Sometimes being a dick is the correct thing to do.
Of course. That’s the whole point.
The laws of physics, chemistry, biology, etc., are not “laws” in the sense that, say, the laws of chess are. The laws of chess stipulate that, by definition, chess is a game that consists of thus and so, and that if you aspire to play a game of chess, the pieces on the board must move in accordance with the laws. Scientific laws, on the other hand, are derived by observation from what is seen in nature.
Newton did not discover a big Universal Rule Book that laid down that “An object subjected to a force will accelerate at a rate directly proportional to the force, and inversely proportional to the mass of the object”; rather, he determined by observation and reasoning that force equals mass times acceleration. It’s not that “The Universe must behave in this manner”; it’s simply “This is how the Universe has been observed to behave, and it is likely that it will continue to do so”.
Specifically, no scientific law has any frame of reference from which it can state that no entity can exist which has the power to violate scientific laws. It is, indeed, not the purview of scientific laws to do so. If a miracle has ever been performed, it is admittedly in defiance of the laws of science. Did anyone claim otherwise? That five loaves and two small fishes can occasionally, for no unnatural reason, provide sustenance for five thousand men and their attendant women and children? That iron axe-heads sometimes, quite of their own accord, float on water? That several dozen gallons of water may spontaneously turn into dilute aqueous solutions of ethanol, fructose and some agreeable aromatic fractions? No. Miracles either occur(red) or they do/did not. The only proper response to “They could not, for they are contrary to the laws of science” is “Well, quite. That’s what we mean when we talk about miracles”.
Also, Dio, without a numerical estimate of the likeliness of life arising spontaneously, it’s the height of unscience to hand-wave at the very large size of the Universe and say “it’s probably a mathematical certainty that life has arisen multiple times”.
I would have probably just deleted the email (and noted mentally that my friend was no longer so much in the “friend” category), but I like your response, deevee. I don’t think you were a jerk at all. Being a jerk would have been sending your friend a vicious attack on Christianity out of nowhere; your friend really asked for the response he got out of you.
I also cringe when I think of Canada following in the Fundie footsteps of the U.S. Religion is different here; we have much more of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding other people’s religions, which is just the way I like it - religion is personal, man. I shudder to think of being accosted everywhere by people trying to convert me to their particular brand of belief.
I gotta say, I’m grateful for people like the OP.
I’m a first-generation American, I guess…I wasn’t born here and neither were my parents. What *does *that make me?
But it’s nice to know there are people out there who don’t agree with this sort of crap. Of course I know there *are *people, but sometimes one starts to wonder.
I don’t intend to leave behind my own culture just because I’ve adopted a new one. Why can’t I have both?
And I also did the same thing. After 9-11 a Muslim friend of mine began forwarding me all kinds of pro-Muslim stuff. It started out sensible, then it got to the point where he no longer e-mailed me as a friend and just sent me horrible lies about 9-11, how it wasn’t a plane, how no Muslim would ever or had ever done such a thing, etc. I broke it off in generally the same way. I told him he was welcome to e-mail me as a friend, and I missed that, but I was tired of hearing lies about his religion. He sent back a scathing e-mail, and we haven’t talked since. All for the better, probably.
I disagree from what I have seen. He is tolerant of people who don’t share his viewpoint provided they don’t a) try and force him to change his viewpoint to match theirs and/or b) don’t say stupid shit on a public message board. Of course, I am new here, so maybe I have missed a lot…
What you’re missing is that far too many people consider criticism and disagreement, especially regarding Christianity, to be intolerence.
If we can’t define “impossible” as that which violates natural laws then the word has no meaning. If I said it was imppossible for humans to fly by flapping their arms, I would not get a bunch of equivocating and special pleading about the difference between the “miraculous” and the “impossible.” I will say again, miracles (as they are understood in Biblical terms) are impossible events. If they weren’t impossible, they wouldn’t be miracles. I don’t know why I always get such resistance when I state something so plainly obvious. Giving it a different word or attributing it to a magical entity who is tautologically defined as a being who can do the impossible (essentially “God can do it” = “It’s not impossible if it’s done by a guy who can do the impossible”).
There is nothing unfair or irrational about assuming the impossible is impossible until proven otherwise, and there is nothing unfair or irrational about dismissing such claims out of hand unless someone can provide the slightest evidence.
That’s why I said “probably.” (I’m a ware that “probably a certainty” sounds contradictory but that’s how it is with this question). There is no reason to believe that the circumstances which led to the origin of life on earth are unique to the earth or that with untold billions or trillions of trials in other planetary systems that the arisal of replicating molecules would be unique to earth. It would be far more unlikely for earth to be the only planet with life than otherwise. Yes, we have no way to calculate the odds but we have no reason to believe that the earth is so infinetessimally rare in its composition and particulars that the odds of the right circumstances arising more than once are smaller than the available sample size in the universe.
