I was a christain student and alter boy when I was younger. I spent lots of time in church. The bible was force fed to all children at every chance they had. I read each passage many times, not because I wanted too, byt because if I did not God would punish me. The fear of God was imprinted into our minds, through church sermons and school bible lessons. They even tried to teach us that sex was dirty unless you were going to create a new life.

As a child, I used to wonder why God wanted us to fear him? What kind od a God would rule through fear? And why would he make sex such a wonderfull thing if we were not suppose to do it. That actually started me on my quest to find out more.

Today, I view the bible as the "holly comic book"!

i thought you might appriciate a passsage from the preface to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass:

Beautiful.

I'm on it! I think I'm gonna love this guy. Thanks!

Well. I have gone to pretty much any church and all churches. ( stand, sing, sit, stand and sing some more) It is all the same shit different day. Oh wait it is Sunday. I am religious in the fact that I believe. I do not go to church, because I am an F1 fan and it would cut into my racing and fishing time. Please do not take offence to this post  

SORRY to reply to a post 2 pages old, but apparently this thread has gotten long pretty quickly, and I've been off doing other stuff for a while.



First of all, what do you mean by "provably"? I think we may have different definitions of what a "proof" is; I generally use it in a narrow sense (ie, mathematical or logical proof). If you differ, feel free to share your definition and why you think your definition should be used in this context.

In addition, I do agree that there may be issues with translations and between different manuscripts - however, the difference are usually obvious, and none of them are large enough to change the basis of our faith as far as I know.

If you wish to discuss the inconsistencies, feel free to do so.



Except that Matthew specifically states that the boat was a considerable distance from land, Peter apparently sank when he became afraid (contradicts the idea this was on the seashore), and he apparently had to ask permission to leave the boat - as proof of Jesus' identity. Frankly, the context speaks volumes as to the correct translation of this passage.

In addition, I searched the blueletter bible for all of the uses of epi, and nearly all of them were were pretty direct - not "by" or "near" something.

http://cf.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?Strongs=G1909&Version=kjv#

In addition, the NIV, a translation done by professionals, translates it as "on" as well. In general, context and word usage are examined very carefully when a translation is done, and a great deal of research goes into ensuring the translation is as accurate as possible.



Actually, lineage seems to be very important - there are many places in the Bible that do nothing but list people and their descendants or ancestors. Genesis chapter 5 is an entire chapter devoted to just listing names and ages of people from Adam to Noah!

Genesis 10-11 goes from Noah to Abram (later to be called Abraham), and Matthew 1 goes from Abraham to Jesus, forming a practically unbroken list of people from Adam to Jesus. Apparently, this lineage was considered very important to the people who wrote the Bible. If the stories were nothing but moral lessons, I doubt this lineage would be a part of them, as it's just long, boring list of people. Why write such a thing if you're just inventing a religion to teach a few moral lessons?

This is what a "cursory" examination of the Bible seems to be telling me.

Okay, enough of replying to posts 2 pages old . Here's a reply to a recent one:



Yeah, I'd say the "god" of naturalism is very sadist. Too bad I don't believe in that "god".

Geez, so much stuff has been written, I don't know where to begin, lol. Lots of ideas floating around.

Anyways, a note on the "infinite universes" idea: It's unfortunately very speculative, and while it does attempt to answer the "fine tuning" argument, it's also very dependent on having faith that these other universes exist, even though we don't have any evidence of their existence.



Or maybe it's just a bunch of 4 dimensional branes in an 11 dimensional spacetime, but that's just me .

one more thing before i stop posting:

"If you spend your life believing in God, and when you die it turns out he doesnt exist, then you've lost nothing, but if you spend your life not believing in him, and he does exist......then you've lost everything"

np, you're welcome.



from The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce:

LOGIC, n.
The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of human misunderstanding. The basis of logic is the syllogism, consisting of a major and a minor premise and a conclusion -- thus:

Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly as one man.

Minor Premise: One man can dig a posthole in sixty seconds; therefore --

Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a posthole in one second.

This may be called the syllogism arithmetical, in which, by combining logic and mathematics, we obtain a double certainty and are twice blessed.

