Cannibalism

[monsta666]

It DOES seem that a lot of good topic threads have degenerated into discussions of fundie Christianity.   My first impulse is to skip those threads as I have little interest in such views.   But when the majority of current threads are in that state it motivates me to look for some chores to do.

I second this opinion. While some spiritual dialogue about faith and Christianity can be interesting I think there has been a little too much of this in the past few days. I just hope you do not lose interest in the Diner permanently over this for I feel it is just a short phase.

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[Ashvin]

You're changing the argument. The "truth of Christ" is not "modern scientific evidence". Evaluating the truth of propositions like "Christ is God", or the doctrine of penal substitution are not within science's purview. Determining historical facts are not within science's purview.

You are misunderstanding. I didn't say it was scientific evidence, or even that it could be scientifically established (although I believe it can). What I said was that the truth in Christ is a TOE that encompasses every field of knowledge, including science, and therefore it will ultimately prove to be the only way to adequately understand reality through science.

Ask any theoretical physicist about their own TEOs, and they will tell you the same thing. If String Theory is true, you cannot possibly understand the full reality of the Universe through some other theory that has nothing to do with strings.

The IDist calculates the probability of event X happening, and comes up with a number so small that it is ridiculous to think of it happening by chance. The Darwinist questions the basis for the calculation, and argues that the probability is not so small as to rule out it happening by chance over a long enough time period.  Because the event in question happened perhaps hundreds of million years ago, there is no scientific way to determine what the actual probability was. To do that one would have to know the state of the system at the time of the event, and neither the IDist nor the Darwinist has that actual information. That is why I said that ID (and also Darwinism) is not scientific. I should also point out that both the IDist and the Darwinist use the same assumption of uniformitarianism -- that physical and biological laws have not changed over time. That is another reason neither position is scientific.

I don't know where you are coming up with this. An ID scientist can make a positive case for intelligent causes for phenomenon based on uniform, repeated and testable experience and evidence. See Stephen Meyer's "Signature in the Cell" for a very good example of a positive case for the intelligent design of specified complexity in DNA. That is science. Assumptions of uniformitarianism or otherwise do not change the fact that the person is performing science.

(although, the fact that physical laws have not changed since the beginning of the Universe is VERY well-established by all of the evidence we have)

The same goes for the improbabilities for physics, though in that case the materialist tries to save the day by postulating the multiverse. But that is a metaphysical move, just as is appealing to intelligent design.

You call those things "metaphysical moves" if you want, but they are science. Everything in science obviously has metaphysical implications.

You are grossly distorting the meaning of 'science' in saying this. Take one of them: the origin of humanity. The Bible says there were no rational animals, and then God made two of them. How is that a scientific model? What does it predict through repeatable, controlled experiments? What is one of your "testable predictions"?

The Bible provides a model of two original human ancestors, created fully-formed by God (not gradually evolved from other creatures), placed in a location called the Garden of Eden (thought to be in Northeast Africa), most likely no later than 50 to 100,000 years ago, with unique capacities and features from any other living creature, and a spiritual purpose that is central to God's entire created Universe.

I have already provided a good amount of modern cosmological, anthropological and genetic/genomic scientific research that has lent support to this model, but I will re-post it again later so you can read it.

For the last part, you can read my latest article - http://picturingchrist.org/the-entire-universe-revolves-around-humanity/

See above -- that Christian claims such as "Christ is God" or the doctrine of penal substitution are not within the purview of science.

I never presented any scientific evidence for Christ being God or the propitiation...

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[Chloe]

Aaaand - Snowleopard, Monsta666 and I will now go for a quiet drink together, and wonder if even a steamroller could stop the fundie Christian vs Everything Else here .... 

Do they even NOTICE the other posts?!   (Would they notice a steam train coming towards them, if they were arguing on the railway tracks?     - SPLAT ...! )

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[Karpatok]

Thank you everybody. And please note. This was why I was so enraged with Ashvins' selfishness and insularity in the first place to the point of using such terrible language. Because I had been to this point of futility with fundamentalism before. They just won't shut up. And they don't care. They are sick. They are autistic and have no way of relating to anyone else. They want to force a captive audience and that is why Surly is right that he is still serving DC.

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[Jaded Prole]

Indeed, fundamentalism is a thought disorder that is immune to rational argument.

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[Chloe]

You know, the original post (she said plaintively!) is still up there, if anyone would care to comment on it?!   

JP wrote:
 

  Indeed, fundamentalism is a thought disorder that is immune to rational argument.

Hah!  Very neatly put. 

K., you wrote:

They just won't shut up. And they don't care. They are sick. They are autistic and have no way of relating to anyone else. They want to force a captive audience 

Hmm - as I've said before, I reckon it's more that they're trying to convince themselves by trying to get everyone else to agree with them, and thus have it reflected back to them from the 'outside'; thus cancelling their own doubts; making it something they can fall into and it'll hold them up, instead of the other way around, if that makes sense ... In all fairness, this would also apply to those who can't stop arguing with them - they're trying to assuage their own subconscious(?) doubts that the fundies may, somehow, be right. Esp.  if they've been brought up in that religion.  (And, of course, we're all interconnected ...)  Hence neither one can let it go.  They're both/all trying to work something out ..


