Why dont we all believe????

[Mockingbird 0]

Actually, what I said was:

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But if you want to have a grown-up conversation, you will debate the issue rather than laugh it off.

But if laughing helps relieve your tension, try it. I really do hope that you will consider Christ's claims more seriously some day, though. Now I bet you will find that statement condescending; I don't mean it that way. I mean it humbly and hopefully. You will never be a complete person until you are reconciled to God through Christ. (Warning: I got that insight from the bible! )

Best wishes... truly!

[Frenchy68 0]

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...I mean what person would not want there to be a glorious afterlife, because as I see it that is really the root of or ultimate reward for most religions. If Christianity came with no afterlife promise I imagine there would be very few Christians around today, and there would be another dominant religion that does promise a glorious afterlife....

I agree with most of your statements.
I could not care less about an afterlife. If there is one, then we'll have to deal with it when we get there.
If there isn't one, then big deal. The "surviving loved ones" will have to deal with my corpse. And that would be their problem, not mine...

"For once you have tasted Absinthe you will walk the earth with your eyes turned towards the gutter, for there you have been and there you will long to return."

[Mockingbird 0]

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Now we need hairyjuan to post some link to some NewAge BS & then we will all be enlightened.

or perhaps another meaningless comment from you??

cant participate? awww poor speed, trapped in the mediocrity of his chosen religion, and inability to discuss the subject intelligently, he choses to throws poo from the trees instead....

Like you just did to Speedracer, Zen?

I thought his comment was kinda' funny. But, of course, that's because he and I generally agree. I'm sure you find the snide comments aimed at us from the other side a bit amusing, right?

[br0k3n 0]

First off, it's ironic that your Icon is a statue of Jesus.

I Agree, although don’t you find it strange that nobody actually knows what Jesus looks like, there is only the common image that you recognized in my avatar.

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Are you telling me that there is nothing in this world that you accept by faith?
Do you personally pack every chute that you jump with, or did you watch when the rigger last packed your reserve?

Ok, yes I have faith in the packers at my DZ, however unlike your god I can see them talk to them, and observe them. Which over time has allowed me to attribute a level of faith in their ability to pack a rig.

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As for no evidence that any of it is true, what year did you write down on your last check when you paid the bills. It wasn't 6006, was it?

Nor was it 4550000006. Of course, Hebrews, Muslims and Chinese all use their own calendars, so this is the year 2006 for only a relatively small fraction of the world.

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How could a simple, humble, lowly carpenter- fisherman affect the whole of time if there wasn't something different about him.
The Muslims have to force their faith upon the masses at the point of a sword, even today. They have no message of love.

Ok I raised these points in another thread, but nobody in the god squad wanted to tackle them, perhaps you might,

1. There is no physical evidence to support a historical Jesus; no artifacts, dwelling, works of carpentry, or self-written manuscripts. All claims about Jesus derive from writings of other people.

2. There is no contemporary Roman record that shows Pontius Pilate executing a man named Jesus?

3. There is not a single contemporary writing that mentions Jesus

4. Comparative Religion shows that the story of Jesus already existed in numerous religions prior to the alleged time of Jesus. Chrishna, Horus, Orpheus, Bacchus, Osiris, Dionysus, Buddha, Apollo, Hercules, Adonis, Ormuzd, Mithras, Indra, Œdipus, Quetzalcoatle, etc. The motif of a Crucified Savior was already extant prior to the alleged time of Jesus.

5. Solar Mythology shows the story of Jesus is just an allegory for the sun passing through the Zodiac and the passage of the seasons of the year. Jesus travels throughout his one year ministry, and the description of his travels exactly match that of the sun traveling through the Zodiac during the year. Here we have the origin of the Jesus story. This common origin explains why all the stories of crucified saviors are essentially the same.

6. It's inconceivable that during the alleged time of Jesus no one bothered to write down anything about this most extraordinary person, yet we have nothing. Even the earliest Bible reference to Jesus dates to at least A.D. 64, and the first Gospel, the Gospel of Mark, dates to at least A.D. 70 (and probably to A.D. 170).

