i thought you might appriciate a passsage from the preface to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass:

I'm on it! I think I'm gonna love this guy. Thanks!

SORRY to reply to a post 2 pages old, but apparently this thread has gotten long pretty quickly, and I've been off doing other stuff for a while.



First of all, what do you mean by "provably"? I think we may have different definitions of what a "proof" is; I generally use it in a narrow sense (ie, mathematical or logical proof). If you differ, feel free to share your definition and why you think your definition should be used in this context.

In addition, I do agree that there may be issues with translations and between different manuscripts - however, the difference are usually obvious, and none of them are large enough to change the basis of our faith as far as I know.

If you wish to discuss the inconsistencies, feel free to do so.



Except that Matthew specifically states that the boat was a considerable distance from land, Peter apparently sank when he became afraid (contradicts the idea this was on the seashore), and he apparently had to ask permission to leave the boat - as proof of Jesus' identity. Frankly, the context speaks volumes as to the correct translation of this passage.

In addition, I searched the blueletter bible for all of the uses of epi, and nearly all of them were were pretty direct - not "by" or "near" something.

http://cf.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?Strongs=G1909&Version=kjv#

In addition, the NIV, a translation done by professionals, translates it as "on" as well. In general, context and word usage are examined very carefully when a translation is done, and a great deal of research goes into ensuring the translation is as accurate as possible.



Actually, lineage seems to be very important - there are many places in the Bible that do nothing but list people and their descendants or ancestors. Genesis chapter 5 is an entire chapter devoted to just listing names and ages of people from Adam to Noah!

Genesis 10-11 goes from Noah to Abram (later to be called Abraham), and Matthew 1 goes from Abraham to Jesus, forming a practically unbroken list of people from Adam to Jesus. Apparently, this lineage was considered very important to the people who wrote the Bible. If the stories were nothing but moral lessons, I doubt this lineage would be a part of them, as it's just long, boring list of people. Why write such a thing if you're just inventing a religion to teach a few moral lessons?

This is what a "cursory" examination of the Bible seems to be telling me.

Okay, enough of replying to posts 2 pages old . Here's a reply to a recent one:



Yeah, I'd say the "god" of naturalism is very sadist. Too bad I don't believe in that "god".

Geez, so much stuff has been written, I don't know where to begin, lol. Lots of ideas floating around.

Anyways, a note on the "infinite universes" idea: It's unfortunately very speculative, and while it does attempt to answer the "fine tuning" argument, it's also very dependent on having faith that these other universes exist, even though we don't have any evidence of their existence.



Or maybe it's just a bunch of 4 dimensional branes in an 11 dimensional spacetime, but that's just me .

np, you're welcome.



from The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce:

LOGIC, n.
The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of human misunderstanding. The basis of logic is the syllogism, consisting of a major and a minor premise and a conclusion -- thus:

Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly as one man.

Minor Premise: One man can dig a posthole in sixty seconds; therefore --

Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a posthole in one second.

This may be called the syllogism arithmetical, in which, by combining logic and mathematics, we obtain a double certainty and are twice blessed.

 

edit: btw, welcome back, Cobra. i wouldn't worry too much about catching up; these conversations are tangental from start to finish.

also, i'm not sure who you were responding to, but i don't remember any of the claims this person made in the bible coverage of my introductory religious studies classes. what approximated claim made by secular scholars that i do remember seeing is that only about 18% of the statements and actions the bible attributes to Jesus were likley made by Jesus. the methods they use involve some of the things your quotee mentioned: close analysis of sentence strcture, grammar, style, writing structure, and vocabulary, as well as comaprison of substative elements.

the other impression your quotee leaves is that scholars seem to agree about what the bible really is. about the only thing most scholars agree on is that the bible is not a literal truth, and i can't even say that with certainty. scholars and academics build their entire careers on the basis of arguing with each other. but any academic will tell you, there isn't much that we can absoultely know beyond a shadow of a doubt, but that doesn't mean we can't achieve better proximity to the noumenological truth.

that said, here's a wiki article covering some of the scholarly debate about the textual origins of the gospels, the possible existence of the Q document. if you're really into the subject, i guess i'd be up for talking about this stuff, but otherwise, the specificities of the bible's origins aren't really a major interest of mine.



yes you have; you'd have lost your integrity. what kind of Christian would advise us heathens to believe in God as a way of hedging our bets? that's not faith; that's cold calculation.

plus, you've also lost all the energy you spent believing in god that you could have spent having fun, helping the downtroden, or sacrificing virgins. and don't you tell me belief doesn't take some energy out of you, mental and spiritual energy if nothing else; strong beliefs might allow you to discover wells of energy you never knew you had, but that's like starvation driving you to discover things you never knew you could eat.

ah, spiritual growth: the insect diet of the human condition.

you don't need to belabor the obvious; i'm not stupid.

but you're making more assumptions than you state. even if there is a god, why do i have to believe in him to go to heaven? just 'cause some crusty old book says so? right.

but if there's no god, i'll have wasted the only time you have to exist, which while small compared to eternity is infinite compared to zero, talking to myself in a stuffy old building, and that's the point of believing in no god. that isn't losing nothing; that's losing everything.

so basically, the only way you don't lose everything is if you happen to be right.

frankly, if there is a god, and he's so petty that he won't let me into his little club unless i give up all my mental faculties to him, i'd rather spend eternity in hell. at least all the other gay guys'll be there.

actually, if it's only the bible-thumpers who go to heaven, and everyone else goes to hell, sign me up for hell now! (i'd be running the place inside a month anyway).

oh, and you'd better hope everyone you love sacrifices their lives to god as hard as you do, or you'll be the lonely one in heaven!

