"Ishmael (Mad Giant): You wrote: :As a matter of fact, in collage... As a self-proclaimed engineer, I find it amusing that you cannot even spell the type of school where you received your education. Then you said, :and must of us are atheists. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Farkel, Hoo Allso Wunt tu skool, an itty bit" And I will apologize again, for any misspellings and errors. English is my second language. Generalmente escribo y pienso en español. Para practicar el inglés, no utilizo ningún programa traductor. Si me pudiera comunicar completamente en español, créeme no tendría tantos problemas y mis oraciones contendrían menos errores. Dicho sea de paso, mi nombre es Ismael, no Ishmael. De cualquier manera disculpa. Cuídate, Ismael
MadGiant
JoinedPosts by MadGiant
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Not all believers in a creator are dumb, may be deaf, so accomplished atheist explain this:--
by prologos in -
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How do believers defend a god who is going to murder billions and pin it on them?
by tootired2care inat that time those slain by the lord will be everywherefrom one end of the earth to the other.
they will not be mourned or gathered up or buried, but will be like dung lying on the ground.
- jerimiah 25:33.
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MadGiant
- You are connecting things that might not be connected. - In the OT, often God was attributed with having killed someone when it is either a natural consequence being warned against, or a consequence of actions (such as wars, etc) - Christ does come and invite some into the kingdom, and send some away. Those who might say, "lord, lord, did we not...", and Christ says, 'Away from me, you evildoers... I never knew you." -That would be those who claim to belong to Him, but it is their claim only, and Christ never knew them. - "You will surely die"... is not the same as... "I will kill you". I really, really need help with this. Are we reading from the same book? Come Judgment Day, your god will create horse-like locusts will human heads, women's hair, lion's teeth and scorpion's tails which will sting and inflict savage pain on sinners for five months (Revelation 9:7-10). As a result of the fires, plagues and beasts He inspires, the world will be covered in unburied dead bodies, rotting everywhere, while good Christians, will "rejoice over them and make merry, and shall send gifts to one another" (Revelation 11:5-10). Meanwhile, the smoke of the burning, rotting bodies will ascend and plague the Earth forever (Revelation 14:10-11). And the smell will attract scavenger birds who will feast upon "the supper of the great God" (Revelation 19:17-18). What happens to sinners since they cannot enter Heaven? Come Judgment Day, they shall be gathered together and hurled into a furnace of fire where there will be uncontrollable wailing and gnashing of teeth (Matthew 13:41-42, 50). Entire cities of people who don't believe will suffer a fate worse than that of Sodom and Gomorra (Mark 6:11). Jesus told us that God, who we already knew is subject to violent episodes, will take "vengeance on them that know not God" by burning them forever "in flaming fire" (2 Thessalonians 1:7-9). He will send an earthquake to kill 7,000 people (Revelation 11:13). And to add just a bit more drama, He will exercise his wrath by inflicting bodily sores, turning the seas and rivers to blood, scorching everyone with fire, causing people to consume their own tongues in pain, and causing horrendous storms which will strike dead the now speechless (though sated) sinners (Revelation 16:1-21). Are we talking about contradictions? Even better, I am taking the verses out of context, yeah, that most be it context. Take care, Ismael
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Not all believers in a creator are dumb, may be deaf, so accomplished atheist explain this:--
by prologos in -
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MadGiant
"JGNAT: Is there something disreputable about appealing to authority ?" With all due respect, yes. Is a flow in your cognitive process and is a logical fallacy. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority Ismael
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Not all believers in a creator are dumb, may be deaf, so accomplished atheist explain this:--
by prologos in -
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MadGiant
"Engineers who've never taken high-level biology coursework are the WORST, since they assume that biology follows the same rules of mechanical engineering. They fail to consider that their world-view is biased by seeing everything about them as a product of design, esp if they don't understand that the rules for non-living inorganic matter are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from living (carbon-based) matter." Adam I don't know if I got this right, but its the other way around. But we develop solutions for technical problems. With the heat of hell, we could design and built a climate control system and turn hell into a paradise. We don't see everything as a product of design. But we know that we can make any design better and more efficient. Take care, Ismael
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Not all believers in a creator are dumb, may be deaf, so accomplished atheist explain this:--
by prologos in -
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MadGiant
"Belief in a creator (not God) is high among engineers, technicians."
