Is there a GOD?

Rafa said:

Yes, if everyone has no purpose in life whatsover except to follow MONEY... Capitalism and greed is good.... Alternatively, if everyone became a socialist, communist, white with blue eyes, etc, etc... it removes one potential motivating tool.

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I don't have too much trouble with most of your post there Raf, (although I don't necessarily agree etc) except for the sentence above.

I have found non-Christians to have equally as much purpose in life ( and equally high morals - on a a par with, if not just as high as ) christians and other religious believers.

But then I agree with the removal of the motivation for war .

BTW, you know they found the mummified skeletons of Adam and Eve yesterday don't you?

You know how they are sure it was them?
- no belly buttons

nice one


btw, just to clarify, i didn't mean to say non beleivers have no purpose in life...
rather meant to say... to have a different purpose in life ...

and i used the examples of making money, greed, become a socialist, communist, etc, etc... i could have added things like helping those in need, stopping violence, ending war, and could go on and on

regardless, everyone needs to have the same purpose, otherwise you have motivating factor for war (commies vs capitalist!)

interesting you state the word morals
what is Morals? and what makes someone's morals higher that someone elses?
are morals related to whats right and whats wrong
is having morals the same as not sinning (thou SHALL NOT), or to live a virtuous life (thou SHALL).

is there a time and place for morals... i.e applied at the micro level (family, society), or the macro level (eg war on iraq, helping the poor, oppressed people, going to africa / asia and risking your own life for people you don't even know)...

PS: this may or may not be related to the tread topic, i don't know.

Raf, have to get back to morals later - certainly kept early philosophers busy contemplating that one.
what is just?
what is just around the corner?
probably best that we don't know

Here are a couple of youtubes :-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpbrFAxV9cc&NR=1 Digitalfreethought's Atheism 101 Part 3 of 6 (there is obviously a set, but this is reasonable summary)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTbdvy5jIQw Richard Dawkins Foundation Introduction.
Dawkins is horrified that
"the general public prefers irrational books (astrology, magic, extra terrestrials, etc etc - without even going near religious books at this stage of the argument) over books that reflect what we know about the real world"

"that a recent gallop poll concluded that almost half the population of USA believes that the entire universe, sun, solar system, milky way galaxy, and all the other billions of galaxies, all began AFTER the domestication of the dog.

"They believe this because they rate a particular bronze age origin myth more highly than all the scientific evidence in the world

"Now as we approach Darwin's bicentennial, the fact that almost 50% of Americans take genesis literally is nothing less than an educational scandal".

"The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America. I am one of those scientists who feel that it is no longer enough just to get on and do science. We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organized ignorance. We even have to go out on the attack ourselves, for the sake of reason and sanity. But it must be a positive attack, for science and reason have so much to give. They are not just useful, they enrich our lives in the same kind of way as the arts do. Promoting science as poetry was one of the things that Carl Sagan did so well, and I aspire to continue his tradition." - Richard Dawkins

Research into the psychological basis of unreason. What is it about the human psychology that predisposes people to find astrology more appealing than astronomy; at what age are young people most vulnerable to unreason

Education. Seek to support rational and scientific education at all ages

I suspect that I'm a follower of these blokes.

wayneL said:

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Though I find the personage of DR thoroughly objectionable

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wayne
please refrain
from showing disdain
to my saviour ... again

wayneL said:

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I will however, stop short of changing my avatar to a picture of Rumsfeld

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your current avatar is far better suited, particularly to this thread, mythologically speaking

and the smiley



fantastic across the ether

2020hindsight said:

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THEN of course there are ...
the known forgottens
the forgotten knowns
and of course..
the forgotten forgottens

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ahh 20's from the ancient revered sacred scripts of the whatchamacallums

Rafa said:

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# Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
# Blessed are the meek: for they shall posses the land.
# Blessed are they who mourn: for they shall be comforted.
# Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice: for they shall have their fill.
# Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
# Blessed are the clean of heart: for they shall see God.
# Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
# Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

