God is Amazing
11-08-2013, 08:27 AM
#112
Fork Horn
Join Date: Oct 2013
Location: Michigan
Posts: 269
11-09-2013, 05:27 AM
#113
Nontypical Buck
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: NE Kansas
Posts: 1,101
Murby, here's a link to a short article I ran into today. You might be interested.
http://catholiceducation.org/article...ics/ap0486.htm
http://catholiceducation.org/article...ics/ap0486.htm
11-09-2013, 05:44 AM
#114
Fork Horn
Join Date: Oct 2013
Location: Michigan
Posts: 269
Murby, here's a link to a short article I ran into today. You might be interested.
http://catholiceducation.org/article...ics/ap0486.htm
http://catholiceducation.org/article...ics/ap0486.htm
And just so you know, if I was reading the same by in an atheist journal, I would take the same attitude. (You can call me an equal opportunity non-believer)
What would have been better would be to watch the actual unedited interview.
This is the very reason "hear say" is not allowed in a court of law..
11-11-2013, 04:54 AM
#115
Nontypical Buck
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: NE Kansas
Posts: 1,101
The problem with that article is that it was written, edited and published by someone with an obvious bias on the subject. As with other media tricks, journalists tend to leave out important details in the "other side" of the story when it suits their agenda.
And just so you know, if I was reading the same by in an atheist journal, I would take the same attitude. (You can call me an equal opportunity non-believer)
What would have been better would be to watch the actual unedited interview.
This is the very reason "hear say" is not allowed in a court of law..
And just so you know, if I was reading the same by in an atheist journal, I would take the same attitude. (You can call me an equal opportunity non-believer)
What would have been better would be to watch the actual unedited interview.
This is the very reason "hear say" is not allowed in a court of law..
Edit: he does make a point, though, that Dawkins has an implicit premise that rejects anything that isn't connectable to Darwinism. That's not good argumentation on Dawkins' part.
While I'm thinking about it, related to an earlier discussion, there is something that the Christians came up with that I don't think the ancients would have otherwise. You were thinking more on the lines of something in the scientific realm. I'll go a different route.
A crucified messiah represented an intellectually bizarre idea that no one would have invented. The reason is that to people in honor cultures, it represented absolute, utter humiliation and dishonor. They didn't crucify you to kill you. They did it to debase you before everybody and utterly discredit your ideas and politics.
The early Christians had a very serious problem in insisting on a crucified messiah. Preach a crucified messiah to a potential convert in that world, and you pretty much ruined your case from the get-go. Messiahs weren't crucifixion victims. Quite literally, crucifixion was something you didn't talk about as a matter of principle, and you never admitted to associating with someone who was crucified.
This is one of the reasons St. Paul had to insist to the Corinthians that the cross and crucifixion were crucial. They want nothing to do with it whatsoever. Paul has to set them straight and preach to them that a crucified messiah was an essential.
The significance: it seems that in the face of a murder that should have totally discredited Jesus as a messiah figure, they insisted on it anyway. Something convinced them that a crucified individual was the messiah nonetheless, despite all of their aversion to the idea. Obviously, a resurrection would carry that kind of weight.
Last edited by Father Forkhorn; 11-11-2013 at 05:23 AM.
11-11-2013, 07:00 PM
#116
Fork Horn
Join Date: Oct 2013
Location: Michigan
Posts: 269
A stupid attitude for sure.
While I'm thinking about it, related to an earlier discussion, there is something that the Christians came up with that I don't think the ancients would have otherwise. You were thinking more on the lines of something in the scientific realm. I'll go a different route.
A crucified messiah represented an intellectually bizarre idea that no one would have invented. The reason is that to people in honor cultures, it represented absolute, utter humiliation and dishonor. They didn't crucify you to kill you. They did it to debase you before everybody and utterly discredit your ideas and politics.
The early Christians had a very serious problem in insisting on a crucified messiah. Preach a crucified messiah to a potential convert in that world, and you pretty much ruined your case from the get-go. Messiahs weren't crucifixion victims. Quite literally, crucifixion was something you didn't talk about as a matter of principle, and you never admitted to associating with someone who was crucified.
