Open Minded Agnostic Atheist

[sealybobo]

Indeed. "These questions are good tests of our logic and critical thinking skills → when we ponder them." So we should perhaps apply Occam's Razor: "entities should not be multiplied without necessity" or "the simplest solution is most likely the right one" first used, ironically enough, "for simplicity to defend the idea of divine miracles."

Well, I'm sorry, but while miracles may seem "the simplest solution" to many (most?), they've never struck me as such. Whenever witnessing magicians perform their tricks I just want to know how they do them. Of course, they want everyone to simply think it's all "magic." A good show. Great entertainment. Not so simple for those raised like me. I don't like being played for a fool or suckered. It often just seems arrogant and meanspirited. I want to see the trick(s) replayed in slow motion with all the hidden bits exposed. Only then can I begin feeling appreciative.

So here you paint gods as workers of vast, super complex magic tricks. Choosing not believe in such gods is clearly then "the simplest solution." Nothing logically changes when a sealyboro ponders aloud about what he might do in their stead. He's just enjoying a thought experiment based upon the popular notion. The exact same analysis applies to quantum mechanics gone wild with all its "particles" that aren't really "particles" with their infinite "fields" now emanating from each and every one. Utter, complete nonsense. Call me when you've seen an electron, let alone a gluon or tackysprinkle. Until then, I'm going with a vastly simpler theory requiring no suspension of disbelief or magic.

I want someone to show me one hitler speech where he told the German people he was an atheist. Didn’t happen. The nazis were Catholics.

 

[BreezeWood]

I would work for an oil company

.

I would work for an oil company

.
no doubt ...

Interior to push drilling in Florida waters after November election

Former Secretary Ryan Zinke backed away from Florida drilling after howls from state leaders.

www.politico.com

The Trump administration is preparing to open the door to oil and gas drilling off Florida’s coast — but will wait until after the November election to avoid blowback in a swing state whose waters both parties have long considered sacrosanct, according to four people familiar with the plan.

look's like job openings in the near future ...

panama city is just the place for someone like you.


we're not so enthusiastic in tallahassee.

 

[Meriweather]

You see, you questioned Christianity too I’m sure, i hope, and it seems like ultimately it must be one thing you can point to where it hit you. The thing you read that convinced you the whole things not made up. What was it?

In hindsight, one thing that helped a lot is that I attended Catholic school, and we were taught both religion and up-to-the-minute science--which included evolution. One question that was posed for us to consider is whether we thought the Bible was used to teach youngsters science, or something else. If Noah's Ark was not to teach us the entire planet was covered by water, what were the other points. A response that has stuck with me all this time is that new beginnings after catastrophes don't work. The same problems that were washed away popped back up.

When we were studying the Commandments we were given a verse something to the effect that sometimes life is hard to test how willing we truly are to keep the Commandments.

In Kings, God being found in the little things has made all the difference. Perhaps the biggest influence has been the Beatitudes.

It wasn't one big thing, just a bunch of little things along the way.

I truly get how the Bible can throw us curves. The biggest one it threw me when I was a teenager, was the week after the Sunday gospel was about Jesus was scolding the scribes for being such hypocrites, and woe to all of them. That Friday, I received an award for an essay I had submitted. The Award was the Scribe & Quill. Naturally I was too embarrassed to tell my parents, and hid the certificate. It wasn't until years later I learned the Scribes of Jesus' day were lawyers--not teenagers who wrote essays. That was a great lesson in learning that not everything in the Bible is about me.

 

[LittleNipper]

I want someone to show me one hitler speech where he told the German people he was an atheist. Didn’t happen. The nazis were Catholics.

At first, Adolf Hitler seemed to accept Christianity.
“In his childhood, Hitler was enthralled by the pomp and ritual of the Catholic Church,” wrote Fritz Redlich in his 1999 biography of the Führer. “Allegedly, for a while he even considered becoming a priest.”

