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alt.atheism

re americans and evolution robert singleton bobs thnext mit edu wrote sure it isn t mutually exclusive but it lends weight to i e increases notional running estimates of the posterior probability of the atheist s pitch in the partition and thus necessarily reduces the same quantity in the theist s pitch this is because the divine component falls prey to ockham s razor the phenomenon being satisfactorily explained without it and there being no independent evidence of any such component more detail in the next post occam s razor is not a law of nature it is way of analyzing an argument even so it interesting how often it s cited here and to what end it seems odd that religion is simultaneously condemned as being primitive simple minded and unscientific anti intellectual and childish and yet again condemned as being too complex occam s razor the scientific explanation of things being much more straightforeward and apparently simpler which is it to be which is the non essential and how do you know considering that even scientists don t fully comprehend science due to its complexity and diversity maybe william of occam has performed a lobotomy kept the frontal lobe and thrown everything else away this is all very confusing i m sure one of you will straighten me out tough bill

alt.atheism

re amusing atheists and agnostics timmbake mcl ucsb edu bake timmons writes ok you have disproved one thing but you failed to nail me see nowhere in my post did i claim that something must be believed in here are the three possibilities god exists god does not exist i don t know my attack was on strong atheism since i am i guess by what you said below that makes me a weak atheist snip first of all you seem to be a reasonable guy why not try to be more honest and include my sentence afterwards that honest it just ended like that i swear hmmmm i recognize the warning signs alternating polite and rude coming into newsgroup with huge chip on shoulder calls people names and then makes nice whirrr click whirrr clam bake timmons bill shit stirrer connor q e d whirr click whirr frank o dwyer might also be contained in that shell pop stack to determine whirr click whirr killfile keith allen schneider frank closet theist o dwyer the mind reels maybe they re all bobby mozumder maddi hausmann madhaus netcom com centigram communications corp san jose california kids please don t try this at home remember i post professionally

alt.atheism

re death penalty was re political athei in article apr abo fi mandtbacka finabo abo fi mats andtbacka writes in o rusnews w w mantis co uk mathew writes i wonder if noam chomsky is reading this i could be wrong but is he actually talking about outright government control of the media aka censorship if he doesn t any quick one stop shopping reference to his works that ll tell me in short what he does argue for manufacturing consent a film about the media you alternative movie source may have this or to book it in your local alternative theatre contact films transit international sales jan rofekamp notre dame e montreal quebec canada h y c tel fax telex filmtransmtl us readers call zeitgeist films at s shamim mohamed uunet noao cmcl arizona shamim shamim cs arizona edu take this cross and garlic here s a mezuzah if he s jewish a page of the koran if he s a muslim and if he s a zen buddhist you re on your own member of the league for programming freedom write to lpf uunet uu net

alt.atheism

re requests in article vice ico tek com bobbe vice ico tek com robert beauchaine writes from bobbe vice ico tek com robert beauchaine subject re requests date apr gmt in article c qllg bc mailer cc fsu edu mayne cs fsu edu writes excess stuff deleted however it seems that a local church elder has been getting revelations from god about a devastating quake scheduled to level the area on may rd he has independent corroboration from several friends who apparently have had similar revelations the quake was in fact in response to a request from the lot of them seeking a sign from god on the veracity of their visions none of this would be terribly interesting except for the amount of stir it has created in the area many many people are taking these claims very seriously there are some making plans to be out of the are on the target date my local religious radio station devoted hours of discussion on the topic i even called up during one of the live broadcasts to tell the host that he would have a full account of my conversion on may th provided my family and i survived the devastation and ruin that will invariably follow the quake bob beauchaine bobbe vice ico tek com they said that queens could stay they blew the bronx away and sank manhattan out at sea i know of a similar incident about years ago a climatologist ithink that was his profession named iben browning predicted that an earthquake would hit the new madrid fault on dec some schools in missouri that were on the fault line actually cancelled school for the day many people evacuated new madrid and other towns in teh are i wouldn t be suprised if there were more journalists in the area than residents of course teh earthquake never occured how do i know about his i used to live in southern illinois and the lican middle school was built directly on the fault line no we still had school we laughed at the poor idiots who believed the prediction bob if you re wanting an excuse to convert to christianity you gonna have to look elsewhere tammy no trim healy

alt.atheism

re studies on book of mormon in article snx enkidu mic cl agrino enkidu mic cl andres grino brandt writes from agrino enkidu mic cl andres grino brandt subject studies on book of mormon date sun apr cst hi i don t know much about mormons and i want to know about serious independent studies about the book of mormon i don t buy the official story about the gold original taken to heaven but haven t read the book of mormon by myself i have to much work learning biblical hebrew i will appreciate any comment about the results of study in style vocabulary place names internal consistency and so on for example there is evidence for one writer or multiple writers there are some mention about events places or historical persons later discovered by archeologist yours in collen andres grino brandt casilla santiago agrino enkidu mic cl chile no hay mas realidad que la realidad y la razon es su profeta i don t think the book of mormon was supposedly translated from biblical hebrew i ve read that prophet joseph smith traslated the gold tablets from some sort of egyptian ish language former mormons please post tammy no trim healy

alt.atheism

re societal basis for morality in article c prv ni news cso uiuc edu cobb alexia lis uiuc edu mike cobb wrote we have to expect others to follow our notion of societally mandated morality pardon the extremism but couldn t i murder your brother and say that i was exercising my rights as i saw them was doing what felt good didn t want anyone forcing their morality on me or i don t follow your morality good statement should we apply empirical measurements to define exact social morals should morals be based on social rules on ancient religious doctrines it seems there will never be a common and single denominator for defining morals and as such defining absolute and objective morals is doomed to fail as long as humans have this incredible talent of creative thinking cheers kent sandvik newton apple com alink ksand private activities on the net

alt.atheism

re genocide is caused by atheism in article apr monu cc monash edu au darice yoyo cc monash edu au fred rice wrote fred the problem with such reasoning is that for us non believers we need a better measurement tool to state that person a is a real muslim christian while person b is not as i know there are no such tools and anyone could believe in a religion misuse its power and otherwise make bad pr it clearly shows the sore points with religion in other words show me a movement that can t spin off khomeinis stalins davidians husseins i don t think such a system exists i think the reason for that is an condition known as free will we humans have got it anybody using their free will can tell lies and half truths about any system and thus abuse it for their own ends i don t think such tools exist either in addition there s no such thing as objective information all together it looks like religion and any doctrines could be freely misused to whatever purpose this all reminds me of descartes whispering deamon you can t trust anything so why bother cheers kent sandvik newton apple com alink ksand private activities on the net

alt.atheism

re free moral agency in article c pxqs lm darkside osrhe uoknor edu bil okcforum osrhe edu bill conner wrote as for your question of moral free agency given the christian position above the freedom we have is to acknowledge god the morality we practice is a direct outgrowth of how we excercise that freedom you are free to ignore god in the same way you are free to ignore gravity and the consequences are inevitable and well known in both cases that an atheist can t accept the evidence means only that he prefers not to accept it it says nothing about the evidence itself i agree i had a hard feeling not believing my grand grand mother who told me of elves dancing outside barns in the early mornings i preferred not to accept it even if her statement provided the truth itself life is hard cheers kent sandvik newton apple com alink ksand private activities on the net

alt.atheism

re yet more rushdie re islamic law in article c qt p mvo blaze cs jhu edu arromdee jyusenkyou cs jhu edu ken arromdee wrote in article bu edu jaeger buphy bu edu gregg jaeger writes i think many reading this group would also benefit by knowing how deviant the view as i ve articulated it above which may not be the true view of khomeini is from the basic principles of islam from the point ov view of an atheist i see you claim khomeini wasn t practicing true islam but i m sure that he would have said the same about you how am i a member of neither group supposed to be able to tell which one of you two is really a true muslim fred rice answered this already in an early posting the problem with your argument is that you do not know who is a real believer and who may be faking it this is something known only by the person him herself and god your assumption that anyone who claims to be a believer is a believer is not necessarily true in other words it seems that nobody could define who is a true and false muslim we are back to square one khomeini and hussein are still innocent and can t be defined as evil or good islamic worshippers cheers kent sandvik newton apple com alink ksand private activities on the net

alt.atheism

re islamic authority over women in article apr monu cc monash edu au darice yoyo cc monash edu au fred rice wrote the problem with your argument is that you do not know who is a real believer and who may be faking it this is something known only by the person him herself and god your assumption that anyone who claims to be a believer is a believer is not necessarily true so that still leaves the door totally open for khomeini hussein et rest they could still be considered true muslims and you can t judge them because this is something between god and the person you have to apply your rule as well with atheists agnostics you don t know their belief this is something between them and god so why the hoopla about khomeini not being a real muslim and the hoopla about atheists being not real human beings cheers kent sandvik newton apple com alink ksand private activities on the net

alt.atheism

re suggestion for resources faq date mon apr gmt from bruce stephens bruce liverpool ac uk i think a good book summarizing and comparing religions would be good i confess i don t know of any indeed that s why i checked the faq to see if it had one but i m sure some alert reader does i think the list of books suffers far too much from being christian based i agree that most of the traffic is of this nature although a few islamic references might be good but i still think an overview would be nice one book i have which presents a fairly unbiased account of many religions is called man s religions by john b noss it was a textbook in a class i had on comparative religion or some such thing it has some decent bibliographies on each chapter as a jumping off point for further reading it doesn t compare religions directly but describes each one individually and notes a few similarities but nothing i have read in it could be even remotely described as preachy or christian based in fact christianity mercifully consumes only or so of its nearly pages the book is divided according to major regions of the world where the biggies began india east asia near east there is nothing about new world religions from the aztecs mayas incas etc just the stuff people kill each other over nowadays and a few of the older religions snuffed out along the way if you like the old stuff then a couple of books called the ancient near east by james b pritchard are pretty cool got the epic of gilgamesh code of hammurabi all the stuff from way back when men were gods and gods were men essential reading for anyone who wishes to make up their own religion and make it sound real good

alt.atheism

re amusing atheists and agnostics date apr gmt from bake timmons timmbake mcl ucsb edu my my there are a few atheists with time on their hands ok first i apologize i didn t bother reading the faq first and so fired an imprecise flame that was inexcusable how about the nickname bake flamethrower timmons you weren t at the koresh compound around noon today by any chance were you remember koresh dried for your sins and pass that beef jerky umm umm

alt.atheism

re objective values v scientific accuracy was re after years can we say that christian morality is in article s rusnews w w mantis co uk mathew mathew mantis co uk wrote lpzsml unicorn nott ac uk steve lang writes values can also refer to meaning for example in computer science the value of is true and is false not in lisp true all you need to define is one statement that defined one polarity and all the other states are considered the other polarity then again what is the meaning of nil false or true cheers kent sandvik newton apple com alink ksand private activities on the net

alt.atheism

re it s all mary s fault dfuller portal hq videocart com dave fuller writes nice attempt chris verrry close you missed the conspiracy by step joseph knew who knocked her up he couldn t let it be known that somebody else got ol mary prego that wouldn t do well for his popularity in the local circles so what happened is that she was feeling guilty he was feeling embarrassed and they decided to improve both of their images on what could have otherwise been the downfall for both clever indeed come to think of it i have gained a new respect for the couple maybe joseph and mary should receive all of the praise being paid to jesus lucky for them that the baby didn t have any obvious deformities i could just see it now mary gets pregnant out of wedlock so to save face she and joseph say that it was god that got her pregnant and then the baby turns out to be deformed or even worse stillborn they d have a lot of explaining to do dave buckminster fuller how is that one o keeper of the nicknames nanci if you know and are sure of the author of this quote please send me email nm w andrew cmu edu life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh

alt.atheism

re islam and scientific predictions was in article c l fv h r ra nrl navy mil khan itd itd nrl navy mil umar khan writes how would a man of th century arabia have known what not to include in the holy qur an assuming he had authored it so now we re judging the qur an by what s not in it how many mutton headed arguments am i going to have to wade through today lots of other books have been written on this subject those books can speak far more eloquently than i one would hope bob beauchaine bobbe vice ico tek com they said that queens could stay they blew the bronx away and sank manhattan out at sea

alt.atheism

re yet more rushdie re islamic law in article apr bnr ca rashid writes p s i m not sure about this but i think the charge of shatim also applies to rushdie and may be encompassed under the umbrella of the fasad ruling please define the words shatim and fasad before you use them again john david munch jmunch hertz elee calpoly edu the heart can change be full of hate or love if people are allowed to base their lives through their hearts anything can happen a dangerous situation in my opinion bobby mozumder describing problems with atheism

alt.atheism

re the inimitable rushdie re an anecdote about islam in article apr cs nott ac uk eczcaw mips nott ac uk c wainwright writes in article bu edu jaeger buphy bu edu gregg jaeger writes the authorities i am referring to is the authority of the world islamic community over itself my point was simply that islamic law does apply to muslims wherever they are despite the fact that islamic law may not be enforcable in non islamic countries muslims residing in the uk may decide to be tried or whatever by the islamic community but their rulings have no legal consequences in these isles it s not really their decision to be tried the rulings do have legal consequences but only in islamic law and not in uk law this should be obvious enforcing a judgment is distinct from the making of a judgment take for example the judgments of the world court this is an internationally recognized tribunal whose judgments often have no physical or economic effect but which are important despite the fact that their judgments cannot be enforced the person may be excommunicated or similar but if it decided to mete out violent laws such as the fatwa then it would be breaking uk laws itself and the persons doing such would be liable to prosecution of course have you read any of this thread before this post to ignore the country s laws in preference to religious laws which are not indigenous to the country in question is an absurd and arrogant notion of course it is a sort of anarchism anarchism is explicitly against islam thank you for your well reasoned response but it is beside the points i ve been making in this thread gregg

alt.atheism

re jewish settlers demolish a mosque in gaza in c iwxm g z news chalmers se d bertil dtek chalmers se bertil jonell writes in article kutluk ccl umist ac uk kutluk ccl umist ac uk kutluk ozguven writes atheists are not mentioned in the quran because from a quranic point of view and a minute s reasoning one can see that there is no such thing but there are people who say that they are atheists if they aren t atheists what are they when the quran uses the word din it means way of individual thinking behaving communal order and protocols based on a set of beliefs this is often interpreted as the much weaker term religion the atheists are not mentioned in the quran along with jews mushriqin christians etc because the latter are all din to have a din you need a set of beliefs assumptions etc to forma a social code for example the marxist have those such as history conflict etc that they do not put idols sometimes they did to represent those assuptions does not mean they are any different from the other mushriq or roughly polytheists there cannot be social atheism because when there is a community that community needs common ideas or standard beliefs to coordinate the society when they inscribe assumptions say nation or progress is the natural consequence of human activity or parlamentarian democracy is doubtlessly the best way of government however they individually insist they do not have gods from the quranic point of view they do therefore by definition atheism does not exist we are a atheist society in fact means we reject the din other than ours atheism can only exist when people reject all the idols gods dogmas suppositions of the society that they part and in that case that is a personal deviation of belief and quran tells about such deviations and disbelief but as i mentioned from a quranic point of looking at things there is no atheism in the macro level i think it took more than one minute kutluk

