I can’t ascertain for myself whether I “read” like your friend or not, but I can tell you that is not an accurate representation of what or how I believe. I have to get to work, but I will be back and I will hare more of my perspective if you’ll have it.
Thanks, y’all
You speak with a voice of authority here…
Hmmm…this does explain a lot. You know, about the odor and such…
Live octopus is commonly served in beach restaurants for the drinking clientele, in the evenings by the seaside. They are chopped up alive and squirming. Raw fish is also served alive and squirming. This is especially true for fishing trips. You catch the fish, cut it up, dip it in sauce and eat it right on the boat.
Several people have asked. Me included.
@Tin-Man I’m sorry I have seemed to miss your request to know why I believe in God. If you will allow me some time. Duty calls.
In all fairness, I realize you are trying to respond to posts from multiple people who are coming at you from different angles. As such, it is easy to miss things in some of these threads. With that in mind, please allow me to “recap” some points from my previous posts to save you some search time.
The God of the bible is suppose to be All-knowing, All-powerful, All-benevolent, and PERFECT. (Do you agree?)
The bible is touted as being THE Perfect Words of said God. It is THE book of instructions to be used by all of humanity until the day the world ends. (Do you agree?)
The same All-powerful/All-knowing PERFECT God dictated the words of the bible to his human scribes and “guided their hands” as they wrote his sacred messages… over the course of many centuries. (Do you agree?) Which begs the question, by the way… That same God created the entire universe and our little planet all within six days, right? YET, it took it SEVERAL CENTURIES to have HUMANS write his most important messages to humanity and get them all compiled into one book? During a time period when a majority of humans were illiterate? Uh, anyway…
The bible is LOADED with many blatant errors. And people STILL believe it was dictated by a PERFECT All-knowing God??? Allllll-righty, then…
Okay, those are the highlights. Looking forward to your response.
Doesn’t Matter.
Like I said I’ve had the same basic conversation before. So I find you redundant.
Have Fun.
Tia? Redundant? Come on, Tia is like an ever flowing river. A process and not a thing. She has moved on. Her belief in God when you completely demolished every possible rationalization she had for her belief, is not the same belief she has now. Remember, Buddhist Master says, “You can not put the same foot in the same river twice.” Tia has moved on. This is an entirely new presentation. I get, that from an outsider’s point of view, rocks still look like rocks, twigs still look like twigs, and the arguments she uses still lool like shit; however, there are subtile but important differences in shit. Think about it. Elephant shit is nothing like monkey shit. Hell, you can make a soup out of elephant shit and it still has a lot of its nutrients. Monkey shit is barely good for feeding the ants and it is a whole lot easier to throw than Elephant shit. You ever tried to throw elephant shit. For starters, you have to use two hands to loft that basketball sized dump into the air. Then the shit falls apart as it heads towards the target. Bits of chunky slime here, a blob of grass there, all the way to the target. Hell, if you fling a three pound elephanat turd at a target, you will be lucky in 6 ounces actually hit the damn thing. Now, monkey turds are a thing of beauty. (At this point you should begin wondering why in the fuck you are reading this shit.) A monkey turd is easily compacted and can form nicely to fit in the palm of the hand. It can be shaped into an aerodynamic missile. The true beautiy of a monkey turd lies in its shiny outer skin. Monkey turds, unlike elephant turds, can be polished, thus enhancing their aerodynamic possibilities. For Example: I can hit a rat shit off the top of a goal post at two hunderd meters while throwing up hill, against the wind, in a snow storm, with my tail caught in a hamster trap, and a gerbil trying to crawl out my ass. (You really need to get a fucking life if you have managed to read this far. What the fuck is wrong with you? Don’t you have any friends?)
So to say, “Tia is using the same arguments over and over again,” is to miss the fact that she is like a monkey turd being flung to a target. Her life began in the palm of an ape and as she flies from her starting point to her final destination,. she is like a shiny orb of flying shit. Never in the same place twice and everything about her spinning and changing from moment to moment. Tia is a process and not a thing. Your attempt to confine her existence to a single moment in time by asserting you talked to her at some point in the past, is to miss the entire point of a flying, shiny, monkey turd, and the process that is Tia moving through time and life.
A. Yes.
Thank you for your list. I do appreciate it. Belief can be a very broad topic. I’m glad that you narrowed down what it is that you would like my opinion on.
Even so, I am just one person with one expanding set of ideas and ideals. I by no means have the answers to everything nor do I claim to have. I do believe in God, but someone else may have information more palpable to you. Perhaps not.
I have my own proofs, that much like my experience of consciousness is exclusive to my personal experiences in life and in death.
I can share them with you. I can share with you how I think and how I feel, but it is pretty much guaranteed that if you aren’t trying to understand, you won’t.
Even if you do sincerely want to conceive my finite ideas on infinity, it has been my experience that it will be something akin to trying to explain to you my experience of the color blue. Unless you have some concept of blue, I will sound like a quack when I muse about the shade of the afternoon sky.
Conversely, every argument that the light seen is a prism, or that the sky is actually seen as purple cannot take away nor diminish my experience of blue. All it will do is help further educate me on what it is that I am experiencing.
I will willingly, actively, and sincerely try my best to convey though. I will also try my best to learn from y’all. I can promise you that, if you still care to know.
@Cognostic you are a truly unique creature. That made me laugh.
