Grassblade wrote:
> Now I'm curious. What ineluctable logic did you think up?

Given it was 10 years ago, I don't remember the exact sequence of 
questions. But since I spent something like 40 minutes making sure I 
understood exactly what was going on, *I* am convinced.

-- 
   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 <sel### [at] rraznet> wrote:
> In article <web.47595d5f922777ebf48316a30@news.povray.org>,
> 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
Looks like something is missing here. If you think Jesus said it's okay to beat
servants I'd like to get the verse, because I don't remember such a thing. He
did mention a master beating a servant, but that was in a parable.
>(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.
Yes. That was the evidence in the eighteenth century. Some progress has been
made since, you know. Like the Nazareth Inscription
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazareth_Inscription). Or Pliny's letter to
Traian.
> 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.
Yeah, right. Now you're asking for God as testable hypothesis.

> 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.
If I wasn't using the web-view, I'd sig this. "Hey, the sun has the same colour
of the sky, except for a key element". Arf. Sorry, couldn't resist.
About Noah, I've read a site making a case for the Indian origin of Abraham
based on all the similarities between their myths and the Hebrews', including
Noah. Can't find the link right now.
<snip>
> 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.
Really? So language cannot prove itself, can it? Therefore let's burn
dictionaries. And math? Can it prove itself? So let's add math books to the
pile. Considering Science is based on published papers, that consist of math
and (usually English) commentaries, I think you just killed Science.
> 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.
Ever heard of peer review? It works on popularity among peers. Man, if you're
trying to take science out of the picture you're doing a good job. <_<
> 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?
I seriously doubt that Buddhism is second. Islam allows four wives, BTW. Kind of
an unfair advantage. ;-)

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> 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?
Of course it counts, but he did mention Jesus did he not? Moses is about a
couple of millenia earlier.

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> 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?
The latter obviously. As I'm sure you know.
>
> 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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you know, this topic has gone completely berserk, even for an offtopic forum in
a 3D renderer site.  I feel unable to follow and counter every little argument
the CSI men come up with.  I'm alone fighting against fierce fiery tongues who,
despite losing hours on end analysing til the last detail down to the literary,
historic or logical aspects and contradictions of the Bible, seem to miss the
Message.

I'll pray for your souls, though... :)

Patrick Elliott <sel### [at] rraznet> wrote:
> 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.

I was not comparing JHVH to Ra, Zeus or anything.  Just stating that, regardless
of the different divine personas the pagans applied to represent the forces of
nature, the one true God is the one who really rules over the many different
forces of nature.

> 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.

Bravo!  You're a true CSI!  You've just made "Da Vinci's Code" look like a bunch
of puerile assumptions.

Now, there's an old portuguese saying that I think apply here: "Deus escreve
certo por linhas tortas/God writes right by twisted lines".  There certainly is
something of Machiavelli in the way God works...

I'm off.

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On Sun, 09 Dec 2007 12:52:40 -0800, Darren New wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> I think we could probably agree that a watch is unlikely to happen as
>> the evolution of something geologic,
> 
> Any particular item is unlikely to happen at all. I don't think it's
> that far-fetched to believe in something that keeps time based on
> sunrise, sunset, or tides.

But something that keeps time accurately that you can wear on your 
wrist?  Surely there aren't forests where those sorts of things grow on 
trees. :-)

> If you ran across a tidepool of water that was just at the right height
> to empty out just as the tide came back in, would it be miraculous?

Arguably, if the limit of my experience was that that couldn't happen, I 
might think so if that was in my nature.  It isn't, so *I* wouldn't, but 
I can see why some people might.

>> It seems to me that a lot of the religious people I know believe we've
>> advanced science to the point that there is no more to discover or
>> understand - and if we don't know "it" now, we will never know it.
> 
> I don't think it's that exactly. But of course people have been
> predicting the end of science since the greeks.

Yeah, it probably isn't exactly it, I think it's probably not something 
those of deep religious faith put a lot of thought into.  I know some who 
do, of course, but I think a larger percentage believe that all that can 
be known is known, in spite of evidence to the contrary.

