xero
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Posts posted by xero
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Envy is at the root of evil. The evangelistic atheist is ideologically possessed by a missionary zeal mirroring that which is seen on the radical left.
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Interesting that Nietzsche forecast this spirit. The evangelical atheist, the evangelical apostates, the social justice warriors all have their spirit animal exemplified in the tarantula.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fpz8bH54G6I
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...I also discovered the power of stupid. Nothing gets an irate householder off your butt than pretending to be galactically stupid. I remember this big guy in a cowboy hat running down his driveway yelling at me saying "There's no soliciting here!". He stopped quick when I put on my dumb face (maybe it always looks dumb?) and said "...but you could still have the magazines if you want them..." He stopped up short...and you could see him realize and think "Why would I kick this dumb dog? It's only doing what it was trained to do..." He said more calmly "...no, I'm sorry that's OK."
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You know I'm getting to love this ignore feature. Now if I could only set it to ignore my posts as well.
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1 hour ago, AlanF said:
xero said:
You still can't get it right, so let me try again.
Almost no atheists claim that the Bible God, or any gods, don't exist. Rather, they argue that there is insufficient evidence to conclude that such exist. Your premise is a straw man.
Yes, the ancient problem of Theodicy. I brought that up in my previous long post, which you'll no doubt try to ignore.
Job does nothing to answer the obvious questions.
See if you can address the contradictions between "God is love" and "God is a monster".
You're easy to ignore, because your posts are predictable. You create straw men and then attack the straw men, or you misrepresent what people say and then cop a superior attitude.
I mean what's there for anyone to deal with? I'd think I was dealing w/a 16 year old girl. (no offense to actual 16 year old girls)
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I'm in limbo land right now. I've been reading Mike Heiser's stuff as well. Some take the account in Genesis as a polemic countering other pagan accounts. I can't explain at this point how they're doing that, as I read through this a while back.
https://drmsh.com/genesis-1-2-as-polemic/
Suffice to say that there's a way of reading this which accords w/the people who were living at the time this was written, and this isn't exactly the way we read the same thing. (at least that's what I'm getting as the argument). In addition there's the issue of material which isn't included, but which was accepted as generally true (manuscripts found along w/the dead sea scrolls, like Enoch, which clearly has mythological elements, but which even NT writers appeared to be drawing from. In 2nd temple Judaism, there was the issue of a screwed up spiritual council, and you get glimpses of this in Job)
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Just to be a contrarian, I note:
29 Then God said: “Here I have given to you every seed-bearing plant that is on the entire earth and every tree with seed-bearing fruit. Let them serve as food for you.f 30 And to every wild animal of the earth and to every flying creature of the heavens and to everything moving on the earth in which there is life,* I have given all green vegetation for food.”g And it was so.
So you can read that and say meat was off limits, or you can say it was simply not mentioned, but assumed. Not that this is the view I'm taking, but strictly speaking we'd have to say it just wasn't mentioned. Then just outside the gate in Genesis 4 you have meat being offered, and no doubt eaten as well.
There's a lot assumed about Genesis, and a lot unwritten.
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Another way of calculating how long man and other creatures have been here is examined:
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I suppose you'd likewise pity the guy I chased down in his yard and took the magazines away from when he came to the fence, smiled and said "Sure! I'll take those magazines...So I can throw them way." I jumped the chain link fence and grabbed them from his hands. Poor guy slipped in the wet grass and was on his back at the time.
His response was "But, but... you made me come to the fence", and I said "And you lied to me with your smiling face. Those are my magazines, and if you want to read them you can, but not if you're just going to pitch them."
Do I think that was the best response? No. But I did it.
I remember another time when I made a call to the local parish to complain because I ran into this young guy who took one of the magazines and started to eat it in front of me.
I said "That's an odd reaction to my presentation." (he was drunk apparently) Then it turned out he was mad because he'd read one of the magazines that blasted the church for pedo-priests and in his drunk mind eating a magazine was a rebuttal of sorts. I sat down with him on his porch while he calmed down and began to talk about his experience w/his local parish priest (he'd apparently been doing something wrong w/him). So I called the parish and let them know they had a priest problem. I don't know what happened after that, I mean he was over eighteen, but clearly disturbed.
Then there was the time I had a gun pointed at me at the door while I was making a presentation. I didn't see it at the time, but the other brother did. I just thought he didn't seem that interested.
Doing a rural once I and another bro had some dogs loosed on us while we were walking up to the farmhouse. I told the bro to just ignore the dogs and don't make eye contact. The dogs just kept running to the cattle guard right past us. The ranch hands were surprised we'd made it. I actually had a pretty good call there for a while. I think because we didn't wimp out from the dogs, they decided we were OK.
