaseous planet?
Mega Maid?
Americans spend time thinking about Australians?
;-)
Seriously,
Chocolate, banks and mountains.
Not much else to think about
I don't doubt it, but where the hell is Holland?
It's in Michigan. It's where Taco is from.
And as such it should be left alone. Who on Earth do these clowns think they are? Why is anybody treating them like they deserve any consideration? And how are they going to enforce their decision, for that matter?
It's really amusing to see such incredible doublethinking in action.
"These clowns" are the ones trying to make sure that the market is left alone. It's the US that is interfering in the free operation of the market in this case.
They're being treated like they deserve consideration because the US (and a lot of other countries) helped create the organization for the purpose of being given consideration in trade disputes like this.
They have a lot of avenues open to them to enforce their decision. Not all of them are practical, of course, but we did sign on to the treaty that gives them the authority to do exactly what they're doing for the purpose that you claimed to support in your first sentence before demonstrating in the rest of your post that you completely disagree with yourself.
Truly an amazing display of doublethink. I'm curious though. Does it hurt when you do that? I mean the level of cognitive dissonance necessary to think something as crazy as what you posted makes it seem like it must.
"I know that this story is true. I believe that the witnesses and the documents are authentic. We wouldn't have gone to air if they would not have been." - Dan Rather, referring to the forged Killian documents
And apart from the fact that one document wasn't the official document even though the person who typed the original official document has stated that the words on the document (you know the actual important element) were accurate, he was right. The story was true and nobody has yet stepped up with anything to refute the facts of the matter.
Going ahead with the story was the right thing to do. It would have been better had he figured out that the document wasn't the actual piece of paper that the words were written on, but nobody's disputing that the words were accurate.
It's pathetic that wingnuts like yourself keep harping on this as if it in any invalidated way the story, but it didn't.
I am not saying belief makes something fact, I am saying that we disagree about which things are facts.
Look, you have a right to your own opinion. You do not have a right to your own facts. The absolute fact is that you do not know, nor do you have a single valid reason to believe that there ever was a person such as Jesus let alone a magical fairy as you're claiming. So, no, we're not disagreeing about which things are facts. You are claiming that things which are not facts are. There is a huge difference.
I believe that, for instance, on several occasions Jesus supernaturally healed people of diseases. You do not. Neither of our beliefs affect whether he did so or not (the underlying fact).
Except that you're the only one in this conversation with a belief about any of that. I don't "believe" that there never was a Jesus. I know for a fact that there is no evidence at all for any such thing, so I reject it as a worthless idea. Again, those are fundamentally different things.
Whether he did magical fairy stuff or not isn't even the underlying question. Pretending it is is merely begging the question. Whether or not he ever lived is the underlying question and not one single shred of evidence backs up that position. I have no belief about the question. There is no valid reason to even consider it, so it's silly from the get go to pretend that he ever did.
The relevant point is that I have no "facts" to give you, not because "miracles never occur", but because you believe they don't
Nonsense. Complete and total nonsense. The sun rises in the morning whether or not I believe it's going to happen. My thoughts or beliefs about something have no bearing whatsoever on whether or not it did does or will happen. You have no facts to give me because there are no facts to support your belief. That's what makes it faith. If there were facts to support it it would be rational, not faith.
you believe that my facts are not facts, and are based on faulty history, or idiocy. So, no number of things I can give you will convince you, not because my list is short, but because you are asking me to make you believe in something while excluding any data which you don't already believe in.
You facts are not facts because they are merely your desperately needed beliefs. You keep avoiding honestly dealing with that critical aspect of faith. You have no data at all which is the fundamental problem with faith. I'm not excluding data, that i don't "believe" in, you are failing to present any data whatsoever because none exists.
And where would one look for records of these facts?
