Doom Shepherd

If that were true, suppose this:

If there was no God, would there be such a thing as an atheist?

 

Yes.

 

For example... There is no Nibiru.

You can nevertheless find people who believe in it.

As well as people who do not. (And the latter are often compelled by the ridiculous statements and actions of the Nibiru-believers to point out the many factual reasons Nibiru does not and can not exist.)

 

The fact that something can be concieved of does not in any way necessitate its prior existence.

 

The fact that I can say "Santa Claus does not exist" (making me a "Hard" aClausist) does not mean that "Santa Claus therefore exists, because without Santa Claus there could be no aClausists."

And the deals aren't even THAT great. I've gotten much better deals on merchandise just by being patient.

 

In closing, people are cattle and the herd needs thinned.

I've wondered, but I'm not going to get to find out.

I DO debate for debate's sake. I find it fun. I don't consider anything off-limits. But the fact that I am a pretty snarky and aggressive debater can easily be taken for active hostility on my part.

 

That's not (usually) true. (And when it IS true, I usually lead with that.)

 

But for my part, I value "debate's sake" rather less than I do maintaining decent relations (most of) with the other forumgoers.

 

Some people can throw down and pull no punches in debates, while outside of that venue they will take each other out for dinner and drinks. And that's great. But not everybody can do that, and not everybody should be asked to. And it's kind of important to know who is who.

Ah, I understand. You see what you see (or more accurately, what one side has presented to you), and you have no interest in what the deeper reality actually IS. Surface appearances are good enough for you. Massive amounts of contrary evidence? Well, that's just somebody's opinion.

 

Okay, then. Enjoy the political equivalent of being a Young-Earth Creationist.

I cannot see Israel as a success at all for the time being. For decades they cannot establish relationship with neighbours - this is not statesmanship.

 

Kind of hard to choose diplomacy with people constantly shooting at you over their fences and announcing that you should die in nasty ways.

 

In any case, wrong. Israel normalized relationships with both Egypt and Jordan, and has not significantly abrogated either treaty.

 

Freedom? Very questionable in a country which is officially based on religious and racial discrimination.

You mean like all those officially Islamic countries, right?

 

What is happening with the Palestinians bears very troubling resemblance to the Final Solution in the Nazy-occupied Europe (with some sensitivities taken into account - so no gas chambers or extermination camps - but with ghettos and a similar ultimate goal).

And without the Jews constantly launching attacks against the Nazis, or inviting the Allies in to get in the first strike before Germany even formed a government, and... well. basically the entire history of Israel that WASN'T Written by Hamas. Seriously, where did you learn this utter bilge, Abu Nidal University?

 

Do you even know who invaded first in 1948? Or for that matter, that the reason Israel won the 1967 war was that it attacked Arab forces that were already massed for invasion?

 

Who rejected a path Palestinan Statehood in 2000? Israel, or the Palestinian leadership? Who has ALWAYS rejected overtures to Palestinian statehood that don't coincide with the abolition of Israel?

 

Also, reliance on the US support is a dangerous game. One day that support will vanish in thin air and Israel will have to face all its enemies on its own, all of a sudden.

Naah, even the Space Hippies know Israel is the US's most reliable ally anywhere. It's not like there's any other nation in the Middle East that is a better choice for alliance. Everywhere else is worse.

Even if I answered all of your objections to my beliefs to a degree of satisfaction, would there be any likelihood of you wanting to know more about Christianity for the purpose of believing it?

 

I have, in the past, been convinced to alter or moderate my beliefs on the basis of a debate conducted on the internet.

 

To my knowledge, this has happened precisely once.

 

I'm open to my mind being changed, but the process is more like replacing a hyperdrive than it is like changing a tire... in degree of difficulty and resistance likely to be encountered. (And possibly danger of explosion / implosion.)

 

If I were you, I probably wouldn't consider it worth the effort, on that basis.

 

So if you decide not to, let's let this end here.

 

I do notice that I kicked this debate off by responding to you, rather than simply stating my own opinions. In hindsight, this was not the most appropriate choice. I shall endeavor to NOT do that in the future.