7. The fact that no history, sacred or profane,—that not one of the three hundred histories of that age,—makes the slightest allusion to Christ, or any of the miraculous incidents ingrafted into his life, certainly proves, with a cogency that no logic can overthrow, no sophistry can contradict, and no honest skepticism can resist, that there never was such a miraculously endowed being as his many orthodox disciples claim him to have been.

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--+ There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.. --+

[Royd 0]

I'm new at forum talk, so I don't know how to break up and repost portions of a message, so I'll just answer.
There was a Jewish historian, Josephus, who witnessed the crucifiction, and the subsequent hours of darkness in the middle of the afternoon.
Solar eclipses only last a few minutes, so we can eliminate that from the mix.
You might Google Josephus, or go to a good library to find his writings. Just spend some time exploring.
I believe that most of the "unbelievers", especially amongst the scientific community are afraid that there is a reckoning day coming, and they are desperately trying to prove there is no god.
Why would any sensible man spend billions of dollars looking for life in other solar systems, just to prove a bunch of nutcase believers wrong.
I find it amazing that the evolutionary community can throw numbers around, like 1 million, or 30 billion years, and we are supposed to buy this crap without question. I've got news for those people. An alligator has always been an alligator, and a monkey has always been a monkey. By the way, they pretty much accept their place in life without question.
Why would we humans, who, according to the Bible, were created in the image of God, be the only creatures to question his sovereignty, or our appointed place in his design.
There's that word "creature." Unbeleivers cannot legitimately use such a word.

[Royd 0]

You mentioned that your icon was your avatar.
I heard that word back in the 70's from some wandering acidhead who thought that he had a direct line to the Divine.
I just looked the word up. Here's the definition.

Decent to earth of a Hindu deity and his incarnation as man or animal.

By the way, this is almost as good as a good chess game. Your move.

[jakee 1,257]

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I believe that most of the "unbelievers", especially amongst the scientific community are afraid that there is a reckoning day coming, and they are desperately trying to prove there is no god.
Why would any sensible man spend billions of dollars looking for life in other solar systems, just to prove a bunch of nutcase believers wrong.

Thats a couple of huge assumptions, both of which are wrong. The drive for scientific discovery is not motivated by fear, or a desire to prove the fundamentalists wrong ('cos lets face it, that is not hard).
The motivation is knowledge. Plainly and simply wanting to know how things work.

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By the way, this is almost as good as a good chess game. Your move

Just now you said that unbelievers who debate this stuff must be trying to convince themselves. No, the real reason is what you just wrote above. Its fun, and at the end of the day it doesn't really matter.

Oh, I've just noticed this..

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I find it amazing that the evolutionary community can throw numbers around, like 1 million, or 30 billion years, and we are supposed to buy this crap without question. I've got news for those people. An alligator has always been an alligator, and a monkey has always been a monkey. By the way, they pretty much accept their place in life without question.

Bwaaahaaahaaahaaa

See, I told you this was fun

Do you want to have an ideagasm?

[SpeedRacer 1]

you would be assuming that all Christians believe the theory of evolution is incorrect. Not true. Most Christians have no problem with the theory of evolution.

Theories about the physical mechanisms of species diversity have nothing to do with the spiritual truth that it was God who created a world with those mechanisms in it.

Speed Racer
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[pajarito 0]

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Most Christians have no problem with the theory of evolution.

I don't believe that statement is anywhere near being accurate. It's dangerous to generalize in any statement without evidence.

This is interesting:

Argument: Evolution is compatible with Christian religion

[Royd 0]

My problem with some evolutionists i.e. those who produce such magazines as National Geographic is that everything has morphed into something else. A fish turned into a reptile, and a reptile turned into a bird, and so on. Give me a break.
The word evolution implies constant change, so why don't we observe animals in transitory stages between one species or another. When did it stop?
The only species that seems to change is the humans, and they are going downhill mentally and morally as if there was never a divine law of truth.
That would be the Ten Commandments- no revisions , no amendments, which, according to the story, was written into stone by the finger of God, and given to Moses to be delivered to the Jews.

[jakee 1,257]

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The word evolution implies constant change, so why don't we observe animals in transitory stages between one species or another. When did it stop?

My word you've got it!