alt.atheism

nostalgia the recent rise of nostalgia in this group combined with the incredible level of utter bullshit has prompted me to comb through my archives and pull out some of the best of alt atheism for your reading pleasure i ll post a couple of these a day unless group concensus demands that i stop or i run out of good material i haven t been particularly careful in the past about saving attributions i think the following comes from john a johnson but someone correct me if i m wrong this is probably the longest of my entire collection so that the prophecy be fulfilled in considering the christian religion and judging it according to its claims it is important to look at its claims at fulfilling earlier jewish prophecy the scribe matthew is perhaps the most eager to draw out what he thinks are prophetic answers in the career of jesus of nazareth as you will see matthew s main strategy is to take various old testament passages often not even about the promised messiah and apply them to the circumstances in the new testament we must also bear in mind the question of the authenticity of the accounts since the gospels were written at least years after jesus was executed we do not know how much happened exactly as stated but for purposes of analysis we will take particular claims at face value immanuel we begin of course at the beginning mt mary will bear a son and you joseph will name him jesus which means g d is salvation for he will save his people from their sins all this happened to fulfil what the lord had spoken by a prophet isaiah in the days of ahaz c bce king of judah rezin of syria and pekah of israel made war on jerusalem capitol of judah but could not quite conquer it when the house of david i e ahaz and his court in judah were told of this its heart and the heart of its people shook and the lord g d said to isaiah go to meet with ahaz and the lord spoke to ahaz through prophet isaiah naturally saying ask a sign of g d your lord it can be as deep as sheol or as high as heaven but ahaz said i won t ask i will not put the lord to a test then isaiah said hear then o house of david is it not enough for you to weary men that you must weary my god too therefore the lord himself will give you a sign behold a young woman is with child and will bear a son and name him immanuel which means g d is with us he will eat curds and honey when he knows how to refuse evil and choose good for before the child knows how to refuse evil and choose good the land of the two kings you dread will have been deserted matthew homes in on just the sentence that is in italics further he the hebrew word almah young woman as specifically virgin but this is not a prophecy about the messiah it is not a prophecy about an event to happen years later it is not a prophecy about a virgin bethulah mother in short it not about jesus matthew has made use of a verse out of context and tries to make it fit the specific case of mary it should be noted that if we want to read the prophecy in a general manner a very general one it can be made to fit mary mary virgin or not was indeed a young woman with child of course the fit is shady and has problems jesus while thought of by later christians to be g d walking among men was never called by the name immanuel if christianity wished to claim this prophecy for jesus it becomes at best a cut and paste prophecy a second class prophecy not too convincing egypt after jesus s birth in bethlehem matthew tells about a quick and elsewhere unmentioned excursion to egypt as if he wishes to liken jesus to moses this was done to escape an alleged infanticidal rampage of the king herod mt and remained there until the death of herod this was to fulfil what the lord had spoken out of egypt i have cal led my son what the lord really said was this hosea when israel was a child i loved him and out of egypt i called my son the more i called them my people the more they went from me they kept sacrificing to the ba als and kept burning incense to idols matthew conveniently omits the rest of hosea s oracle but it was indeed israel that once called out of egypt wanted to return this is history jesus is certainly not being spoken of here and if we are to draw some kind of parallel here we wind up with a jesus that flees and resists g d again this prophecy is just not as convincing as matthew probably had hoped rachel weeps while jesus is off vacationing in egypt matthew says that king herod sought to kill him and thus ordered the executions of all young male children matthew then writes mt by this that which was spoken by the prophet jeremiah was fulfilled a voice was heard in ramah wailing and loud lamentation rachel weeping for her children she refused to be consoled because they were no more the reference is to a passage in jeremiah referring to the carrying off of israel into exile by sargon of assyria in bce rachel the ancestor of the major tribes of israel ephraim and manasseh is said to weep for her descendants who are no more it is metaphorical of course since rachel lived and dies before the hebrews were even in the egyptian exile it is interesting to note that it was leah not rachel who was the ancestor of the judeans the land where jesus and bethlehem were if anyone should do weeping for her children it is leah the only connexion that rachel has with bethlehem is that the legends have it that she was buried north of the city on the way to ephrath bethlehem as for herod and his infanticide it is rather unlikely that such an event actually occurred one never knows but the event is not mentioned or alluded to anywhere else in the bible nor is it mentioned in any of the secular records of the time herod was particularly unliked in his reign and many far less evil deeds of herod were carefully recorded this might be a prime example of how events were added to jesus s life to enhance the message of the church s gospel because of the whole story s similarity to the tale of the infant moses in egypt it is highly likely that it is a device set up by matthew to add prophetic yet artificial approval of jesus it is not surprising that matthew conveniently neglects to mention the rest of the jeremiah quote the children the prophet speaks of are not dead but exiled in the assyrian empire g d comforts the weeping rachel saying that the children will be returned he will gather them back together of course this would not suit matthew s purpose as the children he speaks of are dead for good again the prophecy matthew sets up is not even that and to anyone who bothers to check it out is not too convincing the nazarene we do not even have to go to the next chapter to find another matthean prophecy after leaving egypt joseph wife take the infant jesus to live in the city of nazareth mt that what was spoken of by the prophets might be fulfilled he shall be called a nazarene first thing we notice is that matthew does not mention the name of the prophet s this time second we have to ask who he is there are no messianic prophecies speaking of a nazarene worse there are no prophecies period mentioning a nazarene still worse there are no nazarenes mentioned in the old testament at all in the book of judges an angel tells samson s mother that she will judges conceive and bear a son no razor shall tough his head for he will be a nazirite to his god from the day of his birth he will deliver israel from the hands of the philistines this is of course not a prophecy of jesus or the messiah of g d but it is the best that can be found obviously matthew has begun to go overboard in cut and paste prophecies in that he is simple making them up now bearing our diseases jesus next goes around healing people of physical illnesses and disabilities mt this was to fulfil what was spoken by the prophet isaiah he took our infirmities and bore our diseases as expected the verse quoted in isaiah is quoted out of context and a few words are skewed to fit the christian scheme we have is surely he the suffering servant has borne our sickness and carried our pains from a reading of the surrounding passages in isaiah we know that the prophet is speaking in present tense of the collective nation of israel jehovah s chosen servant and people he speaks to the israelites suffering in exile in the voice of the gentile nations that look upon it this image is deeply ingrained in jewish identity an image of a chastised yet cherished israel as the instrument of the nations salvation by g d the verses speak of israel taking on the sicknesses which are the literal and metaphorical manifestations of guilt and discipline they do not speak of a servant going around and healing people notice that the servant in isaiah takes on the sicknesses and pains of the nations and individual jews jesus as we all know did not take the diseases onto himself the verses here in isaiah are not a prophecy of something to come but rather something that had already happened while it is believed that jesus took on the eternal punishment of hell he did not bear the illnesses he healed so while someone might want to say that figuratively jesus reenacted the deeds of israel in his spiritual atonement he has to admit that matthew s parallel misses where he intended it to have its effect silent messiah upon healing multitudes of commoners it is said that jesus ordered them to keep quiet presumable so that he wouldn t arouse the attention of the local rulers mt this was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet isaiah behold my servant whom i have chosen my beloved with whom my soul is pleased i will put my spirit on him and he will announce justice to the gentiles he will not wrangle or cry aloud nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets he will not break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering wick until he brings justice to victory and the gentiles will hope in his name the isaiah passage quoted reads is behold my servant whom i uphold my chosen in whom my soul delights i have put my spirit on him and he will bring forth justice to the nations we will not cry or lift up his voice or make it heard in the street he will not break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering wick he will faithfully bring forth justice he will not fail burn dimly or be discouraged bruised until he has established justice in the earth and the coastlands await his law you see matthew has conveniently left out part of the passage because it does not suit the dealings of jesus christians could never think of jesus failing never would the light of mankind burn dimly but the servant nation of israel will indeed come to an end when its job is done when the gentiles come to embrace g d there will no longer be a chosen people but rather all will be the children of g d also the ending phrase has been changed from the judaic the coastlands await his law to the christologic the gentiles will hope in his name while the original proclaims the torah law of jehovah the other rewrites it to fit its strange doctrine of believing in the name if one has any doubt the servant referred to is not jesus one has only to read the whole chapter isaiah and hear about the beloved but blind and imperfect servant a people robbed and plundered so we see that when matthew s attempt at prophecy is examined it crumbles three days and three nights now we come upon a prophecy supposedly uttered by the very mouth of the god jesus himself he speaks of his crucifixion and resurrection mt for as jonah was in the belly of the whale for three days and three nights so will the son of man be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights before any further discussion can occur it is necessary to know how the jews understood days as far as day names went each was hours long lasting from sunset pm to the following sunset pm what was referred to as a day was the period of light from am to the ending sunset at pm thus according to our time scale a sabbath day began at pm friday evening and lasted until pm saturday evening this is why the jews celebrate their sabbath on the daylight portion of saturdays instead of sundays it seems like a real miracle that christians didn t forget that saturday was indeed the seventh and last day of the week thus when days and nights are referred to together hour daylight portions and hour night periods are being spoken of thus jesus says that he will be in the grave or in hell or otherwise unresurrected for three days and three nights as the good book tells us jesus was crucified on the ninth hour which is pm friday afternoon he then was put into the grave sometime after that then jesus left the grave rose before dawn of what we call sunday the dawn after the sabbath was over what this means is that jesus was using our time for clarity in the grave from pm friday night to some time before am sunday morning we could also add a little time before pm friday since the bible is not specific here what this means using jewish time is that he was in the grave for one day two nights and possibly a couple of hours of one day certainly this is a problem for jesus prediction there is absolutely no way we are even able to have his death involve three days and three nights even using modern time measurements we then are led to suspect that this error is another one of matthew s little mistakes and that the gospel writer put false words into his god s mouth and no matter who made the prediction it is more than unconvincing it is counter convincing hearing understanding jesus tool on a habit of speaking to his vast audiences in parables stories in which a deeper meaning could be found if you were already one of the elect those chosen to understand the message of jesus he reasons that those who can understand the parables are the ones he wants if the people cannot understand them there is no need to bother with them since they will not accept the plain message any better matthew says mt with them the audience indeed in fulfilled the prophecy of isaiah which says you will indeed hear but never understand and you will indeed see but never perceive because this people s heart has grown dull their ears are heavy of hearing and they have shut their eyes so the they would not perceive with them her with their ears and understand with their heart and turn for me to heal them the original isaiah passages are part of his earlier works his call to the ministry this is in bce when israel is flourishing right before it falls under the authority of assyria isaiah sees the good times ending and also a vision from g d calling him to bring reform to israel and judah is and g d said go and say to this people hear and hear but do not understand see and see but do not perceive make the heart of this people fat make their ears heavy and shut their eyes so they will not see with their eyes or hear with their ears and understand with their hearts and turn and be healed then isaiah said how long lord and he said until the cities lie waste without inhabitant and houses without men and the land is utterly desolate and the g ds take men far away and forsaken places are many in the land and though a tenth will remain in it it will be burned again like a terebinth or an oak whose stump still stands when the tree is felled the holy seed is its stump here we see that it is really g d who causes the people of israel to stop listening to the prophet s warnings but reaffirms the promise made to solomon s and david s seed lineage if you read the rest of isaiah you find that this is done to fulfil the plan of g d to use israel as a servant a light to the nations look at isaiah we see that matthew has cut and pasted just a little portion of isaiah s verse to suit his own gospel needs more than that he has altered the words to make it fit the people who didn t understand jesus s stories and as we see isaiah s verses are not prophecies but rather commands from g d to him in the present once again matthew s prophecy falls flat on its face matthew tries again to make jesus s parables look like they have the prophetic approval mt he said nothing to them without a parable this was to fulfil what was spoken of by the prophet i will open my mouth to them in parables i will utter that which has been hidden since the foundation of the world matthew really botches up here he attempts to quote not from a prophet but from the psalms ps i will open my mouth in parable i will utter dark sayings of old things that we all have heard and known things that our fathers have told us we will not hide them from their children but tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the lord as was pointed out the verses in the psalms do not really come from a prophet you might also want to know that earlier copies of matthew s gospel even inserted isaiah s name as this prophet apparently later scribes caught the error and tried to cover some of it up perhaps the most significant part of this is that once again matthew has altered the old testament scriptures as jesus has said earlier he speaks in parables so that some will not understand them the parables in the psalms are not to be hidden further they speak of things known that our fathers have told us jesus deals with things hidden since the foundation of the world indeed jesus dealt in a lot of secrecy and confusion this is in direct opposition to the parables in the psalms no wonder matthew had to rewrite them and still once again matthew s artificial prophecies fall flat on their face but christians rarely look at this matthew s prophecies aren t the only things about christianity that are beginning to look bad excuses of little faith in mt we see that the disciples are able to go around casting out demons except in one case not knowing what epilepsy was the people thought those with the disease were possesed with demons it is no wonder that the disciples were unable to dispossess the epileptic but jesus perhaps no more enlightened than they is reported to have rebuked them saying they didn t have enough faith this seems strange why was this demon special it seems that either a true believer has faith or he does not apparently enough faith will allow someone to move mountains of course you will find no one these days that can move real mountains no one parts seas the only miracles the charismatics can speak of are those rumoured to happen on trips to mexico or some faraway place major miracles are making some old woman s arthritis feel better on sunday morning t v and the gods including jesus are always shrouded in ancient lore and writings protected from the skeptics in their sacred pasts they are either dead sleeping or hiding in heaven with people rumouring about their imminent return and their great miracles of days long gone yet life goes on tales of mystics stories of miracles all in a distant time or a distant place gods used to reveal themselves to men in the old days jehovah too but now they are silent all the theologians give are various excuses as to why we don t get to see god anymore we re too lazy we re not zealous enough we re sinful it s just his plan we put too many of our own demands on g d s appearance if we had the right faith if we were willing to meet g d on his terms yet even the most pious of men have not seen g d you dear reader have not seen g d not literally you know that to be true i know that s presumptuous and bold but searching your heart you know what i mean all that we ve seen religions do is make people feel good and content about not seeing g d they say our little faith does not merit us to see g d sometimes they say see the love in these people you worship with see the lives of people change that is seeing g d thus people get lulled to sleep satisfied with turning g d into the everyday sights but that is not seeing g d as i am speaking of it is not seeing g d the way people used to see what we see in the world that is good is the compassion of human hearts the love given and taken by men and women the forgiveness practised by christian atheist alike beauty created by the mind of man these are the things that are done these are what we see but it is said this is so only because everybody has little faith jesus rides on an ass shortly after accepting the role of the jewish messiah king jesus requests a donkey be brought in for him to ride into jerusalem mt this took place to fulfil what was spoken by the prophet saying tell the daughter of zion behold your king is coming to you humble mounted on an ass and on a ass colt of course the passage quoted from zechariah reads a little differently lo your king comes to you he is triumphant and victorious humble and riding on an ass on an ass colt he will command peace to the nations there isn t all that much difference here except that zechariah only involves one animal an ass colt while matthew reads the poetic wording slightly differently thus he has jesus call for both a colt and an adult ass from matthew s version we get a comical picture of the divine christ sweating it to straddle two donkeys this could inevitably lead to a theological proctological dilemma we find that in the account written earlier by st mark only the colt was called for and brought to jesus this indeed fits the verses of zechariah properly and shows us that in matthew attempt to use prophetic verses he has bungled now excluding many respectable christians i have met i have noticed that while christ is thought to have ridden on asses the situation is often reversed nowadays then entering the jerusalem temple the priests were angered at people and youngsters calling jesus the messiah but jesus replied as we might expect matthew to have done mt haven t you read out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou has brought perfect praise it is more likely that matthew made this response up since jesus was never one to point out such little prophetic things and since as we might expect the quote is in error which seems to fit matthew s track record quite well we might ask jesus or matthew haven t you read for the source reads psalms o yahweh our lord how majestic is your name in the whole world you whose glory is chanted above the heavens by babes and infants you have founded a bulwark against your foes to still the enemy and the avenger the passages hardly need comment there is no perfect praise spoken of in the psalm and what praise is there is given to g d not his messiah king and not jesus as mentioned it seems to be just one more case of matthew s pen making up convenient prophetic scripture yhvh said to my lord jesus is said to have asked from whom the promised jewish messiah king is to be descended the jews agree it is king david but then jesus counters by quoting psalms the lord said to my lord sit at my right hand until i put your enemies under your feet taken at face value jesus is denying the necessity of davidic descent one assumes he is in opposition to their answer of course the christian answer is that he agrees but is trying to make