Another weird call, though was when this little old black lady the first time let us in and told us that she talked to Jesus every day. I said "Really?" She said "Oh yes, he sits on the edge of my bed and we talk." I said "So what did he look like?" She said "Oh, he's a little black man." .... I didn't think this call was going to go anywhere. But...the next time I came back she wouldn't let us in. She said "King won't let me let you in." I said "Who's 'King'?" and then she pointed at this big angry looking cat. That was creepy.
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3 minutes ago, 4Jah2me said:
Wow, you think people have a 'set time'. Predestination ?
Predestination, in Christianity, the doctrine that God has eternally chosen those whom he intends to save.
Yep you are a strange elder.
Not what I meant. This is what I mean when I say eisegesis. Eisegesis is reading into a verse, something which isn't necessarily there. Like when you quote "The wages sin pays is death" and someone says "That's your interpretation" and I say "No. I'm just reading what's on the paper." "An 'interpretation' would be to say that "death" properly understood in that verse is of the body only, but not the soul....But of course that would be you engaging in eisegesis." So when I say "Not their time, it had to do w/their not being ready yet, like the phrase, "When the student is ready, the teacher will come."
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Truth be told, there are either atheists who are convinced that God doesn't exist and they are happy with that belief, or there are atheists who are convinced that God doesn't exist and they are unhappy with that belief. The latter can and likely will shift over time. The former won't because it suits them.
I prefer that God exists and I'm convinced that he does. I, like many other theists have questions about things and anyone who says he or she doesn't isn't being honest with themselves.
The big issue, unspoken in many cases is the reasons given for pain and suffering.
Read carefully the book of Job, and you can intuit or insert that in the end Job was made aware of his role and all that was presented there, but that's not explicitly stated.
Job simply is confronted with God and asked various questions w/regard to things and his response is :
6 Then Jehovah answered Job out of the windstorm:+ 7 “Brace yourself, please, like a man;I will question you, and you inform me.+ 8 Will you call into question* my justice?Will you condemn me so that you may be right?+
And also...
7 After Jehovah had spoken these words to Job, Jehovah said to Elʹi·phaz the Teʹman·ite:“My anger burns against you and your two companions,+ for you have not spoken the truth about me+ as my servant Job has.
Perhaps you can conclude, that all that Job said about Jehovah was true, but perhaps not. Was the "truth" the actual things Jobs said, or was the "truth" the intent and the spirit that Job had while saying these things.
God's justice and his ways are his and I can only conclude that if his ways don't look adjusted right, it's likely me who either doesn't understand things as they really are or were, or my sense of justice is colored by my own limited state. --- Probably both.
I don't have the apex of all possible viewpoints.
If God exists, and I think he does he would have that viewpoint.
I see some things as "good" and some things as "bad" and I admit my faculty of conscience appears to be built-in to me and other humans regardless of how this compass appears to be calibrated.
What I think is "good" could be "bad" and the reverse as well, for reasons already listed.
So if perceptions as to "good/bad" come built-in as a semi-programmable entity in humans, then God would have had to design it. I can imagine being "conscience-free" and that strikes me at times as perversely liberating, and yet if I am designed such that ignorance of the designer is ultimately damaging to me - then I get concerned, even if it's simply a narrow self-oriented concern, so I don't go there, though it's clear some have in human history and I don't know whether this was a choice, or whether these were like those mentioned by the psalmist "perverts from the womb".
In any case if I'm physical (and I am) and the universe is as well (and even if there are other inaccessible parts to it) I would imagine a certain kind of thermodynamic equation w/regard to the quality of "goodness" such that being downstream from God, I'd necessarily be less "good".
This of course reminds me of Jesus reply to someone who called him "Good Teacher" when he said "No one is good but God". In this he seems to be recognizing that the source of all good is from God the Father. --- The Son, as good as he is and was as our exemplar, messiah and King, was a reflection, an image of that goodness.
Our duty in all this is to try to understand as well as we can, the apex of all viewpoints (which hith-palel --- what prayer to God is about...it's about getting as close as possible to that apex so as to see ourselves in context so that we might know what to do or not do next might be) and having done this try to reflect that good. 2 Cor. 3:18 -
18 minutes ago, Srecko Sostar said:
I have neutral questions:
If God created lions and tigers and bears (today predators) and other animals in Paradise Earth of Eden and outside of Eden to eat grass and fruits, Did He created them with teeth and claws and digestive system just for plant foods?
After the fall of Eden or after Great Flood, how did these animals become omnivores or carnivores?
Did their teeth and claws grow later, so they could catch food?
If not, why did God create them with such teeth and claws?
If their teeth and claws grew later, was it "micro or macro evolution"?
Similar with many other animals in food chain. Birds eats insects. One sort of insects eats other sort of insects. They all killing (murder) each other.
And so on and so forth.