Or perhaps it's not that all that can be known is known, but that all we 
need to know for now is known.

>> That certainly could explain the decline in math/science in the US...
> 
> But has it really? I read all kinds of conflicting reports. It's not
> like the US doesn't still invent buttloads of cool technology.

I think the number of inventions are (a) mostly by people not products of 
the current education system, and (b) are mostly by a small percentage of 
people.  I don't think there's any serious disagreement in the US that 
math and science scores are down in schools.

Jim

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Patrick Elliott <sel### [at] rraznet> wrote:
> Sorry, but I call bullshit.
> 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
Odd that historians know about nothing about the second pope, Linus, and you
know everything. Can you cite a paper?
>
> 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.
Strange, Egyptians had been doing that for millenia, what's new?
> 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.
>
Sounds like a plan Red Mage would come up with.
(http://www.nuklearpower.com/daily.php?date=010302). And plenty of unexplained
facts, like Domitian and plenty of other emperors persecuting christians:
"Yeah, let's kill our religion members in costly games to fill our coffers". Or
the Emperor not converting for over two centuries. Why not invent a new religion
instead of looking for trouble in a troublesome region like that?
And no more *Western* empire. The Eastern empire was even more obsessed with
religion, yet it survived a lot longer. Methinks your theory has more holes
than a sieve.
> --
> void main () {

>     if version = "Vista" {
>       call slow_by_half();
>       call DRM_everything();
>     }
>     call functional_code();
>   }
>   else
>     call crash_windows();
> }
>
> <A HREF='http://www.daz3d.com/index.php?refid=16130551'>Get 3D Models,
>
> 3D Content, and 3D Software at DAZ3D!</A>

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> 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?
He said WHAT????!!! I would check my facts, if I were you. Seriously.
>
> --
>    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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On Sun, 09 Dec 2007 12:46:46 -0800, Darren New wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> Not so much that they're too unlikely, but that they are vague enough
>> as to take anything that fits the criteria and say "well, it happened,
>> so therefore it wasn't improbable enough".  See the difference?
> 
> That's what science is for. And statistics. Generally speaking, it's
> *possible* quantum particles could randomly come into existence in the
> shape of a living, breathing Jesus. Unlikely enough I'd attribute it to
> something else, tho.

Exactly; because your belief is that such a thing is unlikely, so there 
must be a rational (within your frame of reference) explanation for it 
that you're just not seeing.

> It's *possible* that all cancer world-wide spontaneously disappears a
> week after Pat Robertson gets on TV and tells people to pray for that.
> Again, statistically unlikely.
> 
> Yes, I could play the games that religious people play defending their
> faith, but I wouldn't.

So if something were to occur that you couldn't put a scientific 
explanation to, you'd accept that your view was wrong that there isn't a 
god?  I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here...

>> Sure, but none of that particularly implies rapture.
> 
> I wasn't trying to be 100% precise, because I have no expectation on any
> reward for my efforts. I don't expect my proof to materialize, and I
> don't expect religious people to respect or understand my atheism any
> more regardless of how precise I am.

That's the rub, innit?  

>> it could well be said that the rest of us are in hell and those few
>> were saved.
> 
> Then this turns into a pretty silly argument, doesn't it? :-)

For you or me, sure.  But you and I don't have the monopoly on 
perspectives that make sense to people, either.  Maybe God told them that 
the perception was right; just because it was a personal experience for 
them doesn't make it less valid just because we didn't see it happen (or 
aren't privy to the "facts").  Of course, you and I are more likely to 
just call BS and move on.
 
>>> I'll personally disagree on this one. Sometimes, you're just f'ed, and
>>> that's necessary for a free society.
>> 
>> Perhaps, but you'll note that I didn't say it was government's role,
>> but society's role.  I think an important part of a decent society is
>> to recognize bad things happening and to say "hey, that's bad" and to
>> do something about it.
> 
> Do something about it with force? You're describing government.

Not exactly, no.