This is one of the reasons St. Paul had to insist to the Corinthians that the cross and crucifixion were crucial. They want nothing to do with it whatsoever. Paul has to set them straight and preach to them that a crucified messiah was an essential.
The significance: it seems that in the face of a murder that should have totally discredited Jesus as a messiah figure, they insisted on it anyway. Something convinced them that a crucified individual was the messiah nonetheless, despite all of their aversion to the idea. Obviously, a resurrection would carry that kind of weight.
A crucified messiah represented an intellectually bizarre idea that no one would have invented. The reason is that to people in honor cultures, it represented absolute, utter humiliation and dishonor. They didn't crucify you to kill you. They did it to debase you before everybody and utterly discredit your ideas and politics.
The early Christians had a very serious problem in insisting on a crucified messiah. Preach a crucified messiah to a potential convert in that world, and you pretty much ruined your case from the get-go. Messiahs weren't crucifixion victims. Quite literally, crucifixion was something you didn't talk about as a matter of principle, and you never admitted to associating with someone who was crucified.
This is one of the reasons St. Paul had to insist to the Corinthians that the cross and crucifixion were crucial. They want nothing to do with it whatsoever. Paul has to set them straight and preach to them that a crucified messiah was an essential.
The significance: it seems that in the face of a murder that should have totally discredited Jesus as a messiah figure, they insisted on it anyway. Something convinced them that a crucified individual was the messiah nonetheless, despite all of their aversion to the idea. Obviously, a resurrection would carry that kind of weight.
Putting a pharaoh's organs in a sealed jar is intellectually bizarre if you ask me, but that doesn't indicate there was anything else going on.. (relatively speaking)
11-12-2013, 03:37 AM
#117
Spike
Join Date: Sep 2009
Posts: 41
I haven't read all 10 pages of this thread, but paged through them all, enough to confirm that my expectation was correct for what happened here.
If the OP would have posted "Mother nature is amazing," we would have seen 3 or 4 posts over a week commenting on how cool the video was, or asking where it was taken, how the herd was managed, etc etc, before this got bumped off of the main page and forgotten.
Instead, because the title was "God is amazing", an innocent thread became an opportunity for one person to spend 10 pages trying to prove how smart he is. Rather than being smart enough to realize that he's not 'converting' or 'educating' anyone here, he has taken the opportunity argue endlessly, illustrating how close minded he really is, and how denigrating he choses to be toward the belief system of others that don't conform to his own beliefs.
When someone stands on an island like this and argues their position to no end, I often can't decide whether to laugh or shake my head, because at this point, being ignorant to the futility of continuing the argument is no better than the ignorance you're accusing of the people you're trying to 'convert' or 'educate'. Creationist, or other flavors of entrenched believers that take the human documentation of God's teachings (i.e. the Bible) to a faulted literalism, and believe that a man survived in the belly of a whale, or believe that our universe was created in 6 days; these people have decided to live in strict black and white. If any of it is truth, then it must all be truth. Equally, you stand on the other side of the fence to the opposition, and argue that you have no proof that certain aspects of it are true, so therefore NONE of it may be true. Both of you are ignorant. Or should I use your preferred term, "uneducated?"
My honest motivation to comment at all tonight, though I have fought it for a few hours now, is based around your specifically narrow-minded list of reasons for which "educated people might still be foolish enough to believe in God":
I SHARE THE FOLLOWING WITH YOU NOT AS AN ARGUEMENT, BUT AS AN OPPORTUNITY TO EXPAND YOUR UNDERSTANDING OF WHY SOME 'EDUCATED PEOPLE' (or at least THIS educated person) BELIEVE IN GOD. You have made up your mind, and I do not care to change it, but I'll share with you the reasoning as to how I made up MY mind, which contradicts what you have touted thus far.
I consider myself an educated person, and I do believe in God, so I feel it fair to comment on why I don't believe in the narrow division of motivations you have proposed.
My faith has nothing to do with my 'indoctrination': I was not raised by a religious family, we only went to church a few times a year, mostly for the fellowship with other farmers rather than for any actual pious motivation. Neither my parents, nor either set of grand parents were regular attenders. Since the time that I chose my own faith roughly 15yrs ago, I have been off and on for regular Sunday attendance, even though I'm still fairly active within our church activities when I can be of use (in fact, I help out with events a couple church's in our community, not just my own. I do this in the interest of serving my community, not just the other Mennonites within it).