some hidden point to reveal some mystery about the divine nature of the messiah king it s tempting to believe this if one is a christian and not interested in matters of investigation but there are problems in jesus s time the psalm was thought to be about the messiah and it is easy to see why david might refer to the messiah as his superior we need only look at the scriptures about the messiah to see that he is expected to be a great king bringing the jews to times even better than those under david s rule of course the jews listening had no good answer and the passage could indeed refer to a divine messiah such as the christians worship the problem lies in the meaning of this psalm an error that apparently several jews of jesus s time had also made one must remember that there were various factions among the jews often as a result of different expectations of the messiah king jesus was apparently one of these adventists like his audience who thought the messiah s advent was imminent and who interpreted psalms among others as being messianic what is the problem then psalm literally reads yhvh s utterance to my lord sit at my right hand until i make your enemies your footstool yhvh sends forth your mighty scepter from zion rule in the midst of your foes your people will offer themselves freely on the day you lead your host on the holy mountains you are a priest of the order of melchizedek forever the word lord is often mistakenly capitalised by christian bibles to denote divinity in this lord but in the hebrew the word is adoni and no capitalisation exists adoni simply means lord a generic term as we would use it it is used often in the scriptures to refer to kings and to g d it is merely an address of respect there is nothing in the text itself to imply that the word refers either to divinity or to the messiah king that this is supposed to be written by david is not certain the title of the psalm translates to either a psalm of david or a psalm about david it seems fitting to assume it to be written by a court poet about david s covenant and endorsement from g d if the psalm had been written by david it is unlikely that he would be talking about the messiah the idea of a perfect king descended from david was not present in david s age we have extensive tales of david s doings and sayings none of which include any praises of a messiah many of the psalms show evidence of being written long after david was dead in times of the exile when g d had put his show of favour for david s kingdom on hold the description in the psalm fit david very well david was promised by g d a rise to power victory over his enemies successful judgement among the nations he conquered he achieved the priesthood common to melchizedek in being a righteous king enabled to bless the people it all fits we do not have to blame this problem on matthew alone though here there is not artificial prophecy alluded to though his use of the scripture is rather questionable still this event is common to the other gospels too so we let matthew off a little more easily this time it is interesting to note though how matthew dresses up the event the earlier gospel of mark tells the tale with jesus simply speaking to a crowd matthew has the pharisees who became the religious competition of an infant christianity be the target of jesus s question as we might expect matthew writes that the event ends up by embarrassing the pharisees such power is the pen moses jesus had it together all along we leave the gospel story of matthew momentarily to see a pseudo prophecy in john s gospel the gospel story of john deserves special treatment because it seems to be so far removed from the real events of jesus s career as told by even matthew but for the moment we will just look at one verse the early church leaders founded a religion on the jewish hopes of a messiah king and on an artificial extension of the original promises made by g d when constructing the history of abraham moses wrote of a promise of land and nationhood to the jewish people while this was accomplished eventually under the rule of king david the christians who came along later decided that they would claim the fulfillment of the promise but to do so they expanded on the promise preaching about a heavenly kingdom john j c speaking your father abraham rejoiced to see my day he say it and was glad it would be nice to tie in approval for jesus from abraham but abraham knew nothing of jesus or a messiah or anything christian i have tried and failed to find any event in the old testament which corresponds to john s little prophecy it is par for the course to see st john making up old testament backings just like his forerunner matthew many christians know that their faith has many of its foundations in such fraud and it is surprising they still cling to it the potter s field we are told that jesus was betrayed while in jerusalem by one of his followers judas iscariot matthew writes mt and throwing down the pieces of silver in the temple judas departed but the chief priests taking the silver said it isn t lawful for us to put it in the treasury since it is blood money so they bought a potter s field with it to bury strangers in then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet jeremiah and they took the thirty pieces of silver the price of him on whom a price had been set by some of the sons of israel and they gave them for the potter s field as the lord directed me this prophecy is an utterly gross bastardisation of old testament scripture first matthew has made a mistake regarding the name of the prophet it is zechariah who utters the verses which matthew makes use of zech and they weighed out my wages thirty shekels of silver then yhvh said to me cast them to the treasury the lordly price at which i was paid off by them so i took the thirty shekels of silver and cast them into the treasury in the house of yhvh first of all the verses of zechariah do not deal with a betrayer of the messiah or of g d the deal with a shepherd most likely a priest chosen to serve a function of presiding over the people shortly before g d would send judah and israel into conflict with one another the word treasury had been replaced by the king james scholars with to the potter precisely because this made matthew s quote fit better but this is a blatant error the correct translation of the hebrew is indeed treasury which also makes perfect sense in zechariah s context whereas potter s field is totally unrelated whether the mistranslation was intentional or not seems to be beyond speculation however given matthew s track record one finds it hard to resist the notion of intentional dishonesty of course matthew would have ample reason for altering the text the thirty pieces of silver match judas s situation and if as most christians seem to be the reader is willing to disregard the contextual incongruity matthew might have another prophecy to toss around however the correct translation of zechariah directly contradicts the situation with judas and the high priests the high priests would not put the money in the treasury the worthless shepherd of zechariah does exactly the opposite of course to the average thursday night bible student the prophecy as presented by matthew would be taken at new testament face value to those matthew s work is convincing enough wine vinegar casting lots then jesus is led away to be crucified mt they gave him vinegar to drink mingled with gall but when he tasted it he would not drink it and when they had crucified him they divided his garments among them by casting lots that it might be fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet they parted my garments among them and upon my vesture did they cast lots first of all the vinegar offered to jesus is actually common sour wine of the type that roman soldiers drank regularly we find that right before jesus dies the soldiers themselves give him some to drink not polluted with gall jn jesus said i thirst a bowl of vinegar stood there so they put a sponge full of the vinegar on hyssop and held it to his mouth when he had received the vinegar he said it is finished but matthew seems to be drawing on not a passage from the prophets but one from the psalms ps i looked for pity but there was none and for comforters but i found none they gave me poison for food lit they put gall in my meat and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink add to them punishment upon punishment may they have no acquittal from thee let them be blotted out of the book of the living of course the sour wine offered to jesus is done at his request of drink this does indeed seem to be a show of pity the psalm quoted is about david and his political and military enemies it is not about the messiah or jesus it is then not surprising that we run into further problem when we see that the jesus in the psalm asks g d for the damnation of the crucifiers whereas the jesus of the gospels says lk jesus said father forgive them the don t know what they do further matthew misses with his attempt to create prophecy by having gall a bitter substance put into jesus s drink not his meat as the psalm stipulates with the prophecy of the vinegar faulty we naturally ask what of the casting of lots this brings up the nd psalm which deserves discussion all by itself suffice it now to say that the fact that jesus s clothes were divided as told is no great thing it turns out that this happened often to any felon in those days as we will soon see it is perhaps the least erroneous passage of the psalm when applied to jesus it does indeed bring up the interesting question as to the quality of jesus s clothes for a man so removed from worldly possessions his ownership of clothes worthy of casting lots raises some suspicions the nd psalm this psalm is attributed to david as a lament of his condition under the attack of his enemies it becomes a song of praise to yhvh and of hope taken out of context parts of it seem to fit the plight of jesus at the crucifixion quite well we will examine the primary passages verse my god my god why have you forsaken me why are you so far from helping me far from the words of my groaning oh my god i cry by day but you don t answer and by night but find no rest jesus is said to have cried the first sentence while on the cross this suggests that the whole psalm is really about jesus rather than king david of course the rest of the first stanza does not fit as nicely to jesus or his execution jesus is not pictured as complaining about the whole ordeal he is supposed to be like the lamb led mute before its shearers indeed jesus doesn t do much groaning even when on the cross he certainly does not cry by both day and night on the cross but i am a worm and no man scorned by men all who see me mock at me they make faces and wag their heads he committed his cause to yhvh so let him deliver him for he delights in him this seems to fit jesus s execution pretty well with the exception of the holy messiah being called a worm many bulls encompass me they open their mouths widely at me like a ravening and roaring lion yea dogs are round about me a company of evildoers encir cle me they have pierced my hands and feet i can see all my bones they divide my garments among them and cast lost for my raiment but you yhvh be not far away deliver my soul from the sword my life from the power of the dog save me from the mouth of the lion and my afflicted soul from the horns of the wild bull it would seem quite convincing and i m sure the early christian fathers who wrote of this prophecy thought so too unfortunately this prophecy has a fatal flaw the words have pierced really do not exist in the psalm the correct hebrew translation is yea dogs are round about me a company of evildoers encircles me like the lion they are at my hands and feet in hebrew the phrase like the lion and a very rare verb form which can mean pierced differ by one phonetic character the word in the hebrew text is literally like the lion ka ari which makes sense in the context and even further fits the animal imagery employed by the psalm writer it is convenience that would urge a christian to change the word to ka aru but to add the needed yet artificial weight to the prophecy this is just what the christian translators have chosen to do while the correct translation does not eliminate the psalm from referring to jesus its absence does not say much for the honesty of the translators apart from the erroneous verse the psalm does not lend itself to jesus so easily verse speaks of the sufferer being saved from a sword rather than a cross this naturally fits the psalm s true subject king david as a side note we now know that crucifixions did not pierce the hands the palms but rather the forearms this doesn t say much in favour of the traditional thought of a resurrected jesus showing his disciples the scars on his palms but then facts aren t bound by our religious beliefs matthew escapes culpability this time as he does not attempt to draw many direct links between this psalm and his lord jesus but the psalm like many others was on the minds of all the gospel writers when they compiled the stories and interpretations of jesus s life and death how much these scriptures may have contributed to what actually got written down is a question that has serious repercussions for christian theology it is easy to see for those who are not faithful fundamentalists how some of the events in the new testament might have been enhanced by scribes such as the eager matthew but it does less to speculate than to simply investigate scriptural matters and prophetic claims so far this has not said good things for st matthew the reference to the piercing looks a lot like jesus s crucifixion john s gospel recount written about years after the fact tells us at jesus s execution jn but one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear and out came blood and water these things took place that scripture be fulfilled the will look on him whom they ve pierced of course this is built on a passage taken blatantly out of context prophet zechariah tells us how much of the nation of israel will split off from jerusalem and judah and go to war with them zc and yhvh will give victory to judah and on that day i will seek to destroy the nations that come against jerusalem in judah and i will pour a spirit of compassion and supplication on jerusalem so that when they look on him who they have pierced they will mourn and weep bitterly over him like you weep over a firstborn child john s attempt to make up prophecy is perhaps weaker that matthew s attempts matthew at least usually excontexts more than just one passage john s errors are grossly obvious and blatant here it does not speak well for any of the gospel writers as it helps to show how the prophetic aspects of their religion were founded reckoned with transgressors after his arrest jesus is quickly executed for claiming the jewish kingship messiahship according to one version of the gospel tale jesus gets executed along with two thieves mk and with him they crucified two robbers one on his right one on his left and so the scripture was fulfilled which says he was reckoned with the transgressors here mark is trying to link jesus to a passage in isaiah about the servant nation of israel the passage is not about the messiah for if one reads the whole chapter of isaiah and its surrounding chapters one sees that the servant is a nation the verses are also about what this servant has gone through in the past not a prediction of what is to come in any event the servant is thought of as a criminal this also happens to fit the description of jesus had the passage really been about the messiah it still is not at all clear why executing jesus between two thieves would fulfill the prophecy in isaiah jesus would more fittingly fulfill it with his whole ministry he was considered a blasphemer and troublemaker all throughout his career locking onto a single event is a rather poor way to steal prophecy at least in this case as we see that mark could have had made a better analogy with general comparisons mark goes on to tell us how those who were crucified with jesus also reviled him this is to be expected from a couple of robbers of course in his later recount st luke decides to change some things luke tells us lk and one of the criminals who was hanged with him railed aren t you the messiah save yourself and us this certainly fits with mark s recount which tells how the people who crucified jesus said save yourself and that the robbers did the same but then luke goes on but the other criminal rebuked the first saying don t you fear g d since you are under the same sentence of condemnation and we indeed justly so for we are receiving the due reward for our deeds but this man has done nothing wrong and he said jesus remember me when you come in your kingdom and jesus answered verily i say to you today you will be with me in paradise now this little dialogue seems highly contrived it stretches the imagination a bit to see this picture of one ruffian rebuking his fellow criminal with such eloquent speech we have a rather strange picture of a criminal lamenting over the goodness of his punishment and the justness of his suffering such a man apparently noble and of principle doesn t seem likely to have been a robber we wonder at the amount of theatrics created by luke of course luke s recount also disagrees with mark s luke has only one criminal revile jesus not both it is easy enough to discount the discrepancy because the account was made up but those who wish to believe it is all part of the error free words of g d do not have this avenue open this is yet another example of a writer trying to take an old testament passage and expand it and reinterpret it to suit his theology in this case the embroidery creates some embarrassing problems as we have seen the end of the world mt now comes perhaps one of the most extraordinary and embarrassing passages in the new testament it is found in all three of the synoptic gospel stories and casts some of the most unfavourable doubt on the whole theory of christianity jesus mentions the destruction of the jewish temples and buildings and his disciples ask him about this and about the end of the world which he has been warning about the disciples tell us when will this the temple s destruction be and what will be the sign of your coming and of the close of the age jesus take care that no one leads you astray for many will come in my name saying i am the christ you will hear of wars and rumours of wars for this must take place but the end is not yet for nation will rise against nation all this is but the beginning of the birthpangs they will deliver you up put you to death and false prophets will arise and lead many astray but he who endures to the end will be saved this gospel will be preached throughout the whole world a testimony to the nations and then the end will come so when you see the desolation spoken of by the prophet daniel let those who are in judea flee to the mountains immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened the stars will fall from heaven then will appear the sign of the son of man in heaven and all the tribes of the earth will mourn and see the son of man coming and he will send out his angels and gather his elect learn the lesson of the fig tree as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth leaves you know that summer is near so also when you see all these things you will know that he is near at the very gate truly i say to you this generation will not pass away until all these things take place but of the day and hour no one knows not the angels not the son but only the father therefore you also must be ready for the son of man is coming at an hour you do not expect from this it is clear that jesus thought the world would in within the lifetimes of at least some of his disciples he tells them that although he doesn t know the exact day or hour that it will come and thus they must be ready theologians have wet their pants in panic to find some way out of this holy error but unfortunately jesus made himself to explicit he told his disciples that their generation would still be around at the end and that they in particular should prepare for it prepare to be swept away there have been some who resorted to removing the inerrant nature of the bible and said that the phrase this generation shall not pass away really means this race of people will not pass away of course the word for generation is used many times to refer to exactly that the generation of the disciples it is an interesting notion that when god decided to learn greek he didn t learn it well enough to make himself clear but it is quite obvious from the rest of the dialogue that the disciples at least some of them are supposed to live to the end of the world the charge of mistranslation is completely blown away by looking at the apostles responses it becomes abundantly clear from rev peter john and rev that jesus meant exactly what he said the end was very near for years christians have rationalised this th chapter of matthew or ignored its meaning altogether for years they have waited for their executed leader to come back hearing of wars and rumours of wars sure that he is coming soon surely he must be all we must do is wait can you imagine how tired he must be sitting around up there being holy waiting for just the right moment to spring so shortly after his crucifixion jesus of nazareth joshua ben joseph died it is said that after three days or three days and three nights or three periods of time or three eternal seconds or three of whatever they can decide makes for less trouble he was seen again resurrected glowing with divine radiance then the saviour decided it wasn t in the best interests of his new religion to stick around and therefore disappeared from sight into heaven so the story goes anyway as has been seen there were many things attributed to jesus when people got around to writing the gospel stories down to them jesus was the fulfiller of all prophecy and scripture we have seen though that this matter is quite shaky but throughout church history christians have held fast to faith in simple belief what doctrinal objections could not be solved with argumentation or brute force faith and forgetfulness kept away from question to question and investigate has never been the easiest way to treat matters thus for years the prophecies cited in the new testament have gone on largely accepted things may well continue that way for some time pausing a moment to consider the way the doctrines of christianity have been accepted and used properly or improperly to support wars and persecution i suppose there is one prophecy of which christianity can securely keep hold mt jesus don t think that i have come to bring peace on earth i haven t come to bring peace but rather a sword