Somehow you've stumbled on to the most brilliantly original idea I've ever heard. Never has the 'theory' (hah!) of evolution been so concisely yet completely torn to shreds. The damn academics in their ivory towers wont know what to say when you lay that one on them. I laugh at the thought of how stupid they're going to feel when they realise just what they've overlooked!

Bravo sir, bravo. May you be a guiding light to us all.

Do you want to have an ideagasm?

[shropshire 0]

I dont believe .... why do some believers have a problem with that?

(.)Y(.)
Chivalry is not dead; it only sleeps for want of work to do. - Jerome K Jerome

[Royd 0]

I can't decide if that message is filled with kudos or sarcasm, so you're pretty good, yourself.

[shropshire 0]

We see change all the time.... Viruses mutate, as do plants... new varieties are generated every year.... why dont we see higher forms change.. because it happens too slowly i.e not over many, many generations.

(.)Y(.)
Chivalry is not dead; it only sleeps for want of work to do. - Jerome K Jerome

[Royd 0]

Most varities of new plants are caused my man's meddling, and in most cases are hybrids, which does not allow them to reproduce themselves.
As for animals changing over time, you believe this without actually observing it. So, you accept something by faith.

[shropshire 0]

<> - not so... the potato for example has been selectively breed and is completely different from the original example imported... The seeds that we plant are certainly can reproduce themselves.. I think that you need to investigate horticultre in much more detail.

As for animals changing... take a look at cattle, dogs, cats or bird breeding.. have you not obsereved changes... Take a close look.

I mentioned mutation in viruses etc.. come on there is change all around us.

Dont fall into the trap of selective observation.

.

(.)Y(.)
Chivalry is not dead; it only sleeps for want of work to do. - Jerome K Jerome

[Royd 0]

Animals crossbreeding within their own species is not evolutionary change.
I know that when you cross a donkey and a horse you come up with a mule, which cannot reproduce.
Also there are many plants, certain corns, that have good characteristics, but they are hybridized and new seed must be reproduced each year by crossing two other plants. The seed will reproduce, but will not be true to form after one or two generations.It will tend to revert to its original form.
As for viruses, I'll give that one to you. They are probably there to wipe out the weak of the human species, thus, natural selection at work, not necessarily the evolutionary process.

[shropshire 0]

<> If you conceed the evolution of Viruses, then you conceed the theory of evolution in general... or at the very least you can no longer discount it.

Thanks for the conversation mate.

Regards,

(.)Y(.)
Chivalry is not dead; it only sleeps for want of work to do. - Jerome K Jerome

[jakee 1,257]

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As for viruses, I'll give that one to you. They are probably there to wipe out the weak of the human species, thus, natural selection at work, not necessarily the evolutionary process.

What the hell are you talking about? There are so many things wrong with that statement I'm not sure where to begin.

1. There are innumerable different viruses, many of which don't affect humans.

2. Of those that do, many don't kill anyone.

3. Of those that do, many will kill even the strongest humans they infect.

4. Why would they be put there (as you believe) to kill weak humans?

5. Natural selection is the driver of evolution.

Do you want to have an ideagasm?

[Royd 0]

The only viruses that have cause to mutate are those which have been tampered with by man, by the use of antibiotics, or overuse.
Nowadays, we run children to the doctor for the least little reason. They get a dose of antibiotics popped into their ass, and their natural immune system is never allowed to recognize, or deal with an intruder, thus, never building up the natural immunity.
I'm just having fun now. They were put for the same reason as the mosquito, and the flea. To keep us humble and to realize that we are not the masters of our destiny.
A herd of elk trapped in deep snow that gets thinned out by a pack of wolves is natural selection to those who survive. It does not cause the DNA of the elk to change one bit. The elk will never grow snowshoes in order to run on top of the snow.
That's the kind of crap that we've been fed as evolution.
there are plenty of times in my work where I've needed three hands. Just recently, learning to pack a zero-p canopy. Ain't gonna happen.
I am a gardener and observe, and practise natural selection all of the time. I plant ten zucchini seeds in a group. Four or five come up strong. The rest are runty. I pull them up in order to give the good ones room to grow. At the end of the season every thing that came from those plants were zucchini.

