My point to you, for the most part, is that faith is putting your trust in the Lord God who alone is able to save you, not an adherence to a bunch of opinions, beliefs, theories, doctrines, or dogmas. To say that “evolution requires faith” is to reduce one’s allegiance to God to the status of a scientific theory, to be discarded if something better comes along. To me, that’s repellent.
I’m here because I am a part of the fight against ignorance, as are the other members here. I’m here because I love the people I meet and deal with through this board. I’m here because this board and two others like it are my ministry – what God equipped me to do for His glory.I’m here because someone needs to bear witness to a God of love who genuinely cares about the people He created, and sent Jesus Christ to save and teach us, as opposed to the one who likened us to loathsome spiders, who allegedly sent Matthew Shepherd to Hell, and who supposedly created a world replete with false evidence, in order to “test our faith.” And last, I’m here because of the love and generosity of a large number of people ranging from conservative Christians to libertarian pagans, to whom I owe a debt I cannot repay except by what I have to give here.
Francis of Assisi said, “Preach the gospel to all people at all times. If necessary, use words.” That’s what I try to do.
I think it’s buried somewhere on page 5, but I did point out that p -> q implies ~p -> ~q is a Denial of the Antecedant fallacy — a bastardized rendering of p -> q implies ~q -> ~p, which of course is a valid modus tollens. The response I received was that while it might be a logical fallacy, it is a “darn good lab tool” for science.
Pun
I really don’t visit Great Debates anymore. But if you believe it would be best that I drop the matter here, then I will trust your judgment and do exactly that. Thanks again for your infinite patience.
Lib … I think it would be best not to continue your discussion with gobear as it is proceeding here. I do not truly know your heart, so I don’t know if you are proceeding according to plan, so to speak, but it seems to me both because I know gobear and because I know you that the most useful way of coming to any agreement on this (since you no longer hang out in GD as you used to, more’s the pity) would either be to start anew or to drop the matter completely. I think it will be difficult for you to prove anything to gobear here, for one, because his belief is every bit as fervent and reasoned as yours is, from my POV.
Svt4him, would it aid you to know that Poly’s witness and presence on this board is one thing that has many times kept me from saying “uh, no. There is no fucking way God would subject innocent people to this utter fucking bullshit going on here. Sorry, not unless He’s a fucking thug with a ‘look what I can do!’ 2nd-grade sense of humor. Hey, dude? If you expect me to believe in you, do something impressive like, say, making some GOOD for a change.” That I am able to accept in any sense that a benevolent God exists is due in no small part to him. Your kind, for the record, are mostly what have pushed me away in the first place.
OK, 'Punha, I will accede to your request and stop arguing with Lib. However, I would urge you, Lib, and Svt4Him to consult the horoscope for Aquarius in this week’s Onion.
You are being disingenuous (read: dishonest) here. My question was in response to your question of " which theory of evolution doesn’t involve faith"? Since there is only a single general Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, I was trying to find out what you were talking about when you asked about “which theory.”
I would have thought your question was in regards to which theory of evolution do you subscribe to, as there are different ones. There is not one theory, there are a few. So now having read back, I see that it wasn’t defined. You actually said no theory requires faith, and that is untrue. It starts by a belief that something like the big bang happened, and moves from there. That is faith. Now to say all evolutionist believe in the same theory, IMO is wrong, as the theories themselves keep changing. So I was specifically asking which current theory you hold as scientific. And honestly I’m not trying to play on any words.
iamapunha, I in no way was saying he should leave, I was more addressing the post when he asked how posting here was fulfilling the great commission, and I took that to mean that it’s better to be somewhere else.
Yes, I can see how how it would be false witness. I love the jargon used there. Do you want me to scan a copy of the textbook? I hate to tell you that some science books still have this evolution in them. I do work in a school, so I don’t mind getting a copy, unless I’m bearing false witness to that too. My point though is not that the whole evolution of man from monkey has been disproven, more addressing the whole science issue. See, when asked how matter got there, and an answer said it’s always been, that’s not faith. When asked how God was created, and an answer says He’s always been, then that’s somehow blind faith. To me, they’re the same, and that’s no play on words.