So, despite the fact that your sense of self, personality and pretty much everything else entwined into what makes the mental 'you'is provably and indisputably affected by occurences in the brain, it is not therefore a property of the brain?
Even assuming there was a soul which carried on after death, would the fact that our self is dependent, even in part, on the physical brain not argue that anything which would remain be so different from the self as it is now that it would no longer be meaningful to consider it the same self?

The brain doesn't fully develop for ten years. Arguably it continues to develop throughout life. If self awareness is a by product of the brain processing information, then it would require both the information to process, and the structures to do that processing before it would happen.

Why wouldn't there be? It's a pretty strange question to be honest. Might as well ask why some brains play GalCiv, or why we enjoy marinating our brains in fermented liquids.

Not exactly, and not the same activity we're talking about. Your talking about a recognised medical condition whereby the emotional centres of the frontal lobes are deformed or non active, leading to a lack of emotional responses in the affected. Usually this results in a variety of medical disorders from psycopathia to schizophrenia. The vast majority of sufferers aren't mass murderer's though, and surgically inducing the effect in a patient can and is used to treat other conditions. The problem with violence is fairly well documented, largely caused by the combination of lack of emotional response (no feeling of guilt or disgust when encountering violence) and upbringing.


Prove you don't.

What evidence do you have that would prove that you were in fact self aware, rather than simply thinking you were?

How so? We know and can prove your brain generates electrical fields, and these co-incide with your brain activity. Nobody has yet found the soul though.

Because that woman wouldn't be you. She wouldn't have been born on a USAF base for a start. You're still thinking in terms of a predetermined 'you' which could have been born then though. As I've been saying, until your body and brain came into the universe there was no you to have inhabited anywhere.

If some experiments in Quantum physics are correct, that's pretty much the case. Even more interesting is the fact that matter and energy appear to spontaneously pop into our universe constantly. Although to answer your question with another, where did this creator come from then? Who made them? And who made the guys who made the guy who made the universe? Or are you going to claim the creator always existed, in which case why couldn't the universe always have existed?

It would be completely impossible. As far as I know, Cars don't generally breed. Arguing through complexity gets you nowhere though. If you want to say that humanity or the universe must have been designed because it is so complex, you'll need to explain how the designer himself was created, since he'd also be complex. In other words, if the universe as it is can't happen by random event, then God himself could not have randomly begun to exist.

Two problems with that:
1. There's nothing random about natural selection.
2. Our complexity is derived from several millenia of evolution.

This assumes there are only two choices: No god and your god.

What if the Muslims are right? What if it's the Nordic gods? What if you spend you entire life as a Methodist and the Mormons got it right? What if Buddhism is correct? You could spend your entire life believing in the wrong god and, frankly, there are so many it's a crap shoot.

2 hours per week * 52 weeks per year * maybe 75 years in a life = 7800 hours, or 325 days. that's nearly a year of my life. and that's just bible studying. i don't think i'll ever be able to spend a whole year talking about the same thing.

plus, you're not counting the fact that you spend all your waking time believing in god. that affects your whole life.

and no, i haven't "lost everything" by not believing in god, unless god is real. as i said before, if god is unreal, i'll have lost a big chunk of my life beleiving in phantasmagoria.



we're also finding out that maturity doesn't seem to be teleological. that is, i remember a couple recent pyschological studies suggesting it takes longer and long each year for people in the U.S. to grow out of adolescence, almost 30 being the new mean. the most radical are suggesting (gasp) that cultural factors influence maturity.

the religion of christianty started out as ONE faith, it quickly spread into hundreds of denominations, methodist, lutheran, catholic, ect.

that wasnt wut god wanted, humans created all the ceremonies and little things that we conflict over

the difference between the denominations is tiny little things such as.....not eating meat on fridays......the proper way to take communion at church......most of the "faiths" in the world believe in one god......they just have different views on how to worship him and how to live your life on his path

And if you spent all of your life pretenting to believe just in case he does exist, don't you think he will know that?

But don't worry, you can't go to hell, your are already there!

"can" is a double-valent word. sometimes it means, "it is possible," and other times it means, "they have the capacity." but you're right, that 60 men cannot always do a job 60 times faster; i think the problem really lies in the premises itself. in this case 60 men cannot do a job 60 times faster than a single man; most often, they'd do it about 40 times faster; the rest is lost to bureaucracy.

that's my problem with syllogistic logic, it always relies on premises, and all premises are a priori at some point (at some point you need to say, okay, i'm sure enough of this that i don't need to logically prove it).

of course, all explanatory knowledge relies on some common premises, such as causality and the ontological nature of time.

incidentally, i got a D in my Introduction to Logic class, but an A+ in Wisdom (i didn't do my HW in logic).

Yeah, my knowledge of logic comes from some informal logic and a little bit of formal logic at the Christian college, and later when I pursued Computer Science at another college I took a lot of propositional logic. Rarely have I seen syllogistic logic.

And yeah, pretty much everything boils down to axioms and premises at some point.



For me, that's pretty much observation - what I can see with my senses. Sure, I make a bit of room for the supernatural for my religious beliefs, but when it comes to non-religious matters, I usually trust my senses.

Yeah, I know our senses aren't always trustworthy, but usually trying to go "beyond" them means going into stuff that can't be directly observed or tested - which is usually the realm of religion anyways.