In the massive amount of histories written by people at that time and place who make no mention of either Jesus or any of the mass of events the Bible claims happened. It's not like we're digging up some scraps of bones in a cave and trying to reconstruct a whole society from it. We have a huge amount of documents chronicling that time and no mention of Jesus, no mention of mass killing of first born, no mention of a huge earthquake, no mention of a Census and no mention of any of the other claims made in the bible. So, it's quite obvious where one would look. It's as obvious that there is nothing to be found.
Perhaps in historical records of facts made by eyewitnesses and their contemporaries? Like say, the Greek texts Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and the string of letters sent between communities of believers at that time?
Look, you're a pretty pathetic Christian if you haven't even bothered reading the bible. Had you bothered you would have noticed that none of Mark, Luke, or Matthew (which were just later versions of Mark added on to by different people
The jury's job is to determine if she broke the law, not determine if the law makes sense.
Actually determining if the law makes sense is the most important job the jury has. If it doesn't make sense they need to acquit. It's known as jury nullification and is the most important reason to even have jury trials.
Although, if hate is to be paraded, then slashdot is as good a revenue as anything else. :-)
;-)
I'm going to pretend that I don't think you just mistyped "avenue" and ask you what you meant by that
I never said Fox wasn't like the others. NPR does the same thing for the Democrats, sure they change the structure so it makes them feel more intelectual.
Laughable. NPR is the closest thing we have in the mainstream to an unbiased news source. If you'd said CNN, you'd at least be in sane territory, but seriously. Their hate mail generally is from both right and left wing extremists about the same freaking stories.
They tend to be easier on the right wing nutters due to that whole nonsense "liberal media" campaign the wingnuts came up with, but they're still far more neutral than any of the other major media outlets.
For those who believe the accounts of God interacting with people in history, those accounts ARE factual.
So if I believe that you're a left handed porcupine then you are? You might want to take a basic logic class before you say anything else that stupid.
There is no more evidence for the existence of Caesar, Cicero or Shakespeare than there is for God.
Too late. There is *no* evidence for god. Go ahead, try and find some. There is plenty of evidence for the people you mentioned. We actually have books they wrote. We have nothing of the sort from god.
That most scientists expect to overcome the latter two but not the first speaks to presuppositions (all that is real can be seen today, using 5 senses or lenses and film) rather than fact-or-fairy-tale.
No, it speaks to the fact that there have been plenty of gods proposed and nothing coming out of those proposals. Given that you consider all the gods you don't believe in to be fairy tales, consider that it's just as reasonable to consider yours the same.
You presuppose there is no God, so accounts of miracles will always be fairy tales to you, regardless of fact.
No, I don't presuppose anything of the sort. Nobody can provide anything to support such a stupid assertion except their own desperate need to have such a thing. You are the one presupposing silly nonsense. If it weren't silly nonsense, you'd be able to provide evidence. Believing some shit some ancient desert dwellers made up when even their fairy tales are full of direct contradictions is just stupidity.
So, for me, accounts of Jesus doing-things-humans-can't and claiming to be God are historical facts.
That just demonstrates you to be a weak willed fool. They are not historical facts to anybody. You can only say that because you don't know what a fact is. If your idiotic assertion were true, then surely there would be some actual *historical* *facts* to back you up, right? Pity there are none.
For you....you would have to have been there. And even then you probably would swear it was a trick.
Yes, and Jesus would have had to have been there as well. Too bad there is neither any evidence or no reason to believe that.
So -- for you, I've got nothing, for me, I've got plenty.
Which just means you will believe what you want to believe no matter how stupid, nonsensical, or contradictory. That's fine if you're happy living like that but keep it to yourself and quit pretending it's anything besides that. In short if you're happy being an ignorant fool unable to think rationally at least about that subject, knock yourself out. Don't lie through your teeth about "facts" that you know damn well are nothing but your own desperate desire.
Religious faith is not ever nor can it be supported by evidence or *valid* arguments.
I think before we continue, you should explain what you mean, here.
