pashley, I agree that a being of infinite power and knowledge would be beyond my limited understanding. But I will always try to use what faculties I do have to make sense of the world around me.
Patrick, after some of the hateful and extremely un-Christlike things you’ve said, here and in other threads (I don’t think I need to enumerate them again, do I?), you’ll certainly have to make the first move towards detente. You simply cannot demand people be nice to you without demonstrating that you’re willing to do the same.
-andros-
I’m liking you more and more, Alter-Ego.
That depends on the debate and how you bring God in. In a discussion of morality or ethics, claiming that your faith leads you to conclusion y should be pretty solid. You will still get some people who dismiss your conclusions based on dismissing your faith while others will disagree although they may accept your position as yours. It’s a wide-open MB and you’ll just have to put some thought into your presentation.
If you drag God into a discussion of natural science, you will have to be careful not to make God the explanation for any scientific point of origin. No science has found God, yet, and using Him as the answer simply is not valid science.
I you want to see how some Christians have handled that balancing act, scroll back a few weeks and pick out threads started by Polycarp. Look at posts by Triskadecamus and RTFirefly or Libertarian (among others) as examples of Christians maintaining their Christianity in a forum where that belief is not the underlying text for all discussion. (Look for posts by CMKeller for a Jewish perspective.)
This crowd is a rowdy bunch, most discussions are no-holds-barred, and there are, indeed, folks here who are ardently anti-religious or anti-Christian. Not everyone with whom you have crossed swords, however, is anti-anything. Some have simply reacted to your presentation. The majority of posters, here, are smart enough to have something to bring to any discussion, however, and it never hurts to hear the other guy out. (There are a few posters who are simply nasty, but we have had our share of so-called Christians who were quite nasty as well. You are not required to strike out at people that you perceive are mean. If you want respect, you are required to answer legitimate questions, even if they seem threatening.)
Have fun and good luck.
Tom~
Okay, now that all the mutual handshaking has been taken care of, how about getting back to the subject?
Pashley, how do you respond to the arguments made on the last page regarding the scientific impossibility of a flood of the magnitude described in the bible?
If your answer is to dismiss science and claim that it was a miraculous happening, then how do you justify using science to ‘prove’ the existance of God through things like radio-isotope dating of an Ark?
And if you think that evidence such as finding an Ark should instantly change non-believer’s minds, then how come you haven’t changed yours in the face of a whole body of scientific knowledge which ‘proves’ that the flood of the Bible could not have happened?
Pashley said:
Yeah, and why should you be? Just 'cus several other people were already discussing them. :rolleyes:
Of course you are, because you don’t want to deal with anything that doesn’t agree with your beliefs.
Jeez, man, when are you going to grow up and stop whining? We’ve tried to have discussions with you, but you continually avoid those discussions and lash out in various attacks. As I said before, your whining is not going to convince anybody here that you are being oppressed. They just aren’t that stupid.
Where you define “offensive tirades” as any viewpoint that contradicts your own.
You are so full of baloney, it’s just not even funny.
I must have missed where you apologized for all your attacks on me, the most recent being, um, today.
GL Wasteful said:
Poly had to leave for a while. You can read his goodbye message in an MPSIMS thread I started to post the message he e-mailed me.
But you raise the very point I would have raised had I been here sooner. Pashley keeps whining that he’s attacked for being a Christian, yet there are loads of messages in that very thread (the Polycarp one) talking about how people are going to miss him so much. These messages come from posters of all stripes, from dyed-in-the-wool atheists to other believers. Not that I expect this simple fact to change Pashley’s whines, of course. Not if history is any guide.
Hardcore said:
If he changes to be what he claims, that is true. I won’t be holding my breath. But maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised. You never know.
Chee. Go away for 24 hours and it’s a whole new thread. But a couple of you seem to be interested in whether the Ark was impossible, which is my view, so here goes.
Pashley said early on “The boat,being so huge, would take at least a year or two to build”. Ha. I suppose it took the Egyptians at least a couple of long weekends to build the pyramids too.
Creationist propaganda goes on at length about the Ark being the biggest wooden boat ever built, which it certainly would have been-a lot more than twice as big as Admiral Nelson’s flagship HMS Victory, which was state-of-the-art for the late 18th century, 4000-odd years and a lot of hard-earned technology after Noah. Victory mounted 100 guns, and if the British could have built a more powerful (read bigger) ship they would have. (The Spaniards did build some 120-gun vessels, but they were unwieldy and sank a lot, which is what the Ark would have done.)
