Originally posted by ray b: by the way my IQ was tested by the state of fl. and was 130 after all the drugs and rock&roll.I qualify for both mensa and mayflower society membership
I find the above quote very hard to believe. Especially after seeing many posts on many different subjects.
As for this thread, Religion and faith are not in a building or a book, It is inside each of us. What you believe is your own interpetation. Trying to tell someone that their ideas are wrong or incorrect shows a lack of belief in your own faith. I agree with AusFiero that evolution and creation go together. You can't have one without the other.
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12:31 PM
Tigger Member
Posts: 4368 From: Flint, MI USA Registered: Sep 2000
Johnny, ponder this. You feel it is absurd to have faith in the invisible. Yet every day, hundreds of thousands of times, you put faith in things unseen merely by drawing breath. Truely, one can never be absolutely sure that their next breath may not be made up of some toxic gas that could kill you instantly. If you think that is absurdist thinking, think Bhopal, India. Think Chernobyl. Hell, think Richmond, CA.
People breath because they need to breath. People have faith because they need to. It's how we're wired together. If we required absolute proof on everything, we would become prisoners of our own skepticism. And before rayb calls me a bible tumpre one more time, let me clearly state that I believe God to be accessible to all. I believe as long as we purely seek God in our hearts, we shall find God.
Breathing is science my friend.. Not faith. Science is the way to go for me to go at this moment. I can only assume that the next breath I take will not be made of toxic breath. I tend to stay away from nuclear meltdowns. (Mind you, I don't think that has anything to do with oxygen levels..
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12:02 PM
stimpy Member
Posts: 8197 From: Salinas, CA Registered: Jan 2000
So you understood the scince of respiration before you ever drew breath? As a newborn infant, you waited util someoe explained to you that the blend of gasses that we refer to as air is ok to breath? All I am saying is that is instinctual for people to have faith in something. I'm all for having a healthy dose of skepticism, but to deny yourself the innate desire to believe in something larger then you are stifling a part of your humanity. I don't suggest that you believe exactly as I do, just because I believe it. I beleive everyone should seek their truth.
Now the point has been brought up as far as legislating the education of our youth. Personally, I feel the lack of education in ethics is a real problem in society. But I don't feel that any point of view regarding the origin of existance can be taught as unvarnished truth. I think that teaching children that there are some questions that can not be absolutely answered makes them want to explore their own world even more.
I drew my first breath because it was instinct, not because I did it on faith. I grew up learning that evolution is the truth, and after someone explained the "theory" of creation, I had to laugh because it was so absurd! An all powerful being snaps his fingers and people appear. That sounds like something that would have been believed hundreds of years ago when they had no scientific knowledge. (for instance, the earth is flat, the sun rotates, burn the witches, and other fairy tales).. I for one believe the school system SHOULD be teaching creation. After all, it's not like Christians are open minded, so they won't be affected at all. (uh oh.. I'm done for now)
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01:54 PM
Raydar Member
Posts: 40685 From: Carrollton GA. Out in the... country. Registered: Oct 1999
IQ tests? i took one once and my IQ was 142- supposedly genius. last wednesday i fell down. no reason. just fell down. i once asked what gear we were in after my friend backed up his truck. IQ tests mean about as much as your mom telling you you're attractive. needless to say i don't place much stock in them.
ok, here's my take on the religion thing: i used to be an atheist, but after my dad killed himself, we just saw too many weird things to write off there not being more to this existence. but i'm not "born again." i don't believe in that god because i think that the ideology of christianity is too nonsensical for an all knowing, all powerful, all loving being to employ. "if ya dig me and believe what i tell ya, you're into my club, if not, well you can goeth intercourse thyself..." no reasonable HUMAN would even think that way, why would the creator of the universe? besides, god's got an entire universe to run, like he has time to dick around on earth. as for probabilities, they are statistics. and there are three types of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics. what people forget is that with probabilities, given enough tries, the seemingly impossible WILL happen. if enough people play the lottery, SOMEONE will win, regardless of the fact that the odds are the same for everyone (and assuming they bought the same # of tix). who's to say that this is the first time around that the universe has existed? the critical mass of the universe is very close to that needed to contract again. maybe we've been expanding and contracting forever. maybe before that there was a mcdonalds that sold intergalactic burgers. over 99 billion sold! all i know for sure is that a being that is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent would know everything, the past, and the future. he would not set beliefs forth into the world that would cause as much pain and misery and violence as christianity or any of the "god" religions have. what kind of sick puppy ruins the lives of hundreds of millions to better the causes of mere millions? if he knows everything and has all the power that can be, wouldn't he know what would be the best situation for humanity and know how to implement it? logically, if god is omniscient and omnipotent, he CANNOT be omnibenevolent. if he is omnibenevolent and omniscient, he CANNOT be be omnipotent. if he is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, he CANNOT be omniscient. he cant' be all 3. i wrote an 80-some page paper on this once and the conclusion that i came to was that life's too short to ***** about stuff like this...
