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The least he could do is actually target Christianity. He's just lumping it all together. He's not even distinguishing between different religions. It's that kind of closemindedness I hate, no matter the content of his rant.It doesn't sound like you've thought this all the way through.
I'm not sure he came across any worse than O'Reilly did; shouting people down and not letting them finish is just bullying, not discussion. Though I suspect that's par for the course for O'Reilly, from what I've seen. It wasn't so much an interview as an excuse to rail on the guy for five minutes.Bill O'Reilly is terrible and your analysis is pretty much spot on. In general, anything from Fox "News" should be taken with a grain of salt.
In the UK many churchgoers only attend once or twice a year, and attendance has been steadily dropping for decades. How much of the US is privately secular, but conforms to social pressure to attend church? Is there anyone from the US who is willing to share their experience?There are a few dynamics at play in the US. First, yes, your observation is consistent with my experience here. A lot of people identify with the religion of their youth or the religion of their parents, but do not strictly adhere to doctrines. A lot of my friends call themselves religious, but they engage in premarital sex. Or are openly gay. Or any number of other things their faiths forbid. So while it provides an identity and a social group, it does not factor heavily into their daily priorities. However, despite these inconsistencies, people still cling to that identity (ie, calling yourself an atheist is political suicide).
If humans are biologically limited, then are they doomed to destroy each other? I suspect that a nuclear war will break out, when countries are fighting over the last bits of natural resources such as fresh water.I think it's a possibility that humans may cause a world ending scenario. It's been a possibility from the start of the nuclear age. But we are not "doomed" to it like a foregone conclusion. We will have to implement new technologies, radically alter how we view the earth, and completely overhaul our political systems, but in the immortal words of Monty Python: "...I'm not dead yet!"
Necessity is the mother of invention and Science Fiction has brought the warnings of necessity early.Unfortunately, I think your optimism is a bit misplaced. Current UN predictions are that 2/3rds of the world population will have insufficient fresh water within 15-20 years.
I do not think we will get even close to nuclear war over resources until we have already spread out to other planets.
Once we have done that the answer to running out of resources would be preemptive journeys to find more before the stores you have run out.
):"You never believed in the meaning of this world, and you therefore deduced the idea that everything was equivalent and that good and evil could be defined according to one's wishes. You supposed that in the absence of any human or divine code the only values were those of the animal world--in other words, violence and cunning. Hence you concluded that man was negligible and that his soul could be killed, that in the maddest of histories the only pursuit for the individual was the adventure of power and his only morality, the realism of conquests. And, to tell the truth, I, believing I thought as you did, saw no valid argument to answer you except a fierce love of justice which, after all, seemed to me as unreasonable as the most sudden passion.
Where lay the difference? Simply that you... readily accepted despair and I never yielded to it. Simply that you saw the injustice of our condition to the point of being willing to add to it, whereas it seemed to me that man must exalt justice in order to fight against eternal injustice, create happiness in order to protect against the universe of unhappiness. Because you turned your despair into intoxication, because you freed yourself from it by making a principle of it, you were willing to destroy man's works and to fight him in order to add to his basic misery. Meanwhile, refusing to accept that despair and that tortured world, I merely wanted men to rediscover their solidarity in order to wage war against their revolting fate.
As you see, from the same principle we derived quite different codes...you chose injustice and sided with the gods.
I, on the contrary, chose justice in order to remain faithful to the world. I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one. The world has at least the truth of man, and our task is to provide its justification against fate itself. And it has no justification but man; hence he must be saved if we want to save the idea we have of life. With your scornful smile you will ask me: what do you mean by saving man? And with all my being I shout to you that I mean not mutilating him and yet giving a chance to the justice that man alone can conceive."
You guys need to pay more attention to quantum mechanics. Science has basically discovered that consciousness creates the reality it observes on the quantum level. The entire universe, basically, exists as a giant mirror of our collective ability to perceive it.Uhhh...what? Can you expound upon this? Because right now it sounds like a mix of physics, neuroscience, and Jungian pyschology that just doesn't work.
