Yes that english. The one true language of God and thus the Universe.
Obviously my post was a joke. Next time I’ll use the appropriate smiley so as not to cause confusion.
Ah, sorry Tahssa - I can’t help myself when it appears we’ve got a genuine fundie in here for some sport!
I don’t know, are you?
I’m increasingly struggling to find any clear position in your posts. Just lots of "certainly"s and "clearly"s.
What has the rate of evolution got to do with the price of eggs,? I repeat, in RC theology the spiritual body, the soul, was endowed as a specific act of ex nihilo creation via divine intervention.
In which case you have totally misunderstood every post of mine that you have read so far. Can I ask you to go back and re-read them?
Apologist would perhaps be more accurate and less disrespectful to the belief system at hand.
That is because I find myself more and more echoing Koxinga. Your posts are full of "if"s without "because"s.
If I had wheels I would be a shopping cart. If a frog had wings it wouldn’t bump its arse on the ground as it hopped. But there is no reason to believe I ever will have wheels and no reason to believe a frog ever did have wings. So basing an argument on whether I am a shopping cart or the state of a frog’s arse is both silly and futile.
From those cites, it appears not, agreed?
OK, I contend that evolution is gradual, and does not involve grand leaps such as developing speech or self-awareness in a single event.
OK, I know you are pretending to answer as the RC theologist here, who proposes that self-awareness, speech and whatnot emerged in a specific, divine act. But I also know that you, the real Blake, knows full well that evolution doesn’t produce these kinds of huge leaps and that saltation is silly. So I’m asking Angel’s advocate Blake how he reconciles RC orthodoxy with the evidence that saltation is silly, just as I would ask YEC Blake how he reconciled his orthodoxy with the evidence that a young Earth is silly.
(I must say, if there’s confusion here it’s probably because you are defending a position you don’t actually hold.)
OK, I contend that language and self-awareness developed gradually because that’s how evolution works, as the real Blake knows full well. How’s that?
Would they even want to?
Besides, maybe their idea of heaven was nothing more than a place where the dinosaurs aren’t trying to eat them, and there are no more 'so simple a caveman could do it" commercials 
I don’t know. There are too many "if"s and "clearly"s in your argument to know what I’m agreeing to.
We aren’t discussing evolution, we are discussing and act of divine ex nihilo creation.
By pointing out that we aren’t discussing evolution, we are discussing and act of divine ex nihilo creation.
Divine ex nihilo creation isn’t silly. Totally lacking in evidence certainly, but no sillier than that.
No, it’s because you:
a) Build your entire position on "if"s and "clearly"s
b) Insist on attacking a position that I have clearly never espoused.
Terrible. We aren’t discussing evolution, we are discussing and act of divine ex nihilo creation. How evolution works is no more relevant to this discussion than how a shopping cart works.
That self-awareness developed long before ‘artistry’, since Old-world monkeys (and even magpies) pass the commonly accepted self-awareness test, but there is no evidence of artistry until very recently in human development. Is that so contentious an argument, really?
You wouldn’t say it contravened existing evidence, then? You see, whenever we place this notional miracle, the evidence suggests that humans were already self-aware, at least (and maybe talking as well), or that they weren’t painting pictures yet.
Young Earth Creationist Blake could simply point to a miracle as well - God just pulled the continents apart quickly, made fake supernova light shows in the sky, sorted the dinosaurs into their strata during the Flood etc. etc. This is not reconciling one’s beliefs with scientific evidence but outright ignoring it, agreed?
It’s obvious that self-awareness lies on a continuum going way back. And artistic expression lies on a continuum going back not so far. I guess what they’re saying is the event where God gave us eternal souls happened at some arbitrary point, independent of those other two qualities.
So debating who is self-aware seems to be beside their main point: God ensouled mankind when he felt like it, so there.
As for them I am uncertain as it is after Jesus’ life but I am inclined to say yes.
Why would you?
What do you mean?
No but, yet again, it’s totally irrelevant because we aren’t discussing whether there are magpies in heaven.
I’m getting increasingly confused about whet your position is here or where you are going with all this. It would help me no end if you could stop with the "if"s and "clearly"s and just lay out your arguments. I get the impression you think there’s some zing at the end of this chain of argument that you are apparently constructing, but unless you lay out the actual argument the only response I can give is that it’s all irrelevant because we not discussing if there are shopping carts in heaven.
No, because I have yet to be convinced of the existence of any evidence.
Can we see this evidence? I can’t even think what evidence we might have that allows us to know the workings of the mind of a dead organism.
It’s totally irrelevant and somewhat mystifying, that’s what it is. Unless of course you have a fossil of someone’s thought processes that would actually require ignoring. Until then there is nothing *to *ignore.
Why would you think god would make an exception? Being an all knowing, all powerful creature sure makes giving exceptions seem like confessing to making mistakes. Then he is not god. Thinking that you would believe god makes exceptions, puts doubt on whether you are a believer after all. It is not a minuscule problem, but fundamental.
RC-orthodox Blake proposes that
I counter-argue that a woman who cannot speak or even recognise herself as an individual miraculously giving birth to (or, say, seeing miraculously appear, from nowhere, before her eyes) a speaking, self-aware child contradicts not only the general, well-evidenced rule that evolution only works gradually, but specific evidence which places the emergence of some of these characteristics at different times.
For example, the oldest evidence of ‘artistry’ in the sense of painting pictures is Chauvet, a mere 32000 years ago. However, the self awareness test is passed by, for example, gorillas, whose ancestry diverged from ours some 8 million years ago or more.
The cranial capacity of a fossil (and therefore its encephalisation quotient) gives an indication of cognitive complexity: it would be absurd, for example, to propose that the big-brained Homo Sapiens who lived some time before cave painting couldn’t even speak to each other. Add evidence of complex tool manufacture etc. and the RC orthodox position that even Homo Erectus was not self-aware becomes extremely tenuous.
So people have to spend eternity in an afterlife based on a religion they never even heard of?
I don’t find this out of the question. I mean, hey, I don’t remember being asked if I wanted to be born into this life.
Because I believe God is forgiving and it is unfair if you’ve never heard of Jesus but you die. BTW, are you a Christian fundamentalist or an atheist trying to disprove my faith?
That’s obviously a fake. It doesn’t even have Jesus’s words in Red.
Oh, and before I forget, 
Maybe not, but you can also leave this life any time you want. Also, it’s senseless to believe there’s an afterlife that appeals only to you and a tiny proportion of the people who have ever lived. A strictly Christian afterlife would be hell to a caveman.
The reason I asked the question about a tribe of hunter-gatherers 100 years ago, is that if Christian missionaries were really concerned about their ultimate fate, why would they tell the natives about Jesus? The logical thing to do would be to shut up about it. The logical thing would be to not even mention it back home - if everyone who had ever heard of Jesus would just shut up about it, and burn the Bibles, then everyone gets to go to heaven!