 

You're okay, Blue. You at least seem to understand and present your beliefs in a logical and consistent way; even if I don't agree with your premises or your conclusions, I would have to say that your opinions are well-informed. So you're better at this than most.

Who is going to fund fundamental scientific research, paved roads and other high-risk ventures with uncertain return?

 

I just have to leave this here...

 

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44090512/ns/health-cancer/?GT1=43001

 

Basically, scientists working at the University of Pennsylvania managed to come up with a treatment that seems to be capable of taking out leukemia. With ONE shot.

 

The kicker: they did it without corporate or government funding of any kind. They got a grant from a charitable organization.

 

Incidentally, the first paved roads in the USA were paid for by the League of American Wheelmen - a group of bicyclists.

 

And speaking of high-risk ventures... private space looks likely to eclipse Public Space (NASA) before very long. (Ironically, in the US, the privatization of space is being promoted by the People For The Socialization Of Everything Else Under The Sun.)

Nah, the Swiss are better armed.

 

As for Sweden... I like their bikini team.

 

And that one Chef guy.

 

And Gustav II Adolph was A BADASS. He died too soon.

 

Beyond that... I hear you have all this socialized stuff, so the US's Left loves you. But I also hear your average wage is like $13,000 less than what I make in a year, and I'm not exactly rolling in cash.

Well, I'm assuming that the conversion to solar/nuclear for cheap, ample electricity production would also have an effect on the economic viability of electrically powered transportation.

 

As the US government still pays out billions of dollars a year in farm subsidies, I would think that dropping some of those would have a positive effect on the price of food that would at least somewhat offset the rise in actual food prices.

 

The real problem I see here is with speed of charging (can take hours), and availability of charging stations. The first is a technical problem - much like increasing fuel efficiency in gasoline cars, and is being worked on. I hear Illinois U. has an experimental electric car battery that will charge in 2 minutes.

 

The second was already solved once - and franchise-based gas stations demonstrate that.

I think I understand your meaning now. You mean Efficient as in "Less energy spent on wasteful nonsense and the bad things in the world", except the 'spent' part is on behalf of the universe.

God created the world and said it was good. Then, by the deception of the Serpent, Mankind chose to allow sin into the world, and the good became corrupted; hence good and bad exist in the same world.

 

God did not create death or disease. They are the good of God's creation, corrupted. God created Man and Woman, and said they were good. That has all sorts of implications: the wide variety of emotions we have, our ability to think, to create, to love, to have sex, all good things that God made for us to enjoy.

Sin's corruption means those things which God made good, could be changed in such a way that they would be meant for evil. To expression, came irrational extremism. To the ability to create, the ability to create good things ourselves also enabled us to create evil things. Love corrupted into lust, sex gave existence to perversion.

And the natural world became corrupted too: what is meant by "death entering the world" in the same way it referred to Sin entering the world in the book of Genesis, it is to say that before sin, there was no death. There was no such thing as decay or disease.

(A world would be like without death, disease or decay, I have no idea what that would be like, if that's what you're considering asking. If you'd like evidence regarding it, do tell if you find it- you'll shortly afterwards find the bones of Adam and Eve.)

Sin in of itself is responsible for all ill in the world, all things that would be classified as bad, as evil, as detestable, as unlikable. If you think that God is some sort of reprehensible creature for the world that it is, the blame would be much better sought by gazing into a mirror.

If you would question why God even made this amount of corruption a possibility, take a cursory look back at the latter part of what I said earlier: "With great power came the potential of great good and great evil when given free choice. God apparently thought this worth the risk."

 

Again, you're not going far back enough for the root cause. Whence came "The Serpent?" By whose permission was he granted access to the humans?

 

Corruption and sin existed BEFORE man's choice. Else there would have been no Serpent, who was clearly already corrupt.

 

Also, god didn't create disease? Did he also not create lions and tigers and bears and tsetse flies and bacteria and viruses? The whole "disease is caused by sin" line was good enough for the ignorant folks of 4000 years ago. We know better now.