 

edit: btw, welcome back, Cobra. i wouldn't worry too much about catching up; these conversations are tangental from start to finish.

also, i'm not sure who you were responding to, but i don't remember any of the claims this person made in the bible coverage of my introductory religious studies classes. what approximated claim made by secular scholars that i do remember seeing is that only about 18% of the statements and actions the bible attributes to Jesus were likley made by Jesus. the methods they use involve some of the things your quotee mentioned: close analysis of sentence strcture, grammar, style, writing structure, and vocabulary, as well as comaprison of substative elements.

the other impression your quotee leaves is that scholars seem to agree about what the bible really is. about the only thing most scholars agree on is that the bible is not a literal truth, and i can't even say that with certainty. scholars and academics build their entire careers on the basis of arguing with each other. but any academic will tell you, there isn't much that we can absoultely know beyond a shadow of a doubt, but that doesn't mean we can't achieve better proximity to the noumenological truth.

that said, here's a wiki article covering some of the scholarly debate about the textual origins of the gospels, the possible existence of the Q document. if you're really into the subject, i guess i'd be up for talking about this stuff, but otherwise, the specificities of the bible's origins aren't really a major interest of mine.



yes you have; you'd have lost your integrity. what kind of Christian would advise us heathens to believe in God as a way of hedging our bets? that's not faith; that's cold calculation.

plus, you've also lost all the energy you spent believing in god that you could have spent having fun, helping the downtroden, or sacrificing virgins. and don't you tell me belief doesn't take some energy out of you, mental and spiritual energy if nothing else; strong beliefs might allow you to discover wells of energy you never knew you had, but that's like starvation driving you to discover things you never knew you could eat.

ah, spiritual growth: the insect diet of the human condition.

ok i cant help ive gota reply

the point of u not losing anything is that all uv wasted a lifetime, the point of u losing everything is that when u go to heaven u spend eternity with god, now if u didnt believe in him then u get to spend enternity alone

so its either spending ur small little life (which compared to eternity isnt very long...) "worshiping" god and spend an eternity with him(which by the way u dont have to do much to worship him, if u think ud spend to much "energy" worshiping god, then u obviously arent christian), or u get to spend eternity along and probly in hell

you don't need to belabor the obvious; i'm not stupid.

but you're making more assumptions than you state. even if there is a god, why do i have to believe in him to go to heaven? just 'cause some crusty old book says so? right.

but if there's no god, i'll have wasted the only time you have to exist, which while small compared to eternity is infinite compared to zero, talking to myself in a stuffy old building, and that's the point of believing in no god. that isn't losing nothing; that's losing everything.

so basically, the only way you don't lose everything is if you happen to be right.

frankly, if there is a god, and he's so petty that he won't let me into his little club unless i give up all my mental faculties to him, i'd rather spend eternity in hell. at least all the other gay guys'll be there.

actually, if it's only the bible-thumpers who go to heaven, and everyone else goes to hell, sign me up for hell now! (i'd be running the place inside a month anyway).

oh, and you'd better hope everyone you love sacrifices their lives to god as hard as you do, or you'll be the lonely one in heaven!

well since ur not a christian u wouldnt know wut worship is

u dont sit in some stuffy old building talking to urself..........u sit in a group with friends and talk about the bible and how it impacts ur life.......u proly spend 1 hour a day for 1 day a week doing that, and then church on sunday (thats proly an hour to)...........u dont spend u WHOLE LIFE doin it...............ur losing close to nothing, and gaining close to everything by worshiping God.

So, despite the fact that your sense of self, personality and pretty much everything else entwined into what makes the mental 'you'is provably and indisputably affected by occurences in the brain, it is not therefore a property of the brain?
Even assuming there was a soul which carried on after death, would the fact that our self is dependent, even in part, on the physical brain not argue that anything which would remain be so different from the self as it is now that it would no longer be meaningful to consider it the same self?

The brain doesn't fully develop for ten years. Arguably it continues to develop throughout life. If self awareness is a by product of the brain processing information, then it would require both the information to process, and the structures to do that processing before it would happen.

Why wouldn't there be? It's a pretty strange question to be honest. Might as well ask why some brains play GalCiv, or why we enjoy marinating our brains in fermented liquids.

Not exactly, and not the same activity we're talking about. Your talking about a recognised medical condition whereby the emotional centres of the frontal lobes are deformed or non active, leading to a lack of emotional responses in the affected. Usually this results in a variety of medical disorders from psycopathia to schizophrenia. The vast majority of sufferers aren't mass murderer's though, and surgically inducing the effect in a patient can and is used to treat other conditions. The problem with violence is fairly well documented, largely caused by the combination of lack of emotional response (no feeling of guilt or disgust when encountering violence) and upbringing.


Prove you don't.

What evidence do you have that would prove that you were in fact self aware, rather than simply thinking you were?

How so? We know and can prove your brain generates electrical fields, and these co-incide with your brain activity. Nobody has yet found the soul though.

Because that woman wouldn't be you. She wouldn't have been born on a USAF base for a start. You're still thinking in terms of a predetermined 'you' which could have been born then though. As I've been saying, until your body and brain came into the universe there was no you to have inhabited anywhere.

If some experiments in Quantum physics are correct, that's pretty much the case. Even more interesting is the fact that matter and energy appear to spontaneously pop into our universe constantly. Although to answer your question with another, where did this creator come from then? Who made them? And who made the guys who made the guy who made the universe? Or are you going to claim the creator always existed, in which case why couldn't the universe always have existed?

