When you see pictures of Jesus praying...

Not really.

Virtual electron-positron pairs are constantly being created and destroyed in any vacuum. This is a phenomenon predicted in quantum field theory, and experimentally verified (the Casimir effect). They are called "virtual" because they collide and annihilate in a short enough period of time that they don't violate Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (dE*dt ~ hBar), but they definitely have experimentally observable consequences.

Virtual pairs can also become non-virtual when subjected to strong acceleration. This is the phenomenon known as Hawking radiation or the Unruh effect. A solid example of something being created from nothing that can live for a long period of time.

I do not admit that there was anything to start with. I believe that God, being the creator, being divine, did in fact create something from nothing. This is something that science cannot do, but God can.


I think that fate is different from what you are saying. Just because God is not bound by the limits of time and that He knows the choices that we will make and the ramifications of those decisions does not mean that the choices aren’t ours.

I must have missed that part about God hating gays. I submit that some misguided people who say that are Christian may, but many many more do not and God certainly does not. Yes, the Bible says that it is a sin but your sin or someone else’s is no better or worse than mine. We are all in the same boat.


More Christians believe this than you think. Sure, some don’t, but I am telling you what I think, not someone else.


It is statistically not only improbable that it happened, I submit that it is impossible. If not, go ahead and recreate it for me.


As I stated in another post, the Bible is fallible and has issues like this but that fact does not mean that there is nothing to be learned from it.


Lafs… again, the day of rest at the end has something for us to learn but does not necessarily mean that God kicked back in a recliner.

It took so long… because that is the way God did it. Back to God not being constrained by time, it is irrelevant how long it took.


Oh, I agree that there are fallacies… already commented on that.


You have a right to and I respect your opinion even though I disagree.


I do disagree with this. I am better than say a fish, or bird, a fly, a slug… I am better… lafs.


And I can say the same about the inverse.


Yes, it would indeed.

I think it is safe to say that I do not live on a planet called Gor and am in fact not a Gorean. Being that is a fact, I do role-play in that lifestyle in SL but I bring my own set of moralities to what I do. There are good, and bad people in every lifestyle, role-playing or not. I’d appreciate the benefit of doubt that I am not as you portray.

If you have further questions about this, I would be more than happy to discuss personal issues about this with you privately but an open forum is not the place for that.

God is not a thing. We are the creators of things. A thing which detects things or tests for the presence of things will never find God. Only influences may be inferred. And as such will be discarded by a science which a priori dismisses anything not of physical origin.

Life is guided by a will to survive. This drive arises in all lifeforms and guides them to improve themselves generation after generation. This force is nonmaterial and again must be dismissed by materialist science.

That nothing nonmaterial can exist or have influence over its own creations is the fundamental faith at the bottom of science. It is a dogma which blinds itself to these simplicities and causes people to deny themselves and what they can observe directly.

Why in all the universe would material substance randomly decide to start surviving in a particular form?

....

So you believe that God is a part of the universe and yet can do things that the universe can't? Science is simply understanding what the universe can and can't do. Generally what I call a thing that can do things that nothing else in the universe can do, or rather that all the laws of the universe say are impossible, is "imaginary".




Well if I make a decision every minute, which I do. Then god only knows what's going to happen until I make a decision, then presumably he'll know what happens till I'll make another decision. So he's in the dark everytime I make a decision which is a lot. Otherwise it's fate.



It's just a LOT of misguided people who say this.




It's really a more pure form of christianity, before they started adding priests and popes and what not to use as power positions




Give infinite time and it'll happen. Like I said, get 50 million lottery tickets, and you've got a pretty high chance of winning one.




I like that point, but doing it that way says that you don't put any merit into what the bible says as absolutely true, which is what I was saying in the first place is, have your beliefs but without solid proof I don't like when people say they're absolutely right and everyone else is absolutely wrong for not believing they way they do.

At base, the bible would all be about simply believing in a force through the earth that controls how things work, and having basic kindness for your neighbors. If you take out all that bible stuff as untrue.





Just think it's funny that people inspired by god would write stuff so wrong.