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and rafa,

Blessed are the blessed: for they are doubly blessed

and yes i have revisited the matrix to refresh my soul

by the way wayne and 20's, this sunday, ABC (Aust) 9.30, Compass, part 1 of a 2 part series 'Root of all evil: the god delusion' - "Professor Richard Dawkins claims that belief in christianity, islam or judaism has stunted the minds capacity for understanding"

cheers

happytown said:

by the way , this sunday, ABC (Aust) 9.30, Compass, part 1 of a 2 part series 'Root of all evil: the god delusion' - "Professor Richard Dawkins claims that belief in christianity, islam or judaism has stunted the minds capacity for understanding.

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Fantastic !! - thanks happytown - though to be honest, youtube is a great substitute for live TV; much of it recorded from original broadcast of the show of course.

Incidentally, Chasers covered some of the superstitious nonsense that Dawkins was referring to tonight. (nothing to do with religion as such, more about hypnotising materialistic objects into believeing that they belonged to us lol - whatta loada ...)

Also next Monday, Denton's "Enough Rope":-

God On My Side is a film about faith and the places it can take people. Where it took Andrew Denton was to the 63rd National Religious Broadcasters' Convention in Dallas, Texas, in February 2006. More than 6,000 Christian communicators gathered there, at the Gaylord Convention Center, to discuss how best to spread the word of God in this new century, how to take advantage of opportunities presented by the explosion of new technologies and audiences. By turns serious and comic and sometimes a little disturbing, it examines the cutting edge of evangelical technology, the business of God, the America of the religious right, and what the inescapable truths of the Bible mean for US foreign policy and the Middle East. Seventy million Americans are born again Christians. A highly organised, politicised and motivated bloc, they provide more than 40 per cent of President Bush's vote. The NRB provides key access to this constituency. With 350 television and 750 radio stations among its members, and an estimated audience of 141 million Americans, the NRB knows it has a powerful voice in the States. Its members not only speak to the heartland of President Bush's America, they are the heartland of President Bush's America. Denton wondered, what would this heartland look like up close? Who are these people? What were the journeys that brought them to faith? With his trademark wit and empathy, Denton's idea was to avoid the clichés, to stay away from the stereotypical, pulpit-pounding televangelists, and focus instead on the foot soldiers of Christianity, the everyday believers running booths on the exhibition floor or workshops in the surrounding rooms. With an open mind and a determination to take people as he found them, his self-appointed brief was to allow his interviewees the respect and room to express themselves freely, to have their ideas and views heard. Andrew Denton's first feature-length documentary, God On My Side is a subtle but powerful piece o
Format: Movie, Closed Captions

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Personally I am convinced that a far smaller percentage of Australians than 45% or 51% or whatever (as USA poll came up with) believe that the universe is only 6000 years old, a la creationism.

Wow another hindsight post, I can see why 2020 is Broke ~ but happy ?


Have Fun
Bob.

holy Dow!! up 100 points again

I think if anyone thinks the universe is 6000 years old, is a bloody idiot


Having said that, whilst the universe is millions of years old... and i accept that, i am still to be convinced that human race simply just happened!... Maybe the God/s put us on this earth 50,000 years ago, as a giant game of Sims.. or Civilisations.... Can anyone say with any certainty otherwise?

As I myself am only 35 years old, I cannot say for sure how old the Earth and Universe is, as I have not been witness to it's creation or evolution. Neither can anyone else say, if it is 6000 years old, or 6 trillion.

I am a believer in the Bible account, simply because I am yet to find any evidence that proves otherwise, unlike evolution.

If we all have the same evidence, as we do with fossils and whatever else, we have to remove our biased beliefs, that is, what we want to believe, and just analyze the facts, like a detective in a crime.

