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Author Topic:   Anti-theist
dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 371 of 895 (886555)
05-23-2021 6:03 PM
Reply to: Message 370 by Phat
05-23-2021 3:40 PM


Re: Point Taken
It seems like a fellow student trying to teach the class.
All it takes is for that fellow student to know just a little more than you do.
One of my junior high teachers told us about a famous imposter. I think that might have been Ferdinand Waldo Demara whom Tony Curtis played in The Great Imposter (1961), which was based on Demara's biography.
We were told that his easiest role to assume was that of a college professor. All he had to do was to read the textbook a couple chapters ahead of the class.
I think that was the same teacher who introduced us to Tom Lehrer and to Bob Newhart. Retired Navy chief. I still can't remember what the subject was (had to have been in 1964 or 1965, since That Was the Year That Was came out around then.

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 374 of 895 (886584)
05-25-2021 6:43 PM
Reply to: Message 373 by Stile
05-25-2021 4:43 PM


Re: The Ten Commandments Of Progressive Christianity
A few comments on a few of your comments. Or procrastinating again.
Also, as I recall Phat was criticizing these "Commandments".
Phat writes:
1) Jesus is a model for living more than an object of worship.
I think the model for living should be "Love."
. . .
Commandment #1: Follow Love.
My take is that Jesus was supposed to be the Great Teacher and is viewed as such in some religions (eg, Islam, Unitarian Universalism).
If all you do is to worship and praise a teacher but never try to learn his teachings, let alone trying to apply them, then you are wasting that teacher. Indeed, such actions do far more to show your disdain for that teacher than any kind of respect or praise you would fake.
When I read through the New Testament (twice beginning to end, not including going back to check some verses in the original Koiné Greek), my impression was that it was divided into two distinct and distinctly different parts: The Gospels which are about the teachings of Jesus, and the rest which was about the creation of The Christ quite detached from the teachings of Jesus. I see that dichotomy in the New Testament as applying to this first "Commandment."
Phat writes:
2) Affirming People's Potential Is More Important Than Reminding Them Of Their Brokenness.
...
Christian theology, especially fundamentalist theology, is obsessed with Original Sin, that just by how we were procreated into existence we are all already damned and our only salvation is Jesus. That was a key aspect of "DivorceCare" (which I was hoodwinked into attending during my own divorce): paraphrasing "You have been broken by your divorce. There is nothing you can do to fix yourselves. Only Jesus can ever fix you!" So then what, because I'm not a Chrisitian then I'm screwed (and not even remotely in anything resembling a nice way)? That kind of teaching is far worse than useless, but rather is actually destructive.
To bring it down several notches, you come upon somebody who has just been in some kind of accident or similar dire situation. So you stand there doing nothing but telling them how screwed they are, but you never even begin to try to help them in any meaningful way (telling them everything they had done wrong which got them into this situation is not helping).
Maybe this is just a "guy thing", but offering possible solutions or even lending a hand goes a lot further than just telling them "told ya so!"
 