Not my case. I am an Engineer, I know a few, and must of us are atheists. As a matter of fact, in collage, we have some sort of "pledge" at the entrance of the department describing what is light and openly mocking Genesis 1:3. Take care, Ismael
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who has actually read the entire Bible?
by losingit inno matter how many times i've tried, i just couldn't get through the whole thing.
you know, there were always those reminders to read the bible, have a personal study, go out in service, and.... the other two of the five things we were supposed to do i already forgot.
so, i constantly felt guilty that i just had no interest.
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MadGiant
I did it twice, at the beginning of my journey. I felt sick the first time I read it. I was looking for answers and wanted to know if yhwh or yeshua would help me. Realized that yhwh was a jealous, arrogant , angry , sadistic been and yeshua was an a-hole.
“Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.” ? Isaac Asimov Take care, Ismael
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Not all believers in a creator are dumb, may be deaf, so accomplished atheist explain this:--
by prologos in -
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MadGiant
"My proposition is that the whole is done so the maker will never be needed or discovered no matter how good our understanding of the mechanism gets. A truly ingenius unselfish benefactor, giving us the benefit of our doubts not desiring to be worshipped."
"You cannot build a program of discovery on the assumption that nobody is smart enough to figure out the answer to a problem. Once upon a time, people identified the god Neptune as the source of storms at sea. Today we call these storms hurricanes. We know when and where they start. We know what drives them. We know what mitigates their destructive power. And anyone who has studied global warming can tell you what makes them worse. The only people who still call hurricanes acts of God are the people who write insurance forms." - Neil deGrasse Tyson
It's fine and you have the right to believe and rationalize things in a way that make sense to you. But don't you think that your thought still falls under the "God of the gaps" category? We will never have all the answers, but with the overwhelming evidence all around, god is not an answer. Take care, keep searching and researching. Ismael
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Not all believers in a creator are dumb, may be deaf, so accomplished atheist explain this:--
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MadGiant
The god of the gaps.
A boundary where scientists face a choice: invoke a deity or continue the quest for knowledge
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Writing in centuries past, many scientists felt compelled to wax poetic about cosmic mysteries and God's handiwork. Perhaps one should not be surprised at this: most scientists back then, as well as many scientists today, identify themselves as spiritually devout.
But a careful reading of older texts, particularly those concerned with the universe itself, shows that the authors invoke divinity only when they reach the boundaries of their understanding. They appeal to a higher power only when staring into the ocean of their own ignorance. They call on God only from the lonely and precarious edge of incomprehension. Where they feel certain about their explanations, however, God gets hardly a mention.
Let's start at the top. Isaac Newton was one of the greatest intellects the world has ever seen. His laws of motion and his universal law of gravitation, conceived in the mid-seventeenth century, account for cosmic phenomena that had eluded philosophers for millennia. Through those laws, one could understand the gravitational attraction of bodies in a system, and thus come to understand orbits.
Newton's law of gravity enables you to calculate the force of attraction between any two objects. If you introduce a third object, then each one attracts the other two, and the orbits they trace become much harder to compute. Add another object, and another, and another, and soon you have the planets in our solar system. Earth and the Sun pull on each other, but Jupiter also pulls on Earth, Saturn pulls on Earth, Mars pulls on Earth, Jupiter pulls on Saturn, Saturn pulls on Mars, and on and on.
Newton feared that all this pulling would render the orbits in the solar system unstable. His equations indicated that the planets should long ago have either fallen into the Sun or flown the coop—leaving the Sun, in either case, devoid of planets. Yet the solar system, as well as the larger cosmos, appeared to be the very model of order and durability. So Newton, in his greatest work, the Principia, concludes that God must occasionally step in and make things right:
The six primary Planets are revolv'd about the Sun, in circles concentric with the Sun, and with motions directed towards the same parts, and almost in the same plane. . . . But it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions. . . . This most beautiful System of the Sun,
Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.
In the Principia, Newton distinguishes between hypotheses and experimental philosophy, and declares, Hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. What he wants is data, inferr'd from the phænomena. But in the absence of data, at the border between what he could explain and what he could only honor—the causes he could identify and those he could not—Newton rapturously invokes God:
Eternal and Infinite, Omnipotent and Omniscient; . . . he governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done. . . . We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes; we admire him for his perfections; but we reverence and adore him on account of his dominion.
