i don't despise atheists, i just don't want to be categorized as one. it's a negative connotation for me
however, snex's flames were enjoyable. this thread needs more hatred. like, "hey you stupid mormon idiot, are you so ****ing blind that you can't realize a b or c??"
if you atheists are as heartless as i believe you to be you would do so, for my enjoyment.
Um...no. I would not debase myself, nor, I hope, would anyone else, to pointless and nonconstructive insults just to appease your immature and petty sense of enjoyment.
The Elgar Concerto? I love that piece. It's, as you said, amazing. You must have been really good yourself! Du Pre, eh? I'll have to check it out. Go look up either Joshua Bell or David Oistrach for the Sibelius. I have Bell's myself. And yes, I love the Bach Sonatas and Partitas. They are absolutely beautiful. His cello Sonatas are gorgeous too.
I think that if you believe in a God, then you must give him power to take life, as he was the one who created us all. If you don't believe in him, then whatever. This doesn't apply to you.
And about science Reaver...while I agree with you, do you really think that religion is an experiment? Religion doesn't conduct experiments, it doesn't use the scientific method...it doesn't even use knowledge, but faith, as its foundation. I think that their core principles are too different to harass one another. Science can answer most things...but not everything. "For everything else there's Mastercard!Imean, uh...Religion!" Jk. No but back on the serious, religion and science are very different. Science proves things...religion does not. Its standards are different. And as to your story...the Old Testament is very strange, yes it is. It's also probably the most incorrectly translated. It is the least read book of doctrine by me. I'm not familiar with that story.
@Arrowhead: Sounds to me like you have some moral code explanation going on there, and morals really have nothing to do with science. Please don't tell me that an emotion is something your brain sends to your body and attempt to de...emotionalize emotion(?!?). Everyone knows that emotion contradicts logic all the time.
Also, QWAAA?
Man that was a lot longer than I intended. Sorry.
I shall most definitely check out Bell's and Oistrach's recordings for Sibelius' violin concerto. I'm always on the prowl for good music, lol. I had listened to one version I could find on youtube (definitely not the best way to listen to music, but while at work, it's the only way I can), and I think I listened to a Hillary Hahn or something like that. It sounded pretty good, but her interpretation seemed...I don't know, it just didn't have much personality to it I guess. But, then again, I was listening to it on youtube, while working, so that might've influenced my thoughts of it. However, it seems like a technically demanding piece, so I commend you for your level of skill.
I don't think that religion is an experiment, I do think it is an hypothesis though. Pretty much every belief and assumption is an hypothesis, whether its positing the possibility of a supernatural creator and controller of the cosmos, to thinking that you definitely did leave your shoes in the closet yesterday. I had an hypothesis that the computer I built would work fine and would not need any replacing of the parts, but, unfortunately, that turned out to be false (sigh). I have an hypothesis that when I let go of a cup, gravity will pull it to the floor. The scientific process is simply the formulating of an hypothesis, performing a test or an experiment, and seeing whether it validates or disproves the hypothesis you formulated. Rather straight forward in theory, but in reality, can be rather tricky and complicated for certain hypothesii. Often at the end of the process, if you've disproved your first hypothesis, you come up with a new one, then test the new one, and then repeat the whole process again if, once again, you disprove the hypothesis. The scientific process can, and often is, applied to rather ordinary and simple things. Like, to take my computer once again as an example, it kept freezing if I tried to play a game. So I formulated the hypothesis that the drivers I had for my GPU were out of date, and that installing the latest ones would solve the problem. I then did install the new drivers then proceeded to test my hypothesis by once again trying to play my game and seeing if it froze or not. It, unfortunately, turned out to be false, as the game froze anyway, thus prompting me to come up with a new hypothesis (that the GPU card was faulty), testing it (trying to play with a different GPU card my friend provided me), and seeing whether it was true or not (whether the game froze with the other card or not, which, ultimately, it did not).
Religion is not exempt from this process, it just refuses to comply to it. They formulate an hypothesis, that there is a supernatural deity that will reward/punish forever if you do or don't do certain things, and then does not attempt to test it and, in fact, actively prevents people from testing it (even though the bible seems, once again, iffy about it
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/test.html). Religion simply states a possible hypothesis, then asks for people to believe in it without testing or proving any sort of validity for it in the first place.
And, unfortunately, the bible is a package deal, particularly for those people who believe that it's inerrant. The old testament is just as relevant as the new testament in the bible. To disprove or lessen the authority of a part of the bible casts doubt on the authenticity and authority of the whole thing.
Also, emotion is not illogical. It's a completely logical mental process, if you understand it and why you feel emotions in the first place. However, due to the "fast, rough, and dirty" nature of the amygdala's and limbic system's calculations, the responses it arrives at might be incorrect or wrong for particular siutations, thus giving the appearance of being illogical.
Don't worry about your posts being long. If no one yelled at me for the length of some of my posts, then you definitely have nothing to worry about, lol.
Oh and one more thing to what Reaver was saying earlier about how we've become like God. Here's the phrase where that is taken from:
"As God once was, man now is; as God now is, man may be." Makes sense, ja? Not sure where that came from, all's I know is that I know the quote. Food for thought?
I didn't take that from that phrase at all. In fact, I've never even heard that before. It also strikes me as an odd and contradictory statement, since, if, as most Christians posit, that god is omnipotent (a notion that I think I've proved to be an impossibility, but am simply indulging in here for the sake of argument), we're either omnipotent now (hardly), or that somehow god was not omnipotent then, yet somehow became so now, as you can't be omnipotent then somehow "improve" your omnipotence.
If they didn't eat from the fruit they would never have died. Death was a direct result of sin.(Rom. 5:12) God never directly killed them thats my point exactly. He allowed them to die.
Did your parents put a guard on the stove when they told you don't touch it? No you listened, thats all Adam and Eve had to do. They had plenty of trees(and no IKEA to chop them down) they could have eaten from any one. They failed to listen.
So, Adam and Eve were immortal before they ate the fruit? Does that mean all the animals made with them were immortal as well, as they never ate from the tree of knowledge and thus never sinned? Then why was there a tree that would grant immortality if they were already immortal? How does a fruit even grant knowledge or immortality, and what happened to all of them (or, if they were just singular trees, it)? Did the tree of immortality and of knowledge both die out or something (irony)? And how did a snake even talk in the first place to convince them to eat it?
I'm pretty sure actually, as I was growing up, that my parents did put guards on things, mostly to things that were toxic though, such as the cleaning fluids, detergent, etc. If someone has no knowledge of anything, they wouldn't realize what to do and not to do.
The bible is like Animal Farm, you can read it and enjoy it fairly well, taking everything literally, or you can dig deeper and find the symbolisms, metaphors and parallels, the greater meaning and fully understand the book. All good books contain figurative speech, so does the bible, thats not call cherry picking thats called discernment.
Ah, I always knew we weren't supposed to take the resurrection of Jesus literally. Clearly that never could've actually happened, so it's definitely just an allegory for something.
lol, I literally was just asked to finish burning a DVD for a Jewish student who said she couldn't do it herself since it would be breaking Sabbath.