Maybe this video doesn't really apply, but then you are rambling so I'm taking my cue from you. Besides, this is a good one.
The Faustian "I of Newton" from the Twilight Zone reboot (aired 13 Dec 1985). Always loved Ron Glass' patter in it (Shepard Book is sorely missed!). Pay attention to his t-shirt which changes its caption a number of times.
Phat writes:
3) The Work of Reconciliation Should Be Valued over Making Judgements.
...
Remember the "The Simpsons" episode which spoofed the classic Hitchcock movie, "Rear Window"? Bart thought the Ned Flanders had killed his wife, Maude, who was mysteriously missing. Turns out that she had been attending a special Christian camp because she wasn't being judgmental enough.
So the context was one of being judgmental in order to shun someone you disapprove of (usually without even knowing them), whereas reconciliation is trying to find ways to resolve your differences.
Phat writes:
5) Inviting Questions Is More Valuable Than Supplying Answers
Eh. I think (out of context) - this one is too vague to be helpful.
This one spoke to my religious background (UU):
quote:
Andre Gide:
"Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it."
quote:
"To question is the answer."
(UU catchphrase which I think originated with questioning authority during the civil rights movement and the Viet Nam War)
quote:
"The true purpose of religion is not to provide answers, but rather to get us to ask the right kind of questions."
(paraphrased from one of our minister's sermons)
In my time here, I've tried to promote that idea. If you're just handed "answers" which you accept without question nor any thought, then that's no better than ID's "goddidit" nonsense. You learn nothing. Your spiritual growth has halted and has started dying.
Also, since our fallible human nature is such that we will get almost everything wrong in some manner (most especially in absolute matters such as in religion), then it is most imperative that we constantly question and test our conclusions. For the religious, that has the additional benefit of keeping mindful of their beliefs and of working through those religious questions. Plus there's the added bonus of realizing that you had gotten something wrong so now you can correct it. I've mentioned a book about how most adults have childish ideas about God because they had formed those ideas as children and had never returned to them to update them.
Phat writes:
9) We Should Care More about Love and Less about Sex
...
I've always found the final line of the medley on Side Two of the Abbey Road album to be ambiguous:
quote:
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.
Of course, it doesn't help that the English word, "love", is so ambiguous. It is famously said that Greek had 4 words for "love" (and Inuit had a hundred words for "snow"). I started college as a foreign language major, migrating to computer science (at first, pretty much the same thing except I was no longer learning human languages -- tlhIngan Hol didn't count since it had not yet been invented in the late 1970's).
I sure wish I had the resources of the Internet and Netflix back then. One of the early problems I encountered was that the dictionary was not our friend. And English word can have so many different meanings, so in translating to another language which of the dozen foreign words do I choose? As I became more proficient in German, I started collecting dictionaries between German and those other languages; my friend nearly took my arm off in Lugano when I wanted to go into the first bookstore we had seen in more than a week in order to get a Tedesco-Italiano (German-Italian) dictionary.
Case in point. I used to participate on a C Programming forum (no longer exists) where we would get questions from all over the world -- the most indecipherable and unreadable posts were by native English speakers, whereas most of the non-native speakers were readable in spite of the word choice and word order sometimes getting a bit wonky.
But then one day a programmer from Portugal asked us how to use lights in multithreaded programming. Nobody had any clue what he was asking. But being sufficiently familiar with Spanish, I thought I might have a solution: multithreading like multiprocessing (more a UNIX/Linux thing) use semaphores for the separate processes/threads to signal that they were using common resources so everybody else "keep your hands off!". In Spanish, a traffic signal is a "semáforo" so I went to Wikipedia and looked up traffic signals and then went to the Portuguese version of that page and saw that it's the same word in Portuguese as it is in Spanish. He had looked up semáforo in his Portuguese-English dictionary and chose the American word for traffic lights, "lights" (eg, "Go straight and then turn right at the third light."). To him I added that the dictionary is not his friend.
Now for all members and lurkers (4 members, 52 visitors (AKA "lurkers") at this moment), if you work in multiple languages then you should be fully aware that every topic and occupation has its own specialized vocabulary which is normally not accommodated in any dictionary you would commonly buy (eg, from a used bookstore I have an old French-English Medical dictionary). So go to Wikipedia and look up the subject of interest in your own language. Then switch to your target language. The text should then provide you with the specialized vocabulary you will need to communicate with others about that subject in that language.
And to think that we had been operating for centuries without these tools!

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 394 of 895 (886604)
05-26-2021 3:19 PM
Reply to: Message 391 by anglagard
05-26-2021 2:24 PM


Re: The Knowledge of Jesus is Available to All
Josephus is not a primary source if and where he mentions Christ or the equivalent, or many other Biblical characters he mentions. He is a primary source when referring to Jewish customs, traditions, and religion.
I had had two semesters of Koiné Greek (the Greek New Testament was our reading material). One day in the university library I decided to look up that Josephus reference to Jesus that the fundies kept boasting about and see what it really said in Greek.
I found a dual-language edition which had the original Greek text on one page and the English translation of the opposite page. When I went to the page for that quote, it wasn't there. Instead there was a footnote which stated that that reference to Jesus was not in the original, but rather had been added centuries later in Old Church Slavonic apparently by a monk.
 
In every claim I've heard of extra-biblical evidence for the existence of Jesus such as from Roman and other historians, it was always as a reference to there being a new religion in town and here's what they believed. Or, as in the Josephus case, it had been inserted much later.

