Patrick Elliott <sel### [at] rraznet> wrote:
> I absolutely guarantee that, no
> matter how smart or literate the believer, and how careful you are to
> "only" deal with the arguments they bring up, and be completely fair to
> them, it will *inevitably* sink to the point where their only defense is
> that they believe, you don't, and until you do, you won't understand the
> sublime genius of their position.

so, it all comes down to "haha, look at the stupid (non-)believer!".  yep, human
nature at its best! :P

but, yes, it all comes down to faith.  Because a believer sees everything as
ultimately resulting from God's will, down to particles quantum interactions.

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> But as I wrote to Nemesis, surely God could've/would've forseen that need
> and written them clearly enough that such a clarification wouldn't be
> necessary, no?

They were trying to trick Jesus into saying that one of the deadly sins
was worse than the others, and therefore by reasoning that other
sins aren't that bad, since every sin would have a sin that is "less bad".
This is a variation on Zeno's arrow paradox.

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In article <web.47595d5f922777ebf48316a30@news.povray.org>, 
nam### [at] gmailcom says...
> Patrick Elliott <sel### [at] rraznet> wrote:
> > So it influenced human history. So what. So did a lot of things. That
> > doesn't mean it didn't influence it *wrongly*, or that its prevalence,
> > mostly via violence, war, subversion, threats, torture and assassinatio
n
> > (directly or via its acceptance by those that both believed it and used
> > such tactics), makes it somehow better than other alternatives that
> > *could* have happened.
> 
> war, assassination, threats and torture are not the teachings of Jesus or
 any
> other religious leaders AFAIK.  They have nothing to do with religion exc
ept
> some men in power will make other men (not them!) die in the name of God 
to
> justify their needs.
> 
Sorry, but while that may be true of the NT, its ***not*** true of the 
OT. And even Jesus accepted such things as slavery, declaring to one man 
that beating his servant (And yes, in the context of the times and that 
passage, the person being beaten was not a "paid" servant. You where not 
legally allowed to beat people you hired, only those you owned.), so 
sorry, but insisting that its not what Jesus taught isn't all that 
relevant. Not the least because you have to first convince me that such 
a person existed, where the only evidence for his existence amounts to 
the NT, and a few vague statements made by people who, at best, quoted a 
similar name in reference to some event, and which, like the NT, only 
suddenly became important enough to "find", or invent, some 50 years 
after the fact.

> > By your logic, had a
> > few key moments in history been different, you would now be sitting her
e
> > arguing that our Emperor really is a God, and that he is a direct
> > descendant of dragons, because it can't be otherwise and there still be
> > a Chinese empire.
> 
> Except it wasn't different.  There must be a good reason for that.
> 
Yeah, its called chance. If you want to imply otherwise you first have 
to provide evidence that divine intervention was needed to make that 
happen, not human action.

> > Its even worse, given the fact that you can trace virtually **every**
> > story in the Bible back to some prior religion, and that not one of
> > those religions believed in the same God that the Jews eventually
> > insisted was the real one, and many of them believed in ***multiple***
> > gods.
> 
> I believe Adam and Eve and even Noah's times were much farther off than i
n the
> Biblical accounts.  Oral tradition existed for far longer than recorded H
istory
> counts.  Many people through the ages were aware of these histories passe
d
> along, it's not really surprising that many cultures recorded their versi
ons of
> the distant events.
> 
Noah was based on Sumerian legend, its virtually impossible to argue 
otherwise, unless you simply want to insist that somehow they wrote a 
story that was 100% identical, save for a few key elements. Everything 
is there, the sin committed (though by Gilgamesh, not the world in 
general), the loading of animals on the ship, a far more believable size 
of the ship, which could easily have been exaggerated by people that 
realized it was too small to fit the Noah story into, 40 days and nights 
of rain, the **known world** being flooded, and every things else. The 
only thing that doesn't fit is the, "God's chosen built a big boat to 
save all life, while God drowned all the sinners!" The reason for that 
is obvious. The Jewish people wanted God to punish a sinful world of 
greed, and all the other things, while the original story had God 
punishing Gilgamesh for it.