alt.atheism

re some thoughts bissda saturn wwc edu dan lawrence bissell writes first i want to start right out and say that i m a christian it makes sense to be one have any of you read tony campollo s book liar lunatic or the real thing i might be a little off on the title but he writes the book anyway he was part of an effort to destroy christianity in the process he became a christian himself i assume you are posting to encourage comments how much history has tony campello read not much it seems the arguements he uses i am summing up the book is about whether jesus was god or not i know many of you don t believe but listen to a different perspective for we all have something to gain by listening to what others have to say it is good to hear that there are a few reasonable christians about if only those christian scientists would take note in australia there is a very strong movement a bunch of christian scientists who believe that every single event in the bible is exactly true and that there is a rational explanation for it all that can be justified by using the laws of physics for example there are a few chaps who are trying to prove that the age of the universe is years old and that the error in conventional calculations is the result of the fact that the speed light has been rapidly decaying over the years and this has not been accounted for the book says that jesus was either a liar or he was crazy a modern day koresh or he was actually who he said he was or of course that he never existed and the bible was a story and was never intended to become a manifesto for a billion people did tony follow that one up some reasons why he wouldn t be a liar are as follows who would die for a lie wouldn t people be able to tell if he was a liar people gathered around him and kept doing it many gathered from hearing or seeing someone who was or had been healed millions of people have died for a lie this point is difficult to substantiate since it is not well defined a great many religious arguments work in that way but consider the many aztec warriors who sacrificed themselves to their gods in the belief that this act would bring them victory of the spanish invaders the list is endless the aztecs lost btw call me a fool but i believe he did heal people that is perfectly reasonable but it is not grounds for me or anyone to become a christian more to the point it does not add weight to the claim that jesus was the real thing niether was he a lunatic would more than an entire nation be drawn to someone who was crazy very doubtful in fact rediculous for example anyone who is drawn to david koresh is obviously a fool logical people see this right away have you ever seen a documentary about the rise of nazi germany more to the point did tony mention this one could hardly call werner heisenberg and his many colleagues fools or illogical men their support of hitler was based i presume upon an emotional issue rather than a rational agreement with his principles obviously my argument is invalid if tony thought that hitler was sane therefore since he wasn t a liar or a lunatic he must have been the real thing hmmm i don t think his arguments warrant the use of a therefore some other things to note he fulfilled loads of prophecies in the psalms isaiah and elsewhere in hrs alone this in his betrayal and crucifixion i don t have my bible with me at this moment next time i write i will use it this is unfortunately what alot of religious discussions i have had with people result in quoting the bible the only reasonable way i think people can look at the bible is to treat the stories as some sort of metaphorical representation of the messages that the authors were trying to present if someone tries to interpret parts of the bible literally he or she will end up in all sorts of shit tony s argument would be perfectly reasonable for people who believe the events described in the bible took place but to convince someone who thinks the bible is total fiction that jesus is real by quoting the book is totally pointless for example in mathematics you cannot say a is equal to b because a is equal to b i don t think most people understand what a christian is that would possibly explain why there have so many people being killed in religious wars and why there are hundreds of different versions all claiming to be correct it is certainly not what i see a lot in churches rather i think it should be a way of life and a total sacrafice of everything for god s sake he loved us enough to die and save us so we should do the same hey we can t do it god himself inspires us to turn our lives over to him that s tuff and most people don t want to do it to be a real christian would be something for the strong to persevere at but just like weight lifting or guitar playing drums whatever it takes time we don t rush it in one day christianity is your whole life it is not going to church once a week or helping poor people once in a while we box everything into time units such as work at this time sports tv social life god is above these boxes and should be carried with us into all these boxes that we have created for ourselves i think if you posted this part to alt religion you would get more flames than here i have never really understood why the emotional sentiments of a stranger should be of interest to other people someone famous said that there two evils in life polititians and churchs one rules by fear of the living the other by fear of the dead if i am pressed i could probably find the exact quotation cheers charles

alt.atheism

re bible quiz in article apr ccsua ctstateu edu kellyb ccsua ctstateu edu wrote in article kmr po cwru edu kmr po cwru edu keith m ryan writes only when the sun starts to orbit the earth will i accept the bible since when does atheism mean trashing other religions there must be a god of inbreeding to which you are his only son a i think that he has a rather witty sig file it sums up a great deal of atheistic thought imo in one simple sentence b atheism isn t an other religion sm steve mullins vos stratus com if a man empties his purse into his my opinions stratus opinions head no one can take it from him benjamin franklin

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re islam and scientific predictions was in article h r ra nrl navy mil khan itd itd nrl navy mil umar khan writes i strongly suggest that you look up a book called the bible the quran and science by maurice baucaille a french surgeon it is not comprehensive but it is well researched i imagine your library has it or can get it for you through interlibrary loan i shall try to get hold of it when i have time to read of course in short dr baucaille began investigating the bible because of pre ceived scientific inaccuracies and inconsistencies he assumed that some of the problems may have been caused by poor translations in by gone days so he read what he could find in hebrew greek aramaic what he found was that the problems didn t go away they got worse then he decided to see if other religions had the same problems so he picked up the holy qur an in french and found similar prob lems but not as many so he applied the same logoic as he had with the bible he learned to read it in arabic the problems he had found with the french version went away in arabic he was unable to find a wealth of scientific statements in the holy qur an but what he did find made sense with modern understanding so he investigated the traditions the hadith to see what they had to say about science they were filled with science problems after all they were contemporary narratives from a time which had by pour standards a primitive world view his conclusion was that while he was impressed that what little the holy qur an had to say about science was accurate he was far more impressed that the holy qur an did not contain the same rampant errors evidenced in the traditions how would a man of th century arabia have known what not to include in the holy qur an assuming he had authored it so in short the writer or writers of quran decided to stay away from science if you do not open your mouth then you don t put you foot into your mouth either but then if you say quran does not talk much about science then one can not make claims like bobby does that you have great science in quran basically i want to say that none of the religious texts are supposed to be scientific treatises so i am just requesting the theists to stop making such wild claims vinayak vinayak dutt e mail vdp mayo edu standard disclaimers apply

alt.atheism

bible contradictions i would like a list of bible contadictions from those of you who dispite being free from christianity are well versed in the bible

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re after years can we say that christian morality is in article c l ey jts news cso uiuc edu cobb alexia lis uiuc edu mike cobb writes in vice ico tek com bobbe vice ico tek com robert beauchaine writes actually my atheism is based on ignorance ignorance of the existence of any god don t fall into the atheists don t believe because of their pride mistake how do you know it s based on ignorance couldn t that be wrong why would it be wrong to fall into the trap that you mentioned if i m wrong god is free at any time to correct my mistake that he continues not to do so while supposedly proclaiming his undying love for my eternal soul speaks volumes as for the trap you are not in a position to tell me that i don t believe in god because i do not wish to unless you can know my motivations better than i do myself you should believe me when i say that i earnestly searched for god for years and never found him bob beauchaine bobbe vice ico tek com they said that queens could stay they blew the bronx away and sank manhattan out at sea

alt.atheism

re a silly question on x tianity in article pww spac at rice edu pww spacsun rice edu peter walker writes from pww spacsun rice edu peter walker subject re a silly question on x tianity date mon apr gmt in article qaqi inngje gap caltech edu werdna cco caltech edu andrew tong wrote so what

alt.atheism

re islam and scientific predictions was umar khan khan itd itd nrl navy mil wrote i strongly suggest that you look up a book called the bible the quran and science by maurice baucaille a french surgeon it is not comprehensive he was unable to find a wealth of scientific statements in the holy qur an but what he did find made sense with modern understanding so he investigated the traditions the hadith to see what they had to say about science they were filled with science problems after all they were contemporary narratives from a time which had by pour standards a primitive world view his conclusion was that while he was impressed that what little the holy qur an had to say about science was accurate he was far more impressed that the holy qur an did not contain the same rampant errors evidenced in the traditions how would a man of th century arabia have known what not to include in the holy qur an assuming he had authored it this book is worth a read to get a sensible view of this issue the book is in two sections section contains a fairly reasonable analysis of the bible showing many inconsistencies between the bible and modern science well we all know that no surprises section analyses the koran s version of the old testament stories and seems on the face of it to present a good case showing the koran is consistent with modern science however it was plain to me that this consistency was only possible by the vague phraseology of the koran take the flood for example the bible is full of detail forty days and forty nights pair of every animal etc we all know this is nonsense the koran s description of the same event is so obscure as to make possible an interpretation such as a big river flooded for a few days and caused much damage yes no contradiction but also not much fact the koran might be consistent with modern science but being consistent due to its vagueness compared with other books of that time does not seem much of an achievement the book concludes by saying something like the koran must have had divine inspiration because at the time it was written there were a lot of to us now ridiculous ideas about the universe and none of them can be found in the koran arguing for the greatness of a book by talking about what it does not contain seems absurd in the extreme the above is of course from memory so i may have missed some points leonard e mail l newnham bradford ac uk

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re the bible and abortion james j lippard lippard skyblu ccit arizona edu wrote exodus and if men struggle with each other and strike a woman with child so that she has a miscarriage yet there is no further injury he shall surely be fined as the woman s husband may demand of him and he shall pay as the judges decide but if there is any further injury then you shall appoint as a penalty life for life eye for eye tooth for tooth hand for hand foot for foot burn for burn wound for wound bruise for bruise the most straightforward interpretation of these verses is that if men in a fight strike a woman and cause her to miscarry the penalty is only a fine if however the woman is injured or dies the lex talionis doctrine of an eye for an eye applies this is the jewish interpretation and is supported by jewish commentaries on these verses this is quite an embarrassment for pro lifer christians so there is of course an alternate explanation the alternative interprets the word miscarriage to mean premature birth i e the child is born alive and further injury to mean injury to either the woman or the fetus this is not a straightforward interpretation it is not so far as i know supported by any jewish commentaries and it does not appeared to be supported by any other part of the bible what if any historical reference do we have to abortion at this time did the ancient jew have appropriate reference to understand abortion i am truly asking not making a point veiled as a question if there is little understanding of the medical procedure we know as abortion it is not surprising the bible makes little reference to it as it makes little reference to nuclear power and contamination while your interpretation is a reasonable one i see no reason to reject the other out of hand the king jimmy translation says if there is no further mischief this does not necessarily imply to the woman i know if my wife we expecting and someone cause her to spontaneously abort we would feel that a life was truly taken not simply a process halted

alt.atheism

you will all go to hell you blashephemers you will all go to hell for not believing in god be prepared for your eternal damnation

alt.atheism

re yet more rushdie re islamic law in article bu edu jaeger buphy bu edu gregg jaeger wrote khomeini advocates the view that there was a series of twelve islamic leaders the twelve imams who are free of error or sin this makes him a heretic wow you re quicker to point out heresy than the church in the middle ages seriously though even the sheiks at al azhar don t claim that the shi ites are heretics most of the accusations and fabrications about shi ites come out of saudi arabia from the wahabis for that matter you should read the original works of the sunni imams imams of the four madhabs the teacher of at least two of them was imam jafar sadiq the sixth imam of the shi ites although there is plenty of false propaganda floating around about the shi ites esp since the revolution there are also many good works by shi ites which present the views and teachings of their school why make assumptions and allegations like people in this group have done about islam in general about shi ites

alt.atheism

re note to bobby m again in article apr ultb isc rit edu snm ultb isc rit edu s n mozumder writes how about people who are not religous take the inner city there are many people that care little for religion lot of crime lot of murder this is the other end lack of religion that allows wrong to happen i lived in tokyo for a year and a half and one of the many reasons why i intend to go back indefinitely is the freedom one enjoys when one can walk anywhere and i mean anywhere at any time of day or night and not feel uneasy even if one s from an ethnic minority as i was clues for bobby why do i bother i tokyo is a city and inner tokyo is an inner city ii there is a negligible level of violent crime and a street murder will be a lead item on national tv news iii the population is almost universally atheistic next time i go for a stroll around beirut at night i ll let you know how it compares bobby mozumder cheers simon simon clippingdale simon dcs warwick ac uk department of computer science tel university of warwick fax coventry cv al u k

alt.atheism

re islam a clearer view in article bafc i dbstu rz tu bs de i dbstu rz tu bs de benedikt rosenau writes from i dbstu rz tu bs de benedikt rosenau subject re islam a clearer view date tue apr gmt in article healta saturn wwc edu healta saturn wwc edu tammy r healy writes sorry it is generally accepted that the rise of the inquisition is the reason why torture was introduced outside the romanic countries at the end of the middle ages in other words the holy mother church which is lead infallibly by the holy ghost has spread it the roman catholic church claims to be lead by the infallable pope that s why she the rc church has done so many wicked things to xtians and non believers alike the rationale that the pope speaking ex cathedra is infallible is based on the claim above the dogma about the pope is of jesuitic origin and has not been been accepted before the mid of the last century benedikt you re right thanks for enlightening me tammy