------------------ allow me to show you my exhaust pipes...
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06:49 PM
Mar 6th, 2001
GT Bastard Member
Posts: 2243 From: Rapid City, SD Registered: Sep 1999
And if God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good(accord to classic judeo-christian beliefs), evil could never exist in the world. If he were those three things, he couldn't permit evil(since he's all good by definition), he would know where to find evil(since he's all knowing), and he would have the power to stop it(being all powerful.)
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08:23 AM
Hym-The-Man Member
Posts: 65 From: Lawrence,KS,U.S.A Registered: Jan 2001
Just my .02, but If you think about the things that happen every day then how could you not come to the conclusion that there is something better , smarter, faster than you are? I have read most of the postsw here, and I think that we are spending too much time arguing about religion: lets break this down into a form that we can all understand: Cars
Look at the design of the great and mighty Fiero. Four wheels, tires,Drivetrain,engine,brakes,suspension, chassis, body. All of those parts had to be designed by someone. Everything that we use on a daily basis has to be designed, and to be quite honest most of the things in our lives are quite simple when it really comes down to it. Now consider your body, how much more complex is that than an automobile? Look at the design that went into building humans. Everything,that is, has to be engineered. Where is the engineer behind human beings? I don't believe that either creationism or evolutionism is wrong, I think that they are both right. I believe that something set the whole process into motion either by thaught or by action. Now what you call it, whether it be God, Yaweh, Budda, Doesn't truly matter. What is important is that you believe something is out there that is better than we are. And that something had a hand in starting the process of evolution, which is called , by christians,Creation.
I believe in the Bible, but I believe that it was a greatbook of reference, I don't believe in every word of it, I think that would be stupid, I think that it was written with many stories about many men and women to help those of us with faith to know that people have been through what we have been through. That we are no alone in this great vast space, someone understands us. The true problem with religion is that it is soley based on its version of the Bible,don't get me wrong I am a true christian, but I realize that there have been many books either left out on purpose or lost, maybe or purpose, So I take the Bible as a reference book, and take what my brain interprets from an individual storey and I relate it to myself and that helps me . Anyway I am tired so I am going to take a nap now.
Play nice kids
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01:05 PM
BillHarrison Member
Posts: 16 From: Akron, OH, USA Registered: Feb 2001
Personally I find that one good long look out into the clear night sky sets one straight about just how insignifigant WE really are. Definitely a humbling experience, and a good one sometimes. The whole of religion puts us in a "Special" place. We were "Created", a special group of beings on a SPECIAL planet. But, when you take a look out there.... you see that we are not very special. A humdrum star, with a few planets floating around it. One of countless billions out there. How can we be SO arrogant to believe that ALL that is for us. That NOWHERE out there is there another life form. The universe is a VERY vast place, and for us to say such things as WE are special, that we are alone in this universe, just sound ridiculous. While I am not hoping for it, do you honestly think, if a huge asteroid smacked our little planet, and wiped out the human race, hell, cracked our planet into a million peices, that it would make the SLIGHTEST difference in the scheme of the universe? If you do, you are sadly mistaken
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10:12 PM
DJRice Member
Posts: 2741 From: Merritt Island, FL USA Registered: Jun 99
Originally posted by filthyscarecrow: if enough people play the lottery, SOMEONE will win, regardless of the fact that the odds are the same for everyone (and assuming they bought the same # of tix).
The chances of one winning the lottery is in no way based on the number of tickets sold.
------------------ Dillon Black '87 SE V6
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10:43 PM
Mar 7th, 2001
TheHans Member
Posts: 40 From: Carbondale, Illinois Registered: Dec 2000
The odds in the lottery are just the available numbers for every position. Multiply them by each other and walla.. 4 numbers- 10 digits (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,)for every one place 1 2 3 4 So.. 10 x10 x10 x10=10000 one set of numbers is 1/10000.