@Tia_Thompson Interestingly enough I worked two years in a greenhouse. It was not commercial, but on a military base. It was just Ziggy and I, he was the boss and played the military politics well. Almost everything we grew was in two categories, for quality flowerbeds, or holiday gifts. I lost count of how many poinsettias I grew, because a week before christmas we had a steady flow of officers or senior NCO’s coming by, Ziggy would give each one them a beautiful potted poinsettia. Ziggy knew how to curry favor.
But wow, did he ever know how to grow quality flowers. We did all of it old-school manual, nothing plastic or artificial. We had a compost pile, shredded it regularly, and I must have built up strong shoulder muscles, I did so much shoveling.
Ziggy was an interesting story, a Polish peasant who spent at least two years in a Nazi death camp. Every day the guards would go around and select those for execution. Ziggy feigned being insane. He was.
Ouch. Sorry, but there is no, “Yes, but…” there. IF the bible is the Perfect Words of a PERFECT God, then MAN had nothing to do with developing or “approaching” the “concept of God.” That book was COMPOSED BY GOD, right? Meaning that PERFECT God included EVERYTHING in it EXACTLY the way he wanted it. There should be NOTHING for Man to guess. There should be NOTHING for Man to have to interpret. Coming from an all-powerful/all-knowing entity, the message in that book should be CRYSTAL CLEAR. ANYBODY who reads that book should come away with the EXACT SAME message as everybody else who reads it. No ifs, ands, or buts.
Sorry. Wrong again. According to that Perfect book written by a PERFECT God (to which you agreed), the BIBLE is the ONLY book that should ever be used as a source of information and inspiration in Life. Those who seek knowledge outside the bible are considered heretics.
Try telling that to quite a few “hardcore” Christians I have known during my life. And it was a literal six days that I was taught during MY childhood. Regardless, that’s just another example of how faulty that PERFECT book is. The book dictated by a PERFECT God.
(In the interest of avoiding assumptions, you ARE aware of what “Perfect” means, aren’t you?)
Speaking of which, you did not address my question about how a book with so many obvious errors/mistakes was “created” by a PERFECT All-knowing God. (Just so you know, no Christian I have asked that question has ever been able to provide an answer.)
Oh, and you still haven’t explained why you believe in and praise such a god.
My thoughts on the personal aspect of one’s belief in god is on the same level as one’s personal belief in the invisible pink unicorn. A personal belief is not above reproach just because it happens to be personal, and when it comes to religion or spirituality you automatically lose credence to labeling it personal when others affirm to having the same belief as you. Theists like to think their personal beliefs are rational, but they just aren’t. Especially if they cannot provide the adequate evidence for god’s existence. Have faith on a personal level, just don’t expect me to buy into its authenticity in a secular reality.
Oh dear, there are numerous issues in this thread.
Item number one. Atheists don’t “hate god”, they don’t think there’s an entity to hate, or for that matter, to react to in any manner whatsoever. To be more rigorous, they don’t think that the numerous cartoon magic men asserted to exist in pre-scientific mythologies are anything other than fictional constructs. Those who like myself treat this issue with far more seriousness than mythology fanboys do, are perfectly willing to accept an entity accompanied by genuine evidence, instead of the usual tiresome mixture of “my mythology says so” and ex recto apologetic fabrications that a five year old would consider risible, that is the usual stock in trade of mythology fanboys. Indeed, on the old version of the forums, I explored possibilities that the mythology fanboys are incapable of even fantasising about, let alone understanding the ramifications thereof.
Item number two. I’m already experiencing the antennal twitch that occurs whenever I detect even the faintest scent of the “atheist genocide” nonsense, which usually involves wheeling out various dictators as purported “archetypes” of atheists, frequently for duplicitous well poisoning purposes. Which, if necessary, I shall deal with the requisite ordnance drop. Trust me, you do not want to provide the motivation for me to do this.
Item number three. As a direct counter to the well poisoning stereotype being peddled about atheists here, I give you a certain Alan Turing. Who not only saved who knows how many million lives, by shortening the duration of World War II, but who also made possible the computers we now all enjoy, and who also published in 1952, a remarkable scientific paper describing a model for biological morphogenesis, based upon reaction-diffusion equations applied to various morphgenetic enzymes. An accomplishment that is all the more remarkable, because this work was published before we knew about the likes of the bmp, wnt, fgf, pax and hox genes, but which was established to be correct in several model organisms. One particularly nice example centres upon Papilio dardanus butterflies, and their mimetic female wing patterns, and the operation of Turing morphogenesis was spectacularly confirmed in that species back in 2000. Yes, I have the papers (no less than sixteen of them, as it happens) documenting the subsequent experimental work that validated Turing’s ideas in this field. But of course, the usual suspects avoid mentioning Turing, because he destroys all of their lies on this matter.
Oh, by the way, Cog, when listing the absurd mythological assertions that have been flushed down the toilet by science, you missed out the one about genetics being purportedly controlled by coloured sticks.
This rings a few bells. I remember having read about this some time ago, and would like to read it again, but I am not able to find it. Can you share the relevant references with me?
The best humor has its roots in looking at reality with a little twist. I am pretty sure Tia is not a shiny flying orb of shit, but thinking about a set of lips on a turd spewing biblical allegories, that’s a funny image.
I do not have a problem with Tia. Yes, she is a theist and her thinking is a bit fuzzy. But she is not the one in here throwing insults.
I saw this today and thought of Tin Man