I saw one of those “Mysteries of the Bible” programs the other day and there it was, Noah’s Ark as a 500 foot rectangular box, about which the ICR says “Experts have declared it would be stable and seaworthy”.
I don’t know what they were experts in but they don’t know much about the sea. A flat bottom, square ended 500 foot boat is a hydrodynamic, structural and functional nightmare,about as seaworthy as the adobe brick 747 I mentioned above would be airworthy. And a 500 foot boat-shaped boat, round on the bottom and pointed at the ends, could NEVER have been built out of wood, and certainly not with the materials and tools that were available in 2500BC.
This isn’t just my opinion, by the way; I have several notebooks full of references which I would be glad to share, but since this thread seems to be turning into more of a thelogical argument than otherwise maybe I’ll save it for somewhere else. (I’m not pulling a Phadrus (is that a noun now?); I just don’t want to bore you nice people.)
If anybody really wants to hear about it, just say so and I’ll start spouting off. I promise to leave out most of the math, and anyway I can’t make this keyboard write the symbols; and if someone is really really interested you can e-mail me and I’ll tell you where you can look things up.
By the way: Pashley, if someone found a giant raft made out of rattlesnakes tied to a sunken tower in Atlantis, would you start believing in Quetzalcoatl? Or if a 20 mile long spaceship came out from where it’s hiding behind the sun, would you believe that white people were made in a lab by a mad scientist like L. Farkahan (sp?) says? Both are about as likely as finding an Ark on Ararat.
Well, damn me for leaving.
Pat:
I point you to every whine that you uttered about being persecuted because of your Christianity. Despite the fact that there are numerous Christians who post to these boards and never manage to be attacked.
Sure. And howzabout you stop attacking people who have the audacity to disagree with you? After all, if you’re so certain that you are right, then you should be able to post something would might pass for proof. Might that be do-able?
For me, you’re gonna hafta work a long time to prove your ability to act like a grown up before I’ll be willing to accept your handshake. Until then, I’ll do my damnedest to look at you as a reformed person.
Waste
Flick Lives!
Has anyone considered the water may have came from underground? How many millions of wells are there drilled for drinking water? What about underground rivers, lakes? Under great pressure, could this water have ‘erupted’, causing a great flood? I don’t know, I’m not a hydrologist, nor geologist. But there clearly is millions, if not billions of gallons of water under the Earth.
And no, I don’t expect anyone’s minds to be changed, especially the folks that don’t have a religion. See my signature quote for clarification.
Patrick Ashley
“For those who believe, no evidence is necessary; for those who don’t believe, no evidence is enough.” -Unknown
No kidding, I said, at least a year!
Not true, several scale mock ups of the ark have been built, and severly tested in a wave tank, and the ark never once rolled. There is also the issue that the Ark would have broken in two due to it’s weight, while cresting wave. Also not true, since the Ark would not have been lifted out of the water, and to speculate that waves were that high, is just that, speculation.
[quote}
could NEVER have been built out of wood, and certainly not with the materials and tools that were available in 2500BC.[/quote]
Why? You can’t just unilaterally say that, and not back it up.
Patrick Ashley
“For those who believe, no evidence is necessary; for those who don’t believe, no evidence is enough.” -Unknown
Similarly, you can’t say:
… without backing that up, either. Cite your source, durn it!
Esprix
First of all, the bible doesn’t say that the water welled up from inside the Earth - it says it rained, and the rains caused the flood. If you want to interpret the flood story literally, you can’t selectively change some of the facts.
Second, the amount of water required is something like 80 times the amount in all the world’s oceans. You think we wouldn’t know it was there? And remember, it couldn’t be in isolated pockets or it wouldn’t all be able to be released at once. So you’re speculating a huge underground ocean, containing seawater that fish can live in, 80 times more massive than all the world’s oceans. Think about that.
Here’s the problem: God and Science are mutually exclusive. If you want to believe that the flood happened and it was a miracle, no problem. God made the waters appear, and he made the waters go away, using his Godly powers. No science involved. This is untestable, but you’re welcome to believe it.
Where you go wrong is when you try to invoke science to ‘prove’ the existance of God. If you want to use the tools of science (carbon-14 dating, etc) to prove that the Ark existed, then you open yourself up to scientific scrutiny of the whole flood story. And that story is completely impossible on a scientific basis.
pashley
pashley
Patrick, you may want to put your money where your mouth is, here.
