I also don't know if this is what you're getting at, but that's my thought. Perhaps you just posted that to get us talking about it?

So i turned my kite around... and actually raced the shadow of a mountain across the playa for 5 minutes.

what's the bloody point

It's the very best way to ask for a steak in France

Is being human not amazing enough as it is?

It just is

Is being human not amazing enough as it is?

....the best of all possible worlds - as Kris Kristofferson put it.

I don't agree. Without a point, none of what we do matters. Life might be a temporary experience, but this experience doesn’t even amount to a memory when it’s over. Our value sums to ‘0’; we ultimately affect nothing.

Without a point there is no reason to adhere to any standard of morals other than what makes this experience most happy for the individual. However, most people would not attempt to adhere to a “whatever makes me happy must be moral” model of ethics.

those crap acorn things

If all religion is as depressing as living your life for another being with whom you have no interaction, then I'm glad I gave it up long ago.

There is a clear hand that is always working through my life, molding me into a better person and giving strength when I falter.

I've always hated the concept that there's some external force that works on a person to make him ``better''. It's a pretty dim view of humanity, I think. It pretty much makes you a pet.

It's a pretty dim view of humanity, I think.

(waiting for the onset of a 300+ post religious debate... in 5... 4... 3... 2... 1...)

don't think Bitt's remarks are inflammatory, if that's what you're implying.

IIRC this is called Kantian ethics

I don't think Bitt's remarks are inflammatory

Talking of Zenophobic tribal tendencies

or maybe it is just the music...

But only when vim is unavailable

perhaps it's time for Mr Schofiel to reveal his purpose before this thread solves all the problems of "Life, the Universe and Everything"

but again, what is happiness?

but again, what is happiness?

quite simply, if we have the ability to fail, then that itself denies us perfection. a perfect being would not be able to be un-perfect.

but again, what is happiness? that may mean very different things for different people.

am i making this clearer or messier?

they reflect the higher rules given to us by God (do not kill, do not steal, love your neighbour as yourself, etc.)

Surely your not saying that cows worry about adultery

many of your "rules"

they (the rules) led me to God.

This only shows that man is, somehow, uniquely flawed. why is it that a monkey cannot sin, but a man can? did "evolution" take a misstep?

but they all go back to "love your neighbor as yourself" (if everyone followed this, i doubt we would need any more rules, agreed?)

.... what's the bloody point...

anybody beginning to wonder if this was (is) a suicide thread?

anybody beginning to wonder if this was (is) a suicide thread?

You seem to be saying we have an innate knowledge of these rules, i agree compleatly. The only difference between us is that I think God put them there. Where do you think they came from?

I do not understand your necessity to worshi(p) "thy lord" or why commandmants from (somewhere) are so devine" (i took the liberty of fixing your spelling, and would appreciate you editing your post to fix the same)

whoa, i havent gotten to worship yet. lets stick to the basics of, is there a creator, has he given us rules to follow?

religion was created because it helps preserve life

well then i say, good for you. but i have to ask you, what standard were you holding yourself to when you decided that truth was a good and right thing?

where did you get the idea that truth was more important than the survival of the species

now, is this view wrong? if so how? or explain to me how we can trust a conclusion which, by its nature, was arived at entirly by chance.
im still waiting for an answer from somebody on this

the nurons in my brain are firing in the paterns they are because of chance.......then how on earth can i know that to be true, since my (and your) conclusion has been arived at entirly by chance?

...

im still waiting for an answer from somebody on this

Yeah I've talked to him in email.

if the earth, and the animals that live on it are a product of chance,

Anybody know if he is OK

Yeah I've talked to him in email.

give me some other examples of evolutionary baggage please

if you belive survival of the fittest is the important driving force in life (i dont belive this) then i must conclude that you think truth subordanate to that. if you think truth more important than survival of the fittest, then i am asking you on what basis do you claim its superiority?

If the nurons in my brain are firing in the paterns they are because of chance, and by firing producing the idea that "the nurons in my brain are firing in the paterns they are because of chance", then how can i know that the statment "the nurons in my brain are firing in the paterns they are because of chance" to be a true statment?

better?

Dice, chance, and Truth

lets look at a few examples, we have laws which goveren our country, but they dont produce criminals, or more precisly, they dont produce the people which they goveren, do they? [...] likewise, there are laws wich goveren the universe, but they did not produce the universe.

at least I'll admit that what i belive has eliments of faith in it, how about you?

