DunceCap: Anyone who respects the opinions of learned men worships them.
EvilGambler: Nonsense!
AlanF
Posts by AlanF
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121Does God REALLY exist? (An Attempt at an Online Bible Study)
by theMartian inwith the global village now teaching evolution as an absolute fact, and the 'creation museum' making a mockery of the bible, any bible study should begin with this question!
however, the biggest hinderence to learning truth is clinging to concepts we've accepted as 'truth' without being willing to take a closer look at other possibilities.. i ask that ridiculers have fun on other postings, so that it might be possible to enjoy comparing what we have learned, how we see things- and also share what we have found to be facts-truth!.
(and i will not "count the time", as promised; that's unimportant to me, anyhow!).
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121
Does God REALLY exist? (An Attempt at an Online Bible Study)
by theMartian inwith the global village now teaching evolution as an absolute fact, and the 'creation museum' making a mockery of the bible, any bible study should begin with this question!
however, the biggest hinderence to learning truth is clinging to concepts we've accepted as 'truth' without being willing to take a closer look at other possibilities.. i ask that ridiculers have fun on other postings, so that it might be possible to enjoy comparing what we have learned, how we see things- and also share what we have found to be facts-truth!.
(and i will not "count the time", as promised; that's unimportant to me, anyhow!).
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AlanF
theMartian wrote:
: I have read many "Creation" accounts of the ancient cultures: Babylonian, Sumerian, Accaidian, Ubaidians, and Egyptians- and they are easy to find, now, online. NONE but Genesis make any real sense, and only the Genesis account is backed by science (barring the church dogma of 24-hour days being the Creative Days).
I beg your pardon, but Genesis makes no real sense either. The notion of 24-hour creative days is not mere "church dogma" -- it's what the Bible specifically teaches. Genesis 1:1 and Exodus 20:11 together clearly state that the six creative days involved the creation of everything from "the beginning" through the creation of man and woman. No one reading Genesis in ancient times would interpret these "days" as anything other than literal 24-hour ones. Genesis 2:2,3 along with the account of God cursing the ground on Adam's account proves that the 7th creative day ended withing the time span covered by Genesis 1. Since God blessed the 7th day and made it sacred, ithe ground could not have been cursed on that day -- otherwise God's handiwork could not have been called "blessed" and "sacred". Thus a claim that the 7th day extends to our day is wrong, and provides no solace to those who would make the creative days 7,000 years or hundreds of millions of years long. But even if we allow, for argument's sake, that the creative days were long periods of time, Genesis still has the events all jumbled up with respect to the paleontological record. Furthermore, there are two mutually contradictory creation accounts in Genesis: Gen. 1:1-2:3 and Gen. 2:4-25. So even if one claims that Genesis is right and science is wrong, the claim that "the Genesis account is backed by science" is simply wrong.
AlanF
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121
Does God REALLY exist? (An Attempt at an Online Bible Study)
by theMartian inwith the global village now teaching evolution as an absolute fact, and the 'creation museum' making a mockery of the bible, any bible study should begin with this question!
however, the biggest hinderence to learning truth is clinging to concepts we've accepted as 'truth' without being willing to take a closer look at other possibilities.. i ask that ridiculers have fun on other postings, so that it might be possible to enjoy comparing what we have learned, how we see things- and also share what we have found to be facts-truth!.
(and i will not "count the time", as promised; that's unimportant to me, anyhow!).
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AlanF
Gumby commented on my point that "A person who today claims to have such experiences is invariably viewed as a lunatic." Let me expand on that a bit.
Likely, most ex-JWs don't view JW "anointed ones" as actually having had some sort of mystical experience like "the holy spirit" bearing witness to their "spirits" that they are specially chosen to go to heaven. Some of these so-called "anointed" really do claim to have had a mystical experience, such as walking down the street and suddenly having an overpowering feeling of being "washed clean by God" (this is not made up; one JW told me that this was how he knew he was "anointed"). Most people, Christians and non-Christians alike, view such claims by JWs as at best self-inflicted dreams and at worst the ravings of lunatics. I need not go into why.
In the same way, people who don't believe in gods of any sort generally view all people who claim to have had supernatural experiences as at best the victims of self-inflicted dreams or at worst as lunatics.
In the same way, most religious people view the religions of others as delusions and their gods as imaginary.
In the same way, atheists and strong agnostics view all religions as delusions and their gods as imaginary.