Umm - you might want to read some history of cosmology. No one believed in the Big Bang and then found evidence. Hubble’s discovery of the expanding universe was quite a shock to everyone. Then, there were two competing hypotheses to explain it. The first was steady state, which had space being created all through the universe. The second was the Big Bang. The Big Bang predicted cosmic background radiation. Steady state did not. When Penzias and Wilson accidentally discovered this, this evidence caused most people to accept (not believe in) the Big Bang. This is not to say there were no problems with the theory. Inflation solved some, but was just a hypothesis again with some predictions. When the predicted structure of the universe was found to be real, that was powerful evidence that inflation is correct. Of course, better evidence might come causing us to change our hypotheses.
Basically, your contention that people started with a belief in the Big Bang is incorrect. Please admit this.
I would have thought your question was in regards to which theory of evolution do you subscribe to, as there are different ones. There is not one theory, there are a few. So now having read back, I see that it wasn’t defined. You actually said no theory requires faith, and that is untrue. It starts by a belief that something like the big bang happened, and moves from there. That is faith. Now to say all evolutionist believe in the same theory, IMO is wrong, as the theories themselves keep changing. So I was specifically asking which current theory you hold as scientific. And honestly I’m not trying to play on any words.
iamapunha, I in no way was saying he should leave, I was more addressing the post when he asked how posting here was fulfilling the great commission, and I took that to mean that it’s better to be somewhere else.
Yes, I can see how how it would be false witness. I love the jargon used there. Do you want me to scan a copy of the textbook? I hate to tell you that some science books still have this evolution in them. I do work in a school, so I don’t mind getting a copy, unless I’m bearing false witness to that too. My point though is not that the whole evolution of man from monkey has been disproven, more addressing the whole science issue. See, when asked how matter got there, and an answer said it’s always been, that’s not faith. When asked how God was created, and an answer says He’s always been, then that’s somehow blind faith. To me, they’re the same, and that’s no play on words.
It is simply not true that there are “a few” theories of evolution unless you are going back and throwing in Lamarck and other hypotheses that have been disproven. There are minor differences in regards to the speculation regarding individual events, but there is still only the single theory.
Despite your assertions, no faith is required. I have even addressed the reasons why no faith is required, although you have ignored that.
Any good science text will explain evolutionary fact and theory. To do otherwise would be criminally negligent. However, if you have a textbook that claims that man evolved from monkeys, then it is bad in all regards, because no scientist has ever claimed that man arose from monkeys. It is not a matter of “disproving” something that has never been asserted (except, perhaps, by liars such as Hovind, Gish, and Chick).
Incorrect. There is exactly one scientific theory of evolution. You are either misinformed or you’re just talking out of your ass.
Incorrect. Scientific theory starts with hpotheses, not 'beliefs." If a hypotheis can be diproven it is abandoned. Nothing in science is accepted on faith. Hypotheses are either falsified or they are not. Belief has nothing to do with it.
As has been pointed out multiple times in multiple threads, evolutionary theory is in no way dependant on the Big Bang. Evolution is an overwhelmingly confirmed theory regardless of how the universe began. Not a single part of that theory relies on faith.
Please give us the name of a single science book that claims that man is descended from monkeys. That is not a part of evolutionary theory. It is simply factually incorrect to keep asserting that it is.
Neither did I imply you wanted him to leave. I thought it might help you and him to know that his witness was not lost on people here. Unlike others I have had the grave misfortune of meeting on this MB (you’re actually not that bad, FWIW;)).
Svt4him, would it aid you to know that Poly’s witness and presence on this board is one thing that has many times kept me from saying “uh, no. There is no fucking way God would subject innocent people to this utter fucking bullshit going on here. Sorry, not unless He’s a fucking thug with a ‘look what I can do!’ 2nd-grade sense of humor. Hey, dude? If you expect me to believe in you, do something impressive like, say, making some GOOD for a change.”
Here’s the problem, or at least one of them, for you liberal Christians. Svt4him believes in miraculous and supernatural events based on very strong evidence (or at least what he/she perceives as such), being an inerrant bible, all the true prophesy, witnesses to miracles or what have you. From his/her framework of mind her belief in the miracles and afterlife is reasonable. It seems that you liberal Christians want to believe in the same supernatural stuff like heaven and an afterlife, on what you admit is such a shaky source. From what I have gathered from liberal Christians, all you have to go on is weak philosophical “proofs” of god (which at best bring you to deism), wishful thinking, a few vague coincidences that you like to attribute to god working in your lives, and cherry picking a few nice verses from a book which on the whole is quite ghastly. Unlike Svt4him’s position, this I think is quite unreasonable.