As of the whole Adam and Eve thing. We know that humans where reduced to 
a few thousand individuals back when the last super volcano blew. Prior 
to that, it would have seemed like paradise, after, they would have 
struggled to survive in a world where many of the plants and animals 
around them where struggling to survive, or dying, as the ash plume from 
the volcano dropped the planets temperature by a huge amount. Its not 
impossible to imagine two people making up some crazy asses story about 
being thrown out of paradise for eating the wrong bloody fruit. It also 
provides a *reasonable* explanation for where all the other people, 
including the wives of Adam and Eve's children, came from, they where 
other people that wandered, seperately, out of the "paradise" they had 
lost.

This makes sense, and we have evidence of it. All you have for your 
version is the same BS you get from Atlantis advocates: "Well, it must 
have happened way back farther than anyone has looked, so like, we just 
haven't found the evidence yet."

> now why did God made a covenant with the Hebrews and not with other peopl
e, say,
> the Greeks, the Chinese, the Africans?  It could be said Moses and his pe
ople
> are direct descendants of Abraham and Noah and they were the righteous me
n that
> God spared from the Flood, but I really don't know God's intentions.  I k
now
> eventually the covenant was far broadened via Jesus salvation and thus
> available to all people in the world.  It's a mere question of faith.
> 
Sorry, but you are starting with the assumption that a covenant **was** 
made, then asking the absurd question of why what you haven't proven 
happened only happened for the Hebrews. This isn't how science, never 
mind logic, works. You have to prove something happened *first*, then 
explain it, not make up a mess of explanations for why it did happen, 
then insist that because you have a lot of excuses for why it makes 
sense to you, it is therefor real.

And the stupidest part of this backward logic is that you again bring up 
Noah, which even Biblical scholars now admit (you know, the people that 
actually study history, instead of just listening to priests babble) was 
probably based on Gilgamesh.

> other than that, the divine is felt differently by people of different cu
ltures.
>  You don't see, nor hear God with your physical senses and thus it's all 
left to
> personal interpretation...
> 
In other words, you think that the divine felt differently about 
different cultures, want that to be true, so you are defending this idea 
with the claim that the Bible explains this to be true, which is somehow 
supposed to validate the original premise. It won't work. The Bible 
can't be accurate unless it describes what you claim, so until you can 
provide evidence that it **is** true, other than the Bible, the Bible 
can't be used as proof of the original premise. Your using it to prove 
itself. You can't do that. Such proofs require than you provide 
*external* references to events it describes, to indicate that those 
events took place at all. The problem being, the more we learn, the more 
inaccurate and absurd many of its descriptions of events become. Heck, 
they can't even get the time of Exodus right, which recent archeology 
indicates took place some 500 years **earlier** when neither the 
pyramids, nor the great temples, that Moses' people where supposed to be 
enslaved to work on, had even been imagined, let alone built.

And even if you prove times and places, which it invariably fails at, 
your argument that God was involved in it is based ***solely*** on the 
presupposition that because a lot of people believe in your God, this 
validates the idea that *he* was involved somehow. Its argument via 
popularity, not evidence. And you **still** lose even then, since 
****world wide**** Christianity is only the *third* most popular 
religion. Islam is #1, with, I think, Buddhism coming in second. Since 
you can't even claim, correctly, that you have the *winning* religion, 
how do you use that as evidence that your right, and the other, 
probably, 4 billion people in the world that think you are a fool, are 
wrong?

No, the only valid claim you can make is that you believe because things 
happened the way they did. Any attempt to claim that this was ordained 
or helped begs the questions, "What *real* evidence do you have for 
that?", and, "Then why is Christianity the third most followed religion, 
instead of the *most* followed?" Your evidence for the former is 100% 
circular, relying on, "it happened, therefor it had to happen, qed, I am 
right!", while I very much doubt you have any explanation for the later, 
which doesn't undermine your own claim that God has to be on *your* 
side, otherwise you wouldn't be a Christian.

Oh, and the stupidest thing about your argument is that, while the US is 
irrationally insane about religion, and so is the ME, the rest of the 
western world tends to broadly reject these very arguments, and most of 
them have given up on the idea of God you claim to follow, in favor of 
atheism, or at the very least, a form of deism, in which *god* has not, 
and never did, intervene in the world, beyond his initial creation of 
it. So, technically, your version of Christianity probably isn't even 
the third biggest religion anymore, but probably like 10th or 11th.