This message is a reply to:
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Replies to this message:
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 397 of 895 (886607)
05-26-2021 4:17 PM
Reply to: Message 393 by anglagard
05-26-2021 3:09 PM


Re: The Knowledge of Jesus is Available to All
There is also a lot of variation in practically every verse of the New Testament. They themselves were derived from several manuscripts which added things, left things out, or changed things. My NT Greek class used the Bruce Metzger bible which contains extensive footnotes showing what manuscripts each verse came from and what the variations were between the manuscripts.
As a very minor example, most manuscripts left out Barabbas' name: Jesus Barabbas. "bar Abba" means "son of the father" or "son of the teacher". Jesus Junior? Guess some people could read more into that than it deserves.
What does Luke 2:14 say? "peace on earth, good will towards men"? Or "peace on earth among men of good will"? Or "peace on earth among men with whom God is pleased"? The phrase is "και επι γης ειρηνη εν ανθρωποις ευδοκιας", in which the key word is "ευδοκιας", but more important to the point is the case it's in. The word has a few meanings, so part of the translation problem is in word choice. "Good will", "favor", "being pleased with", "choosing".
But the thing is that some of those translations depend on "ευδοκια" being in the nominative case (ie, subject of the phrase) and certainly that is what the KJV's translation is based on. But in most of the manuscripts it's clearly "ευδοκιας" which is in the genitive case. That necessitates an interpretation like "men of good will" or "men of favor" or even "men of God's choosing". BTW, as I recall that final sigma denoting the genitive case is found in the older manuscripts which should make it more original.
Similarly, how does Mark end? Yeah, with Mark Chapter 16, but how many verses does it contain? Fans of KJV will tell you twenty (20), but they've been fooled by the "Long Ending" which was added later. Originally, there were only eight (8) verses in Mark, ending it with the women at the tomb having been told that Jesus had arisen and that they go to his followers to inform them, but they were too afraid to do so. That's the end. It was later that someone added the long ending, verses 9 through 20, with all the appearances by Jesus and the Pentecostal stuff about speaking in tongues and handling venomous snakes and drinking poison.
But my favorite bit of irony is the curse in Revelation 22:18-19:
quote:
22:18 For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of
the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these
things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in
this book:
22:19 And if any man shall take away from the words of the
book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the
book of life, and out of the holy city, and [from] the things
which are written in this book.
Well, the Book of Revelation is just as full of variations as the other books of the Greek NT, so that curse didn't have much of an effect. Though Metzger doesn't list any variations for verses 22:18-19.

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Replies to this message:
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 409 of 895 (886619)
05-27-2021 12:46 PM
Reply to: Message 406 by Phat
05-27-2021 1:58 AM


Re: Point Taken
transcript 07:11 writes:
This worked out well, because Judaism, unlike Medieval Christianity, had no problem being just one religion in the mix.
In World Religions class (c. 1970) I learned a new word, "henotheism", and how it differs from monotheism. Or is an intersection of polytheism and monotheism.
Polytheism is believes that there are multiple gods while monotheism believes that there is only one god. Henotheism believes that although there are multiple gods you have faith in and follow and worship only one god.
The situation described at the end of the Exodus is of a nomadic settling down to become farmers. Naturally, with everything that they needed to learn to make that transition, they would have sought to learn those skills from the people already there. And naturally, part of those skills would involve learning what gods were in charge of what and how to make the appropriate sacrifices to those resident gods.
As the story goes, that set up a conflict between YHWH with whom they were already under a henotheistic covenant and these other resident agricultural gods. Most of us have heard how that story plays out.
What I'm not sure of is the history of how Judaism evolved from henotheism to monotheism or even to what extent it has done so. It may also suggest that there are a number of "flavors" of monotheism just as there are of polytheism. Perhaps even a view of a polytheism-henotheism-monotheism spectrum.
Henotheism was a hot-button topic
There's monotheism

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(2)
Message 421 of 895 (886650)
05-29-2021 11:36 AM
Reply to: Message 419 by Tangle
05-29-2021 7:27 AM