I done run for president.
Didn’t win, though.
Sam Stone:
While I am disinclined to throw a lot of support behind Pashley who was not even aware of the various flood myths that preceded the story in the bible, the bible’s version, in fact, does include the waters beneath the earth as a contributing factor to the flood.
(Sheeeesh, doesn’t anyone read that book any more?)
Tom~
Quite correct. I did see this though, although I can’t say where. I thought it was interesting, and remembered. Sorry.
Patrick Ashley
“For those who believe, no evidence is necessary; for those who don’t believe, no evidence is enough.” -Unknown
Not so.(with apologies to tomndebb)
Genesis 7:11:
…on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the the heavens were opened."
And your reference for that theory is…?
God and science aren’t mutually exclusive. If you can hold that God created physics, which begat the laws of physics, what’s the exclusivity?
I don’t think we can prove God thru science, no, else there would be no need for faith (having “proven” his existence).
And if the Ark was found up high on Ararat, I submit that it would be incumbent upon the non-believers of the flood story to offer another explaination on how something that massive got up there.
Patrick Ashley
“For those who believe, no evidence is necessary; for those who don’t believe, no evidence is enough.” -Unknown
I usually stay out of religious threads, but this topic amused me enough to think of a reply.
What if the Genuine Ark of Noah were found, validating the whole Flood story (even if the waters had to be miracled in and away again).
First, it would prove that there is an entity powerful enough to destroy all life on Earth, except for one vessel. It would show that that entity is petty enough to punish every living creature by drowning ( a particularly horrible way to die) when it would be within its power to just eliminate the biosphere painlessly. The entity seemingly felt justified in doing this because the human population was violating standards of behaviour that the entity had not yet delineated to humanity.
I feel that this would mean that we would have to start researching ways to protect ourselves and our planet from any potential future actions by this entity. Where would one start doing this research?
Manny would suggest that by kow-towing to this entity’s whims we could forestall a repetition of the malicious destruction. I believe that all humans were endowed by thier Creator with certain inalienable rights, chief among these the right to life. An entity who would deprive almost all of humanity of their lives without due process is a tyrant.
I will never advocate appeasing a tyrant, and as Kipling said:
*Here is naught to venture, random nor untrue –
Swings the wheel full-circle, brims the cup anew.
Here is naught unproven, here is nothing hid:
Step for step and word for word – so the old Kings did!
Step by step, and word by word: who is ruled may read.
Suffer not the old Kings: for we know the breed –
All the right they promise – all the wrong they bring.
Stewards of the Judgement, suffer not this King!*
No truce with Kings!
Dr. Fidelius, Charlatan
Associate Curator Anomalous Paleontology, Miskatonic University
“You cannot reason a man out of a position he did not reach through reason.”
Gaudere
Ah does mah best, ma’am. Now which one of us is the sock puppet again?
Dr. F, you owe me yet another keyboard. Beautiful.
Patrick, you said:
The Invisible Purple Unicorn (may Her hooves never be shod!) put it there. She was playing with it in Her Holy Bathtub. Got a problem with that? :rolleyes:
-andros-
Pashley, the reference for the amount of water required is… high school mathematics.
Go find the average depth of all the oceans. Get a rough idea for the volume of water required, given the amount of ocean coverage on the Earth. Now figure out how much water you’d need to cover the entire Earth to a depth of 7 miles, the height of the tallest mountains. Divide one into the other. The answer will not be completely accurate because the volume of the oceans cannot be found that simply, but it’ll put you in the ballpark.
And how come there is no evidence of flood waters in the antarctic? Did you know that people hunt for meteorites in Antarctica because there are areas where the surface has been undisturbed for tens of thousands of years? No flood waters went though that area.
But believe me, there are many, many other problems with a scientific explanation for a worldwide flood. Conservation of energy, for example. The energy required to lift that much water from inside the Earth would be staggering.
But this is all silly anyway, since you are starting from a premise that God did it, through miraculous means. If so, all bets are off. So why do you bother with things like trying to prove the seaworthiness of the Ark? If God wanted a stone slab to float it would. The Ark didn’t have to be structurally sound, because God held it together with his Godly powers.
So be consistent. If God creates miracles, you don’t need scientific proofs of any of this stuff. If he doesn’t exist, the flood never happened as described in the bible. Period. End of Story. Pick a choice, and stick with it. Don’t try to straddle the fence, or you’ll get kicked on both sides.