Good questions. I remember a 1946 Awake article on Dinosaurs and carnivorous activity and thought it stretching things a bit. Too many look designed for them to not be designed for carnivorous activity. You do have examples of animals like Pandas who have the kind of teeth predators have, and I've seen videos of snakes eating grapes, but there seem to be so many of these kinds of things to be explained away as it were. If we look at the chain of life we have carnivorous activity at the roots of plants wholly needful for plant and all life. This is where you (me) start asking how far and why we (me) are willing to stretch all this. Cats have to eat meat because they don't produce a certain amino acid, but then it turns out some plants have this in abundance. Can all animals be vegetarian? These are the kinds of things people who have no interest in the bible are asking. Some because they have instinctive moral feelings about it all, like PETA. Then there's the case of some who are culturing meat in vats, so that one can imagine eating a steak or a hamburger that was never alive as an animal (there's a TED talk on this).
Is my concern moral squeamishness, or scriptural squeamishness? What's wrong with death, if you dont know you're alive, and when you die, you have no pain, only feeling some pressure, like a lobster, or some other animal w/o a nervous system like ours.
Do Pigeons Know They're Alive?
Is pain the issue? Physical pain? Or ...is it psychological pain, the pain of loss, and anticipation of loss and the fear it brings which is the issue? Why life at all?
I read a book years ago entitled "Programs of the Brain" and one line in it got my attention - "The meaning of life is to live"
It seems that we're programmed to desire life, and we want it to keep going.
Do we concern ourselves w/the lives of others out of genuine altruism, or because we simply don't want someone to move the furniture around in our lives w/o permission?
In regard to the DNA modifications necessary to alter the morphology and behavior (yes there is behavioral DNA) of animals, I think it not likely that animals, post creation were modified. The whole evolutionary process is more one of filtration and information-loss over time.
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I remember a young brother who was really into hip/hop. His mother was in my book study that I was conducting and she wanted me to work with him. I knew he was skeptical of having me do my "elder thing" on him, so I didn't. I went to the first door, stood there, prayed a second and then after about a minute, he said "Aren't you gonna knock?" I said "Why? The angels are involved in the preaching work, right? So they need to do their part too. If someone comes, we'll talk, if not, then I guess it's not their time. Remember? "The reapers are angels". He said "You are one weird elder." (w/a grin)
Later I said I was just messing w/him, but only half-way messing.
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The design argument is used all the time. It's an inference to the best explanation. It's used in archaeology and it's used in forensics. The arguments against it's use in the case of OOL is that those who exclude it are doing so out out a philosophy, namely philosophic materialism.
The argument is quite simple and circular
God doesn't exist, therefore OOL arrived out of an undirected material process.
If you point out that the chemistry and physics doesn't work, it's suggested that this is proof of the power of time + chemistry + physics.
Also most people don't differentiate between micro and macro evolution. Micro is true - we see this happen all the time. The finches in the Galapagos ...an example given all the time relative to finch beak size which is merely demonstrating that during various environmental variations finches have differential reproductive rates favoring larger beaks at one time and smaller beak sizes at another time.
Still, they remain finches.
Fossil records are even more incomplete and unconvincing today than they were fifty years ago.
Of course, now that we have a better understanding of DNA and the chicken and egg problem this presents, as you can't have DNA (manufactured out of protein) without DNA already there along w/the rest of the organism, we see it as even more problematic.
Of course evolutionists of the sort we see today are better at polishing the turd, but it remains a turd.
You still see in some texts Haeckel's faked embryos, w/the demolished ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny argument.
You still see the Miller-Urey experiment cited, though this produced a random assortment of left and right chiral forms of amino acids and in the design had a trap and used an atmosphere that's known today to be the wrong type for the early earth. No, this was simply a primitive, yet designed peptide synthesizer, nothing more than that. Yet it's still cited.
The artists renderings of early man are fanciful, and are in the main fictional representations based on artists imaginations. These are just a few.
https://iconsofevolution.com/category/criticism/
The mathematics behind the chemistry is overwhelming. If one accepts that the Cambrian explosion of life forms occurred some 600 million years ago, you have a finite number of seconds to work with. So you don't have enough time, you don't have the right kind of atmosphere, and you have to produce not one single cell but a myriad of living creatures all differentiated into different reproducing groups.
Of course most either say they agree or disagree based on various reasons, most of which have nothing to do w/understanding what's being proposed or even how it's all supposed to have happened.
Evolution as taught today resembles a catechism you memorize and regurgitate on demand.
Ask anyone what the supposed mechanisms are for evolution and you'll get, if anything.
"Mutations and natural selection."
If they're clever, they'll say "It's all about differential reproduction, my dear fellow."