alt.atheism

cannanite genocide in the bible excuse me for my ignorance but i remember reading once that the biblical tribe known as the philistines still exists they are the modern day palestinians anyone out there with more info please post it tammy

alt.atheism

getting to the point to all a a readers i have been asked be several of you to post a list of the sda church s fundamental beliefs i warn you now it s a long list however i ll post it on sunday sabbath is coming up soon so i won t be reading on saturday and i don t have time to do it now i would greatly appreciate it if you would keep me in touch with what s going on i hope all of you have a reastful and relaxing weekend i hope it s the best one so far tammy

alt.atheism

re the inimitable rushdie re an anecdote about islam in article bu edu jaeger buphy bu edu gregg jaeger wrote he d have to be precise about is rejection of god and his leaving islam one is perfectly free to be muslim and to doubt and question the existence of god so long as one does not reject god i am sure that rushdie has be now made his atheism clear in front of a sufficient number of proper witnesses the question in regard to the legal issue is his status at the time the crime was committed gregg so would you consider that rushdie would now be left alone and he could have a normal life in other words does islam support the notion of forgiving cheers kent sandvik newton apple com alink ksand private activities on the net

alt.atheism

re the inimitable rushdie re an anecdote about islam in article bu edu jaeger buphy bu edu gregg jaeger wrote as i have stated on a parallel thread i am not an anarchist nor is islam anarchist therefore the uk should have control over itself however this does not change the fact that it is possible for citizens of the uk residing within the uk to be in violation of islamic law this is an interesting notion and one i m scared of in my case i m a finnish citizen i live in usa and i have to conform to the us laws however the finnish government is not actively checking out what i m doing in this country in other words checking out if i conform to the finnish laws however islamic law seems to be a curse that is following you everywhere in the world shades of eh cheers kent sandvik newton apple com alink ksand private activities on the net

alt.atheism

re objective morality was re political atheists in article qlf ginn sn gap caltech edu keith cco caltech edu keith allan schneider wrote which type of morality are you talking about in a natural sense it is not at all immoral to harm another species as long as it doesn t adversely affect your own i guess hehehe so you say but this objective morality somehere tells you that this is not the case and you don t know all the rules of such transcendental game systems cheers kent sandvik newton apple com alink ksand private activities on the net

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re free moral agency and kent s in article healta saturn wwc edu healta saturn wwc edu tammy r healy wrote at the time ezekiel was written israel was in apostacy again and if i m not mistaken tyre was about to make war on israel like i said the prince of tyre was the human ruler of tyre he was a wicked man by calling satan the king of tyre ezekiel was saying that satan is the real ruler over tyre tammy is this all explicitly stated in the bible or do you assume that you know that ezekiel indirectly mentioned it could have been another metaphor for instance ezekiel was mad at his landlord so he talked about him when he wrote about the prince of tyre sorry but my interpretation is more mundane ezekiel wrote about the prince of tyre when we wrote about the prince of tyre cheers kent sandvik newton apple com alink ksand private activities on the net

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re sci skeptic religion was why alt atheism in article j j psuvm psu edu john a johnson j j psuvm psu edu writes standard groups sci soc talk must conform to stricter rules when being established and must show a certain volume of postings or else they will cease to exist these groups also reach more sites on usenet than alt groups i already posted my opinion to mathew s suggestion which was that alt atheism is on the verge of having too many garbage postings from fundies and elevating its status to a standard group and consequently the volume of such postings could make it unreadable i tend to agree i came here when it first started and watched it grow from the roots on talk religion misc it seemed to take a while for enough atheists to come forward to get past the let s trash xians and such now there s a stable core and frankly there s a feeling that this is our group if we go mainstream we re going to be in a lot more places and every fucking fundy loonie freshman will be dumping on us to find jeesus and warn us that we re all going to hell want to see what we ll get go real alt fan brother jed and imagine that those imbecilic tirades will be here all the time every other post i m being selfish i find i really learn a lot here and the s n isn t too bad the browns and the boobys are a distraction but they are few enough that they even bring in some of the leavening needed to offset them but i greatly fear that mainstreaming would basically put us at the swamping level of the conners of the world regards dew dewey henize sys net admin risc hardware pager x

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re the inimitable rushdie is it just me or has this part gotten beyond useful gregg is not as i understand his posts giving any support to the bounty on rushdie s life if that s correct end of one point gregg is using the concept of legal in a way most westerners don t accept his comments about islamic law i think make a great deal of sense to him and are even making a little sense to me now if a person is a member of a group religion or whatever they bind themselves to follow the ways of the group within the bounds of what the group requires as a minimum the big bone of contention here that i m picking up is that in the west we have secular governments that maintain more or less a level of control and of requirements outside the requirements of optional groups i think the majority of us reading this thread are in tune note i didn t say in agreement with the idea that you are finally responsible to the secular government and within that to the group or groups a person may have chosen with that in mind it not possible under secular law legally as most people would define the term to hold a person to a particular group once they decide to separate from it only if the secular authorities agree that there is a requirement of some sort contractual etc is there any secular enforcement allowed by a group to a group member or past group member a religion can and often does believe in and require additional duties of a group member and it can enforce the fulfillment of those duties in many ways ostracism is common for example but the limit comes when the enforcement would impose unwanted and or unaccepted onus on a person in conflict with secular law this is the difference in a theocracy the requirements of the secular authorities are by definition congruent with the religious authorities outside a theocracy this is not necessarily true religious requirements may coincide or may not similiarly religious consequences may or may not coincide with secular consequences if any regards dew dewey henize sys net admin risc hardware pager x

alt.atheism

re yet more rushdie re islamic law in article apr bnr ca rashid writes deletions the fatwa was levelled at the person of rushdie any actions of rushdie that feed the situation contribute to the legitimization of the ruling the book remains in circulation not by some independant will of its own but by the will of the author and the publishers the fatwa against the person of rushdie encompasses his actions as well the crime was certainly a crime in progress at many levels and was being played out and played up in the the full view of the media p s i m not sure about this but i think the charge of shatim also applies to rushdie and may be encompassed under the umbrella of the fasad ruling if this is grounded firmly in islam as you claim then you have just exposed islam as the grounds for terrorism plain and simple whether you like it or not whether rushdie acted like a total jerk or not there is no acceptable civilized basis for putting someone in fear of their life for words it simply does not matter whether his underlying motive was to find the worst possible way he could to insult muslims and their beliefs got that you do not threaten the life of someone for words when you do you quite simply admit the backruptcy of your position if you support threatening the life of someone for words you are not yet civilized this is exactly where i and many of the people i know have to depart from respecting the religions of others when those beliefs allow and encourage by interpretation the killing of non physical opposition you or i or anyone are more than privledged to believe that someone whether it be rushdie or bush or hussien or whover is beyond the pale of civilized society and you can condemn his her soul refuse to allow any members of your association to interact with him her peacably demonstrate to try to convince others to disassociate themselves from the miscreants or whatever short of physical force but once you physically threaten or support physical threats you get much closer to your earlier comparison of rape with you as the rapist who whines she asked for it look how she was dressed blaming the victim when you are unable to be civilized doesn t fly dew dewey henize sys net admin risc hardware pager x

alt.atheism

nicknames in article ufnyj a voqit vpa andrew cmu edu nm w andrew cmu edu nanci ann miller writes jcopelan nyx cs du edu the one and only writes welcome i am the official keeper of the list of nicknames that people are known by on alt atheism didn t know we had such a list did you your have been awarded the nickname of buckminster so the next time you post an article sign with your nickname like so dave buckminster fuller thanks again jim humor means never having to say you re sorry copeland of course the list has to agree with the nickname laws laid down by the gipu almost years ago you know the of them that were written on the iron tablets that melted once and had to be reinscribed since i am a prophet of the gipu i decree that you should post the whole list of nicknames for the frequent posters here if the first rule of humor is never having to say you re sorry then the second rule must be never having to explain yourself few things are worse that a joke explained in spite of this and because of requests for me to post my list o nicknames i must admit that no such list exists it was simply a plot device along with me being the keeper o the list to make the obvious play on the last name of fuller and to advance the idea that such a list should be made i assumed that the ol timers would recognize it for what it is nevertheless how about a list o nicknames for alt atheism posters if you think of a good one just post it and see if others like it we could start with those posters who annoy us the most like bobby or bill jim d oh i broke the second rule of humor copeland if god is dead and the actor plays his part sting his words of fear will find their way to a place in your heart history without the voice of reason every faith is its own curse will teach us without freedom from the past things can only get worse nothing

alt.atheism

re death penalty gulf war in article e rusnews w w mantis co uk mathew mathew mantis co uk writes rush leland stanford edu voelkerding writes in article apr seachg com chrisb seachg com chris blask writes add to this the outrageous cost of putting someone to death special cell block years of court costs extra guards and the benefits of the death penalty entirely disappear that s because of your earlier claim that the one innocent death overrides the benefit of all the others obviously it s tragic but it is no argument for doing away with the death penalty if we went to war and worried about accidentally killing civilians all of the time because our determination of who the enemy really is is imperfect then there is no way to win the war yes fortunately we have right thinking folks like your good self in power and it was therefore deemed acceptable to slaughter tens or even hundreds of thousands of iraqis in order to liberate oil h h hkuwait we won the war hurrah hurrah the number of civilian iraqi deaths were way over exaggerated and exploited for anti war emotionalism by the liberal news media the facts are that less iraqis died in the gulf war than did civilians in any other war of comparable size this century this was due mostly to the short duration coupled with precise surgical bombing techniques which were technically possible only recently the idea that hundreds of thousands of iraqi citizens died is ludicrous not even hundreds of thousands of iraqi soldiers died and they were the ones being targeted or do you think that the us and its allies were specifically out to kill and maim iraqi civilians either the smart bombs didn t hit their targets and we know they did or they were targeting civilian targets which is hardly condusive to destroying iraq s military potential the military mission planners are not fools they know they have to hit military targets to win a war hitting civilian targets does nothing but unite the people against you not a laudable goal if one wants the people to rise up against their tyrant dictator ok so some innocent people died yes maybe the unarmed civilians fleeing along that road didn t need to be bombed to bits perhaps that kid with half his face burned off and the little girl with the mangled legs weren t entirely guilty but it s worth the death of a few innocents to save the oil h h hlives of the kuwaiti people isn t it after all the iraqis may not have had a chance to vote for saddam but they showed their acceptance of his regime by not assassinating him right all that surrendering and fleeing along open roads was just a devious ploy we were entirely within our rights to bomb em just in case without finding out if they were soldiers how about all the innocent people who died in blanket bombing in ww i don t hear you bemoaning them war is never an exact science but with smart bombs it s becoming more exact with a smaller percentage of civilian casualties sometimes mistakes are made targets are misidentified innocents die that s war the way it really is but the alternative to allow tyrannical dictators to treat the earth like it s one big rummage sale grabbing everything they can get is worse like patrick henry said some years ago i know not what course others may take but as for me give me liberty or give me death war is always the price one must be willing to pay if one wishes to stay free the death penalty was conceived as a deterrent to crime but the legal shenanigans that have been added automatic appeals lengthy court battles etc have relegated that purpose to a very small part of what it should be hence the question is do we instate the death penalty as it was meant to be and see if that deters crime or do we get rid of it entirely yes let s reinstate the death penalty the way it ought to be all that shit about fair trials and a court of appeals just gets in the way of justice let s give the police the absolute right to gun down the guilty and save ourselves the expense of all those lawyers think of the knock on benefits too la would never have had to spend so much money cleaning up after riots and holding showcase trials if the cops had been allowed to do their job properly a quick bullet through the head of rodney king and another for the cameraman and everyone would have been saved a great deal of unnecessary paperwork and expense after all if the police decide a man s guilty that ought to be enough the fact that the death penalty has been shown not to have any deterrent effect over imprisonment well that s entirely irrelevant mathew mathew your sarcasm is noted but you are completely off base here you come off sounding like a complete peace nik idiot although i feel sure that was not your intent so the iraqi war was wrong eh i m sure that appeasement would have worked better than war just like it did in ww eh i guess we shouldn t have fought ww either just think of all those innocent german civilians killed in dresden and hamburg how about all the poor french who died in the crossfire because we invaded the continent we should have just let hitler take over europe and you d be speaking german instead of english right now tyrants like hussein have to be stopped his kind don t understand diplomacy they only understand the point of a gun my only regret is that bush wimped out and didn t have the military roll into baghdad so now hussein is still in power and the iraqi people s sacrifice not to mention the americans who died was for naught liberating kuwait was a good thing but wiping hussein off the map would ve been better and as for poor poor rodney king did you ever stop and think why the jury in the first trial brought back a verdict of not guilty those who have been foaming at the mouth for the blood of those policemen certainly have looked no further than the video tape but the jury looked at all the evidence evidence which you and i have not seen when one makes a judgment without the benefit of a trial where evidence can be presented on both sides one has simply lowered himself to the level of vigilante justice a state of mind which your sarcasm above seemingly spoke against but instead tends to support in the case against the policemen law in this country is intended to protect the rights of the accused whether they be criminals or cops one is not found guilty if there is a reasonable doubt of one s guilt and only the jury is in a position to assess the evidence and render a verdict anyone else is simply succumbing to verbal vigilantism regards jim b

alt.atheism

re the inimitable rushdie in article bu edu jaeger buphy bu edu gregg jaeger writes in article apr st andrews ac uk nrp st andrews ac uk norman r paterson writes i don t think you re right about germany my daughter was born there and i don t think she has any german rights eg to vote or live there beyond the rights of all ec citizens she is a british citizen by virtue of her parentage but that s not full citizenship for example i don t think her children could be british by virtue of her in the same way i am fairly sure that she could obtain citizenship by making an application for it it might require immigration to germany but i am almost certain that once applied for citizenship is inevitable in this case nope germany has extremely restrictive citizenship laws the ethnic germans who have lived in russia for over years automatically become citizens if they move to germany but the turks who are now in their third generation in germany can t it s not a very good example to show citizenship without descent karl lastly i come to china in the hope all you touch and all you see of fulfilling a lifelong ambition is all your life will ever be dropping acid on the great wall duke pink floyd a lie is still a lie even if billion people believe it

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re you will all go to hell on fri apr edt jsn psuvm psu edu said j you blashephemers you will all go to hell for not believing in god be j prepared for your eternal damnation hmm i ve got my mst k lunch box my travel scrabble and a couple of kegs of bass ale i m all set let s go everybody ed mccreary o edm twisto compaq com if it were not for laughter there would be no tao

alt.atheism

re the inimitable rushdie in article bb i dbstu rz tu bs de i dbstu rz tu bs de benedikt rosenau writes i assume that you say here a religious law is for the followers of the religion that begs the question why the religion has the right to define who is a follower even when the offenders disagree no i say religious law applies to those who are categorized as belonging to the religion when event being judged applies this prevents situations in which someone is a member of a religion who when charged claims that he she was not a member of the religion so they are free to go on as if nothing had happened gregg