AlanF
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121
Does God REALLY exist? (An Attempt at an Online Bible Study)
by theMartian inwith the global village now teaching evolution as an absolute fact, and the 'creation museum' making a mockery of the bible, any bible study should begin with this question!
however, the biggest hinderence to learning truth is clinging to concepts we've accepted as 'truth' without being willing to take a closer look at other possibilities.. i ask that ridiculers have fun on other postings, so that it might be possible to enjoy comparing what we have learned, how we see things- and also share what we have found to be facts-truth!.
(and i will not "count the time", as promised; that's unimportant to me, anyhow!).
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AlanF
timetochange wrote:
: I take it then you are not a believer in the so called Big Bang theory.
I didn't say that. I personally don't strongly believe or disbelieve in much of anything when it comes to ultimate origins. The notion of a "macro-cosmic universe" that I mentioned allows that our own little universe might well have come into being as a sort of bubble within the larger macro-cosmic thing, perhaps along with a huge number of other universes that come into existence from time to time in whatever passes for "time" within the big one. Given what science knows at present, the Big Bang seems reasonable so far as it goes, but I don't think many scientists think it's anywhere near as far as can be gone.
For example, according to present physics, shortly after its ultimate origin, our universe was extremely tiny. At the so-called Planck time, 10^-44 seconds after the origin, it was a Planck length across (the Planck length is the speed of light multiplied by the Planck time). Nothing can be said about earlier times because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, but I'm not going to get into that. At this point, entropy was at the maximum possible value (i.e., disorder was total) and there was a uniform "soup" of energy and fundamental particles such as quarks and electrons. The universe rapidly expanded and became what we know today. This raises the interesting question of what this little universe expanded into, and some physicists have proposed that this would be what I've called the "macro-cosmic universe". In this super-universe, little universes like our own could continuously expand to a huge size, and then contract down to an ultimately small size, bouncing back again into a new little universe.
All this is pure speculation, of course, but it's really no worse than speculating that some super-intelligent entity far more complex than our universe has "always existed" or never had a beginning.
AlanF
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121
Does God REALLY exist? (An Attempt at an Online Bible Study)
by theMartian inwith the global village now teaching evolution as an absolute fact, and the 'creation museum' making a mockery of the bible, any bible study should begin with this question!
however, the biggest hinderence to learning truth is clinging to concepts we've accepted as 'truth' without being willing to take a closer look at other possibilities.. i ask that ridiculers have fun on other postings, so that it might be possible to enjoy comparing what we have learned, how we see things- and also share what we have found to be facts-truth!.
(and i will not "count the time", as promised; that's unimportant to me, anyhow!).
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AlanF
timetochange wrote:
: I'd really like to hear what evolutionists believe with regard to the origins of matter. Where do you believe matter came from?
Ultimately, no one knows.
Of course, no knows where an ultimate First Cause came from, either.
Recourse to a First Cause being the God of the Bible is mere special pleading and shows nothing.
It may well be that the macro-cosmic universe -- of which our own universe is an infinitesimal part -- had no beginning and, in the same sense that many Bible believers describe God, is "infinite", so in a practical sense has always existed. But no one actually knows anything about these things.
AlanF
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121
Does God REALLY exist? (An Attempt at an Online Bible Study)
by theMartian inwith the global village now teaching evolution as an absolute fact, and the 'creation museum' making a mockery of the bible, any bible study should begin with this question!
however, the biggest hinderence to learning truth is clinging to concepts we've accepted as 'truth' without being willing to take a closer look at other possibilities.. i ask that ridiculers have fun on other postings, so that it might be possible to enjoy comparing what we have learned, how we see things- and also share what we have found to be facts-truth!.
(and i will not "count the time", as promised; that's unimportant to me, anyhow!).
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AlanF
Since this topic is about the God of the Bible, what convinces me that he doesn't exist is, as Richard Dawkins said, that he must be the most unpleasant character in all fiction.
In addition, the only positive evidence for his existence seems to be anecdotal stories from people who claim to have interacted with him. A person who today claims to have such experiences is invariably viewed as a lunatic.
AlanF
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41
The Bible Says that Jesus is God - Definately
by Sirona ini am not a bible believer.
i have a question for those of you who are bible believers.
if you believe that jesus is not god, how do you justify the following:.
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AlanF
The fact is that the Bible does make statements that are contradictory. That's what gives rise to a lot of confusion.