Re: Elvis has left the building.
As an oral tradition, it has all of the veracity of a game of telephone.
Although the second part of my college career was in computer science, the first part was in liberal arts concentrating on foreign languages. Being a German major is mostly like being an English major in that we also studied the language's literature and the history of the culture.
The 19th Century was primarily part of the Romantic period, which was a reaction against Classicism (which had been a reaction against Sturm und Drang, etc). Part of Romanticism was a growing trend of nationalism which led to a lot of dwelling on your people's (ie, des Volkes) history and mythology.
The Romantic conceit that brought this up was their fascination with folk tales and their belief that those folk tales were centuries old. Indeed, that was part of the work of the Brothers Grimm who collected their stories as part of their research in the linguistical development of the German Language (leading to the famous (world famous in linguistics classes) Grimm's Law about the first Germanic sound shift).
Well, those folk tales being part of the oral tradition means that they weren't anywhere near as old as the Romanticists thought. Instead of going back centuries and millennia, they mainly only went back a few generations. Worse than in the game of Telephone, each generation had the opportunity to embellish the story which could involve adding new information to support the story.
A case of that was an isolated tribe that anthropologists thought was untouched by the outside world. They had a myth involving Sirius (α Canis Majoris, hence the "Dog Star", the second brightest star in the sky after Sol). I think it was only in the 20th Century that our astronomers discovered Sirius B, a white dwarf companion that can only be seen with a telescope. Yet in this isolated tribe's mythology, their deified Sirius had a companion! How could they have known that all those many generations without benefit of a telescope? Well, it turns out that somebody in another team of anthropologists had mentioned that fact and it was immediately incorporated in their oral tradition. Such is how oral tradition actually works, far far worse than a game of Telephone.
For example, Genesis had been an oral tradition until the Babylonian Exile at which time the Judeans started writing it down (in part to stave off assimilation). During that writing, new material from the surrounding Babylonians made its way in (eg, the Flood Story from Gilgamesh). So in a mere generation or two the Judean oral tradition had gotten a major overhaul. Who knows what had happened to it over the preceding millennium?
 
BTW, regarding the effects of writing. Unwritten language changes very rapidly through usage, such that Old High German from about 1000 years ago is indecipherable to a modern German who had not majored in Germanistik (the German equivalent to our English degree). But then after having studied Koiné Greek at university I picked up a book on modern Greek. I was surprised that so many words were written almost the same after about 2000 years. Sure, they were pronounced differently, but they were written almost the same (disregarding verb conjugations ... and I think that declinations by case also simplified out a lot). Because ancient Greek had been written down its writing was largely retained into modern times whereas ancient German, being unwritten (our examples of it come from monks writing about it, like the incomplete Hildebrandslied), changed radically in about half that time (same as with English, but then there was also the effects of strong Frenchification post-1066 courtesy of the Frenchified Vikings known as the Normans.
Here's an interesting LangFocus video about why English spelling is the horrific trainwreck that it is:
The arrival of the printing press did play a part in cementing older English spelling to bedevil us ever after. Also, many other languages have an academy or other authority which will periodically do a language reform in which the standard language is changed even in its writing to match changes in the spoken language. That is why you can reliably pronounce any written word in Spanish, French, Italian, or German, but trying to read English out loud is akin to strolling through a minefield.
Here is the classic "I Love Lucy" clip in which Ricky attempts to read a bedtime story filled with words containing "ough", which is pronounced differently every single time:
BTW, I had married into a Mexican family in which my in-laws loved "I Love Lucy" because of Ricky's lapses into Spanish. Lucy and most of the audience could only imagine what Ricky was ranting about, but my in-laws could hear it.

This message is a reply to:
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(2)
Message 422 of 895 (886651)
05-29-2021 12:09 PM
Reply to: Message 419 by Tangle
05-29-2021 7:27 AM


Re: Elvis has left the building.
All that is known is written in your book and all of it is hearsay written decades after the supposed events by unknown authors - none of which are witnesses - then redacted and edited for political reasons. There is absolutely nothing there that can be relied on or confirmed by secondary evidence.
While awaiting execution during the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution (from which he escaped through the miracle of administrative incompetence), Thomas Paine wrote the first part of Age of Reason, his critique of religion in general and Christianity in particular. Regarding Revelation as hearsay (edited to smaller size, so do research the original text for full context):
quote:
Revelation, when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately from God to man.
No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication, if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it.
It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication- after this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.
. . .
When I am told that the Koran was written in Heaven and brought to Mahomet by an angel, the account comes too near the same kind of hearsay evidence and second-hand authority as the former. I did not see the angel myself, and, therefore, I have a right not to believe it.
When also I am told that a woman called the Virgin Mary, said, or gave out, that she was with child without any cohabitation with a man, and that her betrothed husband, Joseph, said that an angel told him so, I have a right to believe them or not; such a circumstance required a much stronger evidence than their bare word for it; but we have not even this- for neither Joseph nor Mary wrote any such matter themselves; it is only reported by others that they said so- it is hearsay upon hearsay, and I do not choose to rest my belief upon such evidence.
As for theists' accusation that Thomas Paine was an "atheist":
quote:
I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.
. . .
As to the Christian system of faith, it appears to me as a species of Atheism- a sort of religious denial of God. It professes to believe in a man rather than in God. It is a compound made up chiefly of Manism with but little Deism, and is as near to Atheism as twilight is to darkness. It introduces between man and his Maker an opaque body, which it calls a Redeemer, as the moon introduces her opaque self between the earth and the sun, and it produces by this means a religious, or an irreligious, eclipse of light. It has put the whole orbit of reason into shade.
. . .
As to the theology that is now studied in its place, it is the study of human opinions and of human fancies concerning God. It is not the study of God himself in the works that he has made, but in the works or writings that man has made; and it is not among the least of the mischiefs that the Christian system has done to the world, that it has abandoned the original and beautiful system of theology, like a beautiful innocent, to distress and reproach, to make room for the hag of superstition.
So then, no "Shamrock gods" (ie, three in one, AKA trinitarian) for him. One of the jokes in Nuns on the Run (1990 -- two male crooks on the run from the mob hiding out as nuns in a Catholic school) came from the non-Catholic crook having to teach the theology class, so the Catholic crook tells him about using the shamrock to teach "three in one". Later on in a chase scene, one of them does a blessing in passing: "In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Shamrock."

