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EI

printed for reading tomorrow.

our interior designer was gay and he would have loved the capital letter at the beginning of designer.

"If we just evolved from nothing to what man is today we are not accountable to anyone but our self"

DapperDan, you just gave a great one sentence synopsis of the essence of J. P. Sartre's existential philosophy.

Rick, you're confusing high reward/high risk with high odds of winning. High risk carries low odds of occuring, that's why the payoff is so high. Pascal's bet is a hail Mary on a mile long field with a lead filled ball and 1 second on the clock.

I looked at the site Coda. It's similar to the post EI makes a few posts below it. Gerber's site says that sin occured (among other claims) prior to Adam's fall because Satan had previously fallen, etc. Let's formulate an experiment to test this hypothesis? I find this stuff really quite whacky. EI's site claims that 'recent findings bolster the idea that evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics.' This is pretty much high school stuff these days. Entropy can be reversed (negentropy) with the imput of energy. The more you try to legitimize old timey evangelical literalism with modern facts, the more you risk exposing the failure of metaphysics as an explanatory means for natural phenomena. The Catholics have a more reasonable approach at least, they interpret scripture metaphorically, while accepting the brute facts of physical nature as given; they don't pretend to be scientists, but focus on being theologians. ID'ers, which are really fundamentalists in sheeps clothing, are the same folks that want to teach biblical creation in science classes. I see a fairly large honesty gap with intentionally proposing to present disinformation to children, which would be negative for our entire society. We need to keep these debates reasonable and honest. Allowing old time fire breathing fundamentalism to influence education based on false premises is bad policy. Let's keep religion with theologians, politics with politicians, and science with scientists. I happen to be drawn to science because it's method is to stick to the facts as closely as possible. Politicians are dealing with public will and the interests of their major contributors, and are less constrained by factual matters, which may or may not be in their interests to acknowledge. Religion deals with metaphysical events that no fact or measurement can confirm or deny. I think a seperation of powers, as it were, is a good thing in this context.

Well the scientific method requires that we suspend cheating and lying temporarily, just long enough to collect data, then the brain kicks it back in automatically. The reason for this exotic and ephemeral methodology is because accurate information about the physical world carries such high economic value, i. e., it's useful.

"Let's just reverse this entropy here by adding a little energy boost."

In spite of the fact that you have no desire to understand the laws of thermodynamics:
The sun is pumping a large amount of energy into the earth. The earth is not a closed system.

Good attempt at compromise, but should probably be ammended to read "[many] force[s] [are] behind it all, and [they] [are] all around us." Too anthropocentric to present gravity and electronic charge as having gender, and no particular reason to hang a beard on every planet and atom in the universe.

he/she.

Sorry for the gender implication. You are right, but this is a much bigger discussion; I was trying to be too general. It is well worth noting, though, that prior to Roman christianity, many of the teachers and church leaders were women. Many of the religious sects preceding Christianity (and yes, the implication is that they influenced Christianity) were dedicated to female deities. Heck, they could create life!! Why shouldn't they be worshipped? It is one of the greatest tragedies in the history of civilization that the impact of the feminine deity(s)and females in general has been repressed, distorted, and stigmatized by the men in power, who felt threatened. Since then no-one has had the guts to reinstate them to their glorious positions in history (the Catholic Church has admitted that M. Magdelene has been misrepresented by Catholic tradition as being a prostitute, but they have done so very quietly, and without the zeal in which this lie was originally promoted.)

Again, sorry about putting a beard on atoms.

RC, discussion is good because there is often more one way to view phenomena, and differing viewpoints do not always negate one another; which sort of sets old Aristotlean non-contradiction on it's stuffy ear. However, some of the arguments circulating on the creation side are distrurbing because they're commonly known as false, yet someone's keeping them out there, which is somewhat disturbing.

I. Evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics:
This argument is absolutely false and easy to counter.

II. The handedness of the amino acids produced in reaction chamber experiments are the wrong chirality for life:
Another false argument that someone sees an interest in keeping alive. The reaction chamber experiments of people like Miller, Calvin, and numerous others, clearly show the ready formation of amino acids, and a host of other polymer precursors; the building blocks of life. When such molecules are synthesized and are chiral, they form racemic mixtures of different enantiomers, or, a mixture of right and left handed versions of a parrticular molecule. So yea, the wrong isomer for life is made in reaction chamber conditions, but so are the right isomers. This stuff has been documented scores of times. It's bad propaganda to keep alive the disinformation that the wrong enantiomers for life resulted in these experiments, especially if the disseminators premeditadely know it's false. Such acts seem suspiciously larcenous to me.

Historically too even more diverse views vie for attention, but just because history isn't science doesn't mean it has no forensic value. When I was young and in school (in the south) the god fearing, heroic plainsman was taught as the American archetype. I went back to college as an old fart and the message has been changed somewhat in reflecting the formation of American culture, including the warts too. Not only did god fearing settlers tame this wild land, but often by genocidal exterminations and infamous slavery. So more than one view can accurately reflect our historical roots (America's a fairly young country). The pious view and the jaundiced view, and each case should be given it's own credibiliity in the overall view as to who founded what and what they did when doing so.

WOW! What a thread this has turned into. Rick, you are quite the instigator. And before I forget, "great for you" in standing behind your beliefs! As I read through this thread I see so many intelligent people, putting so much thought into defending or proving their positions, that it makes me wonder what might happen if we all focused our thoughts towards a single answer. Will any, or all, of these beliefs/theories/ facts etc. combine into a mutually-supporting beleif?
Just a thought.

....did it ever occur to anyone that the only reason we as a human race have belief in "higher Beings" and afterlife, is because we have a brain that is able to process conscious thought?

In other words, we are able to contemplate death whereas the rest of the animal kingdom cannot. Thus, in our own fear of the absolute inevitable, we create a future for ourselves after death in our own minds to relieve the abslolute mind-freezing terror that would paralyze us if we KNEW that death is the actual END.

It's the scariest thing in the world to even consider the fact that once you are gone, you are gone.....no more here than when you step on a cockroach.....you simply cease to exist.

As evolutionarily advanced as we are, we have no psychological way to deal with this other than to "invent" Gods for us. If we knew that there was no God for certain, most of us would simply shroud ourselves in depression and fear and refuse to leave the house.

God (the Christian based one) is not a new concept. Every form of man from the first recorded histories of early man have worshipped a God or Gods. Why, because once we developed "thought," we realized that we were simply mortal and could not accept that.

They say that Whales go to the shore to die because their minds are developed enough that for some reason they want to be on land when they die. Could it be possible that they have an imaginary heaven above them with a God as well? Are they trying to reach this heaven as they die? Are we their God?

adroomi

hold onto this.

with age the fear completely disappears. the mind adjusts and the inevitable destiny is no longer of concern or interest.

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re: rick wrote
adroomi

hold onto this.

with age the fear completely disappears. the mind adjusts and the inevitable destiny is no longer of concern or interest.
*******************************************************

Another's belief quotes-

Hidden in the mystery of consciousness, the mind, incorporeal, flies alone far away. Those who set their mind on harmony become free from the bonds of death.

-Buddha

Read it recently and it just chimed in nicely with your post Rick.

Art

Some Christians believe dogs go to heaven. Cats too. Maybe snakes will go to heaven. Snakes kind of keep things interesting.

.....I know the feeling. It's as if the thing waits all day just for the opportunity to get launched across the room.

bob dies and finds himself in a brightly lit place.

he finds god immediately and walks quickly to him
and stands next to him.

god starts to walk towards a bright light and bob follows him.

as they approach the bright light, bob notices that god kneels and not knowing why sits next to him.

shortly after god stands again and walks away from the bright light and bob ever faithful follows god
wagging his tail as they walk together once again.