Revelation 1:1, for example, starts off like this: "The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave Him . . ." This clearly distinguishes between God and Jesus, and directly states that Jesus did not have knowledge of this "revelation" at one point, so that God had to give him this knowledge. Since all of the trinitarian formulations I know of clearly state that the members of the Godhead are equal in all things, including knowledge, this clearly contradicts trinitarian doctrines.
Yet, Revelation also indicates that "the Lord God" and Jesus are the same being: Revelation 1:8 clearly has "the Lod God" declaring that he is "the Alpha and the Omega", Revelation 22:13 has Jesus (the context is absolutely clear that Jesus is the speaker) declaring that he is "the Alpha and the Omega", and Revelation 21:6 completely mixes the two up.
The Gospels Matthew, Mark and Luke give no indication that the Father and Son are part of a Godhead, yet the Gospel of John makes statements that are clearly in that direction. Many other NT passages are so ambiguous that they can be interpreted consistently with trinitarian and non-trinitarian concepts. If one accepts traditional dating for the various NT books, one can see an evolution from completely non-trinitarian statements toward a trinitarian view, and this evolution continues smoothly for the next several hundred years as seen in extant Christian writings.
No wonder Christians have argued about this for nearly 2,000 years!
AlanF
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43
607 to 1914 calculation question
by bluebell inis there any culture that actually used years of 360 days length?
if so, surely there would still be some kind of leap year to correct the calendar, why is that not taken into account?
i'd never thought about it when i was a dub because you're not supposed to think!
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AlanF
Thanks for the clarification, Narkissos. I found an interesting calendar calculator here: http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/calendar/ . It has the Gregorian, Julian, Hebrew, Islamic and a bunch of other calendars, and you can easily enter a date in one of them and have the webpage convert it to all the others.
I learned something new and rather odd here (assuming the programming was done correctly): BC dates are expressed with a minus sign (46 BC = -46), which is reasonable, Julian dates have no zero year, but Gregorian dates do have a zero year. For example, 46 BC Julian is entered as -46; 1 BC Julian is -1; 45 BC Gregorian is entered as -45; 1 BC Gregorian is -1; -1 Julian = 0 Gregorian. Hence, 46 BC Julian = 45 BC Gregorian, according to this calendar converter.
The webpage gives as a reference the excellent book Astronomical Algorithms by Jean Meeus, which I've referred to for many years as a calendar Bible. When I get home later, I'll have to look up this business of how the Gregorian seems to be numbered differently from the Julian for BC dates. Whatever, I think it's a non-issue in practice since no one uses the Gregorian calendar for BC dates anyway.
Nice summary of the flaws in the JW Gentile times doctrine!
AlanF
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35
Regarding Psychic Phenomena.
by Blueblades inwith the recent tv.
show ghost hunters 7 hours long shown live and on the internet with web cams planted all over the place from east pennslyvania pentitentiary on friday evening from 8pm to 3am, there were many responses from all over the country about people seeing images, ghosts etc.
for those who watched it, was this real or is it a great hoax.. i read that when it comes with dealing with hard evidence of life after death it's been shown that there are three classes of people.. there are those that ridicule idea of anything beyond the grave.. then there are those who have already accepted the evidence of continued existence beyond physical death.. the third group is often thrown offtrack when trying to get at the truth by the folks in the metaphysical camp.. which group do you belong to and why?
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AlanF
Wanderer, your replies nicely illustrate that facts are unable to penetrate the mind of the True Believer.
AlanF
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Regarding Psychic Phenomena.
by Blueblades inwith the recent tv.
show ghost hunters 7 hours long shown live and on the internet with web cams planted all over the place from east pennslyvania pentitentiary on friday evening from 8pm to 3am, there were many responses from all over the country about people seeing images, ghosts etc.
for those who watched it, was this real or is it a great hoax.. i read that when it comes with dealing with hard evidence of life after death it's been shown that there are three classes of people.. there are those that ridicule idea of anything beyond the grave.. then there are those who have already accepted the evidence of continued existence beyond physical death.. the third group is often thrown offtrack when trying to get at the truth by the folks in the metaphysical camp.. which group do you belong to and why?
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AlanF
Parapsychology is a pseudo-science, just as astrology is. And it has been thoroughly debunked by real scientists and competent skeptics such as James Randi and Martin Gardener.
For information on the James Randi Educational Foundation, see here: http://www.randi.org/
For Randi's longstanding $1,000,000 challenge to paranormalists to prove they can do what they claim, see here: http://skepdic.com/randi.html
While believers in the paranormal always scream bloody murder at their favorite bit of nonsense being debunked, they never manage to come through with proof.
AlanF