Or to use the stock market, our common ground, we all have the same information available to us, we just use different indicators, and thus have different opinions, which is all the stock market is. People with different opinions willing to back it up with money. We can't all be right, as is evident with losing trades, and the 95% of futures traders that go under in their first year. You say it's going up, I say it's going down. Only one of us can be right, regardless of how strongly we believe.

So if we have a bunch of tangible pieces of evidence, we have to be able to look at them objectively, with no pre-formed opinions (presuppositions?), or bias to what our faith-based religion tells us.

It's normal to fear the unknown. What if the Bible is true? In my time as a Christian, I've yet to find a reason to believe it isn't. There is no evidence that I know of to say that it isn't. I think that people put death out of their minds, it's easier to not think about it. The problem is that it is going to happen eventually, whether you think about it or not. It's looming in the future, an unavoidable event for us all. We plan for retirement with all these financial investments, yet a lot of people fail to plan for the real retirement, eternity.



It's worth investigating with an open mind and heart. Maybe people put it off because they know that if the bible is true, then they're going to have to change, stop drinking, fornicating etc, but it's like a gamble with your eternal life. You can put it off until you're older, but if you die in the mean time you lose.

God gives us all freedom to choose. It's what makes us different from animals, different from angels. It's why He loves us. We are His creation, real creatures with free will. It is each of our own choice to accept God, or reject Him.
God has mulititudes of angels that worship Him day and night. We are different as humans in that we can choose.

Here's a link to a page of videos that I'm certain will stimulate your mind. Just be willing to accept something different to what you already believe.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/video/ondemand/

If I can recommend the two most recent ones, Creation, Evolution and Deception parts 1 and 2.

Best regards, hope you enjoy watching.

AP, Just because you can touch the Bible doesn't make it's tangible evidence. Whereas science is pretty confident that they are spot on with carbon dating etc. But I have a feeling that this thread is not about to change your ideas

Maybe if you argued that a "day" is really an epoch or some such (speaking allegorically or metaphorically - or in "macro days" if you prefer ) then you could fudge your way through the argument I guess


e.g. Maybe Pleistocene epoch is the "day" that Adam and Eve were made. BTW, I notice that Wikipedia says that's where dating is heaviest, so maybe Adam and Eve were indeed responsible Maybe carbon dating is when they invented the lead pencil for writing love letters?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene

And another thing - so many of us going to hell and stoking fires for the foreseeable eternity - in fact it's probably the real reason for global warming

PS Re Your comparison to trading on the share market - do you trust the word of the geologists who do those drilling reports for you? How many of them do you think believe that the stuff they are drilling up and reporting on is only 6000 years old.

PS I notice that short faced bears became extinct then.
These days - with the Dow defying gravity as it is - , all we see around here are... long faced bears?

PS Won't it be a great day when kids leave year 12 school majoring in Pleistocene - instead of majoring in Plastocene.

PS I notice that fauna gets a big boost during this epoch as well . Maybe they should rename it - the "Fauna-cation" epoch !"

Looks like there were 6 era for example - "and he rested on the 7th" - snap!!

Don;t know about sitting on the right hand of God or not, but you'll see Pleistocene (and modern man) up there on the very right hand end of the geological time scale.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_time_scale
Note good fossils from around 630 millin years ago.
and formation of earth estimated about 4570 million years ago.
To say that the earth is only 6000 years old is to say is like saying that these blokes got it wrong to the extend that they think the distance across the USA is about 18 inches ( or 18 feet or whatever) - seriously wrong. They might be out by a factor of 2 or 3 or even 100 but sheesh... 4,570,000,000 vs 6,000 (out by a factor of just under a million ?) c'mon.

My apologies there 20/20. By tangible evidence I refer to stuff we find lying around here on Earth, like fossils.

Did you know that they found a fossilized miner's hat down a mine in Tasmania?
There goes the millions of years for a fossil to form theory.