 

And if not God, then who did? You telling me that everything was harmless before us? MANKIND gave the entire animal kingdom claws and fangs and carnivorous appetites? We created every single virus and flu bug and parasite? F***, we're powerful! We should be Gods!

 

(What were viruses before Man's choice, I wonder, since the only way they live is by attacking and destroying healthy cells.)

 

And if all of creation was transformed forever by the actions of a pair of naked-fruit-munching simpletons..

 

Well, that's pretty Evil of God right there, ensuring that we're stuck in Crapsack World through actions not our own. In all but the "worst" and most savage cultures, Humans regard punishing children for the crimes of their ancestors as immoral and evil. Is this another place where our morality has outshone God's?

 

If we did not have free will, and were automatically "programmed" from the word go to instantly give glory to God, he might just as well made mindless robots with no agency or decision regarding his creation, and we would just be like any other animal. A universe without free will would be much more a toy than a wonder.

 

You've also pretty much given the conventional description of Heaven here. If that state is so bad, why should we wish for it?

Unless he permits the corruption to exist.

Touche

One may then ask "Why?"

The Christian answers:

• [Jesus] put another parable before them, saying, "The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, 'Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?' He said to them, 'An enemy has done this.' So the servants said to him, 'Then do you want us to go and gather them?' But he said, 'No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn."
   
  The Gospel of Matthew 13:24-30, ESV

Where the grain is symbolic of the actions of those that believe in Christ that are good (because the bad actions of those that believe in Christ are 'but chaff', and thrown away), and the weeds are symbolic of the actions and behaviors of those that have heard the Word of Christ and did not believe. The Sower is God, the servants presumably are angels, "The Enemy" is the sin nature, and/or where-ever/whatever Sin came from.

 

The problem with this is that God claims to have made everything, and within the set of "everything" are "the wheat," "the weeds" and "the Enemy."

 

God doesn't just allow corruption to exist, he created it.

 

Also... I'm guessing that Jesus wasn't a gardener, because weeds are pulled because they actively harm the crops by their very existence, cutting off nutrients and water and shade. By harvest time, the weeds have gone to seed, and this will just spread more weeds.

 

Infallibility fail! I just broke the universe!

From what book does that come from?

 

Job. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satan Also, parts of the Talmud that weren't incorporated into the Bible. There's quite a bit of that. Probably because it didn't fit in with the New Church's narrative.

Okay... I think as God I would eliminate Sirenomelia, for starters. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirenomelia)

 

There's really no good reason that a small child should suffer horribly in agonizing pain for a few years and then probably die. Especially not since there are already many, MANY other ways that this can happen.

 

And I'd probably make a memetic kill agent that triggered irreversible neural shutdown in any adult who sexually assaulted anybody under 12. (Hey, I'm NuGod, so I get to be just as arbitrary as the current officeholder.)

 

And why DO we need so many different kinds of cancer?

 

Why make the universe more efficient? Why NOT? To give humanity more room and more access to resources, which would decrease things like war and famine and pestilence.

 

Why not make a bigger Earth? Why do we have to risk running out of resources? There are plenty of configurations that would alleviate this problem, both in the short and long term.

 

Unless, you know, God WANTS us to make war on each other, and starve, and be sick.

Oh, wait, he just wants to give us the OPTION, right? Free will? Because obviously, people living in the midst of plenty can't think up enough reasons on their own to be dicks to each other to satisfy God.

 

If a man tries to trip me and fails, I dislike his actions. However if a man accidentally moves his leg and trips me, but apologizes. I do not begrudge the second man even though he has caused me injury.

 

How do you feel about the man who allows a brick to fall off the roof of the building, knowing that it will fall on your child's head and destroy same, could prevent the brick from falling with the mere touch of a finger, stands right there beside the brick as it topples over, and is emphatically NOT sorry?

 

There are no "accidents" in worlds populated by Divinities.

Overheard today, and it made me laugh:

 

"It's not 'a fetus!' It's a member of Occupy Your Vagina!"