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 429 of 895 (886685)
05-31-2021 10:06 AM
Reply to: Message 428 by Tangle
05-31-2021 3:38 AM


In addition, Seventh-Day Adventists (SDA -- if there's a more acceptable abbreviation then please let me know) have perhaps the longest history of young-earth creationism. Most of the YEC and other anti-evolution claims that "creation science" started out with circa 1970 (ie, post-Epperson v. Arkansas (1968)) had been created and developed for decades by SDA. Dr. Henry Morris is considered the "Father of Flood Geology", but he got most of his "Genesis Flood" (1961) unattributed from the work of SDA amateur geologist George McCready Price. Price, with no formal training in geology, published from 1902 to his death in 1963 (not counting two books published posthumously) -- most of his "geological" work was in the 20's, 30's, and 40's.
Miller was followed by Ellen G. White (1827-1915), a visionary and prophet.
Most of my exposure to SDA was from CompuServe member Paul Ekdahl who was active circa 1990. Obviously, he was one of the resident YECs.
And I'm not claiming that he was a shining example of SDA scholarship; rather he was rank-and-file so I would not use him to blame SDA of anything except for the kinds of things its followers would tend to believe (he also mailed me some SDA literature which read like higher quality Chick Pubs tracts, complete with an obsession with End Times and a virulent hatred for the Catholic Church).
Paul had a very distinctive writing style: he would transcribe pages of creationist books and post them. Never a word of his own until strongly pressed for it for an extended period of time. And he was so slavish in his transcribing that he even included footnote numbers in the text, but never provided any of those footnotes he was "referencing" -- perhaps he was using on-line transcripts as his sources, but that was a few years before the Internet opened up for public use so I don't know about that.
He would post a verbatim quote, I would reply, he would "reply" with another verbatim quote that on rare occasion would have something to do with my reply, I would reply to that while calling him out for what he was doing and insisting he do his own writing, another verbatim quote, rinse and repeat ad infinitum.
It took a lot of time, but I finally got him to write his own words. And the very first thing he wrote was to try to convert me! It was part of his efforts to convert me that he sent me that packet of lurid SDA pamphlets.
And he also wrote worshipfully about Ellen G. White and went on about how she would perform miracles. In particular, although she was a small woman she would go into a trance and perform incredible physical feats; eg, she would become too heavy to pick up, nobody could bend her extended arm, she could form a ring with her thumb and index finger and nobody could separate them. So I told him the truth, that when I still practiced Aikido we used to do all those same things ... and we never once had to go into any kind of trance to do it. That was the moment that he suddenly had a lot of work (he ran a mail-order business) and he completely disappeared from our section of CompuServe after that (Religion Forum, Science & Religion Section).
 
While on CompServe, I posted a number of files to the Science & Religion Library. My initial purpose in creating my web page was to repost those files (http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/links.html), but it has grown since then.
Among those first library files was my response to Paul Ekdahl having posted 23 points "criticizing evolution" -- http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/points23.html. His list was obviously copied from somewhere else, most likely a tract (again, this was before the Internet and hence the Web had opened up to the public). In typical Ekdahl fashion, he never replied except to feign confusion.