But Hitler, on April 20, 1889, began rejecting religion as a teenager. He was pulled in different directions by his parents.
His mother, Klara, reportedly the only person Hitler ever loved, was a devout Catholic. His father, Alois, with whom Hitler often fought, thought religion was essentially a scam — a “crutch for human weakness,” as another historian put it.
Hitler followed his father’s religious path straight into infamy. He hated Judaism, murdering 6 million Jews. But he loathed Christianity, too.

Hitler’s mother was ‘the only person he genuinely loved.’ Cancer killed her decades before he became a monster.
“In Hitler’s eyes Christianity was a religion fit only for slaves,” wrote Alan Bullock “Hitler, A Study in Tyranny,” a seminal biography. “Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle of the fittest.”

 

[LittleNipper]

Hitler's Table Talk

• In the long run, National Socialism and religion will no longer be able to exist together. [On a question from C. S., whether this antagonism might mean a war, the Fuehrer continued:] No, it does not mean a war. The ideal solution would be to leave the religions to devour themselves, without persecutions. But in that case we must not replace the Church by something equivalent. That would be terrifying! It goes without saying that the whole thing needs a lot of thought. Everything will occur in due time. . . . The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity. Bolshevism practices a lie of the same nature, when it claims to bring liberty to men, whereas in reality it seeks only to enslave them. In the ancient world, the relations between men and gods were founded on an instinctive respect. It was a world enlightened by the idea of tolerance. Christianity was the first creed in the world to exterminate its adversaries in the name of love. Its key-note is intolerance. Without Christianity, we should not have had Islam. The Roman Empire, under Germanic influence, would have developed in the direction of world-domination, and humanity would not have extinguished fifteen centuries of civilization at a single stroke. Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things. The result of the collapse of the Roman Empire was a night that lasted for centuries.
• Night of 11-12 July 1941; pp. 6-7.

 

[LittleNipper]

Table Talk dated 21 October 1941 ---- Hitler praised Julian the Apostate's Three Books Against the Galilaeans, an anti-Christian tract from 362. In the entry , Hitler stated:

When one thinks of the opinions held concerning Christianity by our best minds a hundred, two hundred years ago, one is ashamed to realise how little we have since evolved. I didn't know that Julian the Apostate had passed judgment with such clear-sightedness on Christianity and Christians [...] the Galilean, who later was called the Christ, intended something quite different. He must be regarded as a popular leader who took up His position against Jewry [...] and it's certain that Jesus was not a Jew. The Jews, by the way, regarded Him as the son of a whore—of a whore and a Roman soldier. The decisive falsification of Jesus's doctrine was the work of St. Paul [...] Paul of Tarsus (his name was Saul, before the road to Damascus) was one of those who persecuted Jesus most savagely.

 

[Grumblenuts]

I want someone to show me one hitler speech where he told the German people he was an atheist. Didn’t happen. The nazis were Catholics.

Not really sure what that has to do with what I was saying, but the more LittleNipper beats it around the bush the curiouser I get..

 

[BreezeWood]

At first, Adolf Hitler seemed to accept Christianity.

.
if nothing else there would have had to have been a mutual relationship ...

both sides actively working together to enhance their own objectives. certainly prior to the beginning of ww II.

 

[Grumblenuts]

Not to overstate the bleeding obvious,.. but, um, if the idea here is to make either group look bad because Hitler,.. there's Godwin's Law. If one wants to know which is more moral, scientific studies have explored that. Or just stop and think about it.

Freedom From Religion Foundation - Outreach & Events

The nonprofit Freedom From Religion Foundation works to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism, and to promote the constitutional principle of separation between church and state.

ffrf.org

That persecution still goes on

Visit the post for more.

wflatheism.com

 

[BreezeWood]

Not to overstate the bleeding obvious,.. but, um, if the idea here is to make either group look bad because Hitler,.. there's Godwin's Law. If one wants to know which is more moral, scientific studies have explored that. Or just stop and think about it.