"what we called his thought was essentially a phenomenon of the same sort as his other secretions - the form which the vast irrational process of nature was bound to take at a particular point of space and time." - C.S. Lewis

"Science does not preclude the fact that a creator exists, but it does preclude the fact that he interacts with us on a regular basis, unless he always does so in accordance with the rules of nature as we observe them, in which case, that creator would be no different than the nature of the universe itself."

but if you remember that He created the laws of nature, and furthermore, created the universe which interacts with them, then it is extreamly logical that He would interact with us and communicate with us through them.

It strikes me that, if there was a sentient creator, He went out of His way to cover up the fact: patiently implementing quigs of nature for every scale of matter and every form of energy,z

no, i dont agree at all with the "random" nature of the universe. i dont think there is anything that is truly random, i dont belive in chance, luck, or coincidences. i also think the claims you are making are at least as outrageous as you seem to think mine are. You say, nothing + nobody + blind chance = everything. I say God is the fundamental explination of all things. The burden of proof rest on both of us.

Do you mean the idea of God, or God Himself?

now most assuredly if naturalism is right then it is at this point, at the study of man himself, that it wins its final victory and overthrows all our hopes: not only our hope of immortality, but our hope of finding significance in our lives here and now.

on the fully naturalistic view all events are determined by laws. our logical behaviour, in other words our thoughts, and our ethical behaviour, including our ideals as well as our acts of will, are governed by biochemical laws; these, inturn, by physical laws which are themselves actuarial statements about the lawless movements of matter. these units never intended to produce the regular universe we see: the law of averages (successor to lucretius's exiguum clinamen) has produced it out of the collision of these random variations in movement. the physical universe never intended to produce organisms. the relevant chemicals on earth, and the sun's heat, thus juxtaposed, gave rise to this disquieting desease of matter: organization. natural selection, operating on the minute differences between one organism and another, blundered into that sort of phosphorescence or mirage which we call consciousness - and that, in some cortexes beneath some skulls, at certain moments, still in obedience to physical laws, but to physical laws now filtered through laws of a more complicated kind, takes the form we call thought. such, for instance, is the origin of this paper: such was the origin of Professor Price's paper [the paper he is responding to]. what we should speak of as his 'thoughts' were mearly the last link of a causal chain in which all the previous links were irrational. he spoke as he did because the matter of his brain was behaving in a certain way: and the whole history of the universe up to that moment had forced it to behave in that way. what we called his thought was essentially a phenomenon of the same sort as his other secretions - the form which the vast irrational process of nature was bound to take at a particular point of space and time." - C.S. Lewis in the essay "Religion without Dogma?" contained in the book titled, "God in the Dock"

scarcasm aside, yes, there are many things we can know through experiment and demonstration, but that in itself doesnt prove there isnt a God.
I hope you dont think that i think im actualy out-right proving the existance of God, that still has to be taken by faith.

what is that one thing that keeps you from beliving in God?

if there was no difaculty, there would be no faith, and hence no love

we've demonstrated the theory of evolution?

how about non-rationalizing life into rationalizing life? (animals to humans)

how do you figure? if you mean that man has the power to break one kind of law and not the other, then i agree, but hardly see how it is relivant. or perhaps you mean one kind of law describes what "should" be done and the other describes what "is done, well ok, but i still dont see quite how it is relivant.

i also noticed you overlooked my mathamatical example.

or take math, you can know and understand all the mathmatical equasions in the world, but it doesnt mean anything untill you actualy mesure something, or count something, right? just because i do math concerning my bank account doesnt mean more money gets put into it.

First, i agree with your preference for the word "describe". Second, if what i have rendered above corectly reflects what you belive, then pardon me if i call it silly (since you've done as much with my beliefs). I can stand here all day and describe the mona lisa in intracate detail, its not going to suddenly appear on the wall infront of me, now is it? or, to take a more scientific example, i can sit at my desk doing equasions concerning the flight and path of bullets, but at the end of the day i still wont have a gun now will i?

likewise, you can talk all day about how an amoba woud evolve into yourself, but you still havent accounted for the amoba.

So it seems that you agree with Lewis and me, in that, in order for our rational thoughts to mean anything they must be more than simply the product of our enviroment. The modern God-debunking psychologist and sociologist does not, i think, agree with you.

i dont see at all how you come to that conclusion. "He created the laws of nature" + "He created the universe which interacts with them" does not equel "the creator has no choice about how things happen."

im still asking which you take to be the better man, the one does everything with the purpose of being the "fittest" for natural selection, or the one who regards truth, in and of itself, for the sake of being true, to be the most desirable thing? because if you say the man who goes for natural selection, then i say, "to heck with truth for its own sake, when it helps me survive, then truth is good, when it doesnt, i should toss it away as 'excess baggage'" on the other hand, if you say truth is important in and to itself, then i say that reaks of a morality not associated with darwinsim.

