Reply to: What do you reckon

[hyperD]

Erm no the powers that be have decided in a change of direction which inevitably means an extension to my current contract as the Programme is now not just going from A to B but going via X, Y and K. Hence why I can devote more time to fighting bigotry, exposing lies and spreading truth.

Can anyone see the contradiction in this statement?

[Homer Simpson]

Your lives are in the hands of men no smarter than you or I, many of them incompetent boobs. I know this because I worked alongside them, gone bowling with them, watched them pass me over for promotions time and again.

[Chico]

So you've been fired for spouting tulipe in the office?

Erm no the powers that be have decided in a change of direction which inevitably means an extension to my current contract as the Programme is now not just going from A to B but going via X, Y and K. Hence why I can devote more time to fighting bigotry, exposing lies and spreading truth.

[hyperD]

So you've been fired for spouting tulipe in the office?

So you've been fired for spouting tulipe in the office again?

[Lucifer Box]

As it happens my current project has reached a time were I can devote more time to this board

So you've been fired for spouting tulipe in the office?

[Chico]

Yes most of you are happy to perpetuate myths and even go to the extent of falsifying the contents of The Bible. As it happens my current project has reached a time were I can devote more time to this board and as such where there is a falsehood being perpetuated I will always challenge it.

[Lucifer Box]

Not foregetting of course that, unlike Chico, most of us are happy and able to make up our own minds and do not need a website to tell us what to think.

[The Lone Gunman]

Ridiculous website... agree Lucifer. This type of tactic is always used by religious tinpots, hence my distrust of born-agains like Chico.

Anyone that keeps thrusting the same ideas over and over again to people has a problem in my experience - and that is one of confidence and credibility.

Chico used to use a different web site for that question, he must have noticed that the old web site did a similar quiz where effectively God replaced The Universe in the questions and answers. The same arguments were used to debunk both.

[hyperD]

Highly entertaining questions, subtly structured to deceive the unwary. For example the first question has answers that use the word "cosmos" and "universe" interchangeably to steer the user down the "right" path.

Somewhat similar to:

Q: Do you believe the moon is made of cheese?

Yes - it is made of cheese
No - it is not made of lemons

Ridiculous website... agree Lucifer. This type of tactic is always used by religious tinpots, hence my distrust of born-agains like Chico.

Anyone that keeps thrusting the same ideas over and over again to people has a problem in my experience - and that is one of confidence and credibility.

[Chico]

Ok s2budd so you are now putting things into the bible now? You disgust me.

Deuteronomy 30:4 (King James Version)
King James Version (KJV)
Public Domain

4If any of thine be driven out unto the outmost parts of heaven, from thence will the LORD thy God gather thee, and from thence will he fetch thee:


Deuteronomy 30:4 (English Standard Version)
English Standard Version (ESV)
The Holy Bible, English Standard Version Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers.

4If your outcasts are in the uttermost parts of heaven, from there the LORD your God will gather you, and from there he will take you.

Deuteronomy 30:4 (New International Version)
New International Version (NIV)
Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society


4 Even if you have been banished to the most distant land under the heavens, from there the LORD your God will gather you and bring you back.

[threaded]

Chico the correct answer to mine is: "You don't go to church to show everyone else that you need to go there."

[s2budd]

"The earth is flat" quote

Deuteronomy 30:4 ~ God assures the children of Israel that even "If your outcasts are at the ends of the earth, from there the Lord your God will gather you, and from there He will bring you back. Although a sphere has no ends, a flat surface does.

[Chico]

"The Earth is flat" is another good one.

Ok tell me smart alec where it says in the Bible "The Earth is flat". While you are at it you may want to re read this.

Famous Atheist changes his mind - There is a God after all.

Atheist changes his mind

Tom Harpur

The Toronto Star


"There is a God, atheist believes." This pre-Christmas headline graced a story about the conversion to faith of one of the best-known British atheists of our time, Anthony Flew. God will not have been surprised - or even particularly moved - by this announcement, but thinkers and teachers in the English-speaking world will certainly sit up and pay attention.