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re an anecdote about islam in article bb i dbstu rz tu bs de i dbstu rz tu bs de benedikt rosenau writes in article bu edu jaeger buphy bu edu gregg jaeger writes a brutal system filtered through leniency is not lenient huh how do you rate public floggings or floggings at all chopping off the hands heads or other body parts what about stoning i don t have a problem with floggings particularly when the offenders have been given a chance to change their behavior before floggings are given i do have a problem with maiming in general by whatever means in my opinion no one who has not maimed another should be maimed in the case of rape the victim is maimed physically and emotionally so i wouldn t have a problem with maiming rapists obviously i wouldn t have a problem with maiming murderers either may i ask if you had the same opinion before you became a muslim sure yes i did you see i don t think that rape and murder should be dealt with lightly you being so interested in leniency for leniency s sake apparently think that people should simply be told the did a bad thing and what about the simple chance of misjudgements misjudgments should be avoided as much as possible i suspect that it s pretty unlikely that given my requirement of repeated offenses that misjudgments are very likely orient is not a place having a single character your ignorance exposes itself nicely here read carefully i have not said all the orient shows primitive machism well then why not use more specific words than orient probably because in your mind there is no need to it s all the same because it contains sufficient information while more detail is possible it is not necessary and europe shows civilized bullshit this is bullshit time to put out or shut up you ve substantiated nothing and are blabbering on like islamists who talk about the west as the great satan you re both guilty of stupidities i just love to compare such lines to the common plea of your fellow believers not to call each others names in this case to substantiate it the quran allows that one beats one s wife into submission really care to give chapter and verse we could discuss it primitive machism refers to that i have misspelt that before my fault again not all of the orient follows the qur an so you ll have to do better than that sorry you haven t put out enough islam expresses extramarital sex extramarital sex is a subset of sex it is suppressedin islam that marial sexis allowed or encouraged in islam as it is in many branches of christianity too misses the point read the part about the urge for sex again religions that run around telling people how to have sex are not my piece of cake for two reasons suppressing a strong urge needs strong measures and it is not their business anyway believe what you wish i thought you were trying to make an argument all i am reading are opinions it is an argument that you doubt the validity of the premises does not change it if you want to criticize it do so time for you to put up or shut up this is an argument for why you don t like religions that suppress sex a such it s an irrelevant argument if you d like to generalize it to an objective statement then fine my response is then you have given no reason for your statement that sex is not the business of religion one of your arguments the urge for sex in adolescents is not so strong that any overly strong measures are required to suppress it if the urge to have sex is so strong in an adult then that adult can make a commensurate effort to find a marriage partner gregg

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re free moral agency in article kmr po cwru edu kmr po cwru edu keith m ryan writes in article apr princeton edu qpliu phoenix princeton edu q p liu writes so while faith itself is a gift obedience is what makes faith possible what makes obeying different from believing i am still wondering how it is that i am to be obedient when i have no idea to whom i am to be obedient it is all written in the wholly babble the users guide to invisible pink unicorns to be granted faith in invisible pink unicorns you must read the babble and obey what is written in it to obey what is written in the babble you must believe that doing so is the way to be granted faith in invisible pink unicorns to believe that obeying what is written in the babble leads to believing in invisible pink unicorns you must essentially believe in invisible pink unicorns this bit of circular reasoning begs the question what makes obeying different from believing qpliu princeton edu standard opinion opinions are delta correlated

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re yet more rushdie re islamic law in article apr bnr ca rashid writes what about the twelve imams who he considered incapable of error or sin khomeini supports this view of the twelve imans this is heresy for the very reasons i gave above i would be happy to discuss the issue of the imams with you although my preference would be to move the discussion to another newsgroup i feel a philosophy or religion group would be more appropriate i think many reading this group would also benefit by knowing how deviant the view as i ve articulated it above which may not be the true view of khomeini is from the basic principles of islam so that the non muslim readers of this group will see how far from the simple basics of islam such views are on the face of them and if they are not in contradiction with the basics of islam how subtle such issues are and how it seems sects exist in islam while they are explicitly proscribed by the qur an the topic is deeply embedded in the world view of islam and the esoteric teachings of the prophet s a heresy does not enter into it at all except for those who see islam only as an exoteric religion that is only nominally if at all concerned with the metaphysical substance of man s being and nature in my opinion considering any human being as having a substance or metaphysical fundamentally different from that of any other human being is a heretical notion and one proscribed by islam from your posts you seem fairly well versed in sunni thought you should seek to know shi ite thought through knowledgeable shi ite authors as well at least that much respect is due before the charge of heresy is levelled absolutely i would be interested in discussing this privately and i am interested in hearing how one might try to make the concept of error free and sinless human beings philosophically consistent with the teachings of the qur an however prima facie such attemptsa are highly susceptible to degenerating into monkery explicitly proscribed by the qur an as salaam a laikum alaikum wassalam gregg

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re koresh is god date fri apr from mathew mathew mantis co uk the latest news seems to be that koresh will give himself up once he s finished writing a sequel to the bible mathew writing the seven seals or something along those lines he s already written the first of the seven which was around pages or so and has handed it over to an assistant for proofreading i would expect any decent messiah to have a built in spellchecker maybe koresh will come with one

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re islam and scientific predictions was date fri apr gmt from umar khan khan itd itd nrl navy mil his conclusion was that while he was impressed that what little the holy qur an had to say about science was accurate he was far more impressed that the holy qur an did not contain the same rampant errors evidenced in the traditions how would a man of th century arabia have known what not to include in the holy qur an assuming he had authored it well it looks like the folks in soc religion islam have loosened up a bit and are discussing this topic as well as the banking interest topic a few books on the subject have also been mentioned in addition to the one you mentioned these may be hard to find but i think i may take a stab at it out of curiosity i know the one film i saw on this subject was pretty weak and the only two quotes i have seen which were used to show science in the koran which i posted here were also pretty vague i suspect that these books will extrapolate an awful lot on the quotes they have at least one poster on the islam channel seems to have some misgivings about the practice of using the koran to decide what is good science i wonder if islam has ever come up with the equivalent of the christians creation science on any topic it would be interesting to find a history of scientific interpretations of the koran to see if anyone used the koran to support earlier science which has since been discarded it is all too easy to look at science as it exists today and then interpret passages to match those findings people do similar things with the sayings of nostradamus all the time anyway it is a rather unique claim of islam and may be worth checking

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re keith is a relativist f levels unisa edu au the desert brat writes keith if you start wafffling on about how it is different for a human to maul someone thrown into it s cage so to speak you d better start posting tome decent evidence or retract your i think there is an absolute morality blurb a few weeks ago did i claim that there was an absolute morality or just an objective one keith

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re political atheists livesey solntze wpd sgi com jon livesey writes perhaps the chimps that failed to evolve cooperative behaviour died out and we are left with the ones that did evolve such behaviour entirely by chance that s the entire point are you going to proclaim a natural morality every time an organism evolves cooperative behaviour yes natural morality is a morality that developed naturally what about the natural morality of bee dance huh keith

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re objective morality was re political atheists sandvik newton apple com kent sandvik writes which type of morality are you talking about in a natural sense it is not at all immoral to harm another species as long as it doesn t adversely affect your own i guess hehehe so you say but this objective morality somehere tells you that this is not the case and you don t know all the rules of such transcendental game systems which objective system are you talking about what is its goal again which brand of morality are you talking about keith

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re yet more rushdie re islamic law in article apr bnr ca rashid writes in article apr zeus calpoly edu jmunch hertz elee calpoly edu john munch wrote in article apr bnr ca rashid writes p s i m not sure about this but i think the charge of shatim also applies to rushdie and may be encompassed under the umbrella of the fasad ruling please define the words shatim and fasad before you use them again my apologies shatim i believe refers to slandering or spreading slander and lies about the prophets a s any of the prophets basically any prophet i ve ever dealt with has either been busy hawking stolen merchandise or selling swampland house lots in florida then you hear all the stories of sexual abuse by prophets and how the families of victims were paid to keep quiet about it it s a kind of willful caulmny and cursing that s indicated by the word this is the best explanation i can come up with off the top of my head i ll try and look up a more technical definition when i have the time never mind that but let me tell you about this chevelle i bought from this dude you guessed it a prophet named mohammed i ve got the car for like two days when the tranny kicks then manny my mechanic tells me it was loaded with sawdust take a guess whether mohammed was anywhere to be found i don t think so fasad is a little more difficult to describe again this is not a technical definition i ll try and get that later literally oh mohammed the word fasad means mischief but it s a mischief on the order of magnitude indicated by the word corruption it s when someone who is doing something wrong to begin with seeks to escalate the hurt yeah you mohammed disorder concern harm etc the mischief initially caused by their actions the wrong is specifically related to attacks against god and his messenger and mischief corruption disorder etc you slimy mass of pond scum resulting from that the attack need not be a physical attack and there are different levels of penalty proscribed depending on the extent of the mischief and whether the person or persons sought to make hay of the situation the severest punishment is death yeah right you re the one should be watching your butt you and your buddy allah the stereo he sold me croaked after two days your ass is grass jim yeah that s right jim

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re cruel was re political atheists kmr po cwru edu keith m ryan writes they spent quite a bit of time on the wording of the constitution they picked words whose meanings implied the intent we have already looked in the dictionary to define the word isn t this sufficient we only need to ask the question what did the founding fathers consider cruel and unusual punishment hanging hanging there slowing being strangled would be very painful both physically and psychologicall i imagine well most hangings are very quick and i imagine painless firing squad note not a clean way to die back in those days etc all would be considered cruel under your definition all were allowed under the constitution by the founding fathers and hangings and firing squads are allowed today too and if these things were not considered cruel then surely a medical execution painless would not be either keith

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re cruel was re political atheists livesey solntze wpd sgi com jon livesey writes they spent quite a bit of time on the wording of the constitution i realise that this is widely held belief in america but in fact the clause on cruel and unusual punishments like a lot of the rest was lifted from the english bill of rights of just because the wording is elsewhere does not mean they didn t spend much time on the wording we have already looked in the dictionary to define the word isn t this sufficient since the dictionary said that a lack of mercy or an intent to inflict injury or grief counted as cruel sure people can be described as cruel in this way but punishments cannot keith

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re the inimitable rushdie in article bu edu jaeger buphy bu edu gregg jaeger writes no i say religious law applies to those who are categorized as belonging to the religion when event being judged applies this who does the categorizing i d cheat on hillary too john laws local gop reprehensitive extolling traditional family values

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re cruel was re political atheists in article qnpa inn av gap caltech edu keith cco caltech edu keith allan schneider writes hanging hanging there slowing being strangled would be very painful both physically and psychologicall i imagine well most hangings are very quick and i imagine painless i think this is a misnomer firing squad note not a clean way to die back in those days etc all would be considered cruel under your definition all were allowed under the constitution by the founding fathers and hangings and firing squads are allowed today too and if these things were not considered cruel then surely a medical execution painless would not be either but this just shows then that painful execution is not considered cruel and unusual punishment this shows that cruel as used in the constitution does not refer to whether or not the punishment causes physical pain rather it must be a different meaning i d cheat on hillary too john laws local gop reprehensitive extolling traditional family values

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re the nonexistance of atheists in article kutluk ccl umist ac uk kutluk ccl umist ac uk kutluk ozguven writes atheists are not mentioned in the quran because from a quranic point of view and a minute s reasoning one can see that there is no such thing i guess that s why scientists probably aren t mentioned either or stock brokers or television repairmen it s precious to know just how deep the brainwashing from childhood that it takes to progress a religion cleans away a very substantial part of the reasoning neurons but don t mind me i don t exist jim halat

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re an anecdote about islam in article bu edu jaeger buphy bu edu gregg jaeger writes deletion sure yes i did you see i don t think that rape and murder should be dealt with lightly you being so interested in leniency for leniency s sake apparently think that people should simply be told the did a bad thing straw man and you brought up leniency and what about the simple chance of misjudgements misjudgments should be avoided as much as possible i suspect that it s pretty unlikely that given my requirement of repeated offenses that misjudgments are very likely assuming that misjudgements are not correlated deletion i just love to compare such lines to the common plea of your fellow believers not to call each others names in this case to substantiate it the quran allows that one beats one s wife into submission really care to give chapter and verse we could discuss it has been discussed here chapter and verse were cited i assume that you weren t looking then let s be more exact do you think it is not in the quran and what would your consequences be when it it was shown to be in it primitive machism refers to that i have misspelt that before my fault again not all of the orient follows the qur an so you ll have to do better than that i have not claimed that it is sufficient for the argument when there are a lot of male dominated societies that qualify as machistic are you going to say that the situation of women is better in sufficeint areas of the orient deletion this is an argument for why you don t like religions that suppress sex a such it s an irrelevant argument if you d like to generalize it to an objective statement then fine my response is then you have given no reason for your statement that sex is not the business of religion one of your arguments the urge for sex in adolescents is not so strong that any overly strong measures are required to suppress it if the urge to have sex is so strong in an adult then that adult can make a commensurate effort to find a marriage partner you apparently have trouble reading things you don t like the point was having sex the way one wishes being a strong desire marriage is a red herring tell me about homosexuals for one you simply ignore everything that doesn t fit into the world as you would like to have it and as for the situation of adolescents one has probably keep your combination of leniency and maiming in mind whe you say that it does not take overly strong measures to suppress the urge for sex in adolescents benedikt

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re the inimitable rushdie in article apr eagle wesleyan edu kmagnacca eagle wesleyan edu writes deletion nope germany has extremely restrictive citizenship laws the ethnic germans who have lived in russia for over years automatically become citizens if they move to germany but the turks who are now in their third generation in germany can t that s wrong they can benedikt

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re a little too satanic jon livesey writes so why do i read in the papers that the qumram texts had different versions of some ot texts did i misunderstand reading newspapers to learn about this kind of stuff is not the best idea in the world newspaper reporters are notoriously ignorant on the subject of religion and are prone to exaggeration in the interests of having a real story that is a bigger headline let s back up to at this point we have the masoretic text the various targums translations commentaries in aramaic etc and the septuagint the ancient greek translation the masoretic text is the standard jewish text and essentially does not vary in some places it has obvious corruptions all of which are copied faithfully from copy to copy these passages in the past were interpreted by reference to the targums and to the septuagint now the septuagint differs from the masoretic text in two particulars first it includes additional texts and second in some passages there are variant readings from the masoretic text in addition to fixing predating the various corrupted passages it must be emphasized that to the best of my knowledge these variations are only signifcant to bible scholars and have little theological import the dead sea scroll materials add to this an ancient copy of almost all of isaiah and fragments of various sizes of almost all other ot books there is also an abundance of other material but as far as i know there is no sign there of any hebrew antecdent to the apocrypha the extra texts in the septuagint as far as analysis has proceeded there are also variations between the dss texts and the masoretic versions these tend to reflect the septuagint where the latter isn t obviously in error again though the differences thus far are not significant theologically there is this big expectation that there are great theological surprises lurking in the material but so far this hasn t happened the dss are important because there is almost no textual tradition in the ot unlike for the nt c wingate the peace of god it is no peace but strife closed in the sod mangoe cs umd edu yet brothers pray for but one thing tove mangoe the marv lous peace of god