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 454 of 895 (886736)
06-02-2021 1:07 PM
Reply to: Message 447 by anglagard
06-02-2021 1:10 AM


Re: The Knowledge of Jesus is Available to All
Generally, scholarship in history means one is allowed to speak of a person they never personally met, which seems to be PaulK's standard for existence, Hey, you kids in grammar school, because you did not personally meet Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, or Lincoln you don't personally know they ever existed, therefore you are not allowed to comment on anything they supposedly did.
And even then, it's not the personage itself, but rather the legend attached to those persons that they learn and discuss.
I tried to make the point before. I think it was supposed to have been C.S. Lewis who came up with this (and Jack Chick used it as the title of one of his tracts -- demonstrated to be worthless when I found several left in the stalls of a public restroom, because each page was too small to use as TP like pages out of an old Sears & Roebuck catalog (someone once told me how to prep those S&R pages for proper use). The claim is that Jesus made these claims, so what was he? Liar, Lunatic, or Lord? The most important "L" they left out of that was "Legend" It's almost never the person who is talked about or studied or held up as inspiration, but rather the legend based on that person even when it has nothing to do with that person -- for example, there's that portrait of Trump in a shirtless Rambo pose replete with rippling muscles. And every person depicted in a bio-pic has been transformed into a legend just by that very process.
Legends don't even have to be based on actual people. Consider inspiring legends like Spock and Steve Rogers (Captain America), both of whom are fictional characters (sorry, folks, they aren't real).
So legends function the same and serve the same purpose regardless of whether the person they're based on ever existed or not. And we have seen over and over again that a legend can be created overnight.
So was there ever an actual historical Jesus? Who cares? It doesn't matter! It never has mattered!

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 456 of 895 (886738)
06-02-2021 1:47 PM
Reply to: Message 449 by Phat
06-02-2021 3:40 AM


Re: Context
Why must all of you be doubters by nature?
In the creation/evolution sector of my web site, I quote from memory a former governor of Mississippi I heard on NPR one day around 1990 or so as he was defending his push for improving education:
quote:
We know that ignorance doesn't work, because we've already tried it!
This also keeps reminding me of the Bond novel, The Spy Who Loved Me, in which Ian Fleming departed from his usual style by telling the story as a first person narrative through a young woman who is rescued from a life-threatening situation (gang of criminals taking over the isolated motel where she worked) by a British stranger (Bond, of course). When she lost her virginity, the winning argument was literally, "Be a sport."
So, you are asking why we don't just "be a sport" and try ignorance yet again. Really?
Which reminds me of an acronym in the Naval Terminology FAQ (NavTermFaq):
quote:
BOHICA - Acronym for "Bend Over, Here It Comes Again."
Have you ever read the Bible? 1 Thessalonians 5:21 in particular? From the KJV:
quote:
5:21 Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.
The Bible tells us to be skeptical, to be doubters, until we have tested (the word used in other translations) and proven what we are being told.
So your position is to ignore the Bible?

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dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 460 of 895 (886747)
06-03-2021 5:16 PM
Reply to: Message 458 by Phat
06-03-2021 9:04 AM