Freedom From Religion Foundation - Outreach & Events

The nonprofit Freedom From Religion Foundation works to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism, and to promote the constitutional principle of separation between church and state.

ffrf.org

That persecution still goes on

Visit the post for more.

wflatheism.com

Not to overstate the bleeding obvious,.. but, um, if the idea here is to make either group look bad because Hitler,.. there's Godwin's Law. If one wants to know which is more moral, scientific studies have explored that. Or just stop and think about it.

.
that is correct - musilinini is a similar example and the exploits prior to the war before its reversal.

- simply as a reoccurrence of the main characters throughout history that was a failed attempt in the 1st century to remedy.

 

[Grumblenuts]

Been pondering evolution a bit and the argument that we've allegedly been unable to create new species thus far. I brought up the example of the mule earlier just to disprove that theory, but making the "fact" or "truth" of evolution contingent upon what humans can or can't do with it is just silly to begin with. Beyond that though, the implication is that evolution somehow can't be real unless different species are free at times to interbreed and produce an all new, improved species rather than it all being the natural selection of better adapted mutations. But here's the problem with that. If we could say breed with dogs and cats, horses with cows and goats, etc. then pretty soon we'd have just a very few species. Those would then be at higher risk of extinction due to pandemics and the shrunken diversity of food available. So having many unique species with difficult interbreeding helps us evolve in the long run.

 

[Grumblenuts]

 

[DOTR]

Actually, there is was or will be life everywhere eventually. Not every star but enough.

we think, know or believe there was life on Mars. Has that been confirmed? And if it is will that shake your faith?

There might be life in europa.

In cosmic terms humans will last for a blip. Will we survive longer than dinosaurs or trilobites did? Why did god go through all that suffering before he made this world for us?

And you think we are the only planet that will ever exist in the entire universe? This is the problem with theists. Jesus is so easy to swallow but science not so much

There is no scientific support for any life beyond earth. You are simply a science denier if you say different.
I’m not sure why all you people have such blind faith in extraterrestrial life and it’s ability to destroy Christianity. It doesn’t exist, so far as we know, and if it did I don’t see the problem for Christians. It may be a problem for you in some way...but it isn’t for Christianity.

 

[DOTR]

RE: Open Minded Agnostic Atheist
⁜→ sealybobo, DOTR, et al,

BLUF: Does it matter?

When you die, what difference will it make if the universe is teeming with life?

When you die, what difference will it make if there is no deity? It will be lights out as if you never existed at all.

When you die, what are the chances that humanity had a correct vision of the deity? What kind of deity would an extra-terrestrial envision? And what would make our beliefs any more credible than their beliefs?



(COMMENT)

Philosophically, these are intriguing questions. These questions are good tests of our logic and critical thinking skills → when we ponder them. But, if there is a Supreme Being, what line of thought did you follow to assume we know even the slightest about what the Master of the Universe thinks (or if the Creator thinks at all)?

But I can't even begin to imagine what a Super Being must be in terms of raw power, just to run the Solar System; let alone the Galaxy, or the Local Group galactic group (estimated to be about 10 million light-years across). You guys have much more brain-power than I have to imagine what the Supreme Being must be like to be that which set every little detail in motion. And the universe that the Supreme Being is so vast that there are stars so far away that its light has not, nor will ever, have enough time to reach Earth. The farthest we've been able to see is a star 55 million light-years away (SDSS J 122952.66 +112227.8). And if we use that for the radius of the known universe, we are talking about an inside surface area of the sphere to be ≈ 38,000M square light-years and a volume of the known universe to be just under 700,000M cubic light-years.

______________________________________
Boyajian's Star and WTF Star, and designated KIC 8462852, is anomalous. It has been noticed to have lost over 20% of its brightness. There is a hypothesis out there that suggests that it is a Dysons Swarm.

