And lo on Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:56:32 -0000, Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom>  
did spake, saying:

> Phil Cook wrote:
>> Therefore there is no Hell.
>
> Yep. And all the carvings on the cathedral where Jesus is guesturing to  
> Satan (who surprisingly looks *just* like Loki, Pan, and Bacchus) to  
> drag the unbelievers off in chains to hell?  That's just decoration.

Who are you going to believe - God or a bunch of artists? ;-)

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

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And lo on Thu, 13 Dec 2007 01:57:16 -0000, nemesis  
<nam### [at] gmailcom> did spake, saying:


> The eye of a needle was how a narrow passageway was known at those  
> times.  The camel had to be unloaded of his goods and knee in order to  
> pass.  A rich man unloading of his goods and kneeling is a very unlikely  
> thought.

I think you'll find that's a retrospective explantion. Firstly if it was  
an actual place it would have one name yet Mark and Luke use a different  
term for 'needle'. Secondly if this gate was so well-known for that  
particular propensity the phrase would have stuck yet it occurs later in  
the Babylonian Talmud with elephant replacing camel, thirdly "eye of a  
needle" is used minus camel or elephant to describe a very small place  
later. Forthly you're pointing out that it is possible for the camel to  
pass whereas the rest of the text continues "The things which are  
impossible with men are possible with God", but it wasn't impossible for  
the camel to pass through the "eye of the needle" from your explanation.

Sometimes a needle is just a needle, and a camel just a camel.

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

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And lo on Thu, 13 Dec 2007 04:54:36 -0000, Patrick Elliott  
<sel### [at] rraznet> did spake, saying:

> In article <web.4760733a922777eb2067189c0@news.povray.org>,
> nam### [at] gmailcom says...
>> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> >  
>> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article1072638.ece
>>
>> So, prayers were comissioned to pray for people they did not know and  
>> patients
>> were not told they were being prayed for and participating in a study  
>> by a
>> bunch of skeptics in a campaign to ridicule religion?
>>
> "This $2.4 million study, funded in large part by the John Templeton
> Foundation, which seeks "insights at the boundary between theology and
> science", was intended to cast some clear light on the matter."

To put it more concisely  
http://russellsteapot.com/comics/2007/omni-impotence.html

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

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nemesis wrote:
> 
> It's determined by who you ask help to.  Offering a chicken to Satan for him to
> "help" me is not helpful at all
> 

Why not? The person offering to sacrifice the chicken obviously believes 
that it will help, in their mind just as you believe praying to God will 
help, the same as a Catholic's belief that asking the saints to pray on 
someone's behalf will help.

>> For some reason I all the sudden have the urge to play the song "Highway
>> to hell" ... ;)
> 
> just play "Stairway to Heaven" backwards...
> 

Nah, when I get that I just get gibberish... :)

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Darren New wrote:
> nemesis wrote:
>> Sabrina Kilian <"ykgp at vtSPAM.edu"> wrote:
>>> JHVH never asked anyone to bring their own child up to a mountain top
>>> and sacrifice them. No, something that important and sadistic would have
>>> been written down.
>>
>> JHVH was testing Abraham. 
> 
> Because, you know, he's omnipotent.
> 
>> The sacrifice did not occur.
> 
> So I guess it's OK to threaten to kill someone, too, as long as you 
> don't do it. :-)
> 

Y'know in modern times if someone were within an inch of sacrificing 
their child and claimed God told them to do it, they'd be placed in a 
mental health facility quicker than you could blink.

Makes me think perhaps the Bible is full of crazies. :)

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nemesis wrote:

> Besides, non-believers will say miracles such as healing due to prayer are
> actually a matter of chance, so I don't see the relevance of them trying to
> find proof of God's interactions in the world when every said interaction can
> be ultimately traced to quantum fluctuations, which IMO is precisely God's way
> of interacting with the physical world...

To quote a website that was shared here recently: "Why doesn't God heal 
amputees?"

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nemesis wrote:
> Sabrina Kilian <"ykgp at vtSPAM.edu"> wrote:
>> Tell me how, in any way shape or form, a 2 year old getting cancer and
>> dying painfully fits into any plan to make the rest of the world a
>> better place.
> 
> A painful departure always creates a change of heart to those who stay.  It may
> also happen to those truly faithful, in which case I see it as provation.