To quote fundamentalist Christian Ken Ham:
“The bible says god created the earth covered with water the sun moon and stars on day 4. Well that’s very different to the big bang. If the big bang’s true, well the bible got it wrong on astronomy. The bible says there was a global flood but a today we have a lot of people who say no there wasn’t. Well if the bible got it wrong on geology, and the bible says god made distinct kinds of animals and plants to reproduce after their own kind. Well today evolutionists say no, one kind of animal changed into another over millions of years so the bible gets it wrong in biology. Then why should I trust the bible when it talks of morality and salvation.”
This is not an unreasonable assertion, IMO. Though I think the conclusion he reaches in the end is a little off.
*That I am able to accept in any sense that a benevolent God exists is due in no small part to him. *
You let a message board poster, who admittedly has never had god literally speak to him overshadow the words of the bible? You will let Polycarp convince you that god is benevolent, while living in a world where war, disease, and famine are so common? In a world where you can survive only by the killing and eating of other organisms? A world where relatively innocent people are regularly subjected to a lot of “utter fucking bullshit” (as you poetically stated)?
That just does not seem reasonable from any frame of mind that I can think of.
Nowhere have I seen any Christian (I’m not one, JFTR) say that the Bible is a “shaky source”.
I think you should gather more than just from reading the few pages of this thread. As for cherry picking … read Otto’s gay christiah thread for some of that. Read pretty much any religious thread in GD for cherry picking galore. Read religious arguments for X or Y or whatever and you’ll see so much cherry picking you’ll get full-on nauseated from it.
Svt4Him has yet to show a comfortable grasp on that which he discusses. The idea that his position is reasonable is unreasonable;)
Why indeed should you, given that … oh, wait. The Bible is not a scientific text. It is not, in toto, a history text. So it should not be used as such.
I don’t let him do anything. He does what he does independently of anything I wish;) I do not place much stock in the Bible inasmuch as it is equally possible to draw one conclusion from it as it is possible to draw the equally opposite conclusion. I do not place much stock in the Bible because if it is wrong, who does it answer to?
I have seen Polycarp’s witness that God is benevolent even in the face of some of the most horrid things life has to offer. I do not LET him CONVINCE me of something so much as his presence and words and love show me same in God.
That the sustenance of life requires that it sustain itself with those things intended for it … does not speak to me to the unnecessary brutality of such. I don’t see how eating makes the world such a hideous place.
Quite simply, yes. Because as much utter fucking bullshit as exists, that there is beauty that shines through it means that something must be propelling it forward. Chaos is much more expectable than order, after all.
Without a heaping helping of that utter fucking bullshit, I would not be here. With a little bit more I would not be here either (I’d be in a grave). With less or none I would be nothing like who I am today. It is the Polycarps of this place (specifically and in general) which point to an actual reason for all the heinous things in this world. Can I see the reason(s) most of the time? Fuck no. I see no reason for one of my cousins being born anencephalic and another having four children and working for NASA.
Too, it helps that Polycarp and I come from similar backgrounds. At least twice in the past month or so I’ve seen him reference his condition when he was a pre-teen … a condition I know very well. He’s made out pretty well, which gives me more than a little hope considering not long ago I had given up on finding anyone to tolerate me at all.
Understandable. You’re operating under false premises … and you can’t think from my POV:)
Because the BIble is not an astronomy book, nor a geology book, nor a biology book, nor a science text of any sort. It is a book of philosophy and theology, the stuff that morality and salvation are made of.
When it speaks of science, it speaks outside its realm. However, when it speaks of salvation, it speaks to the topic it is actually about. Just as you can trust a science book for science more than you could for any philosophical content in it, you shouldn’t take a book of philosophy and discount it just because it gets scientific details wrong.
I’m going to answer your questions in simple terms, to show you whoever gave you this list as a serious questioning of science is lying to you, or is ignorant (or perhaps stupid.)