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re after years can we say that christian morality is frank d s uucp frank o dwyer writes ray netcom com ray fischer writes frank d s uucp frank o dwyer writes plus questions for you why do subjectivists relativists nihilists get so het up about the idea that relativism is better than objectivism to the degree that relativism is a more accurate decription of the truth than is objectivism it provides more power and ability to control events i think you lose the right to talk about the truth once you say values are relative accuracy is a value judgement too it so happens i agree with the substance of what you say below but it s clear to me that at least some values are objective truth is better than falsehood peace is better than war education is better than ignorance we know these things if we know anything while i ll agree that these are generally held to be good things i question whether they come very close to being objective values especially considering that at one time or another each has been viewed as being undesirable i doubt you could even come up with anything that could be said to be universally good or bad and when i referred to the truth i was using the term hypothetically realizing full well that there may not even be such a thing assuming for the moment that morals are relative then two relativists can recognize that neither has a lock on the absolute truth and they can proceed to negotiate a workable compromise that produces the desired results no they cannot because they acknowledge up front that the desired results do not exist that after all is the meaning of compromise plus some problems if the relativists have no values in common compromise is impossible what happens then who if anyone is right what happens if one relativist has a value never compromise a value plant bombs in crowded shopping areas after all if morals are relative these values cannot meaningfully be said to be incorrect true enough but they cannot be said to be anything more than personal morals one thing notably lacking in most extremists is any sense of personal accountability the justification for any socially unacceptable behaviour is invariably some higher authority aka absolute moral truth assuming that there is an absolute morality two disagreeing objectivists can either be both wrong or just one of them right there is no room for compromise once you beleive in absolute morals you must accept that you are amoral or that everyone who disagrees with you is amoral untrue one can accept that one does not know the whole truth part of the objective truth about morality may well be that flexibility is better than rigidity compromise is better than believing you have a lock on morals etc in the same way i can believe in an objective reality without claiming to know the mechanism for quantum collapse or who shot jfk an objective truth that says one cannot know the objective truth interesting notion certainly one can have as one s morals a belief that compromise is good but to compromise on the absolute truth is not something most people do very successfully i suppose one could hold compromise as being an absolute moral but then what happens when someone else insists on no compromise how do you compromise on compromising given a choice between a peaceful compromise or endless contention i d say that compromise seems to be better and i would agree but it s bloody to pointless to speak of it if it s merely a matter of taste is your liking for peace any better founded than someone else s liking for ice cream i m looking for a way to say yes to that question and relativism isn t it almost invariably when considering the relative value of one thing over another be it morals or consequences people only consider those aspects which justify a desired action or belief in justifying a commitement to peace i might argue that it lets people live long healthy and peaceful lives while that much may well be true it is incomplete in ignoring the benefits of war killing off the most agressive member of society trimming down the population stimulating production the equation is always more complex than presented to characterize relative morals as merely following one s own conscience desires is to unduly simplify it ray fischer convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth ray netcom com than lies friedrich nietzsche

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re islamic banks was re slavery in article monu cc monash edu au darice yoyo cc monash edu au fred rice writes in apr bmw mayo edu vdp mayo edu vinayak dutt writes so instead of calling it interest on deposits you call it returns on investements and instead of calling loans you call it investing in business that is in other words floating stocks in your company no interest is different from a return on an investment for one thing a return on an investment has greater risk and not a set return i e the amount of money you make can go up or down or you might even lose money the difference is the risk of loss is shared by the investor rather than practically all the risk being taken by the borrower when the borrower borrows from the bank but is it different from stocks if you wish to call an investor in stocks as a banker well then its your choice relabeling does not make it interest free it is not just relabeling as i have explained above it is relabeling also its still not interest free the investor is still taking some money as dividend on his investment ofcourse the investor in islamic banking its your so called bank is taking more risk than the usual bank but its still getting some thing back in return also have you heard of junk bonds vinayak vinayak dutt e mail vdp mayo edu standard disclaimers apply

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we don t need no stinking subjects in article ql avinn a gap caltech edu keith cco caltech edu keith allan schneider writes kcochran nyx cs du edu keith justified and ancient cochran writes keith cco caltech edu keith allan schneider writes kcochran nyx cs du edu keith justified and ancient cochran writes no if you re going to claim something then it is up to you to prove it think cold fusion well i ve provided examples to show that the trend was general and you or others have provided some counterexamples mostly ones surrounding mating practices etc i don t think that these few cases are enough to disprove the general trend of natural morality and again the mating practices need to be reexamined so what you re saying is that your mind is made up and you ll just explain away any differences at being statistically insignificant try to find immoral non mating related activities so you re excluding mating related activities from your natural morality no but mating practices are a special case i ll have to think about it some more so you ll just explain away any inconsistancies in your theory as being a special case yes i think that the natural system can be objectively deduced with the goal of species propogation in mind but i am not equating the two as you so think that is an objective system isn t necessarily the natural one are you or are you not the man who wrote a natural moral system is the objective moral system that most animals follow indeed but while the natural system is objective all objective systems are not the natural one so the terms can not be equated the natural system is a subset of the objective ones you just equated them re read your own words now since homosexuality has been observed in most animals including birds and dolphins are you going to claim that most animals have the capacity of being immoral i don t claim that homosexuality is immoral it isn t harmful although it isn t helpful either to the mating process and when you say that homosexuality is observed in the animal kingdom don t you mean bisexuality a study release in found that of female seagulls are lesbians well i m saying that these goals are not inherent that is why they must be postulates because there is not really a way to determine them otherwise although it could be argued that they arise from the natural goal but they are somewhat removed postulate to assume posit that s right the goals themselves aren t inherent i can create a theory with a postulate that the sun revolves around the earth that the moon is actually made of green cheese and the stars are the portions of angels that intrudes into three dimensional reality you could but such would contradict observations now apply this last sentence of your to your theory notice how your are contridicting observations i can build a mathematical proof with a postulate that given the length of one side of a triangle the length of a second side of the triangle and the degree of angle connecting them i can determine the length of the third side but a postulate is something that is generally or always found to be true i don t think your postulate would be valid you don t know much math do you the ability to use sas to determine the length of the third side of the triangle is fundemental to geometry guess which one people are going to be more receptive to in order to assume something about your system you have to be able to show that your postulates work yes and i think the goals of survival and happiness do work you think they don t or are they not good goals goals postulates again if one of the goals of this objective natural morality system you are proposing is survival of the species then homosexuality is immoral kcochran nyx cs du edu b c d e f g k m r s t tsakc my thoughts my posts my ideas my responsibility my beer my pizza ok

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re after years can we say that christian morality is in qkq t n horus ap mchp sni de frank d s uucp writes attempting to define objective morality i ll take a wild guess and say freedom is objectively valuable i base this on the assumption that if everyone in the world were deprived utterly of their freedom so that their every act was contrary to their volition almost all would want to complain so long as you keep that almost in there freedom will be a mostly valuable thing to most people that is i think you re really saying a real big lot of people agree freedom is subjectively valuable to them that s good and a quite nice starting point for a moral system but it s not universal and thus not objective therefore i take it that to assert or believe that freedom is not very valuable when almost everyone can see that it is is every bit as absurd as to assert it is not raining on a rainy day it isn t in sahara disclaimer it s great to be young and insane

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re political atheists in article ql qinn kf gap caltech edu keith cco caltech edu keith allan schneider writes kcochran nyx cs du edu keith justified and ancient cochran writes schneider natural morality may specifically be thought of as a code of ethics that a certain species has developed in order to survive wait are we talking about ethics or morals here is the distinction important yes we see this countless times in the animal kingdom and such a natural system is the basis for our own system as well huh well our moral system seems to mimic the natural one in a number of ways please describe these number of ways in detail then explain the any contradictions that may arise in order for humans to thrive we seem to need to live in groups here s your problem we seem to need what s wrong with the highlighted word i don t know what is wrong is it possible for humans to survive for a long time in the wild yes it s possible but it is difficult humans are a social animal and that is a cause of our success define difficult and in order for a group to function effectively it needs some sort of ethical code this statement is not correct isn t it why don t you think so explain the laws in america stating that you have to drive on the right hand side of the road and by pointing out that a species conduct serves to propogate itself i am not trying to give you your tautology but i am trying to show that such are examples of moral systems with a goal propogation of the species is a goal of a natural system of morality so anybody who lives in a monagamous relationship is not moral after all in order to ensure propogation of the species every man should impregnate as many women as possible no as noted earlier lack of mating such as abstinence or homosexuality isn t really destructive to the system it is a worst neutral so if every member of the species was homosexual this wouldn t be destructive to the survival of the species for that matter in herds of horses only the dominate stallion mates when he dies is killed whatever the new dominate stallion is the only one who mates these seems to be a case of your natural system of morality trying to shoot itself in the figurative foot again the mating practices are something to be reexamined the whole theory needs to be reexamined kcochran nyx cs du edu b c d e f g k m r s t tsakc my thoughts my posts my ideas my responsibility my beer my pizza ok

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re after years can we say that christian morality is in article ursa bear com halat pooh bears jim halat writes in article qjd o nlv horus ap mchp sni de frank d s uucp frank o dwyer writes firstly science has its basis in values not the other way round so you better explain what objective atoms are and how we get them from subjective values before we go any further atoms are not objective they aren t even real what scientists call an atom is nothing more than a mathematical model that describes certain physical observable properties of our surroundings all of which is subjective rest deleted you were a liberal arts major weren tcha guess you never saw that photo of the smallest logo in the world ibm made with noble gas atoms krypton xenon i forget the specifics atoms trees electrons are all independently observable and verifiable morals aren t see the difference tep men who love brown tend to be warm and deep sensitive to the needs and desires of their partners sex is a hour a day thing snuggling by the fire walking in the rain or catching snowflakes on their tongue is a real turn on to a lover of brown thanx becka

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re death penalty was re political atheists jbrown batman bmd trw com writes in apr batman bmd trw com responding to dave first with official a a nickname fuller the death penalty is a deterrent dave the person executed will never commit a crime again guaranteed that means that it is an effective anti recidivism measure it does not say that it deters an individual from committing a capital crime in the first place the true question is whether the threat of death is likely to actually stop one from murdering or commiting treason are there any other capital crimes anywhere in the usa that is if there were no death penalty would its introduction deter a would be criminal from committing her his crime i doubt it this is only the first step even if it were a strong deterrent short of being a complete deterrent i would reject it for what about the case of the innocent executed and even if we could eliminate this possibility i would reject the death penalty as immoral this makes me something of a radical on the issue although i think there are many opponents of captial punishment who agree with me but who find the innocent executed the strongest argument to make i would if magically placed in charge facilitate state aided suicide for criminals who have life sentences this could be a replacement for capital punishment those who don t want to live the rest of their lives in jail would always have this option scott sauyet ssauyet eagle wesleyan edu

alt.atheism

re after years can we say that christian morality is in c l tg k q news cso uiuc edu cobb alexia lis uiuc edu writes if some society came up with a good reason for why rape and murder are ok i would be consistent with my position and hold that it was still wrong my basis of morality is not on societal norms or on current legalities my basis is surprise surprise on both the bible and on inherent moral abhorrences ah but what exactly is inherently abhorrent and why is it so what you re saying is in effect i think some things are repulsive and i know a whole bunch of other people who agree with me so they should be deemed absolutely immoral now and forever period which in and of itself is nice enough to some extent i agree with you but i do not agree that things are inherently or absolutely immoral they are labeled immoral each for its own good reason and if the reason can even theoretically change then so can the label yes that s vague and the only way i know off the top of my head to defend it is to say that all humans are similarly made yes that falls into the trap of creation no it doesn t humans are to some extent similar because we all belong to the same species that that species has evolved is another story altogether to a certain extent evolution can even lend credence to moral absolutism of a flavour my arguments are that it is better to exhibit trust goodness love respect courage and honesty in any society rather than deceipt hatred disrespect cowardness and dishonesty you re saying morality is what ll keep society alive and kicking it is i think up to a point but societies are not all alike and neither are their moralities no i haven t been everywhere and seen everyone but according to my thesis i don t have to since i hold that we were all created similarly similar identical if that makes an unfalsifiable thesis just say so and i ll both work out what i can and punt to fellow theists no it s falsifiable through finding someoe who was created different whatever that might be in the real world disclaimer it s great to be young and insane

alt.atheism

re yet more rushdie re islamic law in article qla g afp fido asd sgi com livesey solntze wpd sgi com jon livesey writes in article bu edu jaeger buphy bu edu gregg jaeger writes i hope an islamic bank is something other than bcci which ripped off so many small depositors among the muslim community in the uk and elsewhere grow up childish propagandist gregg i m really sorry if having it pointed out that in practice things aren t quite the wonderful utopia you folks seem to claim them to be upsets you you have done no such thing bbci was an example of an islamically owned and operated bank what will someone bet me they weren t real islamic owners and operators an islamic bank is a bank which operates according to the rules of islam in regard to banking this is done explicitly by the bank this was not the case with bcci and why did these naive depositors put their life savings into bcci rather than the nasty interest motivated western bank down the street this is crap bcci was motivated by the same motives as other international banks with perhaps an emphasis on dealing with outlaws and the intelligence services of various governments so please don t try to con us into thinking that it will all work out right next time back to childish propaganda again you really ought to get a life rather than wasting bandwith on such empty typing there are thousands of islamic banks operating throughout the world which no one ever hears about if you want to talk about corrupted banks we can talk about all the people who ve been robbed by american banks gregg

alt.atheism

re the inimitable rushdie in article qlb oinn shelley u washington edu jimh carson u washington edu james hogan writes p s t i come to my senses and accept the all knowing wisdom and power of the quran and allah not only that but allah himself drops by to congratulate me on my wise choice allah rolls a few bones and we get down then allah gets out the crisco bends over and invites me to take a spin around the block wow p s t i realize that maybe allah is looking for more of a commitment than i m ready for so i say man i ve got some programming to do gotta go i ll call you p s t thinking it over i renounce islam what loyalty jim it seems you ve been reading a little too much russell hoban lately as hemingway said my imitators always imitate the bad aspects of my writing hoban would no doubt say the same here gregg

alt.atheism

re after years can we say that christian morality is in article c l jo news cso uiuc edu cobb alexia lis uiuc edu mike cobb writes in qlapk d v morrow stanford edu salem pangea stanford edu bruce salem writes in article c jrde m z news cso uiuc edu cobb alexia lis uiuc edu mike cobb writes theory of creationism my theistic view of the theory of creationism there are many others is stated in genesis in the beginning god created the heavens and the earth wonderful now try alittle imaginative thinking huh imaginative thinking what did that have to do with what i said would it have been better if i said the world has existed forever and never was created and has an endless supply of energy and there was spontaneous generation of life from non life would that make me all wise and knowing and imaginative no but at least it would be a theory l warren kurt vonroeschlaub o kv iastate edu iowa state university math department carver hall ames ia j

alt.atheism

re you will all go to hell in jsn psuvm psu edu jsn psuvm psu edu writes who cares what the fellow wrote anyway i mean it came from psuvm so how could it possibly have been of any importance disperse smileys until no longer offended disclaimer it s great to be young and insane