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01:05 AM
Phaeton Member
Posts: 1437 From: Interior Alaska Registered: Dec 1999
The statistical odds of a particular person winning is directly tied to how many tickets that person owns. The real life odds are fifty-fifty, no matter how many tickets are owned, ya win or ya don't.
Breaking the world down to numbers only works so far. Magnetism equations always have an irrational number involved. Polarized photons exhibit action at a distance without a mediating particle. Complexity absolutely forbids simple structures from replicating into structures that contain more information.
But somehow life evolved and the universe functions well enough without our math.
Either mankind does not understand the physical laws governing existence or the laws are being broken in select cases.
My opinion won't change anything but my actions can either help or hinder my fellow man, even if only a little bit.
Doing random acts of kindness doesn't hurt, but patterns of kind acts are like waves turning rocks into sand, enough of them can change the shape of the world. The principle is sound, look what systematic acts of hate have done.
rayb, I guess you can take me off the don't care list, its 2001 and life is still a mystery.
I'm taking umbrage at the way some people in this thread use "science" as their ally. Science is a good thing. The methods of science provide a thread of sanity in a gullible and superstitious world, but it is not an unmixed blessing. As anything else in the world, it can be twisted to be perceived as something it is not. It was claimed earlier in this thread that "science" has proven that the universe is 12 billions years old. This can not be proven scientifically; it can only be inferred from current observations. Current observations are even in question; I recently read of a astronomical survey which would seem to indicate that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, defying conventional theories of cosmology. Hubble's law and the Hubble Time can be used to estimate the age of the universe, but the necessary variables--the Hubble constant and the average density of the universe--are hardly known with any precision. A link posted at the very beginning of this thread pointed to an article claiming that evolution had been "proven" by the Human Genome Project, or something similar. This is also not the case. The fact that Humans share genetic material with this critter or that critter does not prove evolution; it only proves that humans share genetic material with this critter or that critter. Proponents of evolution can interpret this as evidence for evolution, but I interpret it as elements of common design. Several GM cars use the 3.4 pushrod engine. Why? Are they all evolved from a common ancestor because they share this trait? Or was this structure utilized by a designer across multiple designs because it worked and worked well? A civilization of cars may or may not be "aware" that they were designed, but they may discover that they share common traits such as strut suspension, engine types, body styles, etc. and draw conclusions from that data. However, like humans a civilization of cars can not prove that they were created in a certain way without observational evidence. If cars can not observe humans building them anywhere, then they can not prove that humans built them, they can only infer this.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics. Given enough time, any improbable event will happen. This is true. But it is not reasonable. A monkey, typing randomly will eventually type the 100,000 or so characters in the play Hamlet, in sequence, with spaces. The time required to have any significant probability of doing this, however, is larger than even the wildest estimates of the age of the universe by a factor of between 10^100 and 10^1000.
A bunch of you are way off your rocker. You CANNOT use Cars, car makers, and car parts in your theory of evolution and whatnot. Designing cars and using the same parts from one car line to another has to do with ease of manufacturing, not "the evolution of cars". Sheesh
[This message has been edited by JohnnyK (edited 03-07-2001).]
Have any of you people even considered the idea that God did create everything, it's just that he had a plan? Maybe this plan was none of our business in the first place. Maybe it isn't in the bible because the intelligence of the people two thousand years ago wouldn't have understood what DNA was. Maybe it was just easier to tell the people of that day "I created the earth one day, then one day I created you". Perhaps evolution does occur; why is it so difficult to think that God actually had a method to creating everything he created.
By the way, a day to God could very well have been the equivalent to millions of earth years, since a day (by our definition) didn't actually exist until the earth started spinning. Sooo, God created the earth and the stars in three days. Maybe that's 3 million years to us.
There. my two cents.