To start: we are seeing stars form from gasses right now, using the Hubble. No one has ever said that man evolved from monkeys, and only the truly ignorant even bring that up. I lived in Africa 30 years ago, and everyone I met there was too smart to think such a thing, and they were all a lot more honest than Johnson. Since the response to the point about monkeys still being around went right over your head, try this one. In the midWest there is an insect which mates when a certain type of fruit tree blossoms. When Johnny Appleseed planted apples, some of these insects moved to apple trees, and eventually changed their breeding time to match that of the apple tree. The insects split into two species, since they no longer mated. Now only some of the insects moved, so there were still some on the original tree. Get it now?
You do know Johnson is a notorious creationist, who believes in lying for Jesus. He’s wrong too. Science says nothing about why, only what. Many devout Christians work in evolution, but iJohnson can’t accept that, so he lies.
The universe is space, and matter. As the universe expands, there is more space. Any book on the expanding universe talks about this one. You might also look up event horizon.
**
Matter is frozen energy. e=mc**2, you know. At some time after the big bang, when the energy density of the universe dropped enough to make it possible, energy froze into matter.
**
First of all, many of the laws and constants are dependent. String theory seems to indicate that perhaps the basics are due to harmonics of strings, which are kind of like vibrating space. Try The Elegant Universe, but be aware this is not an easy book.
**
Perfectly organized? You must think my daughter’s room is perfectly organized. Matter is very lumpy. Gravity of course imposes some structure. Organization seems like a value jusgement.
**
It appears, with the discovery of dark matter and dark energy, that the net energy in the universe is 0, so there is plenty to do the organizing, whatever that means.
**
When? You could look it up, a couple of billion years ago. (There aren’t a lot of fossils of the first molecules for some odd reason). How? A replicating molecule, not alive, replicated with errors, with ones replicating more dominating ones replicating less. Eventually some got more efficient at getting additional material to help in replication. Eventually they became the percursors to DNA. Eventually they grew a suit of armor to protect them and became a cell. (Cell’s didn’t pop up out of precursor material.) Why? As my friend’s father said, Y is a crooked letter. Ones that are closer to life replicated faster than ones that weren’t.
See above. The reproduction probably came before life.
Didn’t you learn about the paramecia exchanging genetic material without sexual reproduction in biology? A transitional form if I ever saw one. Try
Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice for All of Creation, to see the wide range of sexual reproduction that exists. You won’t ever ask this question again after reading that.
Plants and most animals don’t want anything. The ones with genes discouraging reproduction don’t reproduce, and the ones with genes that encourage reproduction do, so our genes tend to “want” us to reproduce. I would suspect that you have had the urge to reproduce at least once or twice in your life, without your brain being involved.
New improved varieties come from a series of small mutations in series. Here is my favorite analogy. Say you have a lock consisting of 100 little dials, each of which have to be set to the proper number for the lock to open. Opening this lock is clearly impossible, since you have 10 ** 100 combinations to go through, right? However, say each of the dials makes a little click when the right number is reached. Now opening the lock is trivial. Turning the dial is mutation, and the click is natural selection. The analogy is not quite right, since it involves a goal, and evolution has no goal. But I hope you get the point. Natural selection preserves the small, useful mutation.
We can’t synthesize vitamin C. Neither can chimps. Gorillas can, as can all other primates. Now maybe god had something against us, but why did he beat up on the poor chimps? The obvious explanation is that the mutation that turned off vitamin C synthesis, not a negative one in the midst of the fruit rich jungle a couple of million years before the British Navy, happened after our common ancestor split off from the gorillas. You are aware that we and chimps are more genetically similar than chimps and gorillas, right?
Wrong. Natural selection tends to select for whatever increases reproductive success. If there is a static environment, that does tend to keep species stable. If there is a change of environment, either from something like an ice age or migration, then it tends to make the genome change. Anyhow, congrats, you just reinvented punc eq.
You know about lungfish, right? And the fish that walk from pond to pond? Birds are dinosaurs, many of which walked on two legs like birds. Flying squirrels may be on the way to real flight, since the further they go the better chance of survival they have. Finally, bird organs and bone structure are not all that different, at least not more than can be expected from 100 million years or so of divergent evolution.
Didn’t you see the section on whale evolution on the PBS series? You can find the answer to all of this in about five minutes of looking. None of this is vital.
There are precursors to all these things to be found in other animals. Origin of Species talks about the eye, and Dawkins updates it a bit. If god designed our eye, how come it has a bug (the blind spot) that the squid eye does not? Does god love squids more than us? This is another one you can look up yourself very easily - if you really want answers, that is.
