Jay Li

Jon...since you believe we are all children of god, I understand your point. You say there's nothing wrong with god wanting his children back, and that it's going to be better for them.

1. Following from this, if you had a child die, and since you believe in the points you expressed, you should actually celebrate, not mourn. While it may make you sad your (god's) child is no longer with you, you should be happy that they are back with their original creator, since that is where they belong, correct? As a Christian you devote your life to god (I presume) and would most certainly put his desires before yours...so if it makes him happy, that happiness should outweigh your sorrow.

2, then what about the people that die that do not believe in god? They deny his existence, and you said that these people (for the most part) do not go to heaven. So what would his purpose be in taking these peoples' lives? The only thing I can think of would be vengeance, but god is not supposed to be vengeful, from what I have learned.

JonasM

[QUOTE]Originally posted by JonBoy
[B]

For starters, I'm only suggesting what it could be.

chroot

JonBoy,

We all understand that sometimes you must hurt something in the process of saving it. I never argued this, so you may do us a favor and stop wasting bandwidth with your examples of it.

What we are discussing here is the act of saving itself.

Let me paraphrase: Since God is everyone's parents, it can only be an act of love when he takes back one of his children.

Let me paraphrase a little more deeply: God must be good because he only does things that are good.

Let me paraphrase even more deeply: I have blind faith in God's goodness, and I am only capable of viewing events as evidence of my pre-assumed faith in his goodness.

I am gaining the sense that you are incapable of arguing outside of your faith -- which is common problem among the religious. You have the axiomatic view of God's goodness so ingrained within your thought process that you continually use that faith as evidence of itself.

All of the arguments you have made so far are circular, because they (I'll say it again) rely on an a priori belief that God is good. They are not proofs that God is good, they are examples.

If you'd like to continue this discussion in any relevant way, you must do the following:

1) Leave your belief that God is good at the door.
2) Show us (don't just tell us) that God is good.

- Warren

JonBoy

[QUOTE]Originally posted by ltweintz
[B]

I would want my child to live and experience life even if that meant not by my side.

ltweintz

What reason is written in the bible for the creation of man? (I can't quite remember it.)

chroot

magician,

Physical theory is, of course, incomplete. As a scientist, I must also accept that we may never know all of Nature's secrets.

There are no methods to measure the simultaneous position and momentum (or energy and time, or charge and parity) of a particle, because particles do not possess definite quanities of both at the same time. This is a result of some of the most basic mathematical structures of the QM theory, not an expression of man's limited experimental apparatus.

Your question brings up the central philosophical question of modern physics: much of our experiments are intended to measure effects predicted by the mathematical models we construct of varying interactions. Are we investigating the math, or Nature? Where does the math/Nature boundary exist, and how precise is it?

I don't know the answers to these questions -- but if you're willing to accept the fact that the mathematical model is self-consistent, and its predictions agree with experiments, then the conclusion is that, as the math shows, particles don't actually possess definite values of complementary quantities like position and momentum.

It does -- and the scientist walks a thin line in regards to faith. He has to have just enough faith to stick to his guns until the bitter end, when his theory is proven wrong, but not too much to continue clinging to it (even emotionally) after it has been proven wrong.

- Warren

Morris

All this talk about the Bible, I can't help myself:
The third grade teacher was discussing whales, and she finished the lesson by telling the story of Jonah and the whale from the Bible. When she concluded, she said, "of course that story isn't true, because whales have too small of throats to swallow a man."
A little girl stood and said, "But teacher, that story is in the Bible, so it must be true. And when I get to heaven I'm going to ask Jonah."
The teacher said "what if Jonah went to the other place?"
The little girl replied,"then you can ask him."

chroot

There you go, that blind faith. This is the fundamental dichotomy between religious and non-religious folks: the religious are perfectly content to continue believing something, even when there is no evidence or negative evidence.

You realize, of course, that I can imagine a God who is inherently bad, and is in every way to opposite to your God. I can explain every moral structure, every line of scripture, and every act of faith in a precisely symmetrical, evil way. Even though my description of things is self-consistent and admirably as elegant as yours, you will not like it -- you'll choose to believe your version, in which God is good, on purely aesthetic grounds.

Oh, and I just have to make a trivial argument against this one, too:

If God wanted people to know about him, he wouldn't muck about with human witnesses. He has absolute control over the Universe. If he wanted us to know, we'd know.

- Warren

JonBoy

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Jay Li
[B]Jon...since you believe we are all children of god, I understand your point.

JonBoy

[QUOTE]Originally posted by JonasM
[B]

To Quote chroot:
[B]Holy Christ!

This is what religion does to people: [B]

This is what allows the religious to justify ANY crime whatsoever.