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nemesis wrote:
> war, assassination, threats and torture are not the teachings of Jesus or any
> other religious leaders AFAIK. 

Doesn't Moses count?  You know, Numbers 31? Or was that genocide an 
allegory too?

> It could be said Moses and his people are direct descendants of Abraham and Noah 
 > and they were the righteous men that God spared from the Flood,

Sorry, isn't *everyone* a direct descendant of Noah? Or was that another 
of those allegories? :-)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     It's not feature creep if you put it
     at the end and adjust the release date.

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Patrick Elliott wrote:
> This isn't how science, never 
> mind logic, works. You have to prove something happened *first*, then 
> explain it, not make up a mess of explanations for why it did happen, 
> then insist that because you have a lot of excuses for why it makes 
> sense to you, it is therefor real.

And, just for general edification, *this* is what "begging the question" 
means.  "The Bible is true because it says so, right there in the 
Bible!" :-) It doesn't mean asking the question or raising the question.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     It's not feature creep if you put it
     at the end and adjust the release date.

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Darren New wrote:
> I have never met an theist who could give a single example of anything 
> that would convince him *his* religion is wrong. 

And here's an example of that, too:

Say you go to hawaii, and you find this group of people who, by praying 
to Pele (the volcano goddess), can *actually* regenerate amputated 
limbs. No scientific explanation is forthcoming, but anyone who has lost 
a limb can go there, get three people to pray in a circle, and his limb 
will grow back all by itself within a month.

Show this to a faithful Christian. What is he going to say?  "Gee, maybe 
Pele really exists, and answers prayers better than JHVH does?" Or is it 
going to be interpreted as a conspiracy by Satan to lure faithful 
Christians away from their One True Religion?

I'd be interested in hearing what someone here who considers themselves 
a faithful Christian would answer to that.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     It's not feature creep if you put it
     at the end and adjust the release date.

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Show this to a faithful Christian. What is he going to say?  "Gee, maybe
> Pele really exists, and answers prayers better than JHVH does?" Or is it
> going to be interpreted as a conspiracy by Satan to lure faithful
> Christians away from their One True Religion?

there is only one God and through Him all miracles come forth.  He's not known
by the same name by the many peoples of Earth.  He's the God of the volcano, of
the fire, of the waters and of all that exists in His universe.

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In article <475a1c2d$1@news.povray.org>, dne### [at] sanrrcom says...
> Patrick Elliott wrote:
> > This isn't how science, never 
> > mind logic, works. You have to prove something happened *first*, then
 
> > explain it, not make up a mess of explanations for why it did happen,
 
> > then insist that because you have a lot of excuses for why it makes 
> > sense to you, it is therefor real.
> 
> And, just for general edification, *this* is what "begging the question"
 
> means.  "The Bible is true because it says so, right there in the 
> Bible!" :-) It doesn't mean asking the question or raising the question.
> 
Its sometimes also called, in a specific context, "arguing from 
incredulity", i.e., its so incredibly unlikely that the only explanation 
is the one I believe. The easiest dismissal of that argument though is 
simply that if you generate a random number, with any arbitrary large 
number of digits, never mind if its mathematically derived, or done by 
counting entirely random quantum particles, as they form in a vacuum, 
the odds of that number coming up can be extremely unlikely, to 
theoretically infinitely impossible, yet *some* number must come up, and 
its no more or less unlikely than any of the other n-1/n possible 
numbers in that set.

So, any number that is too big to *feel* and which they fail on an 
intellectual level to understand either, becomes nearly infinite and 
therefor impossible, hence, only God could have managed it.