I trimmed the usual Piltdown man crap, and the lack of transitional forms quote mining. (From 1977, as if nothing had been discovered since then.) Creationist sources that talk about this are just liars. Check out the talkorigins section on creationist quote mining if you want to see some real liars exposed.
Svt4Him, what interest do Creationists have in presenting a balanced picture of evolution? What do they have to gain from putting up a religious text against a scientific one? It seems as logical as deriving methods of prayer from a science text. I know it seems odd that a Creationist would not want to espouse a truthful view of evolution because you have been told that they are truthful. But the easiest way to discredit something to someone who probably will not challenge it is to say things that are not true and then discredit those things. Imagine that someone wanted to say that Christianity is a hoax. They then started out by pointing out, falsely, that The Bible says God is made of string cheese when it is clearly observable that He is made up of basketballs. Etc. The views of Hovind, Behe, Johnson et al. do not represent a valid and intelligent view of evolution any more than Jack Chick represents a valid and intelligent view of people who do not agree with his particular view of Christianity.
Nowhere have I seen any Christian (I’m not one, JFTR) say that the Bible is a “shaky source”.
They have different euphemisms for “shaky” but the meaning is the same. Once you allow for errency, then the walls of faith come tumbling down, well ok, in practice they don’t, but they ought to. In your earlier response you wrote:
That I am able to accept in any sense that a benevolent God exists is due in no small part to him.
Just for clarification, what god is it that you accept as existing? Perhaps I misunderstood but I took your post to mean that you were accepting Polycarp’s version of god which he describes as Christian.
I think you should gather more than just from reading the few pages of this thread.
Don’t worry I did.
As for cherry picking … read Otto’s gay christiah thread for some of that. Read pretty much any religious thread in GD for cherry picking galore. Read religious arguments for X or Y or whatever and you’ll see so much cherry picking you’ll get full-on nauseated from it.
Oh, I agree 100%. Any version of Christianity I have seen requires a good deal of cherry picking. One reason I give liberal Christianity a hard time is that, on these boards at least, it is where I have a somewhat unique voice. With regards to fundamentalism I would just be another guy joining the dog pile.
Svt4Him has yet to show a comfortable grasp on that which he discusses. The idea that his position is reasonable is unreasonable
Svt4Him’s position (he can correct me if I’m wrong) is that evolution is wrong because his infallible source says it is. If we allow that his source (the bible) is infallible then it is quite reasonable to assert that evolution is incorrect. Whether he has a comfortable grasp of evolution is immaterial to that as long as he knows that evolution contradicts the bible. I would suggest that the claim of the bible being infallible is unreasonable, but that’s a different debate, and for the sake of Svt4Him’s POW I’m ignoring it.
quote:
"Then why should I trust the bible when it talks of morality and salvation.”
Why indeed should you, given that … oh, wait. The Bible is not a scientific text. It is not, in toto, a history text. So it should not be used as such.
What Iampunha do you think the bible should be used for?
quote:
You let a message board poster, who admittedly has never had god literally speak to him overshadow the words of the bible?
I don’t let him do anything. He does what he does independently of anything I wish I do not place much stock in the Bible inasmuch as it is equally possible to draw one conclusion from it as it is possible to draw the equally opposite conclusion. I do not place much stock in the Bible because if it is wrong, who does it answer to?
How much stock do you place in Polycarp, who says he believes in only the pleasing aspects of god in the bible.
I have seen Polycarp’s witness that God is benevolent even in the face of some of the most horrid things life has to offer.
Do you think that Polycarp’s witness that god is benevolent in the face or most horrid things is reason enough to for you to believe the same? Don’t you think that a benevolent god could have made the world a little less horrid.
I do not LET him CONVINCE me of something so much as his presence and words and love show me same in God.
Huh?
That the sustenance of life requires that it sustain itself with those things intended for it … does not speak to me to the unnecessary brutality of such. I don’t see how eating makes the world such a hideous place.
Don’t tell me you aren’t profound enough to look at the world from a different point of view than your own place at the top of the food chain. If you were being hunted down for food I think your perspective regarding the beauty of nature might be a little different. If you were a cow or a carrot, you might have hoped that god would be benevolent enough to allow all creatures to get their energy from photosynthesis. Would you not?