[shropshire 0]

<> - No, No ,No where on Earth would you get an idea like that?

(.)Y(.)
Chivalry is not dead; it only sleeps for want of work to do. - Jerome K Jerome

[shropshire 0]

<> ... I seriously doubt that... they were around BEFORE man. Found in amber from about 100–90 million ago.

(.)Y(.)
Chivalry is not dead; it only sleeps for want of work to do. - Jerome K Jerome

[jakee 1,257]

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The only viruses that have cause to mutate are those which have been tampered with by man, by the use of antibiotics, or overuse.

Viruses (and any living cells) do not mutate because they want to, that is a purely random process. The selection occurs after the mutations. Does the new generation have something that will help it reproduce or something that will hinder it? Take drug resistance, sometimes the new strain that is resistant to treatment is actually weaker in other ways, less transmissable for example. In a drug free environment this would cause the new strain to die off since it is inferior. In the modern world, though, it is better equipped to survive and reproduce than the original strain and will flourish.

Natural selection as the driver for evolution.

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That's the kind of crap that we've been fed as evolution.

No. Thats the kind of crap that is fed to you by creationists, IDists and other religious fundamentalists who do not have the slightest understanding of what it is they are so vehemently fighting against. All your arguments so far display a complete lack of understanding of Darwinian evolution.

No wonder you don't believe in it, you don't even know what it is.

Do you want to have an ideagasm?

[Nightingale 0]

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The only viruses that have cause to mutate are those which have been tampered with by man, by the use of antibiotics, or overuse.

OMG.

Um...viruses mutate whether they run into antibiotics or not, mainly because antibiotics don't kill viruses. They kill bacteria. Antibiotics weren't even discovered until 1929. "Scientists have found that the 1918 Flu Pandemic (11 years before the discovery of penicillin) was caused by a bird flu virus nutating to infect humans. By restructuring the 1918 influenza virus, scientists have discovered the deadly disease was an avian flu that advanced directly from birds to humans. The 1918 pandemic killed as many as 50 million people worldwide. Scientists reconstructed the disease from samples from lung tissue from two American soldiers and an Alaskan woman who died of the highly infectious virus.

The scientists traced the genetic sequence of the 1918 virus and synthesized it using molecular biology. Avian flu is zoonotic, a disease that primarily affects animals and can be transferred to humans. It is only when the disease can transfer from human-to-human that it becomes highly contagious. Currently, avian flu has only been transferred from birds to people. The avian flu viruses act differently from ordinary human flu viruses; they infect cells deep in the lungs that would normally be immune." -NAS

"A virus is a bit of genetic information (RNA or DNA) packaged in an envelope of proteins and/or lipids sometimes including sugars. Viruses cannot live by themselves but must be able to quickly get into eukaryotic (Plant or Animal) cells to survive. They use the energy metabolism and biosynthetic machinery of the cell to replicate themselves. During the phase of replication inside the eukaryotic cell, a virus makes a copy of its RNA or DNA and from that copy duplicates itself. The RNA or DNA in a virus usually encodes enzymes involved in this process in addition to gene sequences that encode the envelop proteins.

Sometimes during the process of copying the RNA or DNA of the virus, small errors (substitutions in nucleotide base pairs) occur in the copy. These errors are replicated into subsequent copies. If the change isn't fatal to the virus and causes it to stop replicating, then the virus has resulted in a mutation. If that mutation results in a changed protein that enables the virus to survive, infect or replicate better the virus will become more infectious.

...In addition to these kinds of big changes in flu virus genes, there are also minor point mutation changes that cause "antigenic drift" so the virus of the same type is slightly different antigenically and can escape elimination by the body's immune response to that type's vaccine."
-Art Anderson, Senior Scientist in Immunology and Pathology at USAMRIID

[jakee 1,257]

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.. I seriously doubt that... they were around BEFORE man. Found in amber from about 100–90 million ago.

Hah, shows how much you know sucker!

If you'd read Paj's article you'd see that the world is only 6000 years old. Fossils are just a test of faith or some shit



(Seriously though, I never thought I'd actually see someone use the 'New Earth' argument for real. Reality really is an uphill struggle for some people)

Do you want to have an ideagasm?