alt.atheism

re the inimitable rushdie re an anecdote about islam in article bu edu jaeger buphy bu edu gregg jaeger writes well in one was not allowed to leave the domain of authority one is free to leave islam if one regards islamic law as a curse one should consider leaving islam the only way out seems to be death i d cheat on hillary too john laws local gop reprehensitive extolling traditional family values

alt.atheism

re death penalty was re political atheists in article apr daffy cs wisc edu mccullou snake cs wisc edu mark mccullough writes you exagerate to the point of libel i gave only unpopular reasons deliberately or do you think that we should have let iraq absorb kuwait i could make the tired old poland comparison but i think you ve heard it but the principle aplies never play a chamberlain and roll over to another country being invaded that only invites further invasions perhaps we ought not to have supported a known genocidist provided him with weapon systems tactical support technology etc we made suddam hussein what did bush call him oh yes an ally and a freind i d cheat on hillary too john laws local gop reprehensitive extolling traditional family values

alt.atheism

re you will all go to hell in article tan psuvm psu edu andrew newell tan psuvm psu edu writes in article jsn psuvm psu edu jsn psuvm psu edu writes you blashephemers you will all go to hell for not believing in god be prepared for your eternal damnation readers of the group how convenient that he doesn t have a real name let s start up the letters to the sysadmin shall we his real name is jeremy scott noonan vmoper psuvm psu edu should have at least some authority or at least know who to email postmast psuvm bitnet respectively p rfowles or p wverity the sys admins at the same node are probably a better idea than the operator benedikt

alt.atheism

re the inimitable rushdie re an anecdote about islam in article bu edu jaeger buphy bu edu gregg jaeger writes deletion certainly it is a central aspect of islam to show mercy and to give those who ve done wrong even presuming rushdie did violate islamic law and committed crimes this was the basis for my posts regarding leniency which seemed not to have penetrated benedikt s skull you have demanded harsh punishments of several crimes repeating offenders have slipped in only as justification of harsh punishment at all typically religious doublespeak whenever you have contradictory statements you choose the possibility that suits your current argument it is disgusting that someone with ideas that would make theodore kkkaldis feel cozy can go along under the protection of religion gregg tell us would you kill idolaters benedikt

alt.atheism

re islam and scientific predictions was re genocide is caused by atheism in article apr monu cc monash edu au darice yoyo cc monash edu au fred rice writes and it is he god almighty who created the night and the day and the sun and the earth all the celetial bodies swim along each in its rounded course holy quran hmm this agrees with the ptolemic system of the earth at the centre with the planets orbitting round it so copernicus and gallileo were wrong after all you haven t read very carefully if you look again you will see that it doesn t say anything about what is circling what anyway they are not moving in circles nor is there any evidence that everything goes around in a rounded course in a general sense wishy washy statements are not scientific benedikt

alt.atheism

re wholly babble was re free moral agency in article p psilink com robert knowles p psilink com writes deletion of course there is also the book of the subgenius and that whole collection of writings as well does someone know a ftp site with it benedikt

comp.graphics

call for presentations navy sciviz vr seminar call for presentations navy scientific visualization and virtual reality seminar tuesday june carderock division naval surface warfare center formerly the david taylor research center bethesda maryland sponsor ness navy engineering software system is sponsoring a one day navy scientific visualization and virtual reality seminar the purpose of the seminar is to present and exchange information for navy related scientific visualization and virtual reality programs research developments and applications presentations presentations are solicited on all aspects of navy related scientific visualization and virtual reality all current work works in progress and proposed work by navy organizations will be considered four types of presentations are available regular presentation minutes in length short presentation minutes in length video presentation a stand alone videotape author need not attend the seminar scientific visualization or virtual reality demonstration byoh accepted presentations will not be published in any proceedings however viewgraphs and other materials will be reproduced for seminar attendees abstracts authors should submit a one page abstract and or videotape to robert lipman naval surface warfare center carderock division code bethesda maryland voice fax e mail lipman oasys dt navy mil authors should include the type of presentation their affiliations addresses telephone and fax numbers and addresses multi author papers should designate one point of contact deadlines the abstact submission deadline is april notification of acceptance will be sent by may materials for reproduction must be received by june for further information contact robert lipman at the above address please distribute as widely as possible thanks robert lipman internet lipman oasys dt navy mil david taylor model basin cdnswc or lip ocean dt navy mil computational signatures and voicenet structures group code factsnet bethesda maryland phishnet stockings long legs the sixth sick shiek s sixth sheep s sick

comp.graphics

graphical representation of vector valued functions gnuplot etc make it easy to plot real valued functions of variables but i want to plot functions whose values are vectors i have been doing this by plotting arrays of arrows complete with arrowheads but before going further i thought i would ask whether someone has already done the work any pointers thanx in advance tom weston usenet weston ucssun sdsu edu department of philosophy office san diego state univ home san diego ca

comp.graphics

re dmorph in article apr usl edu jna ucs usl edu armstrong jay n writes can someone please tell me where i can ftp dta or dmorph dmorf dave s morph i think is what it means and dtax dave s tga assembler are available in the msdos uploads directory on the wuarchive they are arjed and bundled with their respective xmemory versions dmorfx exe and dtax exe you can also find a version of aaplay exe there with which you can view files you create with dta exe or dtax exe i downloaded the whole bunch last week and have been morphing away the afternoons since the programmes are all a bit buggy and definitely not ready to spread to the masses but they are very well written the interface is frustrating at first but it gets easy once you figure out the tricks i have noticed that dmorfx will crash horribly if you try to morph without using the splines option not sure why since i don t have the source i think it was written for tp if anyone else comes up with any other hints on getting the thing to work right tell me it took me several hours the first time just to figure out that if i just used the durned splines then it would work jna jna usl edu ryan rap cis ufl edu

comp.graphics

voice input vendor information needed hello i am looking to add voice input capability to a user interface i am developing on an hp unix workstation i would greatly appreciate information anyone would care to offer about voice input systems that are easily accessible from the unix environment the names or adresses of applicable vendors as well as any experiences you have had with specific systems would be very helpful please respond via email i will post a summary if there is sufficient interest thanks ken p s i have found several impressive systems for ibm pc s but i would like to avoid the hassle of purchasing and maintaining a separate pc if at all possible ken hinckley kph q virginia edu university of virginia neurosurgical visualization laboratory

comp.graphics

where can i find sipp i recently got a file describing a library of rendering routines called sipp simple polygon processor could anyone tell me where i can ftp the source code and which is the newest version around also i ve never used renderman so i was wondering if renderman is like sipp ie a library of rendering routines which one uses to make a program that creates the image thanks joe tham joe tham joth ersys edmonton ab ca

comp.graphics

re million vs thousand colors d hh dtek chalmers se henrik harmsen writes bits per r g b gives horrible machbanding visible in almost any picture bits per r g b colors gives visible machbanding color gradient picture has almost no machbanding this color resolution is see some small machbanding on the smooth color gradient picture but all in all there are situiations where you get visible mach banding even in a bit card if you create a very smooth color gradient of dark green white yellow or something and turn up the contrast on the monitor you will probably see some mach banding while i don t mean to damn henrik s attempt to be helpful here he s using a common misconception that should be corrected mach banding will occur for any image it is not the color quantization you see when you don t have enough bits it is the human eye s response to transitions or edges between intensities the result is that colors near the transistion look brighter on the brighter side and darker on the darker side andre andre yew andrey cco caltech edu

comp.graphics

translating tttddd to dxf or swiv d i am a mac user when it comes to graphics that s what i own software and hardware for and i ve recently come across a large number of tttddd format modeling databases is there any software mac or unix for translating those to something i could use like dxf please reply via email thanx eric oehler oehler picard cs wisc edu

comp.graphics

help on renderman language wanted hello everybody if you are using pixar s renderman d scene description language for creating d worlds please help me i m using renderman library on my next but there is no documentation about nextstep version of renderman available i can create very complicated scenes and render them using surface shaders but i can not bring them to life by applying shadows and reflections as far as i understand i have to define environmental and shadows maps to produce reflections and shadows but i do not know how to use them any advises or simple rib or c examples will be appreciated thanks in advance alex kolesov moscow russia talus imaging communications corporation e mail alex talus msk su next mail accepted

comp.graphics

re more gray levels out of the screen in article pp t cc tut fi jk lehtori cc tut fi kouhia juhana writes in article apr kpc com hollasch kpc com steve hollasch writes i think you re proposal would work to get an extra one maybe two extra bits of color resolution however if you had a display that chould do only zero or full intensity for each primary i don t think you d get great equivalent bit photographs i have not suggested to do so i wrote about problems and the problem were clearly visible with bit b w images not to mention bit images description of experiment deleted if the bit images are viewed quickly and in sync with screen then intensities could be better than we have i dunno more deleted in any case getting black color with slow machines is problem i could try it on our bit screens but i don t know how to render pixels with x in constant time i recall our double buffer has other image color and one b w that doesn t help either maybe i should dump photos to screen with low level code how a few years ago a friend and i took some grey level photos from a bit mac plus screen using this method displaying all levels synchronized to the hz display took about seconds after experimenting with different aperture settings and screen brightnesses we found a range that worked well giving respectable contrast the quality of the images was pretty good there were no visible contrast bands to minimize the exposure time the display program built different bit frames the first contained a dot only for pixels that had value the second only for pixels that had value etc these frames were stored using a sparse data structure that was very fast to or onto the screen in sequence creating these frames sometimes took minutes on that old mac but the camera shutter was closed during that time anyway and yes we wrote directly to the screen memory mea culpa our biggest problem was that small images were displayed in the top left corner of the screen instead of the center it took an extra week to have the film developed and printed because the processors took the trouble to manually move the all images into the center of the print who d have guessed regards jon rowlands

comp.graphics

re more gray levels out of the screen in article c c r btg csc ti com rowlands hc ti com jon rowlands writes a few years ago a friend and i took some grey level photos from a bit mac plus screen using this method displaying all levels synchronized to the hz display took about seconds why didn t you create grey level images and display them for time slices this requires the same total exposure time and the same precision in timing but drastically reduces the image preparation time no kenneth sloan computer and information sciences sloan cis uab edu university of alabama at birmingham a campbell hall uab station fax birmingham al

comp.graphics

re rumours about do in article h p s g zola esd sgi com erik westworld esd sgi com erik fortune writes better than cdi much better than cdi of course i do not agree it does have more horsepower horsepower is not the only measurement for better it does not have full motion full screen video yet does it have cd rom xa starting in the quarter of the first do multiplayer will be manufactured by panasonic and will be available late this year a number of other manufacturers are reported to have do compatible boxes in the works which other manufacturers we shall see about the date all this information is third hand or so and worth what you paid for it this is second hand but it still hard to look to the future lex van sonderen lex aimla com philips interactive media

comp.graphics

visuallib d graphics for windows i am currently looking for a d graphics library that runs on ms windows are there any such libraries out there other than visuallib it must run on vga and should not require any other add on graphics cards for visuallib will it run with metaware high c compiler v any email contact for the author of visuallib any help would be much appreciated thanks chua teck joo information technology institute email teckjoo iti gov sg science park drive phone singapore fax

comp.graphics

graphics library package hi all i am looking for a recommandation on a good royalty free graphics library package for c and c program this is mainly use to write children games and education software i heard someone mentioned genus and also gfx are they any good please pardon me if my question sounds a little strange i am asking this question for a friend thanks in advance caroline tsang cst garfield catt ncsu edu

comp.graphics

re rumours about do in article c eyz ix optimla aimla com lex optimla aimla com lex van sonderen writes in article h p s g zola esd sgi com erik westworld esd sgi com erik fortune writes better than cdi much better than cdi of course i do not agree it does have more horsepower horsepower is not the only measurement for better it does not have full motion full screen video yet does it have cd rom xa starting in the quarter of the first do multiplayer will be manufactured by panasonic and will be available late this year a number of other manufacturers are reported to have do compatible boxes in the works which other manufacturers we shall see about the date a do marketing rep recently offered a phillips marketing rep a bet that do would have boxes on the market on schedule the phillips rep declined the bet probably because he knew that do players are already in pre production manufacturing runs months before the commercial release date by the time of commercial release there will be other manufacturers of do players announced and possibly already tooling up production chip sets will be in full production the number of software companies designing titles for the box will be over how do i know this i was at a bar down the road from do headquarters last week some folks were bullshitting a little too loudly about company business all this information is third hand or so and worth what you paid for it this is second hand but it still hard to look to the future lex van sonderen lex aimla com philips interactive media what an impartial source

comp.graphics

re graphics library package

comp.graphics

wanted sird alogorythmn hi i m interested in writing a program to generate a sird picture you know the stereogram where you cross your eyes and the picture becomes d does anyone have one or know where i can get one please e mail to steveq sndcrft dialix oz au with any replies many thanks for your help steve q

comp.graphics

any graphics packages available for aix does anybody know if there are any good d graphics packages available for ibm rs aix i m looking for something like dec s gks or hewlett packards starbase both of which have reasonably good support for different output devices like plotters terminals x etc i have tried also xgks from x distribution and ibm s implementation of phigs both of them work but we require more output devices than just x windows our salesman at ibm was not very familiar with graphics and i am not expecting for any good solutions from there ari ari suutari ari carel fi carelcomp oy lappeenranta finland

comp.graphics

re bw hardcopy of colored window mars ixos de martin stein writes i use xwd xpr from the x r dist and various programs of the ppm tools to print hardcopies of colored x windows my problem is i don t like xpr it gives at least the x r version does louzy output the hardcopy looks very grainy to me instead i use pnmtops this takes full advantage postscript and lets the printer do the dirty job of dithering a graylevel image to black and white dots so if you have a postscript printer try xwdtopnm xwdfile convert to ppm ppmtopgm to graylevel for smaller file to print pnmtops noturn to postscript lpr print pnmtops has several neat options but use them with care if you want your image to be wide use pnmtops noturn scale width noturn prevents the image from being rotated if it is wider than it is high width specifies the paper width not the image width see below scale is used because if the image is small it may fit within a width less than and will thus be printed smaller than wide if you first scale it up a lot it will certainly not fit in and will be scaled down by pnmtops automatically to fit the specified paper width in short pnmtops will scale an image down to fit the paper size but it will not blow it up automatically hope this helps marcel x marcel wijkstra aio wijkstra fwi uva nl x faculty of mathematics and computer science x university of amsterdam the netherlands life stinks fortunately i ve got a cold

comp.graphics

re more gray levels out of the screen in article apr cis uab edu sloan cis uab edu kenneth sloan writes why didn t you create grey level images and display them for time slices by grey level images you mean items of bit images it does work but it doesn t work if you have more than bit in your screen and if the screen intensity is non linear with bit per pixel there could be c c timing this gives levels but they are linear if screen intensity is linear with c c it works but we have to find the best compinations there s levels but choises best must be chosen different compinations for the same level varies a bit but the levels keeps their order readers should verify what i wrote juhana kouhia

comp.graphics

looking for ctds i can t find ctds connect the dots smoother in france if it is a commercial program i ll happily pay whatever it may cost do not take it litterally please help i have lots of pov sources texture images and animations though if you are looking for something just tell