Faced with all the fake evidence for His non-existance that He planted

what evidence?

burying fake dinosaurs

i dont seem to recall saying the dinosaurs were fake, nor do i recall the bible saying they were fake, infact, i seem to recall the bible mentioning a few things that sounded like dinasaurs. further more the bible states that man was created after animals.

the real issue is: do I have a sin problem that is keeping me from the God relationship I was designed to have and what can be done about it?

the real issue is: do I have a sin problem that is keeping me from the God relationship I was designed to have and what can be done about it?

My belief is that it's rational to place my faith in Jesus Christ' death, burial and resurrection as a solution to my sin problem. I do have philosophies and science that backs this up, but many other people will put forth science and philosophies that deny it. It ultimately does come down to a matter of faith (imagine that) but not on issues of evolution or science (though of course these should be addressed);

the real issue is: do I have a sin problem that is keeping me from the God relationship I was designed to have and what can be done about it?

well, it doesnt, rather it offers answers to the questions which science can"t answer.

by illogical, to do mean "not suficent evidance to come to a logical conclusion" or "this can be disproved by logic" if you can disprove it, show us, if there isnt suficent evidance then i belive i did say that God has left just enough gap to require faith to belive in Him.

you seem to think your enviroment can change your "mental/physical state"

at what point would the human element with in them be considered "dead" (perhaps the heart still beats, the lungs still breath, everything still works, there is just "nobody upstairs") at this point i would say the soul has left the body.

The whole idea for a soul seems designed to control other human beings afraid of their own mortality.

actualy the existance of a soul seems to make people fear their mortality less. i am not afraid to die because i belive death to be mearly the begining of my existance.

It strikes me that, if there was a sentient creator, He went out of His way to cover up the fact: patiently implementing quigs of nature for every scale of matter and every form of energy, tirelessly working out Hubble's constant and red shifts in order to use million-mile-wide open-frame fusion reactors to make nice little speckles in the night sky, laboriously burying fake dinosaurs,

and then just setting the clockwork going and walking away, resisting any temptation to tinker with it later.

Well, you know... let's see what we have here:

¤ a dude who has always existed...
¤ ...in the middle of absolute nothingness.
¤ whose future consists of continuing to exist in said nothingness

you know (according to the Bible) that He does tinker

laws can state that "if X then Y" but they cant produce X out of thin air. so if your not saying that X was produced by "chance" then where did it come from?

what is that one thing that keeps you from beliving in God?

However, based on my experience and knowledge, the opposite is true. The claim that there is no God working in my life would be an outrageous one to me, and a great amount of proof would be required to make me believe otherwise.

We don't know any of that.

None of those examples can be demonstrated to be anything more than natural occurrence.

It's circular logic.

that's what it says in the Bible

Please demonstrate, using the technology of 2000 years ago, how a virgin woman can naturally become pregnant without having sex.

we have two choices:

You mean to tell me that this is all just a huge coincidence, despite the statistical probability of that ever occuring? Yeah, right -- just the odds of winning the lottery are astronomical."

For a lot of people, it's far simpler to pick option 2

Particularly if they also have some sort of personal experience which they *can't* explain via option 1

If you aren't going to do that, then there's no point in arguing, because you haven't agreed on what you're arguing about yet.

I think you've just created a three-sided argument.

So if you have a ``sin problem'', that would mean that you're hurting either yourself or someone else. Why does that necessarily have to have any relationship to God?

There's no reason to believe that those sorts of ethics and morals have been inserted into us either through divine intervention or training.

This leaves only the ``no other gods/believe in me'' part. This has only internal logic. It means nothing if there is no God, and if you believe that there is a God, it's pretty self-fulfilling.

I feel like I've glossed over something here. Please tell me what I've missed.

Please demonstrate, using the technology of 2000 years ago, how a virgin woman can naturally become pregnant without having sex.

So when people refute your "philosophies and science that backs this up" of Jesus Christ, you just ignore that science and rely instead on your faith? Why? why the necessity to dump the obvious solutions for the wacky one.

for some reason i still cannot wrap my brain around ignoring all that i know about science to say that theres some supreme being no one can see, but that some guy(s) over the last 2 thousand years talked to, maybe.

What logic brings you to ask this question? under no circumstance in my entire life have i asked myself this question, nor would I. Because i haven't sinned. I don't break my own moral code. unless you'd like to point out otherwise..and please don't use the bible, i don't believe it's any more divinely inspired than "Gross Jokes Volume IX".

I would ask, though -- what was it that made you sure it was Christianity that this perceived God wanted you to follow, and not, say, Islam, or even Jove-worship? Direct perceptions of God do seem to come with, and I know this phrase was used for something different upthread, lots of baggage these days...