Probably makes sense like that, that God took his sweet time making the planet, since he seems to care so little about the people on it



I disagree, because we're all made from the same thing when you go down to the basic levels of it and we're all important when it comes to the scheme of things, we all contribute to the world and it's workings. To say I am better because i'm a human is egotistical indeed. We may be smart but who says that's a good quality? Like I said, we mostly use our intelligence for destruction, and we hurt the balance of the world more than help it.

We're all parts of the same system, and without one in the system it doesn't function right.

I'm really glad you pointed this out Kath.

People don't roleplay things that have nothing to do with their real life personalities. I'm not a gorean because I find the philosophies and morals repulsing. Obviously you don't. Your Fantasies always say something about who you are in real life.



Why wouldn't it? Why do our bodies randomly decide to break up and disolve and randomly decide to reform into something else? There's a lot of questions about the world that we don't know. And I think it's unbelievably unlikely that all of these questions will have one answer. Especially when that answer has been the answer to questions before and then proved wrong.

God is always described as an abnormality. He's not a part of the universe. He doesn't act like us or think like us. He's not a thing. He can do whatever he wants. He's not a part of time. He's not governed by the laws of the universe. Qualifiers, qualifiers, qualifiers. When you put that many qualifiers on it, we're saying the same thing. There is no discernable difference between a world with or without god.

I see that you have me all figured out. You are entitled to your opinion.

It is of poor taste to discuss personal issues in an open forum. Once again, I invite you to IM me if you have any questions or comments.

I love it when we can all be using English words and not really be communicating.

I haven't noticed my body randomly breaking up and reforming. I've seen random things happen to it, which it then quite desperately and purposefully tries to recover.

I don't really believe God is different from you and me. I tend more towards the Valentine Michael Smith blasphemy - "Thou art God." Philosophically, it's the Strong Anthropic Principle, except without any materialistic implications. The universe only exists because it is, or was, observed to exist. Not by man necessarily but by those who in the act of observing and agreeing that what is, is, created it.

I don't put qualifications on what God is, rather I think of God as an allness utterly without qualification. With God there is a universe. Without God there is not, and nothing to observe the nothing. Seems a difference to me.

So you call it god and I call it the universe. No difference.

And you are randomly breaking up and reforming. Where do you think dust comes from? It comes from chunks of skin from humans breaking of and being replaced by new cells. Certainly it doesn't break off in a straight line, just in random places.




Not just you, but me, and everyone is run by that. We all have reasons for choosing one look over another, one lifestyle over another, and one setting over another in SL. And that reason is all of course based on our RL personality.

But yeah, it is of poor taste to discuss this and rather irrelevant. I just found it amusing since the morals of christianity and the morals (or lack thereof) of gorean are so opposite. I didn't think i'd ever see a christian gorean hehe

Its great to see such an agreeable discussion on such an interesting topic!

Can I go back to the 'earth created before the sun and the moon' thing? That stuck in my head for some reason.

We have a scientific theory about how our solar system formed, and thus our planet... and we have observed distant proto-solar systems that back up our theories.

Essentially, the theory states that planets are created from suns that exploded, the resulting gas and dust coalesing under gravity to form asteroids, comets, moons and planets.
Further, since the first suns, which were created via gravitational attraction from mainly hydrogen gas (and were the first 'bodies' to grow out of the nothingness), there has been a chain of solar creation/destruction leading up to the present.

Each succesive generation of suns has produced more and more complex elements through nuclear fusion - with each generation having more and more differing elements incorporated into themselves at birth, and thus adding a wider range elements into the universe at their death.

Through this solar evolution, all the elements we have catalogued to date have been produced, and without them, planet Earth could not have formed, and certainly could not have contributed to the living beings having this discussion today.

Therefore, science is confident that suns came first, and planets later on.

How does the biblical approach to the creation of Earth refute this theory, without throwing out hundreds of years of other (mostly experimentaly reproducable) scientific theory with it?

All I can say is...hmm...wow!

Dood, it's becoming a full time job...

It's almost a shame we don't have more conservative extremists posting here, so I don't give off this "omfg u r a neocon conservartive" aura or something. I could debate with them too, but alas...

Oh well, it's only entertainment anyway.

Garoad, I'm glad you brought Kiamat's quote back up, because I'm still not sure why anyone in this thread is a hypocrite, how he can automatically determine that someone is left-wing from their views on religion, and why its so godawful that someone's mocking Christianity anyway. Pardon the phrasing.