Re: DSA & Global Finance. A Real Concern
We can't just ship all of the Right to Africa and strip them of their citizenship.
Why to Africa? To be extra mean by making them a very small minority in a region with a very large black majority? Are you projecting your own serious malicious streak onto us? Just ship them out to Missisloppy or somewhere in Texas and let them form their own separate country all by their lonesome, since they don't want to even try to get along with anybody else.
I agree with a lot of what you and dwise1 say in spirit, but am unsure of the practical implications.
Huh? I just reviewed my messages in this topic and couldn't find myself advocating any kind of economic system. Maybe I missed something. Could you please point out my messages that you are talking about? And what you understand me to have said, please.
quote:
2) Freeze the military budget.
I advocate spending enough to keep the equipment we have now maintained and upgraded as needed. I agree that we spend far too much on the military though I do have concerns with China running the world. Their CCP is hardly compatible with DSA principles, and don't kid yourselves and advocate a one-world humanistic secular order. They will exploit that and supplant us as a global superpower. Unless you don't care whether or not we are.
Please refer to Robert Reich's video, Where Your Tax Dollars Really Go (I have linked to it more than once in this forum):
Basically, military spending accounts for a bit more than half of the federal government's discretionary spending, about 51%, whereas all the "welfare" programs that the GQP wants to balance our budget on the backs of account for a small percentage of the budget (about 10% by rough guestimate from my memory of that video -- I'm currently multitasking in the middle of an online class). Furthermore, only a small part of that military budget actually goes to the military itself while most of it goes to defense contractors.
So freezing the military budget (which I interpret as holding it at current levels and not allowing it to be increased) would have no effect on the operational and logistical budgets for the military, but rather would only affect the defense contractors. Except, of course, the GQP would cut funds for military operations and divert them to the contractors and then complain how the military is being starved by that freeze. Not unlike Trump's own diversion of defense funding from the military in order to fund his border wall which is not quite literally falling flat to the ground -- BTW, in response to Russia's invasion of the Ukraine Obama allocated funds to bolster NATO's defensive capabilities against Russian aggression, all of which Trump took away for his wall (and at the same time kissing Putin's жопа (Russian for "ass", though it might more specifically refer to the rectum which I assume is somewhat more intimate) ).
As a veteran (35 years of honorable service), I do support national defense. Our experience of the Trump Administration was that of watching national defense getting flushed down the toilet while Trump was handing to Putin and Russia everything they wanted.
Their CCP ...
Sorry, but I cannot help but misread that every time I see it. I assume you mean "Chinese Communist Party", but I keep seeing the Cyrillic abbreviation for "Soviet Socialist Republic". Guess my mind must be too highly trained (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference for those who know where their towel is).
quote:
3) Take all the White Supremacists and traitor politicians, permanently terminate citizenship, seize all assets, ship to any African nation that will take them in (for a price, I'm sure).
LMFAO but in all seriosness how would we identify such people? What defines traitor? When did DSA themselves become authoritarian? I do not advocate being cultural morality police.
Well, Trump himself didn't call for terminating a traitor's citizenship, etc (OK so there is where you had gotten that "ship them out to Africa" idea). Instead, he explicitly called for their execution -- refer to his "we used to know what to do with traitors" which referred to capital punishment. I guess that does terminate the traitors' entire status and permanently froze the traitors' assets from their own personal use (no person, no personal use ).
The problem is in the legal definition of treason, which I understand to require the existence of an actual state of war.
However, we are indeed under attack by Russia who have interfered in our elections and whose hackers are attacking our infrastructure, so even though there is no actual formal declaration of war there is a de facto condition of warfare.
How to define a traitor? How's about someone who violently attacks a government body (ie, Congress, both houses) for the purpose of preventing them from performing their Constitutional duties and in order to effect the violent overthrow of the legitimate government of the United States of America. Would that begin to qualify as treason?
I'm not necessarily advocating their execution, but they must be brought to justice and made to pay for their crimes against our country. BTW, that will include every single member of Congress who had aided and abetted them (eg, those who signed them in for their pre-attack recon tours and perhaps had even led those recon tours, those who had sabotaged the alarm systems in the offices of targeted Democratic members of Congress, those who telephoned out reports of the movements of targeted members of Congress and of the Vice President who was explicitly targeted for lynching.
Legalistic weaseling aside, any normal person could not look at those acts and fail to recognize them as traitorous. But then nearly all the normals have been purged from the GQP, haven't they?
 
