Fair enough.
I’ve seen that quote, but I’m still note sure it’s accurate.
It seems… too nutty.
Do you have a cite for it?
From Haaretz (Israeli news site):
Hrm, I’ve seen the same attribution for that quote… and although I loathe Bush with a passion, I’m wary to credit it with being true with only one man saying it happened.
Yes, you are, in a very fundamental way. Gnosticism (not surprisingly) holds that the key to spirituality is intellectual knowledge. I hold that intellect is irrelevant. A person may believe in God intellectually, but be far from Him morally. Likewise, an atheist may deny God intellectually, but be close to Him morally. And God is all about morality (i.e., goodness). Naturally, though, I do not define morality in the sense that most Christians do. Morality isn’t about obeying rules; it’s about edifying oneself and others. A man who sucks the penis of another man is doing a Godly act if his purpose is give a gift of love. Love is the facilitation of goodness.
And sin is its obstruction. Love and sin are opposites.
Well, if it ever got to the point that f did not equal ma (assuming a relativistic mass), then we have a problem, but with the natural, not the supernatural. It is, in my opinion, a mistake to apply such phrases as “known forces” to the supernatural. Brains, and therefore knowledge, are natural. So are forces for that matter. The supernatural is not concerned with such things. Science will never intersect the supernatural, not unless we change the definition of one or both.
If that is the case, then the supernatural is indistinquishable from the natural. If Sabrina changes every outcome, then there is no point in saying that she is supernatural, since she apparently cannot *not * affect the experiment. You have found in nature the cause — her.
Okeley dokeley. 
If I were to pick some random absurd belief of my own (as opposed to supported by any already established religion), without objective basis, nobody ridiculing me would be called a “judgmental, egotistical, intolerant prick”.
The belief that wine can be magically turned into blood is respectable, the belief that the government is injecting radioactive materials in my milk bottles to kill me isn’t. The latter is actually provably possible. It should get much more respect. It won’t. Why exactly?
This is correct in the larger context of the (often subjective) meaning of “spirituality”. If one looks at the definition of spirituality – the sensitivity or attachment to religious values – one is immediately alerted to that term’s diametrical opposition to gnosticism. Gnostics receive transcendence through inner means, through what is commonly called intuition, and therefore have no ecumenical definition of a God. As a consequence, and despite knowledge’s key significance in popular ecclesiastical theology and its utility in the modern promulgation of spirituality, intellect itself has no importance in gnosticism. Technically, from the gnostic’s standpoint, intellectual knowledge is essential to others’ religious values, and as you said, “the key to spirituality”.
For anyone unfamiliar with the topic, gnosis, knowledge, from the Greek word γνώσις , is commonly part and parcel with docetism, the belief that The Christ was simply an illusion: that the body is no more than an obstructing, meaty vessel, a prison that holds our true, divine spark. This ancient pair of terms has found its way into many components of modern popular culture, including the proto-molluscan Scientology, video games like Xenosaga, or as the core of the purportedly revolutionary film, The Matrix.
So as for the OP, how far are we to extrapolate this “GOD-damned idiocy” in education? If for example, your film-studies class required you to write a paper based on the social value of The Matrix, would this be equally offensive?
Or is it just in-your-face Christianity that trips your hammer?
First, you said
Not true.
The Gnostic worldview states that: Knowledge to them was not an intellectual exercise; it was not a passive understanding of some aspect of spirituality. Rather, knowledge had a redeeming and liberating function that helped the individual break free of bondage to the world.
In other words, all ‘true’ knowledge is knoweldge of our onesness with God, through a direct connection to the divine. In other words, Gnosis comes directly from God.
I don’t need to hijack this any further though.
Gee, I don’t know. I’m more inclined to think that Abbas is just lying. I mean, that’s simply nutty to tell a Palestinian leader that God told you to attack Saddam and whatnot. It strikes me as the sort of thing opponents of the president wish he would say, rather than something approaching reality.