Carbon dating, while I can appreciate your sense of humour, is an inaccurate method. Here's a link to a page that will give some facts on radiometric dating.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2002/carbon_dating.asp

There have never been found any transitional species fossils, as you would expect to find if we did indeed evolve from apes. All that are found, regardless of depth, are species. The Bible (I know, here I go...) says that each species produces after it's own kind
.
An example is that we don't find a half-cat/half-dog.
It's why we can't get a half-ape, half-man. Different gene structure. Each species is created after it's own kind, always has, always will. Like humans, some have missing legs, some have slanty eyes, some have dark skin. Still all are humans, that have adapted to their environment over time, like cockroaches adapt to insecticide and become more resistant to it.
Humans occasionally have birth defects for any number of reasons. Call it an accumulation of sin, the wrong combination of parents, a freak genetic thing, whatever. Some animals are born defective as well. But we still are individual species, that can breed (after their own kind) within our own species.

All the species you see on the planet have existed that way since they were created. Species vary within species, like we have poodles and dobermans, but they are both dogs. They simply have genetic mutations within that species (dog). It is scientifically proven that all dogs came from a common ancestor, the wolf, much like it is proven that all humans come from common ancestors, Adam and Eve/Noah.

If we did evolve from apes, why are there still apes? There are no ape-man fossils. Only ape fossils, and man fossils, found together at the same levels in fossil layers. Should there not be ape fossils at the bottom, then a graduation of ape-to-man as "time" passes (yes, the evolutionists will have you believe that it takes millions of years for each layer of rock to form in the fossil record).

Fossils are found facing vertically in layers of rock, existing in multiple layers of rock which supposedly took thousands of years for each layer to form. Evolutionists therefore will have you believe that the carcase stood protruding from the ground for thousands of years while the rock layers formed over and around it. Unlikely, you must admit.

Just noticed another chatroom where people were really dumb and no-one would admit to definitely "knowing" either way. what a lot of dummies !

If I could nominate a GOD I would nominate 2020hindsight for his contribution to this thread, Is there a GOD. Mate I just love your tireless work.You,ve got my vote

I've been told that one of my posts back there was altogether wrong, and I therefore wish to post this correction -

After the big flood the population was 8, (not 2) -
Noah, his wife (past child bearing age)
three sons and their wives.

so I was out by a factor of 4 !- how incorrect can you be!. That's nearly as bad as calling those fossils 630 million years old

Lol - thanx peter - just that I'm allergic to the TV - (and I seem to have caught some bug from this youtube thing - and wikipedia

And you see someone like Dawkins trying to set up a charity (!!!) to help educate Americans - I mean - they expect to be classified as a charity because the need to counter this trend of "unreason" is so great. Obviously won't get that classification while George Bush is around lol. , but you gotta admire him for trying. Looking forward to his show on SBS Sunday night .

PS Or does that mean that , if they found fossils of sponges from 630 million years ago - that PROVES that Adam and Eve has a bathtub!!

AnalysisParalysis said:

The Bible gives us an infallible account of the entire history of our planet, including it's creation.

There is evidence all around us to support the Bible account. One that I have recently read is how canyons form. The average atheist evolutionist will say that it took millions of years for the Grand Canyon to form. However, there is no evidence to support this statement.

They simply make up a number, and that's their evidence. Why not make it trillions? There is, however, evidence to support rapid formation of canyons, including the Grand Canyon.

If the world was covered in water, as recorded in the Bible, the Grand Canyon could have formed very quickly, as the waters receeded from the land, rapidly carving a massive canyon. The land would have been nice and soft as well after a couple of months of being underwater.

Evolutionists will disagree though, and say that it was the river that gradually took millions of years to erode the Canyon.

In recent times, huge canyons have been seen to form in a matter of days from large volumes of water rushing through them.

All evidence points to the Bible's account of a flood, which must then cause people to ask themselves, could the rest of the Bible also be true?

