jamesmahon

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Posts by jamesmahon

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  14

  any fluent german and english speakers?

  by jamesmahon in

  1. social
  2. family

  i know it is a big ask but i have a personal message in german that i need to translate into english.

  tried the online translators and they are good but there are some important nuances i think i am missing.

  james.

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  jamesmahon

  Thanks Cedars. Hope you are well. Sorry to read about the trouble you had on here a while ago. I missed the thread but it sounded pretty rough.
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  14

  any fluent german and english speakers?

  by jamesmahon in

  1. social
  2. family

  i know it is a big ask but i have a personal message in german that i need to translate into english.

  tried the online translators and they are good but there are some important nuances i think i am missing.

  james.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
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  jamesmahon

  Hi

  I know it is a big ask but I have a personal message in German that I need to translate into English. Tried the online translators and they are good but there are some important nuances I think I am missing. It is not very long.

  Thanks

  James
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  28

  Important Supreme Court Case on Monday

  by Hortensia in

  1. social
  2. entertainment

  http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/a-supreme-court-clash-could-change-what-ownership-means/.

  could bring down ebay, and the selling of used books on amazon, and reselling goods on other sites.

  book publishers who sell their textbooks for astronomical prices in the u.s. but much cheaper in other countries are suing entrepreneurs who import the cheaper but identical books and sell them for less.. at issue is whether you own the stuff you buy.

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  jamesmahon

  It is certainly not an issue in the EU. Levi jeans tried to stop a supermarket chain selling 501s at £20 over a decade ago. The EU courts decided that whilst a seller of an item is under no obligation to sell to another individual or company, once they had completed a sale the purchaser of an item had the right to dispose of it any way they saw fit. Seems perfectly sensible to me. I suspect the US courts will decide the same.
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  697

  Why aren't you an Atheist?

  by Bloody Hotdogs! in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  long time lurker, first time poster.. .

  i'm an ms (accounts servant) in a large congregation in canada.

  over the last several years i've faught a hard-won battle to rid my mind of all religous and supernatural beleifs.

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  jamesmahon

  Christ alone

  Things humans have believed for most of our recorded history (and many still do):

  • the earth was flat
  • women are second class citizens who can be beaten and raped at will
  • being ruled by a king who can do as he pleases is a good form of government
  • sex with children is fine (even up to the early 50's there was no law against that)
  • slavery is perfectly acceptable
  • white people are superior to black people
  • it is ok to kill people if they don't believe in your god
  • homosexuals should be executed
  • dragons were real

  Do you want me to go on? Just because something has been believed for a long time does not make it true.
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  697

  Why aren't you an Atheist?

  by Bloody Hotdogs! in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  long time lurker, first time poster.. .

  i'm an ms (accounts servant) in a large congregation in canada.

  over the last several years i've faught a hard-won battle to rid my mind of all religous and supernatural beleifs.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
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  jamesmahon

  Oh - and hi Cofty. Not really dissapeared, just lost the energy to post on this thing with other things going on.
• 
  697

  Why aren't you an Atheist?

  by Bloody Hotdogs! in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  long time lurker, first time poster.. .

  i'm an ms (accounts servant) in a large congregation in canada.

  over the last several years i've faught a hard-won battle to rid my mind of all religous and supernatural beleifs.

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  2. 
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  jamesmahon

  I can tell you with absolute certainty..

  The General Store is stuck where it`s at..And..

  I`m going to have to drive to get there..

  At which point your truck will move relative to the earth.
• 
  697

  Why aren't you an Atheist?

  by Bloody Hotdogs! in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  long time lurker, first time poster.. .

  i'm an ms (accounts servant) in a large congregation in canada.

  over the last several years i've faught a hard-won battle to rid my mind of all religous and supernatural beleifs.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  jamesmahon

  I think Atheists and Believers can be very black and white..

  Given one of these believes there is a god and the other does not believe there is a god I am not sure how they could be anything but black and white on this issue. What I think you are getting at is that believers and non-believers seem to argue and you don't like it and think they should all get on.

  Well, as a starter, when

  • my kids can go to school and not be encouraged to bow their heads to some christian god (and if the christians on this board think this is ok then how would they feel if the local iman came in and encouraged their children to pray to Allah?)
  • leaders in the west stop making decisions to go to war having 'spoken' to their god
  • church leaders get no place in the legislature of my country by default

  I will consider stop arguing with believers.

  But even then if someone chooses to come onto a messaging site and debate that is their right to do so and my right to argue with them. Why do you have a problem with that? Do you think that no theist (or atheist) has ever changed their mind because of debate? your contribution to this thread has been 'neither side has proof so they are just arguing from faith'. This is just junk. Both sides have evidence and we all try on both sides, as well as we are able, to challenge that evidence.
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  697

  Why aren't you an Atheist?

  by Bloody Hotdogs! in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  long time lurker, first time poster.. .

  i'm an ms (accounts servant) in a large congregation in canada.

  over the last several years i've faught a hard-won battle to rid my mind of all religous and supernatural beleifs.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
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  jamesmahon

  No outlaw. You have a lot to learn about relativity. The best you can say is that you are moving relative to something else, but you cannot prove that it is you moving rather than the object that you appear to be moving away from. Unless you are telling me you know of a way to determine absolute motion in which case you might want to also tell me how to make a perpetual motion machine and we can share the nobel prize.
• 
  697

  Why aren't you an Atheist?

  by Bloody Hotdogs! in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  long time lurker, first time poster.. .

  i'm an ms (accounts servant) in a large congregation in canada.

  over the last several years i've faught a hard-won battle to rid my mind of all religous and supernatural beleifs.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  jamesmahon

  So let me get this straight..

  I`m in a plane,I`m in the air..But..

  The plane might be parked at the moment..And..

  It`s the earth thats moving..

  You might not like it but the answer is there is no way to determine whether the plane is actually motionless and the earth is moving.

  As humans we process the world so it makes sense to us. One of the reasons we have succeded as a species is because we process the world in a way that links cause and effect and also puts us as individuals at the centre of our own little universe. We might not like it because it goes against our nature but to understand the universe we first have to leave all our preconceptions about how things work at the door and be prepared to not be able to comprehend what the evidence suggests. But that has always sounded more fun to me than keeping a human centric view that the proof of god is in the design of a tree or a personal revelation.

  Could in the end science lead to a 'proof' of an existence of god? I doubt it but that doesn't mean it couldn't. But I suspect that any god found would be so different from anything we can even begin to imagine that there is no point expending any energy believing.
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  697

  Why aren't you an Atheist?

  by Bloody Hotdogs! in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  long time lurker, first time poster.. .

  i'm an ms (accounts servant) in a large congregation in canada.

  over the last several years i've faught a hard-won battle to rid my mind of all religous and supernatural beleifs.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
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  jamesmahon

  Cofty, to be completely honest I have never read 1 book about evolution written by a Evolutionary Scientists.

  If you did then you would know that the evidence for evolution has very, very little to do with the fossil record. However, the fossil record still fully supports the order of cell, to multicellular, to 'blob' to vertebrates to...the life we see today. Creation without evolution is not evidenced by the fossil record unless you interpret the fossil evidence as a god continually creating organisms, destroying them, then creating ones that are similar to the ones destroyed. Not more 'complex' or 'better' in some human centric way but simply 'different'.

  Please read some books that present the evidence on evolution. You might disagree with the conclusions but at least you will be doing that from a position of knowledge of the facts.