Regarding the Gnostics, there is some misunderstanding, I believe, at least as I understand from my readings, about the nuance of the intellect. Their writings, quite frankly, are bizarre. It is as though Hagel went back in time and decided to play a joke on future mankind by writing even more cryptically than he already did. It’s almost as if the Gnostics wanted to be as slippery as the Taoists. But two things specifically are clear, and emerge no matter who the writer or what the context — (1) a man attains salvation by coming to know his spiritual essence, and (2) the world is fundamentally evil, and was created by an evil god. In my own theology, number (1) is impossible and number (2) is false. It is impossible for the brain to comprehend spiritual essence, and the universe is amoral (not immoral).
(Hijack)
The Set S described does not contain negative numbers, therefore the axiom is false.
And disproving it can not be that simple so what am I missing? Is there an implicit “Positive” in that axiom? Well I don’t suppose there can be since zero is not definable as positive or negative.
So I’m missing something else, enlighten me Liberal?
Peano’s axioms deal with the natural numbers only. See Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica for the complete formalization of Peano’s arithmetic across the set of real numbers. Here is an introduction to the text, and here is a guide to understanding the notation. You might also be interesting in Godel’s On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems. Taken as a whole, the work of Peano, Whitehead, Russell, and Godel, exhausts arithmetical analysis. Nothing is needed beyond these works to describe any arithmetical hypothesis.
Lots of quotes on this topic here Bush Button News
[QUOTE=Ghanimacapacitor: “The creeping atheism,” huh? If only it were the “raging torrent of atheism”…oh well, I can still hope.[/QUOTE]
Have faith, it may come true someday. :rolleyes:
To that, you replied:
No, that is subjective to how each person uses their own views in their own life experiences. None is superior to the other.
True. Some (very few actually) of mine are based on faith. It gives me stength and wisdom to deal with harsh realities in the world, and not go off half-cocked verbally and violently every time I see things that are wrong with this world…YMMV.
Never did make a claim contrary to that. Like I said, some (again, very few) of my views are based on faith, not facts.
I’m not sure I’d concede that point. Proof is the only standard one can base survival decisions on, blind faith is not, wishing is not.
Now, if you are talking about someone using their views about a deity to feel good, that is of course their right. Which is why I don’t hate them or think they must be stupid. But I do feel that there are other, more efficent, less harmful, ways of feeling good and/or coping with one’s mortality.
It may give you strength, but you do not gain any wisdom through blind faith. Wisdom comes from knowing about things. Blind faith is dreaming about non-things.
This is good, but I would still argue that a thought process which uses imaginary friends as reasons for belief or action, is lacking. There are reasons to behave decently that do not need to invoke a gaseous invertebrate of astronomical heft (to steal a phrase).
I honestly believe that the more ruthless we are in an application reason and skepticism, the better we will be able to deal with this world and find a place in it. There’s also the point that if we’re dealing with facts, we can talk, negotiate, find a common ground if we’re both reasonable. We can work out trade agreements, build bridges, decice on a sytem of government, go to war, protest war, etc… Yes, there may be impasses, but those will be purely human ones, and time has a way of changing things.
But when we deal with all powerful invisible friends, there’s very little room for any discussion. I can’t talk to your invisible friends, if you really believe what he’s telling you, I can’t talk you out of it either.
And, the halmark of any true belief is that it influences your interactions and/or perceptions of Universe. Asking a person not to be influenced by their beliefs requies them to reject, in part or in whole, their habitual mode of perception.
But I’d wager that reflective natures and critical thinking are not the norm. And the last thing we need is people whose actions and beliefs are based on no proof, but who’ll kill and die for them. Once you say blind faith is good, it has to be any blind faith. You, and the Satanist, and the guy down the block who hasn’t been out of his apartment in a year and thinks that aliens want him to do… whatever. You can’t draw a line and say “this is good blind faith, but that is bad blind faith.” There’s no standard, no way to judge. And if we stipulate that the standard is to be that as long as it harms nobody it’s a good blind faith, how then are our faith(s) as anything more than comforting illusions, having banished all opposing faiths which just commited the “sin” of having the wrong kind of faith about reality?