Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by River Otter on February 26, 2009 at 2:20pm

Alex,

I really enjoyed reading your post! Brilliant!!

Did you send it to Bush? If not you should. :)

Would it be alright if I used it for future reference? I might get an opportunity to go to my friends church and I am eager to ask a few questions of the preacher man, preferably at lunch when there is a gathering. Your post would be PERFECT for this. Mwhahahahah :D

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Permalink Reply by Daren Davis on March 9, 2009 at 8:39pm

If I post that on my facebook as a note, who should I credit it to? Anonymous email, or you?

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Permalink Reply by Фелч Гроган on March 10, 2009 at 8:26pm

origins

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Permalink Reply by Michael on February 28, 2009 at 4:30am

My favourite is Malachi 2:3 "Behold I will corrupt your seed and spread dung upon your faces".

Most Christians simply do not believe that god could be so gross and when they finally open the book and read the text - well the look on their face is pretty to watch. The usual response is "that's symbolic" and my usual response is "What does it symbolise?"

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Permalink Reply by Rickr0ll on March 5, 2009 at 1:27pm

my favorite, and i can simply recite from memory here:
Luke 6: 43-45 a tree and its fruit:
"No good tree bears bad fruit, not does a good tree bear good fruit."
44
"Each tree is recognized by it's own fruit. People do not pick figs from thornbushes, or grapes from briars."
45
"The good man brings good out of the [treasure- in KJV] stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil out of the [treasure] stored up in his heart. For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks."

So sayeth the lord jebus christus. Problem: it directly contradicts the Doctrine of Original Sin, because, according to the words of God (though not really becasue he is in fact God's son, right there entailing another series of contradictions to the then canonized Yehwist OT), there should never have been any Original Sin- not even by Satan

Satan isn't even a mythical figure. He's a historical figure- a babylonian King who called himself "The morning star"= Lucifer, and it went from there...

there's my two cents

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Permalink Reply by Rickr0ll on March 5, 2009 at 1:58pm

...a babylonian King who called himself "The morning star"= "The Bringer of Light" ="Morning Star"= Lucifer. Then it got twisted up all over iself from that point. (It's not even really likely that OT Jews even believed in angels- they would much liklier have "met" their patron gods face to face- Making no mistakes in assuming that Jews were monotheists, which they weren't for a looong time.)

The best video for this was actually by a Jew on Youtube. It was amazing to watch him dissect the passages in all their different Verisions and cross referance them in the Original Hebrew to actually get the real answers out of the book. Too bad he gave up his subscription, that was amazing. Ah well. there are others.

John L Armstrong, again, has great videos using the Bible to contradict itself, in particular Jesus vs. the Old Testament. He also has a very nice Jesus Timeline. *rubs hands together* BWAHA HAHAHA

There are also many that make Daniel out to be apochryphal and therefore not Orthadox Judaism- presenting a problem for Christians if they want to assume there is a lasting peaceful (HA!) engagement between Jews and themselves, going all the way back to Moses (*Snort*)

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Permalink Reply by Rickr0ll on March 7, 2009 at 1:24am

Hmmmm, i suggest that William James' Exceptions to Evidentialism might apply to the causal properties of consciousness, Live hypotheses do exist i warn you...

In layman, you may have inadvertantly given them a peice of information that Will be helpful. But the same could also be stipulated that nothing or tragedy might befall them due to your alleged "messege". How deep is the human consciousness? I would like to think it can influence small things, or in a system as chaotic as moderniszed society, great things over a large distance. However, i think Rudy Rucker may have a point in saying (though he quoted someone else in saying this) "Such phenomenon are fundamentally and totally unpredictable and incalcuable." Note, also a paraphrase rather than a quote. He wrote a whole book on the thesis. But i will have to read cover to cover at some point it before i descend my mighty gavel- as it were -on the subject matter.

Just a dollar in the Atheists' cuss jar...

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Permalink Reply by Rickr0ll on March 10, 2009 at 1:18am

apophenia- i think ought to be insulted. given that apoptosis is self-destruction. Clarifaication please.

"Confirmation bias."- possibly. I try to remain nuertal, but we athiets have a hard time, we tend to go with negative bias, perhaps undervaluing certain feilds of inquiry. I myself do not see anything to be a waste of time, if enough honest thought goes into it's practice or theory. So yes, confirmation bias is the same sin as over-skepticism. They are opposite direction vectors, but you falsely assume the magnitude of my mental energy put forward on these epiphenomenon-but again, some have considered consciousness itself to be a epiphenomenon of neural behavior. I think that's fairly accurate. So it would really be meta-meta-phenomenon. But i'm blustering. I need sleep

And i find Cognitive Dissonance to be insutlting thank you. *shoots bird*
just becasue i may suffer from an open air mind, doesn't mean i let just any vagrant thought stay at resort Rickr0ll ;) I'm not into Exclusion, except for the express purposes of necessary effeciency

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Permalink Reply by Rickr0ll on March 18, 2009 at 2:03pm

Very poigniant.