However, I must remain unconvinced that it is possible to solve for all variables. Think about it; there are literally infinite ways one could put together a mathematically defined universe, and only in a vanishingly small fraction of these would it be possible to discover/solve for all of the variables in that universe using mathematics, logic, and the scientific method.You are right to be unconvinced, because mathematicians, logicians, and scientists certainly are. There was a time it was believed that if we knew all variables, we could simply "plug and chug" our way to all the answers, but this ended at the start of the 20th century when classical Newtonian physics was overturned. The universe was not as deterministic as we thought, and things aren't so neat and pretty.
The problem is that science alone can never make this jump. The system with the hyperparticle is set up such that the phenomena will invariably be dismissed as experimental error, and unless you already knew to look for it, or it also affected some other physical process in some predictable way, it would never be noted by a standard scientific approach.Again, look at chaos theory. Newtonian thought had a vice-like grip on the scientific world for hundreds of years. In the 1890s, Poincare first discovered what we would now call chaos. And what happened? He largely ignored it (although he did write a description of the butterfly effect some 20 years later). No one could grasp the gravity of what he had discovered, and the problem was ignored (because it was part of a question that everyone assumed Newtonian physics answered).
I could easily design a machine that would detect the hyperparticle using technology available today. The problem is that such a machine would need to cover a very large area, have a very low error rate, and be sensitive enough to detect even modest abnormalities. All this adds together to mean that detecting the hypothetical hyperparticle would be incredibly expensive, and no one could gather supporting evidence that would be considered scientifically credible.Ignoring the fact that CERN's incredibly expensive LHC is designed in part to test for higher dimensions that may lead to finding your [admittedly hypothetical] particle, I think you're losing perspective on history. We're on the precipice of the unknown, but history is full of examples where claims exactly like yours could have been made.
Lee StrobelWhile I respect your wish to keep opinions about authors out of this, I have to object here. I can't remember if I read The Case for Christ or The Case for Faith (I think it was the former), but it was abysmal. For being a former journalist, he fails miserably at writing an unbiased piece.
Even though I disagree with some of Strobel's conclusions I still like the idea behind his books. He comes up with a list of challenges to a religious belief (in this case a rather conservative branch of Christianity). For each challenge he then finds an expert on the subject, and then he lets the experts speak for themselves.
After each interview he asks the reader a few questions about their opinion of the challenge to Christianity and the discussion of it, including asking which points in the counter argument were weak.
LOL, finally some athiests besides me on the thread!I think there's plenty around here, but making it seem like a club is counter-productive to the intent of the thread.
To humor all people that say that people are born that way, Autistic people are born violent, that doesnt mean that they have a right to be. Life is about doing something with it, not just making excuses for everything saying its out of your control.Blue Priest, while I normally disagree with what you say, I can at least respect it. However, I find this totally unacceptable. For one, you clearly don't understand autism, as your blanket statement is as ridiculous as it is wrong. I would hope a christian could muster some more compassion for one of god's fellow creations. Second, at least in the US, if your in-law truly has a condition, he could have been treated differently under the law, because we recognize that it is NOT an excuse and he should NOT be treated as the same as someone who knowingly made the same decision.
So why should being born that way be an excuse, if we still say autistic people arent allowed to be violent? Also, an in-law who is mentally slow, got sent to jail on child molestation charges, because he didnt understand something he just said, not did, but only said to a boy was wrong.
So to answer your question, why should that be an excuse?
dudes... evolution CANT co-exist with intelligent design, intelligent design is the EXACT OPPOSITE of evolution, therefore evidence for evolution IS evidence against intelligent design.What about deism?
you might say: why cant evolution and intelligent design co-exist?
well, because: evolution states (with proof) that humans and all modern animals evolved from what you creationists like to call "primordial soup"(i have no idea WTF u guys were thinking when u called it that)
intelligent design states (with the only proof being the bible or something :/) that god(or maybe the flying spaghetti monster) made humans go "poof" into existence.
There are no scientific papers on intelligent design, there are a great many on evolution. But as I said earlier evidence for evolution is not evidence against an intelligence behind the formation of life.
There are no scientific papers on intelligent design, there are a great many on evolution.
There are no scientific papers on intelligent design...