Most Respectfully,
R

Not to quibble but the farthest we have seen is in excess of 13 billion light years away. I still get the point. The universe is big.

 

[Fort Fun Indiana]

There is no scientific support for any life beyond earth.

You mean, "empirical", not, "scientific".

Ideas can be a type of support ("theoretical evidence"). The ideas are scientific, if it is feasible to test the truth of them.

As an example: we had plenty of theoretical evidence of the existence of black holes for nearly 100 years before we had empirical evidence of them. That theoretical evidence is, indeed" "scientific".

 

[Grumblenuts]

There is no scientific support for any life beyond earth. You are simply a science denier if you say different.
I’m not sure why all you people have such blind faith in extraterrestrial life and it’s ability to destroy Christianity. It doesn’t exist, so far as we know, and if it did I don’t see the problem for Christians. It may be a problem for you in some way...but it isn’t for Christianity.

True. No confirmation of life on Mars as of yet. But not all of us people "have such blind faith in extraterrestrial life" or "it’s ability to destroy Christianity." There are interesting aspects to consider nonetheless. The probability of life existing somewhere out there is one. The Biblical references to it all being created for man's dominion (or humans "in His image") is another. If superior (non-human) aliens suddenly arrived one day, then at the very least they should have the decency to supply us with new Bibles. (lol)

Colossians 1:16 ESV
For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.

Bible in Basic English
I have made the earth, forming man on it: by my hands the heavens have been stretched out, and all the stars put in their ordered places.

 

[Grumblenuts]

Psalm 104:5 ESV
He set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be moved.

(concrete footers perhaps? lol)

 

[BreezeWood]

There is no scientific support for any life beyond earth. You are simply a science denier if you say different.
I’m not sure why all you people have such blind faith in extraterrestrial life and it’s ability to destroy Christianity. It doesn’t exist, so far as we know, and if it did I don’t see the problem for Christians. It may be a problem for you in some way...but it isn’t for Christianity.

There is no scientific support for any life beyond earth. You are simply a science denier if you say different.
I’m not sure why all you people have such blind faith in extraterrestrial life and it’s ability to destroy Christianity. It doesn’t exist, so far as we know, and if it did I don’t see the problem for Christians. It may be a problem for you in some way...but it isn’t for Christianity.

.
all life on Earth is extraterrestrial ...

physiology is a metaphysical substance not native to planet Earth and with its inseparable spiritual content will occur anywhere conditions are favorable for its development. the same or in an altered form conducive to its environment - such as early life on Earth based on nitrogen.

 

[RoccoR]

RE: Open Minded Agnostic Atheist
⁜→ DOTR, et al,

REFERENCE BLUF:

Not to quibble but the farthest we have seen is in excess of 13 billion light years away. I still get the point. The universe is big.

(ACKNOWLEDGEMENT)

I will assume my references are incorrect and default to your superior knowledge.

{LINK TO SOURCE}
Scientists will never know the farthest star from Earth, as the star is so far away that its light has not, nor will ever, have enough time to reach Earth. Even the stars within the visible universe are far too numerous to count, but the farthest one that humans have ever detected is about 55 million light-years away. This incredibly distant star is called SDSS J 122952.66 +112227.8.

I was wrong.

I should have known better when I typed it. (I did not double check my source.)

I apologize.

Most Respectfully,
R

 

[sealybobo]

.

.
no doubt ...

Interior to push drilling in Florida waters after November election

Former Secretary Ryan Zinke backed away from Florida drilling after howls from state leaders.

www.politico.com

The Trump administration is preparing to open the door to oil and gas drilling off Florida’s coast — but will wait until after the November election to avoid blowback in a swing state whose waters both parties have long considered sacrosanct, according to four people familiar with the plan.

look's like job openings in the near future ...

panama city is just the place for someone like you.


we're not so enthusiastic in tallahassee.

I’m doing great right here in metro Detroit