Nor do I believe in a higher power as a fraudulent ruse for my own gain. I assume you are referring to those 'televangelist' types we might see on late night TV, or those that post on facebook every sunday afternoon about the Glory God has shown them in their lives, on top of the pictures from the bar they posted from Saturday night. I consider my faith to be a very personal thing, and take a slight insult that this makes your list as a substantial subset for the motivation of Christian followers. If I have gained monetarily from my faith, or the recruitment of said faith in others in any way, it'd be news to me.
My faith in God does indeed stem directly from my level of education, but contrarily to the perception you have about the correlation between faith and education level. I would expect that I would be fair to consider my 'education' to be above average for Americans, as it includes two bachelors degrees, one in Medical Science: Pre-Med, the other chemical engineering with minors in physics and microbiology. While working full-time jobs over the last decade, I have so far finished my Masters in Chemical Engineering, working toward my PhD, and should finish my MBA at the end of next year. I'm a certified Project Management Professional, a licensed Professional Engineer, and a certified Risk Assessor. I have co-authored 2 registered US patents, and been supporting contributor on over a dozen others in the last decade. I consider myself to be "educated" at least partially, and I can say irrefutably that my education, and the resultant understanding I have for how the universe around me functions, has served as the motivation for me to START believing.
My 'without-a-doubt expectation' for your response will be for you to reference, probably even quote yourself, your thread where you emboldened the word "majority", giving yourself an excuse to exclude someone like me from your narrow-minded definitions of 'educated believers'. Undoubtedly, you included this modifier to give yourself an outlet to pursue that someone like me might come along, so you can dismiss me as an exception to the "majority". To which my response is this: you've drawn very small boxes for a very diverse subset of the world's population. There is no reason to believe nor evidence to support that your boxes are applicable as global definitions other than narcissistic cynicism, but you have passed them off as such. You have revealed yourself.
My reasons for believing, including some of the reasons that I believe things that contradict traditional Christian teachings (which I politely keep to myself around certain members of our church), have come directly from my understanding of science and the world around me. It is the continuity of RULES, many of which contradict the number one rule of the universe, that created a foundation for my faith.
If the OP would have posted "Mother nature is amazing," we would have seen 3 or 4 posts over a week commenting on how cool the video was, or asking where it was taken, how the herd was managed, etc etc, before this got bumped off of the main page and forgotten.
Instead, because the title was "God is amazing", an innocent thread became an opportunity for one person to spend 10 pages trying to prove how smart he is. Rather than being smart enough to realize that he's not 'converting' or 'educating' anyone here, he has taken the opportunity argue endlessly, illustrating how close minded he really is, and how denigrating he choses to be toward the belief system of others that don't conform to his own beliefs.
When someone stands on an island like this and argues their position to no end, I often can't decide whether to laugh or shake my head, because at this point, being ignorant to the futility of continuing the argument is no better than the ignorance you're accusing of the people you're trying to 'convert' or 'educate'. Creationist, or other flavors of entrenched believers that take the human documentation of God's teachings (i.e. the Bible) to a faulted literalism, and believe that a man survived in the belly of a whale, or believe that our universe was created in 6 days; these people have decided to live in strict black and white. If any of it is truth, then it must all be truth. Equally, you stand on the other side of the fence to the opposition, and argue that you have no proof that certain aspects of it are true, so therefore NONE of it may be true. Both of you are ignorant. Or should I use your preferred term, "uneducated?"
My honest motivation to comment at all tonight, though I have fought it for a few hours now, is based around your specifically narrow-minded list of reasons for which "educated people might still be foolish enough to believe in God":
I SHARE THE FOLLOWING WITH YOU NOT AS AN ARGUEMENT, BUT AS AN OPPORTUNITY TO EXPAND YOUR UNDERSTANDING OF WHY SOME 'EDUCATED PEOPLE' (or at least THIS educated person) BELIEVE IN GOD. You have made up your mind, and I do not care to change it, but I'll share with you the reasoning as to how I made up MY mind, which contradicts what you have touted thus far.