It would be completely impossible. As far as I know, Cars don't generally breed. Arguing through complexity gets you nowhere though. If you want to say that humanity or the universe must have been designed because it is so complex, you'll need to explain how the designer himself was created, since he'd also be complex. In other words, if the universe as it is can't happen by random event, then God himself could not have randomly begun to exist.

Two problems with that:
1. There's nothing random about natural selection.
2. Our complexity is derived from several millenia of evolution.

It wouldn't affect your faith unless you're a literalist. Genesis for example has signs of alteration (you can tell through the verse structure, notably the relation between the part of God seeing whatever he's done that day is good, and the day/night cycle). There's also a number of occaisions where you can see two authors at work (Noah being told to take 2 animals, then two of the unclean animals and seven of all the rest, then back to 2 of every animal again).

Matthew's account is incredibly similar to Mark's, except for five additional passages. What's probably interesting from a context point of view is that Mark actually states that Jesus almost passed them by before they saw him, bit strange if he was walking on the water where there'd be no obstacles to block the view. John's account (usually regarded as the most likely version) doesn't give much of anything to go on, he states they'd been rowing some time before they saw Jesus either on the Sea or Seashore (Greek doesn't distinguish between the two). Mathew is the only one who states Jesus was on the water, and he's also the only one to mention anyone leaving the boat (wonder why nobody else thought that was important).

The Torah the bible is based on is not only the holy book of God, but also a record of the Jewish history. Lineage is important in this case as it established legitimacy of the Jewish leaders (something the church later co-opted in the middle ages when establishing the legitimacy of European monarchs. It's amazing how many could trace their lineage back to a biblical figure, despite having a most definite non-middle eastern heritage). Being able to prove you're directly descended from one of God's chosen tends to stop people questioning your authority.

This assumes there are only two choices: No god and your god.

What if the Muslims are right? What if it's the Nordic gods? What if you spend you entire life as a Methodist and the Mormons got it right? What if Buddhism is correct? You could spend your entire life believing in the wrong god and, frankly, there are so many it's a crap shoot.

1. Natural selection is basically survive of the survivalist. It's main weapon is death. NS would still apply even it the reverse was true, all of life is slowly falling apart.(Dieing)
2. evolution (mutation creation) doesn't have any real engine accept random, blind search engine. It works with what already exists.

2 hours per week * 52 weeks per year * maybe 75 years in a life = 7800 hours, or 325 days. that's nearly a year of my life. and that's just bible studying. i don't think i'll ever be able to spend a whole year talking about the same thing.

plus, you're not counting the fact that you spend all your waking time believing in god. that affects your whole life.

and no, i haven't "lost everything" by not believing in god, unless god is real. as i said before, if god is unreal, i'll have lost a big chunk of my life beleiving in phantasmagoria.



we're also finding out that maturity doesn't seem to be teleological. that is, i remember a couple recent pyschological studies suggesting it takes longer and long each year for people in the U.S. to grow out of adolescence, almost 30 being the new mean. the most radical are suggesting (gasp) that cultural factors influence maturity.

As far as anybody is concerned, this reply is not here.

the religion of christianty started out as ONE faith, it quickly spread into hundreds of denominations, methodist, lutheran, catholic, ect.

that wasnt wut god wanted, humans created all the ceremonies and little things that we conflict over

the difference between the denominations is tiny little things such as.....not eating meat on fridays......the proper way to take communion at church......most of the "faiths" in the world believe in one god......they just have different views on how to worship him and how to live your life on his path

not according to archaeological evidence, which suggests most strongly AFAIK that "Christianity" started out as hundreds of scattered Jesus cults, and their followers probably all still considered themselves Jews.



this is also incorrect. numberically, only 3 of the world's religions believe in one single god, and they're the sister religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. while that might encompass the largest chunk of individual people in the modern world, it doesn't not even come close to representing the thousands of spirit-based, polytheistic, enotheistic and nontheistic religions that have existed throughout history.

seriously dude, if you believe in god, that's great. i'm not being sarcastic in the slightest; it might seem strange or surprising, but i celebrate others' beliefs.

however, i don't think it's a good thing to start spreading misinformation in a desparate attempt to... hell if i know. convert us? justify your own beliefs? do other people actually tell you these things you've said? because if that's so, it seems you've been misled a great deal for a long time.

And if you spent all of your life pretenting to believe just in case he does exist, don't you think he will know that?

But don't worry, you can't go to hell, your are already there!

Yeah, gotta be careful with that that stuff . Logic can be very picky about word choice.

In this case, the logic fails at the definition of the word "can" - "can" means it is possible, not that it is applicable to all situations - so in this case, conclusion 3 does not necessarily follow the premises.