Meanwhile you listen to or watch a just so story not much different than the Mother West Wind stories of Thorton W. Burgess. "Why Jimmy Skunk wears stripes"
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8 minutes ago, AlanF said:
I need do no such things. The Watchtower religion is going down the tubes of its own weight. Although I think I've played a small part in this decline.
You should know that if it's a cult, any disconfirming information will be reinforcing and if it's not it won't matter either. So if it is a cult, you've done a disservice to the service you've been hoping to render, if not you've simply been wasting your time. On the other hand, this is a theraputic, safe place for you to unburden yourself.
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6 minutes ago, AlanF said:
Now you've assumed the standard JW position: ostrich with head in sand.
I'd schedule a visit w/a gastroenterologist if I were you. I think you may have a blockage.
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9 minutes ago, AlanF said:
Mostly wrong. Your ideas obviously don't come from talking with real atheists, but only what your religious prejudices influence you to think.
You don't even realize that your last statement makes no sense: one cannot hate what one does not believe exists. I don't hate Santa Claus.
For those like me, raised as JWs or in some other sort of fanatical religion, realization that their religious leaders are incorrigible liars often lead inexorably to questioning the existence of God, or of any gods. Eventually they realize that there is no actual evidence for any gods. Note that the Argument From Ignorance is not an actual argument.
So you do fall into one of the boxes.
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4 minutes ago, AlanF said:
The essay shows far more than that -- which you'd understand if you actually read it.
It shows that Watchtower writers will lie and generally distort source references to support their supposedly Bible-based traditions. They do this with other subjects as well.
Since Watchtower leaders claim to speak in God's name, but have demonstrably said false things in God's name, they are by definition false prophets and should not be listened to.
Sweet! Now I don't have to study it. You know you could probably make a living out of this if you put your mind to it.
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Just now, AlanF said:
The essay shows far more than that -- which you'd understand if you actually read it.
It shows that Watchtower writers will lie and generally distort source references to support their supposedly Bible-based traditions. They do this with other subjects as well.
Since Watchtower leaders claim to speak in God's name, but have demonstrably said false things in God's name, they are by definition false prophets and should not be listened to.
You really are invested in this. What do you plan on doing to wrestle the bulk of the planet away from their delusions? Tell me you have a plan.
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5 minutes ago, Arauna said:
Great experience!
What is shows is that it's more of a religion to people who'd you'd imagine would know. They all assume, that someone in the next department has the data, and besides, they aren't religious nuts and they also want tenure, so it's pretty much just salute the evolution flag and move on. Believing in it or not has nothing to do with the majority of productive working scientists and technicians. In fact this is, to me where ID has shone. It sees design, and where others thought "Junk DNA!" - not so fast scooter!...Turns out this DNA has a function. Appendix? Nope - it too has a function during embryonic development and later. But had one simply viewed it through the lens of the evolutionary world view (where one would expect stops and starts and dead ends) one would have stopped looking. No. The whole history of science progressed because of looking at the world as being designed.
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Just now, AlanF said:
As I have explained to various people many times: The Theory of Evolution does not include Abiogenesis.
Abiogenesis, if it happened at all, is an entirely separate subject. I, along with most competent scientists, are agnostic on the subject. Darwin himself had the same view. James Tour was arguing against a straw man in his lecture.
Many competent scientists believe in some sort of deity -- not necessarily the God of the Bible -- that created the universe such that it had within its structure the ability to evolve life. Others feel that some sort of deistic god actively created life and then mucked about with life forms in such a way as to make it look like it evolved. No matter -- the fossil record and genetics prove that some sort of evolution has occurred over some 4 billion years. Only Young-Earth Creationists and related idiots dispute this -- not on scientific but religious grounds.
I see that you refuse to concede the point amply made that w/o abiogenesis - no evolution of any kind can take place.
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In any case I've found that most ardent atheists fall into one or more of the following categories:
1. They had a bad reaction to religion and they're mad.
2. They have desires to do corrupt stuff, religion tells them to knock it off, and they don't want to.
3. They have daddy issues.
"God doesn't exist and I hate him!"
Creation-Evolution-Creative Days-Age of the Earth-Humanoid Fossils-Great Flood
in Topics
Posted
The fact that an inspired writer quotes from an uninspired source does not make the quoted statement false. There are dozens of places in Scripture that quote from uninspired sources such as:
Of course this implicitly suggests that Jesus was much less concerned about clearing up issues w/regard to canonicity than he was about fulfilling his mission. It didn't matter if someone was wrong about some particular point not patently clear - all that would and will be cleared up in due time. So no - it's not in the canon, but it's good to know what was running through the minds of people who were living in the 1st century.
Maccabees isn't canonical either, and doesn't claim inspiration, but is a historical record.
BTW - Who hasn't been annoyed at Jesus for the illustration of Lazarus and the Rich Man?