That’s about right. I try pretty hard to be respectful of faith but that doesn’t mean I always respect every single belief or individual. I’m pretty sure that no one on earth can honestly say they respect every single religious belief equally.
Maybe Updike would find it informative to know that my wife is a church going Catholic and that my kids are being raised in the Church. I know I’ve made that point a million times on this board but I feel I have to keep responding to allegations that I hate Christians.
Nah, Dio, it’s three days, man. You know, Friday to Sunday.
Word.
Deevee, tell your “friend” to bug off. Hopefully one day he’ll be mature enough in his faith to realize what he’s doing. Until then, it’s pretty apparent he can’t handle having non-Christian friends.
This isn’t bigotry?
or this?
That’s not what I’d call tolerant.
That’s like only one working day.
How so? Tolerance doesn’t mean deference. Diogenes did call for them to be disenfrancised, banned from public service, fired from their jobs, blocked from having their marriages receive state recognition, thrown from their housing, made ineligible for military service or disqualified for security clearence. How is it intolerant to call bullshit when someone is up to their knees in it?
Exactly. This is also the point I was trying to drive home to my friend in follow up emails where he accused me of intolerance. When I said this
in the op my intent wasn’t to insult all religion with a broad stroke but rather to emphasize my complete lack of bias. (remember too, this was a private email exchange between friends, I would be more tactful in public) As a fundy-ish Christian, my friend is not capable of understanding secularism without bias. As a person who dismisses all religion I can be trusted not to play favourites. If our society is to be inclusive, all religions must be considered equal before the law. Since we can’t logically allow that each religion posesses the inviolable truth then the only alternative is to treat them as if they were all nonsense.
On a personal level I have different levels of bias. Some rational, some not so. A secular society doesn’t need to give a rat’s ass about my biases because it’s illegal for me to act on them. There’s no dichotomy in me being intolerant yet calling for a tolerant society.
His response was " yadda yadda yadda precious little beauty in the world…yadda man has corrupted the divine…
like he was an automaton. I have had countless innocuous email exchanges with him over the past few years. I know his style and his voice inside and out. When he got into the yaddas it wasn’t him talking.
For the record, I’m not the one who said that stuff about religion being claptrap. The OP was. **Kidchameleon was disagreeing with me over whether the OP said anything bigoted, not accusing me of it.
And for the record my son attends a Catholic high school. I was married in a Catholic church (divorced in a secular court) and still fondly recall the amazing conversations with the Jesuit 23 years ago when we got our pre-marital counselling. Jesuits Rock!
I guess we don’t need to ask how that pre-marital counselling went. 
It is usually very interesting to have conversations with open-minded religious people of all denominations. It’s when they start trotting out the dogma that it starts getting bo-ring.
Ya know, I should have attributed those other quotes, shouldn’t have I? :smack:
Now that was FUNNY!!
::wife checks in to see what’s going in in here::
Perhaps we’re using a sloppy definition of “impossible”. It goes with the sloppy definition of “omnipotent” that gets bandied about here, which tends to boil down to some version of whether an omnipotent being can create a beef burrito that is so humungous he can’t eat it without barfing. Omnipotence does not imply the ability to do the logically absurd; God cannot express the square root of two as a non-terminating decimal. But there is nothing logically absurd about turning water into wine - it just requires a rather unlikely rearrangement of matter. There is nothing logically absurd about raising the dead - it just requires a likewise unlikely reversal of an existing process or, if you like, a repeat of the process that caused life to arise from non-living matter. Perhaps Biblical miracles should be considered not “impossible” so much as “very[sup]n[/sup] difficult”. 
That’s not to say that I swallow all claims of miracles without question, btw.
We have no reason to believe it isn’t, either. We have some fancy guesswork as to the likely composition of the early Earth; some equally fancy guesswork as to the process by which the passage of lightning through a reducing atmosphere led to complex molecules and thence via “then a miracle occurs” to self-reproducing molecules, and thence via “then a miracle occurs” again to complex organisms; and some fancy guesswork as to the likelihood of Earth-like planets existing elsewhere in the universe. None of this amounts to a hill of beans, mathematically speaking, and the figures in Drake’s Equation are patently ex ano. That leaves us back with hand-waving and appealing to the obvious. The available sample size in the universe can be considered as large or small - it is, for instance, many orders of magnitude too small to contain every possible game of chess.
Personally I hope very much that there is intelligent life on other planets, but it is entirely likely that interstellar travel is “impossible”, by which in this case I mean “very difficult, to the extent that it is unachieveable within the lifetime of the universe”. It’s a shame; I’d like mankind to go to the stars (it saddens me that there isn’t a hope I’ll live to see it) and when I see Venus in the night sky, I wish it were habitable. But we’re devoid of evidence that life on other planets is even possible, let alone on a “reasonably” nearby one.