Because as much utter fucking bullshit as exists, that there is beauty that shines through it means that something must be propelling it forward.
Cite?
Without a heaping helping of that utter fucking bullshit, I would not be here. With a little bit more I would not be here either (I’d be in a grave).
You don’t see your survivorship bias (literally) here? There are a lot of people A LOT who are not here, they are in the grave because the world is pretty nasty. Of course they can’t post their experiences to say how extra-crappy life was to them. Of course you can just rationalize they are in heaven and they unfortunately can’t point out to you that in all probability they aren’t.
With less or none I would be nothing like who I am today.
Well I’m glad to know that the various holocausts in history served the purpose of building your character.
It is the Polycarps of this place (specifically and in general) which point to an actual reason for all the heinous things in this world.
And what might that reason be? I think Polycarp admitted to me that he did not have an answer to the “problem of evil.”
Too, it helps that Polycarp and I come from similar backgrounds. At least twice in the past month or so I’ve seen him reference his condition when he was a pre-teen … a condition I know very well. He’s made out pretty well, which gives me more than a little hope considering not long ago I had given up on finding anyone to tolerate me at all.
From what I gather from these boards, Gobear comes from a background which society still unfortunately sanctions, and he seems to be making out pretty well, and doesn’t have to resort to belief in a bunch of superstitious nonsense. As such I would think him to be a superior role model.
In my experience (so this is a personal opinion and not something that can be propped up as Fact of the World, then refuted:)), those who place any large amount of faith in the Bible as the inerrant Word of God have placed their faith upon that statement like a house fo cards on toothpicks. If you so much as breathe on the toothpicks, the whole thing comes crashing down because they rarely have any depth or strength to their faith.
In practice, those who do not base their faith on the inerrancy of a book, and instead base it on something like God’s love or something equally strong, do not have the same problem with toothpicks. I don’t see why this should come as any grand surprise to you;)
What do you believe are their meanings behind their uses of “shaky”?
Just for clarification, do you intend to mask such a clear disingenuous sense of things behind all your questions? To a point I can handle it, but if you’re going to continue in this line … well, I don’t have Polycarp’s patience yet.
I believe that Polycarp’s understanding of God is in line with much of what God is (Polycarp would be the first to say that he does not have a complete understanding of Him;)). I do not agree with him completely on everything (even at his advanced stage of … knowledge[;)], he’s still got some stuff wrong:D), but I think he has a much more useful and clear view of God than some other people I have met.
That is not borne out in any meaningful sense in your posts to this thread, as of yet. The only place on the SDMB where I have seen a post like Lib’s outlining proofs and such of God’s existence was in this here thread. The vast majority of people on this board, from what I have learned of them, if they do believe in God it is not based merely on semantic proofs or evidence. So either you have gained a thoroughly imbalanced view or you have forgotten 95% of what you read. Or, alternately, something less amusing.
Right, then. What inherent cherry picking do you see in Polycarp’s “version of Christianity”? What inherent cherry-picking is necessary for any version of Christianity?
What is your voice?
Just because I believe a source is infallible doesn’t mean it is.
Even if it is, The Bible is not a scientific text and it should not be given the importance of such in a scientific debate. Fuck, dude, The Art of War is a pretty reliable text for its subject matter but I wouldn’t use it as a guideline for watering my houseplants:)
Even assuming the infallibility of the Bible it is incorrect to say that the Bible and evolution contradict, or do you know something the Jesuits don’t?
What it was intended as in the first place: a way of recording the history of the Jewish people;) Seriously, though … my thinking is that people shouldn’t use it to justify their hate. They shouldn’t use it to justify their shortcomings in general. They should use it as part of their faith if they happen to have one. Beyond that (and really even that much) ain’t my call. I am not its proprietor.
You will cite justification for the allegation that Polycarp believes in only the pleasing aspects of god in the Bible or retract that RIGHT FUCKING NOW.. Might even be too late … I recall him saying that the next person who said something like that about him was going to get a very thorough pitting. Could be wrong, of course.
Now. I think what you mean to say, rather than “Polycarp only believe the happy fun stuff about God”, is ACTUALLY something more like “Polycarp emphasizes God’s love to those who have been beaten over the head with Bibles by those who only cite God’s wrath/hate/judgment”.