ABE:
I forgot to mention this. When you enlist in the military and when you apply for a security clearance or get your clearance updated (happens periodically), you have to affirm that you do not belong to any organization that advocates the overthrow of the US government -- it's been decades, but I'm pretty sure that includes affirming that you yourself do not advocate sedition or insurrection.
Obviously, participation in the 06 Jan insurrection would qualify as sedition and insurrection and so you would not be able to make those affirmations. Also, membership in the organizations that were involved (eg, Oath Keepers, Proud Boys) would similarly disqualify you from being able to sign that affirmation. The organizations advocating the overthrow of the government has expanded to include Q-Anon and now, arguably, even the Republican Party (GQP)!
The rioters included military veterans and retired police and firemen, but also off-duty police and firemen and I'm pretty sure I've heard of some off-duty military members having been there too. And there were members of state governments among the rioters. And inside the Capitol building there were members of Congress and/or staff aiding and abetting the insurrection as I described above -- that is a key reason why an investigation is absolutely needed and a good explanation for why the Republicans are so strongly opposed to an investigation (after all, if AntiFa was really involved as they keep claiming, then they should be first in line to support an investigation). And there were phone calls between Oath Keepers and somebody in the White House. ?And the cherry on top of that is Gen Flynn (ret) openly calling for a military coup.
So what to do about them? I say "investigate and prosecute appropriately." While we non-lawyers can clearly see them to have committed treason, when you indict somebody for a crime it must be according to the legal definition of that crime. If we try to indict somebody for the crime of treason, then his actions had to fit the legal definition of treason. To my knowledge, the legal definition of treason is that it must be during time of war. Hence, any attempt to charge them with treason would fail.
However, there are still other crimes, including sedition and insurrection, which definitely do apply here. Not only would conviction for sedition or insurrection carry penalties (including prison), but the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits anyone guilty of sedition or insurrection from holding any government office. And engaging in sedition or insurrection would also violate a military member's terms of enlistment as well as to disqualify anyone holding a security clearance.
So you asked what should be done with these reprobates. Follow due process to investigate, indict, prosecute, and incarcerate them. Yank their security clearances immediately pending adjudication -- standing procedure whenever any kind of negative information arises. Military members need to be handled under the UCMJ, possibly leading to courtmartial and dishonorable discharge. People have been calling for Flynn to be courtmartialed and to lose his pension. I'm not sure exactly what the status of retired officers is; I think that they are kept on the rolls and can be recalled to duty at any time, so he might still be subject to the UCMJ. Non-citizens found guilty should be deported.
Edited by dwise1, : ABE

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 547 of 895 (893698)
04-18-2022 1:20 PM
Reply to: Message 543 by ringo
04-18-2022 1:02 PM


Re: Justification: Impeccable Reasoning
The cynic in me suggests that there's more money in olive oil selling it by the ounce than by the gallon.
Plus how all the packaging drives the price up. Especially when it involves a brand name.
Which makes me wonder. In their deification of Trump, how long before evangelicals put Trump's name on their churches. Isn't that supposed to be part of the progression of the Mark of the Beast?

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dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(2)
Message 566 of 895 (894300)
05-11-2022 10:56 AM
Reply to: Message 564 by Dredge
05-11-2022 10:18 AM


Re: why someone might be anti-theist
Why restrict it to Christians? Are you trying to claim that Christians are the only theists?
270 million deaths are attributed to Islam. They're theists too by anybody's definition. Except according to Christians, apparently.
 
Hmm. Are you one of those who define atheism as not believing in the Christian god? Such that if you're not a Christian then you're an atheist? I have heard and seen that sentiment expressed, so it makes me wonder.
Kind of like Dr. Henry Morris in defining the "atheistic" "evolution model" of their overarching Two Model Approach strategy: "It includes most of the world's religions, ancient and modern." So creationists classify the vast majority of theism as "atheism"? Curiouser and curiouser.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 564 by Dredge, posted 05-11-2022 10:18 AM Dredge has replied

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(3)
Message 574 of 895 (894314)
05-11-2022 11:18 PM
Reply to: Message 571 by ringo
05-11-2022 3:18 PM


Re: Prayer For The Universe
Jesus didn't teach infallibility of the Pope but that's what Catholics do. He didn't teach praying to saints but that's what Catholics do.
You just touched on a pet peeve and wish of mine: Believers should learn what their beliefs are and where they came from (ie, what they are actually based on).
So many believers actually think that their beliefs come from the Bible even though that is not true. Instead, so many "biblical" beliefs come from other sources. A lot of Catholic beliefs came from extra-biblical Church fathers. A main thrust of the Protestant Reformation was to switch to sola scriptura, but I strongly suspect that a lot of those extra-biblical beliefs in Catholicism were retained (basically, the Protestants were trying to reconstruct the "original true Christianity", which is ambitious and vulnerable to failure). Fundamentalists of the Jesus Freak mold believed in dispensationalism and that it was in the Bible from the start, when in fact it was first developed around 1830. For that matter, fundamentalism originated around 1900.
What we encounter all the time are "believers" who believe in things that aren't even in their religion. I think that every believer needs to study his religion as thoroughly as possible, which must include learning the history of individual beliefs.

This message is a reply to:
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 576 of 895 (894360)
05-13-2022 7:18 PM
Reply to: Message 575 by Dredge
05-13-2022 7:00 PM


Re: Prayer For The Universe
Note: I had to write "t-r-u-t-h" coz otherwise it appeared as"*****". Weird.
Not weird. There's an admin option to blank out in that manner words that a member has overly abused.
Apparently, you have a history of abusing the word, "truth".

This message is a reply to:
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Replies to this message:
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