I consider myself an educated person, and I do believe in God, so I feel it fair to comment on why I don't believe in the narrow division of motivations you have proposed.
My faith has nothing to do with my 'indoctrination': I was not raised by a religious family, we only went to church a few times a year, mostly for the fellowship with other farmers rather than for any actual pious motivation. Neither my parents, nor either set of grand parents were regular attenders. Since the time that I chose my own faith roughly 15yrs ago, I have been off and on for regular Sunday attendance, even though I'm still fairly active within our church activities when I can be of use (in fact, I help out with events a couple church's in our community, not just my own. I do this in the interest of serving my community, not just the other Mennonites within it).
Nor do I believe in a higher power as a fraudulent ruse for my own gain. I assume you are referring to those 'televangelist' types we might see on late night TV, or those that post on facebook every sunday afternoon about the Glory God has shown them in their lives, on top of the pictures from the bar they posted from Saturday night. I consider my faith to be a very personal thing, and take a slight insult that this makes your list as a substantial subset for the motivation of Christian followers. If I have gained monetarily from my faith, or the recruitment of said faith in others in any way, it'd be news to me.
My faith in God does indeed stem directly from my level of education, but contrarily to the perception you have about the correlation between faith and education level. I would expect that I would be fair to consider my 'education' to be above average for Americans, as it includes two bachelors degrees, one in Medical Science: Pre-Med, the other chemical engineering with minors in physics and microbiology. While working full-time jobs over the last decade, I have so far finished my Masters in Chemical Engineering, working toward my PhD, and should finish my MBA at the end of next year. I'm a certified Project Management Professional, a licensed Professional Engineer, and a certified Risk Assessor. I have co-authored 2 registered US patents, and been supporting contributor on over a dozen others in the last decade. I consider myself to be "educated" at least partially, and I can say irrefutably that my education, and the resultant understanding I have for how the universe around me functions, has served as the motivation for me to START believing.
My 'without-a-doubt expectation' for your response will be for you to reference, probably even quote yourself, your thread where you emboldened the word "majority", giving yourself an excuse to exclude someone like me from your narrow-minded definitions of 'educated believers'. Undoubtedly, you included this modifier to give yourself an outlet to pursue that someone like me might come along, so you can dismiss me as an exception to the "majority". To which my response is this: you've drawn very small boxes for a very diverse subset of the world's population. There is no reason to believe nor evidence to support that your boxes are applicable as global definitions other than narcissistic cynicism, but you have passed them off as such. You have revealed yourself.
My reasons for believing, including some of the reasons that I believe things that contradict traditional Christian teachings (which I politely keep to myself around certain members of our church), have come directly from my understanding of science and the world around me. It is the continuity of RULES, many of which contradict the number one rule of the universe, that created a foundation for my faith.
Then you started up with this stuff...
Discrete Examples:
In engineering school, many aspects of our world get simplified into standardized equations. These equations, in application, are essentially a set of rules for behavior that the world exhibits. Oddly, equations for VERY different systems will have the same structure, essentially the same rules. Why might it make sense that a photon of light traveling through space would behave under similar rules to water flowing through an aqueduct or the same rules as heat traveling through a rifle barrel? Why would the equations for gravity, magnetism, or ionic potential be nearly identical? Or why would inductive magnetism follow the same equation structure as gyroscopic stabilization? Why would the radiative decay of radio-isotopes used for carbon dating behave under the same set of rules that apply to the metabolization of an acorn by a squirrel's stomach?
In engineering school, many aspects of our world get simplified into standardized equations. These equations, in application, are essentially a set of rules for behavior that the world exhibits. Oddly, equations for VERY different systems will have the same structure, essentially the same rules. Why might it make sense that a photon of light traveling through space would behave under similar rules to water flowing through an aqueduct or the same rules as heat traveling through a rifle barrel? Why would the equations for gravity, magnetism, or ionic potential be nearly identical? Or why would inductive magnetism follow the same equation structure as gyroscopic stabilization? Why would the radiative decay of radio-isotopes used for carbon dating behave under the same set of rules that apply to the metabolization of an acorn by a squirrel's stomach?