And the answer, since I have yet to see anyone be driven away from God by Polycarp, is that I place a hell of a lot more stock in him than I do in those who use the Bible as a weapon.
Is it reason enough? Quite frankly, with the things he says he thinks about the world (and what trust I have in his perceptions and knowledge etc), it is more than a little reassurance:) I think a benevolent God could have made the world turn out better, sure. I also think I ain’t its maker so I don’t know what this God is going for.
I did not invite Polycarp to make a difference on my life. I did not initially welcome it. It happened. Rather like osmosis.
Rather than assuming that I am looking at the world from my own little perch atop the food chain. I doubt you’d find a gazelle or amoeba who is bawling its little eyes out that its friends got eaten by Timmy the Tiger or Wally Whale or whatever. There’s a reason the cycle of life isn’t a Lifetime Original Movie: THIS IS HOW SHIT HAPPENS. This isn’t “One Plant’s Struggle to Avoid Getting Eaten”. This isn’t “Gordy Gazelle Has a Broken Leg. Watch Gertrude Gazelle Carry Him in Her Mouth for a Year While He Heads. Tonight at 11”. This is life.
If I were being hunted for food I doubt I would have the mental capacity to hope. Cows et al. do not dream of getting married and sending their calves to college. They don’t go to the grocery story and spend their last $5 on milk. They do not have the capacity for the things humans do, such as hoping.
See my sig, for one:)
Don’t tell me what I think and I won’t try to tell you how far up your ass your head is, mmkay? Now, here’s another important Life Lesson: People Die. I don’t know why my grandfather was healthy for decades and then bang smash got cancer twice in his 80s. I don’t know how my other grandfather managed to live for years with a horribly abused body (drugs and alcohol), then manage to die in his sleep of pneumonia. I don’t know why I didn’t die from amniotic fluid intake and my sister didn’t die from (IIRC) conjunctivitis when she was a toddler … which disease kills far more than it leaves alive. And I have no fucking clue why God would have my aunt abort a child at the EXACT SAME TIME my mother misscarried. Why not save both of them and have my mother get pregnant with the kid who had to be killed by a doctor and save my aunt the grief? I don’t know why there are kids in Rwanda missing limbs because the local government doesn’t give a fuck.
But I get the sense that there is a good reason for it. Because my grandfathers both lived long enough for me to know them well, and then they died. And my sister didn’t die because now she and I have lots of things in common regarding depression and she’s been able to help some kids I’d never be able to reach. And without that miscarried baby I wouldn’t be here. Can’t help you with the Rwandan kids, though.
I don’t rationalize that anyone’s in Heaven. From my understanding of it, I hope there are one or two people up there who certainly didn’t get Heavenly treatment. But one of the most helpful things I’ve gotten from Polycarp is that even the people who know the most and have the best vision don’t know. So I keep plugging along and finding little answers to big questions, and sometimes big answers to little questions.
I’m sure you are. If I had more confidence in your character I’d tell you more about my life:)
Love.
Again, do not presume to think for me or know me better than I know myself. I did not say gobear was not a role model. I’ll be happy if I have half his taste in art when I’m his age:) I look at the stuff and don’t see anything spectacular. Gregorian chant does little for me. Most movies are no better. He finds much more beauty in those things than I do.
Neither gobear nor Polycarp is required to resort to belief in a bunch of superstitious nonsense.
That would be fine if Svt4Him just stuck to the Bible to make his argument but he doesn’t. He’s tried to support his argument by attacking the science of evolution and that’s where he fails. Most of his creationist arguments and suppositions about evolutionary theory have nothing to do with the Bible but with a bad understanding of science. Piltdown Man, for instance, has fuck-all to do with evolution or the Bible. It’s not a reasonable point in an evolution debate, regardless of what motivates his agenda.
Do you want me to scan a copy of the textbook? I hate to tell you that some science books still have this evolution in them. I do work in a school, so I don’t mind getting a copy, unless I’m bearing false witness to that too. My point though is not that the whole evolution of man from monkey has been disproven, more addressing the whole science issue. See, when asked how matter got there, and an answer said it’s always been, that’s not faith. When asked how God was created, and an answer says He’s always been, then that’s somehow blind faith. To me, they’re the same, and that’s no play on words.