A Working Definition of God

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Now treat everybody as you would her (Eliza Dushku), and then you'll see God.

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Hey Dan, I'd love for you to treat me the way you would treat Eliza Dushku, but I'm married already.Mike, are you sure you want Dan, um, "treating" you like Eliza Dushku?

Right on, that sounds like a LOT of fun.

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You never know who's reading and may get the point in spite of this nutty naturalistic dogma here.

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Hmm, the idea of verifiable, reliable cause and effect in nature that anyone, regardless of religious belief, can also witness and observe and experience, that ha led to cures for disease, space exploration, vaccinations, and computers.Yeah, that's pretty nutty.Silly, one might say.

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Well. you've been a member longer than I, but these guys are for science and seem to worship it as their naturalistic god of the elements.

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Uh, no.Science is a verygood method for figuring things out about nature.That's all it is.

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They seem to not be able to see past it so much that it dominates their time.

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Huh?

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The wool is over their eyes so much that they think science means that God doesn't exist anymore unless they have tangeable evidence.

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Arrogance and condescention.

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Backwards, just as the enemy wants it. It's the big authority of their time, and they obey it, and stay in the land of boxed thought.

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I could believe in a lot of things that have no evidence.Why should I pick one over any other without some reason to?How do I know it isn't just cultural?Why didn't you pick Zoroastrianism, or Wicca, mike?

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God says not to murder, and certainly not harm any little ones.

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Sure he does:Psalms 137:9 Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.I mean, have you actually read the Bible, mike? God tells people to murder all the time. see a list of God-ordered death and destruction, plagues, wars, revenge, and slavery here

Either I have read you wrong, or you didn't realize that you were rather unclear to what you were referring (the topic or the site), but let me review so you see why I replied how I did...(bold added by me)

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Faith: That seems to be the case with many on this site. Sad but true. I don't know if it's a waste of time. I may come to that conclusion eventually but up to a point it can be an entertaining challenge to try to explain something to people from a totally other frame of reference. You never know who's reading and may get the point in spite of this nutty naturalistic dogma here.

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Totally, when it comes to this topic.

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As you might notice above, there qwas really no indication in your message that you were referring to this topic only. In fact, it certainly seemed as though you were referring to the whole site.

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It's great for cures for disease, space exploration, vaccinations and computers but it's absolutely irrelevant for knowing anything about God or spirit beings or anything else having to do with spiritual life. It's the wrong tool for the job, and insisting on making it the method and the standard where it is unfitted to the task IS pretty nutty.

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Well, I generally agree, and I wouldn't have commented the way I did if I thought you were referring to just this subject.

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Finally figured out that MOY means "millions of years." Yeah, isn't it amazing how whatever really does falsify the idea of MOY doesn't even get a blink of recognition from them? They just toddle right on MAKING the data fit the theory, denying the contradiction. That's the problem with a theory that can't be falsified, but is all a matter of interpretation -- we can interpret ad infinitim without ever having to touch down to reality. So now it's soft dinosaur parts. It would be hilarious if it weren't just, well, nutty.

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Yeah.All of those scientists are just a huge pile of steaming LIARS, aren't they?Not an honest one among the entire bunch, those scientists. They must take classes at scientist school on how to be a really good LIAR. That way, when they go to the secret Illuminati-style meetings (usually held every February in Vegas) they can all figure out how to best maintain THE BIG CONSPIRACY TO LIE TO THE ENTIRE WORLD ABOUT EVERYTHING IN SCIENCE THAT CONTRADICTS A LITERAL READING OF THE BIBLE.I hear the head LYING SCIENTIST gets to wear a cool cape.Well, maybe only SOME of them are LIARS. The rest of them are IDIOTS. Utter, raving MORONS who just follow the LIARS. It's a wonder that they got such good grades in all of those difficult college courses, passed all of those graduate school entrance exams, survived Prelims, and went on to complete their PhD dissertations! How did such clearly RETARDED and MORONIC people manage to do that? You tell me!And to THINK that we trust them to try to cure DISEASES!Man, I don't know about you, but I'm ONLY going to trust my health to the FAITH HEALER down at the local Pentacostal church from now on.

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I like the idea that I disappeared, though. Probably wouldn't have wasted my time with all those posts if I'd known I was invisible.

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Sorry, Dan.Your powers only work, a la The Invisible Boy, when nobody is looking.

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No, it's my view of evolutionism which is not science.

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Biology isn't science?How so?

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No, it's a definition of science when it pretends to be able to pronounce on the nature and reality of things outside its area of applicability.