Flew has been a leading warrior for atheism for more than 50 years with a flood of articles, debates, and books to his credit. Oddly enough, our paths crossed briefly during the stirring months after he first dropped his major bombshell, an article based upon a paper first read to the Oxford Socratic Club. It was called "Theology and Falsification" and argued that since the evidence for God can't be subjected to the kind of falsification which is always possible in the empirical realm of science (where you create a theory and then test it by the hard data of experimentation), it is virtually meaningless.

The Socratic Club, a weekly religious forum for debate and discussion, was chaired by C.S. Lewis and I had the privilege of becoming a member of it in the fall of 1951 during first term at Oxford. I remember Flew and his numerous cohorts who dominated philosophy at the time, including such worthies as A.J. Ayer, and the Logical Positivist, Professor Gilbert Ryle. Since my philosophy tutor, Richard Robinson, was also an atheist, it was an interesting atmosphere for candidates for "holy orders" like me to think and study in.

Flew campaigned for his initial "no-God" faith for half a century while holding teaching posts at several different British universities and by regular lecture tours in the United States and Canada. His essential argument remained the same: the "evidence" for God falls like a pack of cards under scientific scrutiny.

Now, at the age of 81, Flew has recanted. As the story announcing his change of heart put it: "He now believes in God, more or less, based upon scientific evidence." He says so in a new book, God and Philosophy, to be published next year and in a new video made for TV.

Flew first hinted at his seismic shift in a letter to the August issue of Britain's Philosophy Now Magazine. He wrote: "It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic (i.e. God-free) theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism."

In his video Has Science Discovered God? he clarifies this by saying that current investigations of DNA have shown "by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved."

In other words, some kind of super-intelligence is, he now realizes, the only adequate explanation for the origins of life and the complex multiplicity of the natural world.

There is a slight catch, however, in the "more or less" part of this story. Orthodox believers in all faiths and camps will have to wait a long time before Flew comes knocking at their door seeking admission and acceptance.

He has said that he is probably best labelled as a deist like Thomas Jefferson, that is, one who believes in a God who creates the world and then lets it run much in the fashion of a clockmaker who sets things going and then leaves it alone. This is not a God who gets involved in people's lives or who is in the business of answering prayer.

The AP story, by religion specialist Richard Ostling, quotes Flew thus: "I'm thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and far and away from the God of Islam, because both are depicted as omnipotent, cosmic Saddam Husseins."

He went on to add, however - and this is quite significant in my view - that "it could be a person in the sense of a being that has intelligence and purpose, I suppose." He's not thinking of a person as we think of persons (God as the "Big-Guy-in-the-Sky"), but rather of a being who can best be described as trans-personal or meta-personal instead.

Theologians and philosophers in particular will await his book with some excitement. It will be interesting to see how far his "personalizing" of a Supreme Intelligence goes. Deism, itself, a sort of "natural religion," first came into fashion in the 17th and 18th centuries in England. The philosopher John Locke objected to being called a deist, but his book The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) profoundly influenced the movement.

The classical exposition of deism is J. Toland's Christianity Not Mysterious (finished at Oxford in 1696) in which he argued against the ideas of revelation and the supernatural altogether, maintaining instead belief in a God wholly comprehensible by human reason. He narrowly escaped prison over this and his books were burned in Ireland, his native land.

Tom Harpur

[s2budd]

Problems with the bible

"The Earth is flat" is another good one.

[Lucifer Box]

Darwin's theory of evolution would be a good one.

Good article in this week's Economist critiqeuing creationism and so-called "Intelligent Design". As well as alarming stuff such as:

In 2000, a survey by the Fordham Foundation found that only ten [US] states taught evolution fully, six did so skimpily and in 13 the treatment was considered useless or absent. Kansas received an F- and "disgraceful".

It also has amusing stuff such as:

When the Discovery Institute, a promoter of Intelligent Design, came up with a list of 370 people with science degrees who backed their ideas, the National Centre for Science Education responded with almost 600 scientists called Steve or Stephanie who rejected them.