A century later, the French astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace confronted Newton's dilemma of unstable orbits head-on. Rather than view the mysterious stability of the solar system as the unknowable work of God, Laplace declared it a scientific challenge. In his multipart masterpiece, Mécanique Céleste , the first volume of which appeared in 1798, Laplace demonstrates that the solar system is stable over periods of time longer than Newton could predict. To do so, Laplace pioneered a new kind of mathematics called perturbation theory, which enabled him to examine the cumulative effects of many small forces. According to an oft-repeated but probably embellished account, when Laplace gave a copy of Mécanique Céleste to his physics-literate friend Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon asked him what role God played in the construction and regulation of the heavens. Sire, Laplace replied, I have no need of that hypothesis.
Laplace notwithstanding, plenty of scientists besides Newton have called on God—or the gods—wherever their comprehension fades to ignorance. Consider the second-century a.d. Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy. Armed with a description, but no real understanding, of what the planets were doing up there, he could not contain his religious fervor:
I know that I am mortal by nature, and ephemeral; but when I trace, at my pleasure, the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch Earth with my feet: I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia.
Or consider the seventeenth-century Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, whose achievements include constructing the first working pendulum clock and discovering the rings of Saturn. In his charming book The Celestial Worlds Discover'd, posthumously published in 1696, most of the opening chapter celebrates all that was then known of planetary orbits, shapes, and sizes, as well as the planets' relative brightness and presumed rockiness. The book even includes foldout charts illustrating the structure of the solar system. God is absent from this discussion—even though a mere century earlier, before Newton's achievements, planetary orbits were supreme mysteries.
Celestial Worlds also brims with speculations about life in the solar system, and that's where Huygens raises questions to which he has no answer. That's where he mentions the biological conundrums of the day, such as the origin of life's complexity. And sure enough, because seventeenth-century physics was more advanced than seventeenth-century biology, Huygens invokes the hand of God only when he talks about biology:
I suppose no body will deny but that there's somewhat more of Contrivance, somewhat more of Miracle in the production and growth of Plants and Animals than in lifeless heaps of inanimate Bodies. . . . For the finger of God, and the Wisdom of Divine Providence, is in them much more clearly manifested than in the other.
Today secular philosophers call that kind of divine invocation God of the gaps —which comes in handy, because there has never been a shortage of gaps in people's knowledge.
As reverent as Newton, Huygens, and other great scientists of earlier centuries may have been, they were also empiricists. They did not retreat from the conclusions their evidence forced them to draw, and when their discoveries conflicted with prevailing articles of faith, they upheld the discoveries. That doesn't mean it was easy: sometimes they met fierce opposition, as did Galileo, who had to defend his telescopic evidence against formidable objections drawn from both scripture and common sense.
http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/read/2005/11/01/the-perimeter-of-ignorance
take care
Ismael
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Thoughts on Jesus' Resurrection
by Perry ini think that in our various discussions about life after the wt, we many times forget about the cornerstone of christian life - the resurrection.
the implications of the existence a man who holds the power of life and death is manifold.
it makes discussions about the existence of god obsolete.. for all of scientists' accomplishments they have never been able to make even one amobea come alive from non-life.
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MadGiant
Cofty: "Interesting how any evidence or reasoning to the contrary just gets ignored by the "faithful".
Mustn't let facts get in the way of a good superstition."
You are totally right.
"Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. What if someone says, “Well, that’s not how I choose to think about water.”? All we can do is appeal to scientific values. And if he doesn’t share those values, the conversation is over. If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove they should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?"
— Sam Harris
Take care,
Ismael
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Thoughts on Jesus' Resurrection
by Perry ini think that in our various discussions about life after the wt, we many times forget about the cornerstone of christian life - the resurrection.
the implications of the existence a man who holds the power of life and death is manifold.
it makes discussions about the existence of god obsolete.. for all of scientists' accomplishments they have never been able to make even one amobea come alive from non-life.
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MadGiant
Yeah Right!
A response within 3 minutes of my post. That's my sign. Thank you for your time. Ismael