If you replace the word "can" with "always," then the logic obviously breaks down at the first premise - it is not true that sixty men can always do a piece of work sixty times as fast as one man.



I do not believe the two are contradictory. The existence of a soul does not deny the existence of electrical fields.



True, I'm not a "literalist" in the most literal sense of the word . When "science" and scripture seem to conflict, however, it becomes a question of which one to prefer as the more reliable source.



Interesting - could you provide more details? Or, even better, the reference you are using?



Okay - he starts with a more detailed account: take 2 unclean animals, and 7 (or 7 pairs) of clean animals. Then in later passages, the writer just mentions the pairs, possibly for brevity's sake. It looks more like writer's laziness to me than proof of altercation.

But you know what? I'm no expert, and it would be interesting to read this for myself - would it be possible to provide me with a list of your resources?

It seems to me like there are two "classes" of experts about the scriptures: There's one class that tends to view it more conservatively, and another that seems to be more skeptical about it. I've been to a Christian college that teaches the conservative view, so it appears I've been exposed to different experts than you have - because what you claim about what experts believe doesn't match what I've studied in college.

So, yeah, a list of references would be nice. I'm open to reading beyond my comfort zone.



#1: Natural selection may not be random, but mutation is. It is well-known that natural selection itself cannot explain the origin of species (it cannot go beyond certain limits), so the general consensus AFAIK is mutation + natural selection and not natural selection alone.

#2: Isn't time rather convenient here? I see this as "given enough time, anything is possible."

"can" is a double-valent word. sometimes it means, "it is possible," and other times it means, "they have the capacity." but you're right, that 60 men cannot always do a job 60 times faster; i think the problem really lies in the premises itself. in this case 60 men cannot do a job 60 times faster than a single man; most often, they'd do it about 40 times faster; the rest is lost to bureaucracy.

that's my problem with syllogistic logic, it always relies on premises, and all premises are a priori at some point (at some point you need to say, okay, i'm sure enough of this that i don't need to logically prove it).

of course, all explanatory knowledge relies on some common premises, such as causality and the ontological nature of time.

incidentally, i got a D in my Introduction to Logic class, but an A+ in Wisdom (i didn't do my HW in logic).

Assuming your characterization of "God" as sadistic was serious, I'd like to say ... I used to feel the same way. When I gave up the "self-center" view, and just thought of myself as another piece of the puzzle ... an insignificant little atom in the Universe ... then something changed.

I dunno what to call that, transcendentalism maybe. It wasn't easy, but then again it wasn't so bad once I got past that "fear of heights while standing on the ground" thing. Nothing material changed. The world kept right on turning, as usual. I didn't blow-up, get carried off by fork-tailed demons, or turn into a frog (I'm a toad, btw. ). It was really just a matter of overcoming some sort of internal fear. Maybe my brushes with death, or the deaths of some of my companions in the military, jolted me in some way and made it easier for me ... but I don't think that's particularly necessary. The same result can be accomplished via meditation, fasting, and exercise.

When I read a Buddhism related text, a few years later, I discovered some similar references there, but that's another line of thought. Back to the point, if someone can accept being a molecule, then "the life and times of molecule-X" take on a different emphasis. (it's more fun!)

Anyway, so much for my amateurish opinions. Back to you now, God!  

Yeah, my knowledge of logic comes from some informal logic and a little bit of formal logic at the Christian college, and later when I pursued Computer Science at another college I took a lot of propositional logic. Rarely have I seen syllogistic logic.

And yeah, pretty much everything boils down to axioms and premises at some point.



For me, that's pretty much observation - what I can see with my senses. Sure, I make a bit of room for the supernatural for my religious beliefs, but when it comes to non-religious matters, I usually trust my senses.

Yeah, I know our senses aren't always trustworthy, but usually trying to go "beyond" them means going into stuff that can't be directly observed or tested - which is usually the realm of religion anyways.

yep, i'm an empiricist myself. though, i'm curious, how do you regard electron microscopes? they most certainly are not our senses, but at the same time they can be understood as an extension of our senses. you can also regard in that way radar, radiocarbon dating, radio astronomy, sonigrams and MRIs, night-vision goggles... just to name a few. moreover, the phsyical forces, paradigms and particles (on knowledge of which these technologies rely) cannot be perceived with the senses. we had to theorize electrons to build an electron microscope, even though we've never seen them and only felt them through electrical shock (and sticking my figers in christmas light sockets as a kid left me with no impression of electrons any more than burning my hand left with with a notion of kinetic energy).

i mean, what really counts as empiricism for you? to be fair, "relying on your senses only" isn't empiricism. rather, the philosophy of empiricism states that the meaning and nature of things cannot be understood a priori, but rather must be criticially examined and interogated. so i guess my question really is, where do you draw the line between your senses and "beyond"?

cheers,
nik