Science cannot possibly tell us that Jesus Christ didn't rise from the dead

the first letter written that contains a belief in the resurrection was written five years after it happened

Will this convince you that Jesus died and rose from the dead for our sins? Probably not, but science can and does say very little to refute these arguments. Philosophically there are arguments as well, but I haven't heard any yet that convince me the resurrection didn't happen.

I think everyone should have an empeg, I hate it when people just don't "get it." In many ways, my faith in Jesus is the same only a billion times stronger!

As wfaulk mentioned you cant use the bible to prove its validity.

that's what it says in the Bible

You can't use the Bible as a reference to prove the validity of the Bible.

Please demonstrate, using the technology of 2000 years ago, how a virgin woman can naturally become pregnant without having sex.

I was going to add, but left out for the sake of not being overly offensive, ``or falsehoods''.

we have two choices:

There are more choices than those two. In fact, the only mutually exclusive pieces of those two choices you provide are the ``there is no/a god'' parts.

You mean to tell me that this is all just a huge coincidence, despite the statistical probability of that ever occuring? Yeah, right -- just the odds of winning the lottery are astronomical."

Yet people win the lottery all the time. Just because it's unlikely doesn't mean that it can't be.[emphasis mine]

For a lot of people, it's far simpler to pick option 2

It's also a lot simpler to assume that one plus one equals three than to go through the immensely complicated mathematics to prove that it, in fact, equals two. But just because it's simpler doesn't make it so.

Particularly if they also have some sort of personal experience which they *can't* explain via option 1

Example? I'd bet that it's because they'd rather attribute it to option 2.

If you aren't going to do that, then there's no point in arguing, because you haven't agreed on what you're arguing about yet.

Absolutely true. I'd love clarification from both sides.

My point is that science describes the laws of the universe. Those laws may or may not have been put in place by a creator, but that point is irrelevant. Whether we're determining natural law of the rules put in place by that being is irrelevant. In fact, they may well be the same way of stating the same thing.

In addition, any potential creator does not rig the results of this reality.

My ultimate point is that those of you that beileve that you can depend on said creator to provide you with things, physical or psychological, are mistaken and setting yourselves up for failure. Depend on yourself, not the boogeyman.

I'm quite aware of that, thank you.

how do you purport to demonstrate that the story and circumstances surrounding Jesus' conception is irrefutably a falsehood?

So remind me again why you argue so vociferously against the possibility of a god, that he has a direct hand in things, etc, etc?

it's commonly accepted knowledge.

cute story

That point could be debatable

I got off track.

You my point, really, was that the Bible, I don't think says that God existed in nothingness. It implies that he created everything we can comprehend, but it doesn't say that there weren't other things we can't comprehend that he could.

how do you purport to demonstrate that the story and circumstances surrounding Jesus' conception is irrefutably a falsehood?

I can't prove it irrefutably. But it seems much more likely that someone lied, or was mistaken.

There is only one person who could really know if Mary was a virgin -- Mary herself.

Also note that there is at least one report of a woman becoming pregnant in the US Civil War due to a bullet passing through a man's testicle and carrying sperm into her uterus/fallopian tubes/whatever. That may well be apocryphal, but it's not totally outrageous.

So remind me again why you argue so vociferously against the possibility of a god, that he has a direct hand in things, etc, etc?

Unlikely things that occur are no longer unlikely. They are a certainty. It is easy to prove that certain people have won the lottery. There is no evidence that anyone has ever been affected by God.

it's commonly accepted knowledge.

That's precisely my point. Just because it's commonly accepted doesn't mean that it's right at all. What I was saying is that if people feed you incorrect information, just because it was taught doesn't mean that it's so.

cute story

Did you question your brother? Did a voice pop into his head and tell him to turn right?

I have no explanation for this, assuming it's true.

But just because I have no explanation doesn't mean that I have to go making up imaginary people to explain it away.

Rob should know that we all care about him by the sheer quantity and quality of the posts in this thread. In fact, if he were to read it, it would take so long that by the time he finished he'd be out of his depression. (i hope)

Hear, hear. And, uh, yeah, we slightly hijacked your thread.

To support your claim, you must show that each and every person on the face of the earth has never been affected by God.

My only claim is that he

does not interact with the universe in ways that violate static laws of nature.

Grammar! It should be "He"

Many of the 'static' laws of nature were changed with the Theory of Relativity and quantum physics.

To support your claim, you must show that each and every person on the face of the earth has never been affected by God.

Yet despite the fact that you have the easier job, you've yet to provide any real evidence (unverifiable anecdotal evidence does not count) that God does exist.

I've stated many times that it's possible that God exists.

My only claim is that he does not interact with the universe in ways that violate static laws of nature.