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AP,
You say the Grand Canyon was due to Noah's Flood.
Here's a slightly more scientific version :-

Just up the road from the Grand Canyon you'll find Hoover Dam / alias Boulder Dam. - all part of the Colorado River. Firstly a photo from a plane - then a closeup of the strata that make up the layers of rock. Don't tell the missus this , lol , but when I took this (that's the missus legs btw ) I was fascinated with the possibility that each of those layers of rock was possibly once horizontal. i.e. there was lake here, which was constantly laying down sediment, which was somehow tilted, new layers at different angles. Since then I find that some of the sandstone was windblown, and that might explain that particular area. Either way, geology still has a tremendous story to tell through such laying of sedimentary and/or wind blown rocks.

Up the road at Grand Canyon, the rocks have been cut to give one of "the most complete geologic columns on the planet". The geologists make the following observations (including the age of some of the strata now evident in the walls) :-

The principal consensus among geologists is that the Colorado River basin (of which the Grand Canyon is a part) has developed in the past 40 million years and that the Grand Canyon itself is probably less than five to six million years old (with most of the downcutting occurring in the last two million years). The result of all this erosion is one of the most complete geologic columns on the planet.

... The major geologic exposures in Grand Canyon range in age from the 2 billion year old Vishnu Schist at the bottom of the Inner Gorge to the 230 million year old Kaibab Limestone on the Rim. Interestingly, there is a gap of about one billion years between the stratum that is about 500 million years old and the lower level, which is about 1.5 billion years old. That indicates a period of erosion between two periods of deposition.

Many of the formations were deposited in warm shallow seas, near-shore environments (such as beaches), and swamps as the seashore repeatedly advanced and retreated over the edge of a proto-North America. Major exceptions include the Permian Coconino Sandstone which was laid down as sand dunes in a desert and several parts of the Supai Group.

The great depth of the Grand Canyon and especially the height of its strata (most of which formed below sea level) can be attributed to 5,000 to 10,000 feet (1500 to 3000 m) of uplift of the Colorado Plateau, starting about 65 million years ago (during the Laramide Orogeny). This uplift has steepened the stream gradient of the Colorado River and its tributaries, which in turn has increased their speed and thus their ability to cut through rock (see the elevation summary of the Colorado River for present conditions).

Weather conditions during the ice ages also increased the amount of water in the Colorado River drainage system. The ancestral Colorado River responded by cutting its channel faster and deeper.

The base level and course of the Colorado River (or its ancestral equivalent) changed 5.3 million years ago when the Gulf of California opened and lowered the river's base level (its lowest point). This increased the rate of erosion and cut nearly all of the Grand Canyon's current depth by 1.2 million years ago. The terraced walls of the canyon were created by differential erosion.[3]

About one million years ago, volcanic activity (mostly near the western canyon area) deposited ash and lava over the area, which at times completely obstructed the river. These volcanic rocks are the youngest in the canyon.

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So , sorry, I prefer this version than yours
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canyon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulder_Dam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_river
PS the river no longer reaches the sea

The lower course of the river, which forms the border between Baja California and Sonora, is essentially a trickle or a dry stream today due to use of the river as Imperial Valley's irrigation source. Prior to the mid 20th century, the Colorado River Delta provided a rich estuarine marshland that is now essentially desiccated, but nonetheless is an important ecological resource.

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Thanks for some interesting truths on the canyon formation 2020.

Does anyone feel that with more people , more facts , more experience and more general knowledge up to today (18/05/2007) that still,no one knows if there is a god?
If you believe the scientists (if you don`t then defy the earths gravity) then a much clearer `picture` has emerged to the history , and after all it is history that the conjecture is about , of the planet that we live (and die) on.

The ones who have dared ask the questions & prove their theories have , and are , opening doors to truths we have never even thought of.There is a place in this world for a belief in a god (i did when i was dealing with loss) though if you want to experience life fully , then a belief in any religion captivates you.

P.S. i`m not the devil (but don`t tell anyone)

I needed to add that the time taken for these changes to the shape of the earth was over more time than thinking man has legibly recorded.To know the truth in these matters is liberating and comforting as one.

There is no God.