Perhaps i read too much from Godel, Escher, Bach. the primary thesis is that meaningless information aquires meaning despite itself. In fact, it is this idea that monomers synthesised into proto- DNA or RNA in the prebiotic environment.

Again, perhaps i read too much Hegel- you know, thesis, antithesis, synthesis. I must say, atheism is the default stance, but anything is possible. it just depends a great deal on the percentiles or probability... and the assumption that direct realism is a trustworthy approach. after all, if Newtonian physics fails us at high enough speeds, and General Reletivity fails at small enough spaces- obviously the Planch Length comes to mind there -then our naturaism may fail us at when we near some sort of boundary.

And like i said, it's completely up in the air becasue those propabilities are utterly impossible to calculate at this point.

And if anyone takes Alan Guth seriously, our Universe may have more strangness in it that that, given the vast panorama of early universe vacua. There is not reason to believe Or disbelieve in the highly unlikely based on data we do not or cannot attain.

i don't even want my brain. i'm waiting for a good cyberbrain ;)
My brain is a complete dumbass- my memory is utter shit. And besides, too much unnessecary and frankly frightening political games being played in the back of my head. the only way to stay ahead of the brain- and the ego, another major hinderance to society at large ;) -is to start a la Descartes, with radical skepticism, and work one's way forward.

i apparently worked backward. absolute skepticism is almost the same as infinite gullibility- becaause things are of equal likelyhood if one employes that tactic. But the pragmatic approach is to keep things simple- and deal ONLY with our limited sytem- the universe, the earth, and the pople in it.

then there is that pesky expansion of our intellectual horizons... :-/

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Permalink Reply by Rickr0ll on March 19, 2009 at 1:02pm

I never said such boundaries couldn't be crossed. you assume that there isn't any evidence- my response is "we shall see".

The world wasn't made whole in a day, or six, or a million. If our society is indeed evolving- as is our species in general -then there are many unexpected triumphs and failures of the intellectual sort that will occur. You want to forcast the entire universe, but you fail to realize how staggeringly little we know- like dark matter and energy, and the great distance from a TOE, as well as the obvious political and ethical mess that we call "life"

Hmmm, the word naturalism is problomatic, becasue it assumes there is only one correct view of nature among many. Whether supernatural or unnatural, they remain within the realm of quantifiable existance, or at the very least, predictability.

You are taking this too personally. I never said YOU proposed absolute skepticism- as a empericist, you can't.

You are making a false dichotomy. The anger and projection aren't helpful either, and it is a classic Creationist tactic to get offended and blow things out of proportion. just a little reminder there.

you can't explain infinities with only 40% or so complete knowledge- a staggeringly optimistic humber, by the way. it's a great deal closer to 1-5%, simply from a perspective on what we don't know about dark matter+energy, our own biochemistry, the history of us as a species and that of the biosphere, as it were.

You are coming dangerously close to dogmaticism.

Permalink Reply by Rickr0ll on April 1, 2009 at 1:11am

well well, thank you for proving my point. If not anger that certainly an absurd amount of snark to be using on someone who agrees with you on just about everything. The only thing i said is that we may have the tools available one day to put things like supernaturalism in their proper perspective. So we aren't really speaking different languages.

It may very well be that our normative metaphysics and that of the alleged "supernatural" will be more than simply tangential to our own. There may be a ceiling- that is the universe may turn out to be finite and boring, or there may be an architecture to it that will be less striaghtforward- perhaps fractal as some physiscists like Alan Guth suggest (am i repeating myself?), possibly infinite (depends, i think on whether or not CTC's are prevelent, visa vi Gott and Li)

The whole "i win neener-neener" line is frankly disgusting.

How do we scientifically investigate things have have no tangibility? Or are artists and philosophers second-class citizens in your mind?
We might one day- but then that will only be the expansion of our conception of "scientific enquiry". I have no problem with that.

1. explain what the correct view is; 2. explain how you would determine that this other view is the 'correct' one, WITHOUT using the tools of scientific investigation.
hmmm, isn't that an argument from incredulity? Your idea is necessarily true if it's true, not dependant on our current knowledge. god's didn't produce lightening or the weather, and a great deal we have is unknown in regards to the role in particular of the "observer" who seems to have such an invaluable position in the pillar of quantum mechanics. We know things happen, but the possibility of infinite knowledge about any subject is unreasonable. So, any small bits left over have to have some bizarre correlation correct? That's the idea in a nutshell. "super" simply means in this case, beyond comprehension. But i do make an unnessecary assumption- that a finite reality couldn't simply occur spontaneously.

That is something which will likely remain mysterious for centuries. Anyway, this has all gotten seriously out of hand. It's way off topic...

But if the strings all connect to each other, as you ultimately have to believe -as an empreicist, a rationalist, and a scientist- then none of this means jack :-p

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Permalink Reply by Doug on March 7, 2009 at 5:41am

Hosea 13:16 Samaria shall become desolate; for she hath rebelled against her God: they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up.

Goes really well if you are discussing abortions. For some reason Fundies seem to think their God is against abortions but this shows he is pro abortion.

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