Well for one thing, the whole idea of Satan being "Evil" is a rather late invention. In Judaism, Satan was on fairly good terms with God.

 

He was more of a "trickster angel," tasked with testing humanity's worthiness/ability to follow God's commands. Of course, God was a bit of a prankster, too. See "The Book of Job."

 

You might even say he was God's Prosecutor.

 

It wasn't till much later that "Satan" became the scapegoat for humanity's Epic Fails. (Or God's, if you think about it that way.)

The Omnipotence Paradox in a nutshell:

"Can God microwave a burrito so hot that he himself could not eat it?

 

I prefer the Suckiverse Paradox, wherein we list all the ways in which the universe could run more efficiently, be more suitable for a Divine Creation, and not have run into all the pitfalls that Our universe has, while still preserving things like free will.

 

Then we ask how an Omnipotent, Omniscient god managed to create a universe even we puny humans can figure out ways to improve upon.

Perhaps orbital solar (with power being microwaved or lased down) has got more potential...

That's actually what I meant.

 

What I resent the greenies for is for undermining that will by constantly suggesting some delusional but seductive (to some) solutions.

 

If they weren't delusional, they wouldn't be the same greenies.

Sorry, GE is too busy not paying taxes, under the direct pardon by Barack Obama

 

Well, not exactly.

 

GE did get a pretty big "Green Jobs" tax break from Obama, but that's not the whole reason they "paid no taxes" (which isn't accurate either.)

 

See, like a lot of other corporations, GE lost billions in the 2008-9 crisis. And like corporations (and people,) they're allowed to apply losses against next year's taxes, for up to several years. So they did.

 

Meanwhile, GE paid all their usual $ millions in regular taxes and fees that aren't counted under "corporate income tax," Just like the 46% of people who "don't pay taxes" because they don't pay income tax still have to pay sales tax and gas tax and payroll tax and all those other happy little taxes that the government nickel-and-dimes us all with.

I'm tired of having to explain to Nibirunuts that gravity is NOT optional.

 

If a big planet came cruising through the solar system every 3000-odd years, its gravitational attraction would totally screw up the orbits of all our little inner solar system planets. In fact, it would have totally screwed them up LONG before humanity even arose. That's not "an opinion" as some of them seem obsessed with saying, it's a goddamn FACT.

I was in a thing once where a crazy guy picked up a baseball bat and was going after a girl who had refused to return his obsessive stalkery "affection."

 

No time to call police, so I had to take him on myself - to give someone else enough time to GET the police. (Response time - not the greatest. Police have to solve crimes, they don't really prevent them unless they're right there.)

 

So, yeah, sometimes fights need to happen. What was I gonna do, stand there and let him whale on her?

What we need is energy. With enough energy supply we can produce all the oil we need for the use as fuel and chemical raw materials (or switch to other chemical that do not need petroleum as the starting point).

 

The question is where to get the reliable, sustained, powerful enough energy source, which does not itself depend on oil.

 

Regards

 

I know where there's a giant fusion reactor with about 4 billion years of fuel remaining.

Star Trek, TNG era. Mainly because I want my own holsuite.

 

My gf wants TOS era, but that's because she has a crush on doctor McCoy.

Hah, almost everything Jack posts is him being an asshole.

 

Yeah. And when I think you're being an ass, you know you've crossed the line.

I don't believe it. I thought I had already made that at least somewhat clear.

 

It's rather ludicrous, but some tend to be rather... fervent in their beliefs and use this story as an excuse for saying "HUEHUEHUE HELL EXISTS." I'm definitely religious, but I try not to be this shortsighted.

 

It's just nice to know the opinions of such a refined community, as silly as this may sound.

 

When you think something is a hoax, you shouldn't use phrases such as "there's a clip of the screams of tormented souls on Youtube" as though you were stating a fact. Because clearly, if that's NOT the gateway to Hell, then that's obviously NOT a clip of the screams of tormented souls heard via the gateway, either.

 

That's like saying "bigfoot doesn't exist, now look at these bigfoot tracks."