I mean exactly what I said. If you think it's not true, then all you have to do is provide one single valid argument to demonstrate it. As you, like everybody else in the entire history of the world who ever tried, will fail, my point stands.
I'm sorry you're not happy with that fact, but reality has no need to comply with your desperate desire to beleive in one particular silly fairy tale.
The founding fathers didn't want to take religion out of government. They didn't want the government telling YOU what religion you had to be.
But you contradict yourself. The one isn't possible without the other.
You have to look at WHY they put that in the Constitution to begin with.
Indeed you do, and you're only looking at a tiny piece of it.
Apart from good old King Hank, there were the preceding 1000+ years of religious rule over Europe and it was brutal, disgusting, and completely oppressive. Then even in the colonies, torture murder and oppression were the role of religion. Given that a lot of the settlers were thrown out of their native countries for their ignorant murderous hatred of anyone that didn't agree with them on trivial details of their interpretations of fairy tales.
There was a lot more to it than the C of E. It had to do with the fact that they were Liberals ( as in what the word actually means, not how it's used in the US these days) who believed in freedom (for white men at least) and knew that allowing religion into government had no possibil;ity of ever working toward that end as the history of the world testifies to quite clearly.
You're welcome to quote what people said (without any mention as to whether they actually believed it or were just spinning to get the loonie vote), but that's meaningless. I quoted an actual *treaty* which was approved *unanimously* stating *absolutely* that the US government was in no way founded on the Christian religion.
Thoughts, beliefs, and actions are very different things. Actions are the only things that matter in this issue.
The fact is that that treaty was approved unanimously by the congress of that time stating exactly that.
How many votes do you suppose anything in congress with that wording would get today? How quick would a massive hate fueled campaign to oust anyone voting for it be put together by religious extremists?
That proves absolutely that your original statement that America has gotten less religious is wholely without merit or any reasoning behind it.
But I have a problem when people start trying to take down Christmas lights on the town square, because someone was offended.
If they're paying for them, they have a right to do so. Those things don't really happen nearly as often as you'd like to believe though... as in hardly ever.
I have a problem when Halloween and Christmas are canceled because someone was offended
Yeah, I was in England for Christmas last year so I must have missed how it was canceled here. I didn't get the memo about Halloween apparently neither did a lot of people as my party was a hit and hopefully will be again this year. Of course, nobody is trying to cancel Christmas and it's only the religious nutters trying to cancel Halloween, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
Of course, the fact that these hate mongering extremists did manage to shove their filth into the pledge of allegience in order to help brainwash the youth of the nation (not that the pledge itself was a good idea even without that trash).
I have a problem when a local judge is forced to remove a statue of the Ten Commandments from the rotunda, even though the VAST majority of the local population wants it there because someone from out of town was offended.
There is no justification or excuse for having religious nuttery in a fucking court house. People's lives are at stake based on having a fair impartial justice system. Having crap from one of the most violent, murderous, intolerant religions in history staring them in the face is pretty fucking disgusting. Why do you have a problem keeping your religious artifacts in your church where they belong? Why would you want them shoved in the one place they have the least reason to be?
It doesn't matter at all if all of the people of that area want them there. Just like if all the people in your town voted to lock you in a cell to be tortured because t
In a nutshell, Christian faith is belief in and reliance on Christ for salvation.
That is arguably what Christians have faith in, but it has nothing to do with what faith is.
A person's faith might be supported by evidence and arguments, or it might not be. The definition simply doesn't address that question.
Absolutely false. Religious faith is not ever nor can it be supported by evidence or *valid* arguments. The definition you gave demonstrates this. If you really believe that you're correct, then please provide an actual valid argument for it. You will be the first person in history to have ever done anything of the sort.
Anyway, it is emphatically not the case that a belief only amounts to faith when it is held without evidence or good reasons.
Except for the fact that that is the case. If that were not the case then it would be reason, not faith. That's why there are two different words with vastly different meanings.
