The ancient writers of the Bible would have considered a wheelbarrow a breathtaking example of emerging technology, but it is not so much technology that differentiates modern from ancient men, JD, it is scientific knowledge. Those men were hopelessly ignorant about virtually everything scientific and ascribed what they did not understand - disease, meterological, astrological and geological phenomena, plagues - to angels, demons and gods. They were an exceedingly superstitious lot who codified their superstitious beliefs into the Bible and the Qu'ran. They apparently did a good job because many of the people I see when I look around still subscribe to them. You might call them the modern unwashed.
Nickolas
JoinedPosts by Nickolas
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26
"I can live with doubt and uncertainty, and not knowing."
by leavingwt inrichard feynman on god .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylteym9h0x4.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/richard_feynman.
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My Wedding Photos are. . .
by leavingwt inchock full of jehovah's witnesses.
with the exception of my wife and my best man, they're all jws.
jws who probably despise me.
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Nickolas
I refuse to look at my wedding photos, but only because I look like a complete dork. It was 1973 and the in thing at the time was to dress up for your wedding like you'd never do otherwise. I had long hair, parted in the middle, muttonchop sideburns that joined into a moustache, a frilly blouse a la Freddie Mercury, platform heels and an impossible purplish, rented tux. It's like an episode out of Twilight Zone. Not a JW in sight, though, although a few of them would become JWs a year later. I'd burn the lot if I could and keep only the post-wedding photos in which I'm wearing a tie-dyed undershirt and frayed bluejeans shorts. Still weird, but not so barf-worthy.
Congrats on your 10th, Donny. May you have many, many more.
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"I can live with doubt and uncertainty, and not knowing."
by leavingwt inrichard feynman on god .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylteym9h0x4.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/richard_feynman.
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Nickolas
Just got up. Nine hours of shuteye and now I'm not so cranky.
God, if He exists, has not seen fit to provide proof of His existence but has paradoxically provided the ability of intelligent people (like Richard Feynman but also far lesser minds) to perceive evidence that He does not exist. We are left with probability. Taking everything into context and fitting it best you can into the most likely explanation for reality as we have the intellectual ability to perceive it, the probability of God existing is very, very, very small. No, not zero, because as you point out it is something for which a definitive proof cannot be established. That goes either way. The question remaining is how you will think and live your life accordingly. Personally, I allow the tiniest fragment of doubt about the existence of a god, JD. I am a 6 on the Dawkins scale, like Dawkins himself, rather than a 7. I am a 7 when it comes to belief in a personal god, in particular the personal god described by the ancient unwashed of the middle eastern deserts. The world view of these men was exceedingly narrow and what they codified in their holy books reflects it. Man was not created in God's image, it was the other way around.
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"I can live with doubt and uncertainty, and not knowing."
by leavingwt inrichard feynman on god .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylteym9h0x4.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/richard_feynman.
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Nickolas
I don't believe for a microsecond that the universe was created for my benefit or yours, but in order to believe in God one must believe just that. All this, so that God may prove a point on this tiny, little insignificant planet? The earth is almost immeasurably, infinitesimally insignificant, and we are even smaller. Whose ego is inflated, yours or mine?
Good night.
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26
"I can live with doubt and uncertainty, and not knowing."
by leavingwt inrichard feynman on god .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylteym9h0x4.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/richard_feynman.
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Nickolas
It's an extremely conservative illustration of extreme improbability JD, not presented as a definitive number. You say the number is not 1.0, and I have to agree, that constitutes knowing. But based on the evidence that can be observed we can be virtually certain that we're not all that special. If you take 100 billion galaxies each with 100 billion stars and tens of billions of planets relative to God choosing this tiny, blue dot we happen to inhabit for his showdown with Satan etc you get a good idea how provincial, improbable and insignificant the Abrahamic religions really are. Too complicated?
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26
"I can live with doubt and uncertainty, and not knowing."
by leavingwt inrichard feynman on god .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylteym9h0x4.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/richard_feynman.
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Nickolas
call it .99999999999999, then, JD. It comes down to probabilities.
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the global Noahic flood is truth
by undercover inthat's not my assertion... that quote belongs to "godrulz" who said it on a thread introducing a newbie.
instead of hijacking that one, i thought i'd repeat here.. now, mr. godrulz... are you prepared to back that statement up with some proof?.