I don't think the thread literally proves anyone is a hypocrite, but it hints of it's presence. I'm not sure if he was referring to hypocracy in general among liberals or among the thread. For the record, I know it exists among conservatives too. Also for the record I've caught myself being one before, and corrected my views. I think most people have and either forgot or won't admit it. It's no "mortal sin" (couldn't resist using the phrase).

Anyway, I liked this part of his post better honestly, and it may answer part of your question:

I don't care who he's praying to. I care what he's praying about.

Now, if he's praying that Republicans will save themselves from their own evil banality, I'm all for him. If he's praying that oil companies will get a windfall from legislation to ease tax-structuring and environmental regulations on increased refining capacity, then I'll say a prayer for him.

The same is true of Muhammad, the Buddha, the Dao, and any other religious icon or historical figure.

If he's postulating that Islam is coddled by people who bash Christianity, I think he's mistaken and looking to throw a pity party.

The same problems with Christianity apply to Islam. They're much more alike than different.

In fact, a number of Christianity's problems are applicable to organized religion as a whole. Once you start mixing men and power with the divine, you might as well throw the whole mess out the window.

uuhhh i think its his daddy??

I'd like to go back to the question of how atheists can be moral. It's an interesting subject that is frequently posed to non-believers. I like to turn the question around. How is it that Christians can be moral when their religion provides them with a get out of sin free card? How is morality inspired by believing that acceptance of Christ negates your sins (not to mention the fact that christian worship services involve ritual cannibalism performed under a giant replica of a first century torture device)? There is nothing moral about that. Atheists, on the other hand, believe they and they alone are accountable for their actions. There is no absolution and no forgiveness. I personally have to live with the things I do, and that is made all the more powerful a motivator by the fact that I believe there is nothing after this life. The only thing I contribute to eternity are my deeds and how they are remembered by other human beings.

Say there are two people, one of whom is a devout Christian and the other an atheist. They both live moral lives, are kind and generous, altruistic, and live by the golden rule. Which is the more moral person? Is it the Christian who seeks to gain eternal reward and avoid eternal punishment? Or is it the atheist who has no such ulterior motives and lives as he does simply because he believes it's the right thing to do?

Morality is not a religious word, or even a religious concept. Not that you'd know it since religion throughout history has claimed to be the source of morality. If the religious are inherantly more moral than the non-religious, and some 80% of the US population is Christian, and we have the highest percentage of our population in jail of any civilized nation, can anyone deny the fact that most of the people in prison are Christians? At its root, Christianity doesn't discourage sin. It simply absolves it. What exactly is moral about that?

Don't confuse ethics with morality, Chip. One is based on reason, the other is just law and tradition.

and LOL! I laughed when I read the part about ritual cannibalism. One time I was with my parents after going to my grandmother's church. My dad refrained from communion. I asked my parents if they objected to it because it was like a form of ritual cannibalism. Now usually, my parents are very liberal in their beliefs and encourage reasoned thought and questioning, but boy, did my dad's face swell up in apoplexy at that one!

I was already a non-believer (though hadn't given it any serious formal thought) while I was still a kid going to church. I remember when it was my turn to help pass the communion plates being hugely tempted, while handing the tray of wafers to someone at the end of a pew, to say "wing or thigh?"

Ok, this is mean-spirited but I couldn't resist as it's one of my favorite jokes ever.

From comedian Rick Reynolds:

"I might have joined the Catholic Church if it was just a little different. If at Communion the Host was fudge, I'd be there for that. 'Body of Christ, with or without nuts?'"

I spoke about this in this thread already. Who ever said that Christians are more moral than non-Christians? It is not a question of morality. There are plenty of good, decent, moral non-Christians that are better people than I am. Being a believer in Christ does not magically make you, me or anyone else more moral. Ultimately we are all sinners and fall short in the eyes of God.

Christianity is not about being better, or more moral than anyone else. It is about faith that Jesus Christ died for our sins and the gift of grace that He gives to us. It is about faith and grace, not morality. This is a huge misconception that many non-Christians have and one that frankly ticks me off. Christians are no better than anyone else. As a matter of fact, they are worse in that they believe... yet still sin.

I neither believe nor sin. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

I enjoy the "ritual cannibalism" of communion.

coco