The bible is full of reasoning. See in particular Paul's epistles. You might not think any of the arguments are any good, but that's beside the point.
Twaddle. The quality of the arguments are exactly the point. Every argument ever given in support of Christian faith has been shown to be fallacious reasoning. I could claim that the Goldbach conjecture (a particular unproven mathematical conjecture) is true because I really want it to be, or because it holds in all known cases or something like that, but those are not valid arguments. They are complete crap and examples of fallacious reasoning that lead to contradiction.
That does not in any way make them useful, meaningful or in any other way anything but ignorant nonsense.
It's the same with your assertions. If the arguments don't pass a basic sanity check, then making them anyway does nothing to forward your position.
So, yes, absolutely the fact that the "arguments" for your faith are totally invalid is very much the point.
The point is, the bible never says, "Just take my word for it."
Never, huh? You might try reading it again.
Though I am not a literalist, you could call me a fundamentalist, in that I believe the Word of God is just that, and there is none of it that should just be ignored.
So then, do you go around brutally murdering people with rocks for a variety of silly offenses against your God?
If not, you're actively ignoring the direct commands of the god you're claiming shouldn't be ignored.
Indeed, if you do not regularly murder heretics and the like, then you were lying in your above statement which is against one of the commandments as well.
There is no way to win when attempting to defend the Bible as god's word since it directly contradicts itself in so many particulars.
Although the Soviet Union had many important scientific discoveries, the independent discovery of the atom bomb wasn't among them. The soviets made their first atom bomb by stealing US designs through espionage. The earliest soviet bombs closely resembled early US bombs.
The Rosenbergs gave the soviets the H Bomb, but do we know they got the A bomb the same way?
Rather, God is a described entity, for which certain people accept certain accounts of as history, and others dismiss all accounts as fairy tale.
Let's see. From dictionary.com entity, first definition:
"something that has a real existence; thing: corporeal entities."
So, no, you are absolutely wrong about something very very simple.
Your "argument" is nothing but begging the question which is a logical fallacy.
Sorry, god is a fairy tale and if you think otherwise perhaps you'd like to become the first person in the history of the world to provide *anything* factual to counter that?
Yeah, I thought not.
So no, it's not the exact same thing that's going on in America. Others will chime in with their opinions of why it is, but they'll have a hard time finding comparable behavior amongst religiosos in the US.
That's just because the Christian nutters in America don't really believe whereas the Muslims do.
The bible still says to brutally murder people for a whole host of inane crimes, it hasn't changed over the last several hundred + years, but the people who claim to believe it don't anymore.
Some of them do though, and if they continue to gain power it will come back into fashion. Theocracies are by their very nature brutal, authoritarian, and inevitably increase in those directions.
It seems to me that the US is moving away from religion, not towards it.
That just means that you don't have the foggiest clue what you're talking about.
The US was founded on the idea that religion has no place whatsoever in the government of a free society. That is what set it apart.
Just go read the Treaty of Tripoli which was approved *unanimously* by congress when Thomas Jefferson was president. "As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."
So that's what the founding fathers thought about a religious basis for the US.
Yet today, you'll hear people spout idiotic lies like "the founding fathers were fundamentalist Christians". Not only is that a bald faced lie, it's one that any effort at all would easily show to be a lie.
You'll even hear members of Congress repeat the same idiotic nonsense when they damn well should know better.
Then just look at all the God bullshit in the pledge of allegiance and on our money.
Those were added in the 50s by pressure from religious extremists for the purpose of undermining the fundamental basis of America.
That nonsense wouldn't have flown back in the day when liberty was actually important to the people of this nation.
So the rest of your comment was just nonsense based on a badly broken premise.
Hope this helps. In future, try and think things through for a couple of seconds and you'll look less silly.
I'm far more puzzled about why the god of the Hebrews and Christians is a "plural" word.
Because, back in the day the Hebrews were polytheistic. When they went mono, they just promoted their wind demon to one true god status as opposed to inventing a new one.