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Nickolas
There's a fence between the farmer's lower 40 and the asylum next door. One day the farmer is driving his tractor past the fence, pulling a wagon full of horse shit, and he notices a smiling man standing on other side of the fence waving at him enthusiastically. The farmer, being a polite sort, stops his tractor and says hello. The man asks the farmer what he's going to do with all that shit. The farmer says, I'm going to put it on my strawberries. The man laughs at the farmer and says, "You should come in here with us. We get whipped cream!"
Some days I feel a lot like that farmer. This computer monitor is the fence and JWN is the asylum. And all I have is a wagonload of useful shit.
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the global Noahic flood is truth
by undercover inthat's not my assertion... that quote belongs to "godrulz" who said it on a thread introducing a newbie.
instead of hijacking that one, i thought i'd repeat here.. now, mr. godrulz... are you prepared to back that statement up with some proof?.
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Nickolas
I will take the Glenmorangie Quinta Ruba, please. Make it a double, straight up of course. Put it on my tab.
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90
the global Noahic flood is truth
by undercover inthat's not my assertion... that quote belongs to "godrulz" who said it on a thread introducing a newbie.
instead of hijacking that one, i thought i'd repeat here.. now, mr. godrulz... are you prepared to back that statement up with some proof?.
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Nickolas
Nickolas, I know you don't agree with much that I say
I agree with you more often than you know, PS.
but trust me, Jan Kosonen is dead-nuts serious about this, and anything else in the Book of Jewish Fables.
And I see from the post above that you are correct. Hey, Jan. Pleased to meet you. You've pondered the Hubble evidence and proposition there presented, I trust? Hundreds of billions of galaxies each with hundreds of billions of stars and hundreds of billions of planets and God chose to send his Son to die horribly so He could save the minions of this one? Just this one? Have you really thought this through logically?
This place is a flaming nuthouse.
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the global Noahic flood is truth
by undercover inthat's not my assertion... that quote belongs to "godrulz" who said it on a thread introducing a newbie.
instead of hijacking that one, i thought i'd repeat here.. now, mr. godrulz... are you prepared to back that statement up with some proof?.
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Nickolas
Kosonen, I do hope you're joking. I watched the first video through and saw not one single shred of physical evidence presented. Just an interview of two breathless Believers describing an aerial photo of what looks like a manufactured mound of earth as Noah's Ark and the interviewer taking it all in as fact. Bollocks. I won't bother investing any time in the second video.
http://www.rejectionofpascalswager.net/flood.html#shipActually the story of Genesis is, even at first glance, absurd.
Noah's Ark: An Engineering Imposibility
First let us look at the ark built by Noah. Genesis 6:15 gives its measurements as 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high. The length of the cubit is based on the length of the human forearm and varies among the various ancient cultures. For instance, the Babylonian cubit was approximately 0.53 metres, the Roman cubit was about 0.44 metres while the Hebrew cubit was about 0.56 metres. Using the Hebrew cubit the ark would have measured 168 metres long, 28 metres wide and 17 metres high. There are two problems with this ark as described: it is both too big and too small at the same time.
- It is too big, because before the invention of steel, the wooden ark of Noah simply could not have been structurally sound and was thus unseaworthy. The longest wooden ship ever built (i.e. historically verified) was the USS Wyoming. This vessel, which was, at 110 meters long, a full 50% shorter than Noah’s ark, was found to be so unstable that it could only be used for short coastal hauls to avoid rough conditions further out in the sea. The huge structural stresses that developed in the USS Wyoming made the ship sag and, well, it leaked. Water thus had to be pumped out continuously to prevent the ship from sinking. Now, here we have Noah’s ark, built with wood, before the invention of steel and hydraulic pumps, undergoing the turbulent conditions of the flood unscathed. It is simply an engineering impossibility.
- It is too small, because there is simply not enough room for all the animals. There are extant today over 4,500 species of mammals, 6,000 species of reptiles, 8,600 species of birds and 3,000 species of amphibians. Each of these have many large members: elephants, camels, rhinoceros, hippopotamasus, giraffes, horses, donkeys, zebras, cattle, bison, tapirs, pigs, tigers, lions, jaguars, panthers, sea lions, walruses, crocodiles, alligators, giant turtles, Komodo dragon, snakes, ostriches, emus, falcons and giant salamanders. There are 23,000 species of fishes, many of which will not be able to survive the flood if not taken up into the ark. Each kilogram of fish require about a cubic meter of water to survive-this is simply to provide enough oxygen and provide space for swimming while sleeping and feeding. The volume of water required for the fishes alone would be larger than the ark.[4] And then there are the little creatures; there are about a million species of insects and 60,000 species of arachnids. How were these species stored in the ark?