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In article <web.475b53d1922777eb4b7adf720@news.povray.org>, 
nam### [at] gmailcom says...
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> > Show this to a faithful Christian. What is he going to say?  "Gee, mayb
e
> > Pele really exists, and answers prayers better than JHVH does?" Or is i
t
> > going to be interpreted as a conspiracy by Satan to lure faithful
> > Christians away from their One True Religion?
> 
> there is only one God and through Him all miracles come forth.  He's not 
known
> by the same name by the many peoples of Earth.  He's the God of the volca
no, of
> the fire, of the waters and of all that exists in His universe.
> 
Sorry, but I call bullshit. Unless you are so absolutely ignorant of any 
and all religions other than your own, which I suspect is likely, that 
you don't know how absurd this is, then its ***impossible*** to 
reconcile every god that ever existed, and which people claim perform(s) 
miracles with the Christian God. If nothing else, the Bible itself makes 
it absolutely clear that all those other gods, even if they do perform 
them, is *not* the god of the Bible. Mind you, I don't doubt that Jesus, 
or his ghost writer, would have wanted to suggest that. It is precisely 
what the Romans who adopted the religion **wanted** everyone to think, 
so as to more easily remove all the annoying priests that where not 
*conveniently* members of their own families. The first Roman family to 
officially adopt the religion was the Flavians, and the second official 
pope, considered second *only* because he claimed that was made such by 
Paul, was *also* a Flavian and a close relative to *ding ding ding*, the 
new Emperor, who thought it would be a real neat idea to adopt 
Christianity as his families religion. Odd that... lol

These where not stupid people. Most already pretty much concluded that 
the Gods where all BS, but that they had to pretend to support the 
priests and allow the thousands of temples to flourish, because if they 
tried to throw any of them out the people wouldn't stand for it. But, 
that meant that a) they had *no* real control over any of them and b) 
huge amounts of money they would have loved to get themselves was 
disappearing into church coffers. They initially had some success 
declaring *themselves* gods, after they noted how well it seemed to work 
in Egypt, but then that kind of fell apart when the Egyptians started 
bringing in temples for Isis, Ra, etc. as well. How better to kill two 
bird with one stone than a) declare a religion that is so new and 
relatively unknown to be the true one, assign one of your own family 
members to head the local version, set up a council to sort through all 
the legends, stories, etc., and find stuff that is useful to you, 
convince at least "some" of the Jews you are fighting that Titus Flavius 
is the second coming, thus removing *another* problem, blame them for 
the death of the savior, so that any still around are hated even more 
than before, and so on.

You want to know why Christianity *succeeded*? Because it was the only 
one that the Roman Emperors had near absolute control over, undermined 
the power and will to fight of those who where, at the time, there worst 
enemies, and which, because they controlled it, could be written to 
support any idea they wanted. No other religion of the time period was 
sufficiently unknown, malleable, and lacking in a powerful, entrenched, 
priesthood, which the ruling families couldn't have gotten rid of, or 
subverted enough to control them. After all, declaring the emperor a god 
didn't get rid of all those other religions. Building a new one, then 
later telling people that all the others where false, did. Its certainly 
what I might have considered, in their position. Not that it did them 
much good, because as soon as the idiots in their own families started 
believing the BS they became more concerned with who was committing sins 
than maintaining a military or defending their borders, and *poof* no 
more empire.

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void main () {

    if version = "Vista" {
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      call DRM_everything();
    }
    call functional_code();
  }
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}

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nemesis wrote:
> there is only one God and through Him all miracles come forth.  He's not known
> by the same name by the many peoples of Earth.  He's the God of the volcano, of
> the fire, of the waters and of all that exists in His universe.

Wow. Let me just comment that this is the most hubris I've seen in a 
long time.

So Pele is really JHVH? And the plagues of Egypt were cast against those 
who also worshiped the same God as Moses?  And the Mayans who practiced 
human sacrifice were doing so in honor of JHVH?  And Satanists would be 
happily accepted at your church, for they are, after all, worshiping the 
one God? And the emperors of Japan and China were really JHVH after all?

I believe JHVH, through Moses, disagrees with you. Specifically, the 
first commandment would be unnecessary if all religion was in worship of 
JHVH under a different name.

I believe Jesus disagrees with you as well, when he says not to suffer a 
witch to live. Why would he instruct you to execute those who can 
perform miracles (such as flying on brooms and cursing fig trees), if 
all miracles come from JHVH?

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     It's not feature creep if you put it
     at the end and adjust the release date.

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