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"Bio" means "life"."Ology" means "study of".So, "Biology is "The study of life".So, is it your contention that those who are trained in "Biology" should not be studying life?What should they be doing, according to you?This message has been edited by schrafinator, 04-20-2005 11:14 PM

[text=red]Please do not reply to this post. It is off-topic. --Admin[/text]

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If you're through raving, my answer is that none of what scientists do requires any notion of millions of years.

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Have you spoken to any Geologists, Astronomers, Paleontologists, Geophysicists, or Nuclear Physicists about this?I'm sure this would be news to those I know.

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It's just hung on their work, it doesn't have anything to do with their work.

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Please explain where those silly scientists have it all wrong, Faith.I mean, can you explain how they have it wrong about nuclear decay rates, for example? Or maybe the speed of light?All of those bonehead Physicists and Biologists at MIT and Harvard sure do need your help to explain this to them, this much is clear.

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It's just a habit of thought they all take for granted but it's completely irrelevant to the actual work of science.

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Yeah, like I said, they're all just basically really slow thinkers and have never realized that they are so wrong.You'd think that one of them, at least, would have figured out what you, a person completely untrained in any scientific field, have easily figured out about all of science a long time ago, but hey, stranger things have happened.This message has been edited by schrafinator, 04-21-2005 01:23 PMThis message has been edited by Admin, 04-21-2005 01:42 PM

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Contrary to this 'evolutionary' position, the lifetime work of Wilhelm Schmidt (published in his Origin and Growth of Religion: English Ed. 1931) found that, thoughout the world, primitive cultures have a notion of a supreme god. This god has the following characteristics - remarkably uniformly across the world:

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Wow, this list is completely wrong in so many aspects.I'll go through it now...

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He lives in, or above, the sky -- anthropologists refer to him as the "Sky-God", although the name the peoples have for him is more commonly one meaning "Father" or "Creator".

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Except for the Goddess religions, or that polytheism is much more common across cultures than monotheism.Also, there are cultures in which their gods live in everything, including rocks, trees, animals, rain, the ocean, etc.Let's not forget the buddhists, who do not believe in a God at all.

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He is like a man, or a father.

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...or an elephant, a woman, or a jackal, or dozens of other exaples.

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However his form cannot be physically represented, and so there are almost never idols of him.

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This is just laughable.Have you been to a museum lately? They are chock full of many, many ancient representations of all sorts of gods.

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He is the creator of everything.

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Polytheistic cultures usually have many separate creators.Some religions say that both the universe and god/s have always existed.

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He is eternal (i.e. He existed before anything else, and He will never cease to be).

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The ancient Greeks and Romans belived that gods could cease to be.

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He is all-knowing.

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Again, even the monotheistic Hebrew God of the OT isn't all-knowing.He's surprised all the time.

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All that is good ultimately comes from him.

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Some cultures, including the early Jews, treated God as an entity that need to be appeased and not angered so that the crops would grow, etc., instead of an entity that was responsible for the success of the crops.

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He is the giver of moral law.

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Clearly, the Greek and Roman pantheon displayed a wide spectrum of moralities.Buddhists do not believe in a God, so they believe morality comes from people.

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He is good, and abhors all evil.

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The early Jews really stressed the "power" thing in their depictions of God much more than the "good" thing, as the OT readily shows.

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He is all-powerful.

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Again, clearly the God of the bible is not all-powerful, and neither is the Greek Pantheon of gods, and neither are the Hindu pantheon, nor the animist "gods", and of course buddhists do not believe in a god.

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He judges people after their death.

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Many religions believe in reincarnation.

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People are alienated from him due to some misdemeanor in the past.

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This one is peculiar only to the Judeo/Christian faith, for the most part, AFAIK.

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Because you're looking at "all gods". I specifically said primitive sky gods.

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repeat: primitive...sky...gods...

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OK, but this hardly represents all, or even the majority of all the religious thought in the world.The Eastern/Buddhist traditions, Hinduism and the Greek/Roman pantheon are completely ignored for some reason.Why is that?

I understood the noah contradiction just fine.The biblical accounts of when Noah and his family went into the ark are self-contraditory. One says that they entered the ark and seven days later it began to rain. The other says that they went into the ark the very same day it began to rain.Also, just to biggyback on this, are you going to be drinking poison any time soon? The bible says you should be able to do this without harm.I will instantly become a Christian if you drink, say, a cup of bleach without damaging yourself.

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If you don't believe the Israelites were real people, and you think the Mahabharata is equivalent, far be it from me to try to talk you out of your insanity.

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But that's the point, Faith.Sure, there really were Israelites, but that doesn't mean that the individual things reported in the Bible are perfectly accurate.

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Think for a change.

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Are you this arrogant and condescending in person, or is it the annonymity of this meassage board that makes you think that insulting people is perfectly OK?If I became a Christian would I have to act like this? It would really be contrary to the way I was raised WRT having good manners.