For example, I've a cousin who "kidnapped" his granddaughter because the 
situation she was living in was reportedly abusive.  They were attempting 
to adopt, and the mother (his daughter) decided after all that she didn't 
want to give her daughter up but instead keep her in the allegedly 
abusive situations.

That's the sort of thing I'm talking about.  From what I know of the 
situation, he did "the right thing", but he did go to jail for what he 
did.

>> That is why, as a society, we have laws.
> 
> I understand. I think it would be a bad law to let the government decide
> what's best for your own children.

I agree; but it's not about government making that decision.  It's about 
decent people like you and me seeing something bad happening to someone 
and doing something about it instead of standing by and saying "gee, 
sucks to be you."

>> second, that God missed.
> 
> <punchline> God damn it, I missed. </punchline>
>
> Heh.

<G>  Though I think it would've been "Me damn it, I missed".

> Plus, of course, an event of size one is really not something easy to
> analyze statistically.

Absolutely.  And that's the fallacy that many who use single events to 
prove (or disprove) something fall into.

>> Statistically speaking, all of those events are quite improbable, yet
>> it happened.
> 
> Statistics doesn't apply to one event, generally speaking. Everything
> that actually happens is 100% probably. :-)

Well, true enough - because the event already happened.  But the 
statistical likelihood of it happening prior to actually happening is 
what I was referring to.

> Is it miraculous that I roll 10 6's in a row? No. Is it miraculous that
> I can do it on demand without cheating? Sure.
> 
> You can't look at an event that already happened, and say "gee, that was
> really unlikely, so something must be up." Basic rule of statistics.

Exactly.  Which is why an event or series of events that have happened 
(as opposed to "if they do happen") is unlikely to prove that God exists 
to anyone - because if they do happen, then they were statistically 
likely to happen and all the information necessary to make that 
determination just wasn't in yet.

>> Agreed, because belief isn't logical.  Otherwise, it wouldn't be
>> belief, it'd be fact-based.
> 
> Well, it isn't (in my experience) logical, but it's also not scientific.
> The two are somewhat different.

Somewhat different, but strongly related.

>>> There's also the other fun kinds of conversations: "Do you believe in
>>> Life After Death?"
>>>     "Sure."
>>> "Then you *are* religious."
>>>     "No, why would you say that? Can't there be LaD without God?"
>> 
>> Heh, yes, that's true enough.  (The "fun conversation" aspect, not the
>> content).
> 
> If you like that sort of stuff, read some Greg Egan works. I'd recommend
> Permutation City for a start, or his Axiomatic short-story collection.

I'll add that to my list as well.  :-)

>>> And it constantly amazes me the number of people who try to support
>>> religion by pretending organization of structure is unimportant. That
>>> there must be some physical "thing" that represents the difference
>>> between a live person and a dead person, beyond how the parts are
>>> positioned.
>> 
>> Well, some people do seem to have the need to think "there's got to be
>> more to it than what I see", and I don't have a problem with that up to
>> the point that they try to convince me that if I just studied harder/
>> prayed harder/did whatever they do, it'd be revealed to me as well. 
>> I've got my own understanding of the universe based - I think like
>> yours - around what I can observe or logically infer from what I
>> observe.
> 
> Well, yes. But what I was trying to say is, I see many arguments along
> the lines that the soul must exist because there's no physical
> difference between the chemicals in a live body and in a dead body. Yet
> these same people will cheerfully ask you to install the operating
> system on their new blank hard drive. :)

LOL, now *that* made me laugh out loud.

Jim

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On Sun, 09 Dec 2007 15:42:10 -0500, Grassblade wrote:

>  Christianism is based on a dogma: God exists.

And some would say that that's the core flaw right there - because it's 
based on something that may or may not be true, then even if it is 
logical (which IME it isn't, but that's another discussion), if you've 
started from a false premise, then that would kinda invalidate the entire 
thing.

Which is why my observation has been similar to Darren's - if something 
in the bible is demonstrably wrong, then the logic must be flawed because 
the premise from which the whole thing derives is so strongly believed to 
be true that it MUST be the logic that's wrong.

Jim

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