Why should a human being have the same physical structure as a deer? Why would snakes have remnants of legs? Why is it that a spider's leg (an invertebrate species, mind you) has the same fundamental structure as a human limb? Why does all living matter on earth share a common foundational structure for genetic blueprinting (DNA)?
Why do all life forms on our planet rely upon CO2 or O2, and H2O? Regardless of our species specific transport strategy (lungs, gills, book lungs, etc) and despite the extreme differential in species genetics, all animals rely upon oxygen, and all plants rely upon carbon dioxide, and both depend upon water.
Why do all life forms on our planet rely upon CO2 or O2, and H2O? Regardless of our species specific transport strategy (lungs, gills, book lungs, etc) and despite the extreme differential in species genetics, all animals rely upon oxygen, and all plants rely upon carbon dioxide, and both depend upon water.
How can someone with a background in biology not be familiar with this rather fundamental concept?
Again, read the Origin of Species. It will help fill a few holes in that education of yours.
Now consider these questions and the broad reaching 'coincidental' similarities between these well defined rule structures in the context of the highest order irrefutable rule of our universe: the increase of Entropy. If our universe, and arguably our planet, is as old as science has 'proven' it to be, and originated in the way that science has proven it did, how did a non-selective entropic universe develop a planet with an extremely SMALL set of universal rules? (Keep in mind, I'm not suggesting here that I disagree with the scientific theory of the age nor origination of the earth or universe.) For a system to behave in an isentropic, or even decreasing entropy state, the work required to combat the 'decay of universal structure' must be entropic. In layman's terms, someone or some thing had to put in the work, in an entropic release, to create all of the unified structure and organization that we have within our universe. An explosion does not result in order.
That is why I believe. I may not believe that Jonah was swallowed by a whale, and I may believe in the expanding universe (big bang theory), but science has shown me that a well structured set of rules exist, which contradicts the very nature of the universe in which they exist, and therefore SOMETHING has to have written those rules.
That is why I believe. I may not believe that Jonah was swallowed by a whale, and I may believe in the expanding universe (big bang theory), but science has shown me that a well structured set of rules exist, which contradicts the very nature of the universe in which they exist, and therefore SOMETHING has to have written those rules.
I find it kind of amusing how all of this depends on a very simple, human assumption: that "rules" had to have been written. I often see it stated in this language: "Laws imply a lawgiver".
It's all just shorthand for "I personally can't imagine that the universe simply IS...it MUST have been designed by a super-intelligent being."
You have chosen, and are defending, a VERY narrow interpretation of the world. You seem to have considered so little. To go from I understand physics -> I feel like the world had to have been created by an intelligent being -> I'm a Mennonite...I mean, what happened to intellectual honesty? Okay, so the world had to have been created by someone/something super powerful and super intelligent. Compared to who? Us? Big deal! Maybe the creator of our universe is the member of a "species" of which he is a particularly unintelligent example. Maybe he is in one of their special ed classes. Maybe our universe was the pathetic project his school administrators allowed him to enter when they saw how excited he was for the science fair (only to discard it once his handler lead him away).
Note that there is nothing in your reasoning or logic that precludes the possibility of a special ed God. Yet here you are, a member of a religion that believes the creator of the Universe cares deeply about us and will give us eternal joy and happiness after we die. How convenient!
11-12-2013, 06:34 AM
#118
Fork Horn
Join Date: Oct 2013
Location: Michigan
Posts: 269
Then what? Has anyone ever considered this? Do you then sit in a box with a big smile on your face in some kind of limbo stasis?
I would think that no matter how great heaven is, you're going to get bored eventually. You could travel the universe, but eventually you're going to get bored. Once boredom sets in, that joy and happiness is going to disappear pretty quickly. It might take a while, but eternal is a big number.
This type of argument is one of the key indicators that religion (any religion) is a bunch of hogwash.
The people who made up these silly things long ago did not have the intellectual reasoning power we have today. In short, they weren't as smart as we are.. Their brains not as developed or experienced in abstract or logical thought patterns. (some folks are still undeveloped in this sense)