Yes, so ... When a grief-stricken father falls off the deep end, enters 
a crowded shopping mall and starts picking off random people with his 
hunting rifle, this makes the world much better? Lets say the father in 
this case was very faithful, believed in God and believed the Bible is 
literal truth. His becomes delusional in his grief, refuses psychiatric 
help, relying only on church and scripture, and hears the voice of God 
saying his child contracted cancer because of all of the evil in the 
world, and he has now been chosen to eradicate that evil. He truly 
believes God is talking to him. God instructs him on which people are 
evildoers. He picks them off and shoots them each and every one at God's 
instruction. The man was truly faithful, believed in God, but was 
delusional, causing the death of several people. One of whom was on 
their way to creating a community outreach program to help impoverished 
children in the inner city, who because of this man will never reach 
this goal. How does that make the world a better place?

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Phil Cook wrote:
> And lo on Thu, 13 Dec 2007 01:57:16 -0000, nemesis 
>> The eye of a needle was how a narrow passageway was known at those 
>> times.  

> I think you'll find that's a retrospective explantion. Firstly if it was 
> an actual place it would have one name 

I think you misread, Phil. Nemesis was saying "the eye of a needle" was 
slang for "alleyway."  Not that it was a specific alleyway.

The explanation *I* heard was that the original text said "camel-hair 
rope" rather than just "camel", but I have no idea where I heard 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 wrote:
> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Wed, 12 Dec 2007 11:02:27 -0800, Darren New wrote:
>>
>>> Jim Henderson wrote:
>>>> I don't know that it does - is there evidence/proof to suggest that it
>>>> does?
>>> Do you know who Abraham Lincoln was?  George Washington? Adolph Hitler?
>>> Julius Ceaser?
>>
>> What's that got to do with souls?
> 
> I'll let you think about it first, for a while.  Ask yourself what a 
> soul is, and what makes a difference between a live and a dead person.

I just wondered if you wanted to continue this.  So, having thought 
about how to try to put it in words...

A chicken doesn't have a model of the universe in its head. You put a 
three-foot fence between a chicken and food, and it'll walk around the 
fence. You put a nine-foot fence between a chicken and food, it'll walk 
a little ways, see its getting farther away, and come back to the middle 
without getting to the food.

Remember eating breakfast this morning. Think about it. Visualize it. 
Where's the camera? Behind your eyes? Or can you see yourself?

You have in your head a model of the universe. Imagine yourself in your 
bedroom, all the doors closed in the house, all the lights out. How 
would you go to the kitchen? Get up, open the door, turn on the hall 
light, maybe go down stairs, around that corner, turn on the kitchen 
light, pull out the chair, sit down. Yet you didn't actually have to do 
that to know that's what you have to do.

You have a model of the universe in your head, and in that model, you 
have a model of yourself. That is your soul. It's what makes you 
self-aware, and it's what makes you know the difference between good and 
evil.

You're self-aware because you can run simulations on yourself to 
determine what would happen were you to do something. You don't need to 
step off the edge to know you'd bounce painfully on the way down.

You know good from evil because, being able to simulate yourself, you 
can determine likely outcomes.  You also know good from evil because you 
have models of other people in your head, too. You know your mom would 
be insulted if you call her a bitch. You know, were you young enough, 
that she would punish you for doing so. You probably even know what sort 
of punishment, and you *probably* even understand *why* she would do so.

You have a bit of your Mom's soul in your head. Put there by love, 
unless you had an exceptionally unhappy childhood, in which case it was 
put there by fear and hatred. Bits of your Mom's soul will continue to 
live in your head after she is gone.

You know you're not your Mom because the model predicting what your Mom 
would do is flawed much more than the model predicting what you would do.

When you can model all the important aspects of someone in your head, 
that person is on the way to achieving immortality, or perhaps 
reincarnation might be a better word. Many attempt to model their 
behavior on what they think Confucius would do. Since he was clear and 
explicit and intentionally trying to tell people what he thought and how 
he thought they should behave, many succeed to a greater or lesser 
extent. But Confucius lives on.

-- 
   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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nemesis nous apporta ses lumieres en ce 2007/12/12 18:31:
> Mike Raiford <mra### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
>> If someone is doing something they
>> genuinely think is helpful to others, how is it determined that it's a
>> ticket to heaven or hell?
> 
> It's determined by who you ask help to.  Offering a chicken to Satan for him to
> "help" me is not helpful at all
> 
>> For some reason I all the sudden have the urge to play the song "Highway
>> to hell" ... ;)
> 
> just play "Stairway to Heaven" backwards...
> 
> 
Just play an "Ave Maria", any one, backward... Now, go on and play ANY gregorian 
chants backward. If you can, dig out any old 75RPM record, done by machanical 
recording, and play them backward. ALL would produce some sounds thah CAN be 
interpreted as "Satanic messaged"!
The explanation: When you heard some giberish, and you can't class it as 
"music", your brain just can't accept it as just gibberish and tend to organise 
those sounds as actual words.

-- 
Alain
-------------------------------------------------
'The Computer made me do it.'

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