------------------
>> '87 Coupe 4 cyl, auto << >> '86 SE V6, 4 speed- project <<
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04:38 PM
Hym-The-Man Member
Posts: 65 From: Lawrence,KS,U.S.A Registered: Jan 2001
No one was talking about the evolution of cars, that is irrelevant. I was talikng about the design of cars and the complexity with witch a simple mechanical device such as a car is designed. How that relates to animals and all creatures and their complexity. The complexity of aminals and bugs and such are beyond our small mids comprehension. I am saying that the universe works way too well for things to just randomly happened. Some forethought had to be put into the creation of the universe and all that is in it. Whether you call it creation or evolution, something/one had to be behind it
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05:48 PM
Phaeton Member
Posts: 1437 From: Interior Alaska Registered: Dec 1999
Sorry about offending, but I look at math just like any other belief, very subjectively. If I only see two possible outcomes and both are random then the odds are fifty-fifty. And I certainly don't put money on random events so this belief is very real and true for me.
I've held a straightedge even with the horizon and dang if the horizon wasn't absolutely straight and flat.
Sodium, the shiny metal, is half the ingredients of salt? The other half is chlorine, the corrosive gas? Who are these chemists trying to kid?
Everything in the universe is running away from everything else just because electromagnetic radiation drops in frequency over a long distance? Hello, nobody has ever listened to a rock band from far away? How about them cymbals? or is it just the bass that travels? Whadaya mean Doppler, you saying light is just fast sound? Or sound waves will coalesce into sound particles?
50/50 means you have the same chance to win either way. I have an equally good chance of winning the lottery as I do losing it. Thats NOT how the lottery works.
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06:07 PM
Phaeton Member
Posts: 1437 From: Interior Alaska Registered: Dec 1999
According to the theories of evolution where life was born from nothing and by chance grew into us, then the same logic applies to the Yugo in the front yard- I am still waiting for it to evolve into a Porsche. It shares the same DNA you know. It has tires, an engine, made of metal and composites. Does this sound stupid? Good, then I made my point.
If you REALLY believe in evolution, and especially if you believe in the Big Bang, then EVERYTHING is related and came from the same origination. Including dirt, minerals, chemicals, plants, animals, -everything-, all ultimately from the same speck of __(?)__. To even attempt to imagine the possibility of this is merely running from the simple truth, that a God created this. Regardless of what you believe happened after that, once you can get to the point of accepting that one thing, the existence of God, then you have some heavy duty searching to do, my friend.
Even THIS universe is not all there is. There is much more, and that too was created by God. What we don't see is even more real than what we do see. All this is temporary. A natural seed is sown, a spiritual seed is raised. I'm not a citizen of this world on my way to Heaven, I'm a citizen of Heaven, in this world, on my way. I don't know what you feel when pondering the end of this life, but it doesn't worry me at all.
I had a hard time reading those long posts, and couldn't read all of them, so I won't do the same to you.
Thanks again, Cliff, for providing a place for this discussion.
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08:46 PM
Will Member
Posts: 14216 From: Where you least expect me Registered: Jun 2000
Originally posted by JohnnyK: A bunch of you are way off your rocker. You CANNOT use Cars, car makers, and car parts in your theory of evolution and whatnot. Designing cars and using the same parts from one car line to another has to do with ease of manufacturing, not "the evolution of cars". Sheesh
[This message has been edited by JohnnyK (edited 03-07-2001).]
I'm just trying to draw an analogy, much the same way 4 dimensionally curved 3 dimensional space is described in terms of 3 dimensionally curved 2 dimensional space. It's really not that hard a comparison if you accept that one of the possible ways humans got here was by design.
But you obviously don't accept that, so maybe I should just type randomly for a while: fdhjtroejw.cmv kgfleod;d,s'weprjgjk to be or not to be theifnmf,m dls s. xlkal eie894j23,d
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10:42 PM
Phaeton Member
Posts: 1437 From: Interior Alaska Registered: Dec 1999
Given that god exists because somebody had to build the universe, where does the leap to mankind as the end all of all creation come from? We could merely be the means god is using to spread dolphins throughout His universe. We have the hands and logic while dolphins have the beautiful souls.
When I catch myself explaining what god wants or why things are, I stop and have a hard laugh at my presumptions.
Understand a being who created more galaxies than there are grains of sand on earth? Anyone who claims to know the mind of god deserves pity.
Most folks do not even understand what their own spouses want from them.
I would like to think that we go somewhere nice after this, but to tell you the truth, it just sounds like a way to make people feel better. What, your going to float up to the clouds where everything is white and be greated at the gates? I somehow doubt that... See, i can only assume that everything goes black, and then, well, thats it. Like an eternal sleep. You don't know when your sleeping, you only know when you wake up. Except you don't wake up.