 

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[Karpatok]

Well Jaded Prole. I don't believe that I have thanked and praised you for your excellent posts and poetry lately. FYI, You brought tears to my eyes, a lump in my throat, joy to my heart and applause to my hands. Now, would you agree that "Common Fucking Sense" is not a rational argument either?

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[Ka]

You're changing the argument. The "truth of Christ" is not "modern scientific evidence". Evaluating the truth of propositions like "Christ is God", or the doctrine of penal substitution are not within science's purview. Determining historical facts are not within science's purview.

You are misunderstanding. I didn't say it was scientific evidence, or even that it could be scientifically established (although I believe it can). What I said was that the truth in Christ is a TOE that encompasses every field of knowledge, including science, and therefore it will ultimately prove to be the only way to adequately understand reality through science.

No, you said that Christianity is the only TOE that is adequate to the scientific evidence. I replied that my TOE is also adequate to the scientific evidence. Now you are saying that Christianity "will ultimately prove to be the only way to adequately understand reality through science". That is a different claim. But it is a claim, so I will now repeat why it is a bad one, and that is, that not all reality can be understood through science. Science is the development of theories about sensed reality. That which senses that reality is therefore not within the scope of science. Neither are the nature of God or Christ, or Christ's divine purpose in incarnating -- which is to say all that really matters with respect to Christianity in terms of salvation.

I don't know where you are coming up with this. An ID scientist can make a positive case for intelligent causes for phenomenon based on uniform, repeated and testable experience and evidence. See Stephen Meyer's "Signature in the Cell" for a very good example of a positive case for the intelligent design of specified complexity in DNA. That is science. Assumptions of uniformitarianism or otherwise do not change the fact that the person is performing science.

It was the argument that some new biological feature required some 40 new proteins to all occur as random mutations at the same time. The materialist response was that they could have been useful (and therefore stable) in pairs. But I haven't read Meyer, and probably won't (since I'm already convinced of ID), so I'll just say I'll leave the question of whether ID should be called science open, that is, where the dividing line between scientific evidence and interpretation of that evidence lies.

(although, the fact that physical laws have not changed since the beginning of the Universe is VERY well-established by all of the evidence we have)

All the "evidence we have" necessarily presupposes uniformitarianism.

The same goes for the improbabilities for physics, though in that case the materialist tries to save the day by postulating the multiverse. But that is a metaphysical move, just as is appealing to intelligent design.

You call those things "metaphysical moves" if you want, but they are science. Everything in science obviously has metaphysical implications.

I am referring to the difference between a scientific theory like quantum mechanics, and its various interpretations. The latter are not science, though obviously they must be consistent with the science. Likewise, you are interpreting the results of science in Christian terms, while I interpret them in my terms. We can both do that (as can the solipsist -- though considering my previous remark on ID I will no longer include the materialist) because there is no scientific means to choose from among them. Nor, in the questions that matter (like Christ's salvific role) can there be.

You are grossly distorting the meaning of 'science' in saying this. Take one of them: the origin of humanity. The Bible says there were no rational animals, and then God made two of them. How is that a scientific model? What does it predict through repeatable, controlled experiments? What is one of your "testable predictions"?

The Bible provides a model of two original human ancestors, created fully-formed by God (not gradually evolved from other creatures), placed in a location called the Garden of Eden (thought to be in Northeast Africa), most likely no later than 50 to 100,000 years ago, with unique capacities and features from any other living creature, and a spiritual purpose that is central to God's entire created Universe.

Well, you're mixing things up here, as the date and place are not in the Bible. But in particular the bit "created fully-formed by God" is not, and cannot, be demonstrated through science. Hence this is not a scientific model.

I have already provided a good amount of modern cosmological, anthropological and genetic/genomic scientific research that has lent support to this model, but I will re-post it again later so you can read it.

For the last part, you can read my latest article - http://picturingchrist.org/the-entire-universe-revolves-around-humanity/

I read your article, and none of the science in it provides a means to choose between your TOE and mine. Which is my point. Earlier you gave a couple of long quotes that seem to drive your thinking. The second starts with:

"Did man crawl his way into existence over millions of years? Or did he leap to two feet by supernatural design? Did humans emerge from amoebas or did a Creator intend for life to possess purpose, value, and meaning?"

The author goes on to show the first option is untenable (and I agree). But that does not imply the second option is true. See Surly's list in which this is called the fallacy of the false dilemma. In short, there is nothing you have referenced or said in your piece on your blog that provides scientific evidence for your TOE in preference to mine. Now I haven't read everything you have referenced, but I am confident in saying that there is no determining scientific evidence because of what I said above: that the differences between our TOEs lie outside of the scope of science.

Now you haven't really been exposed to the full nature of my TOE, but the remark I made earlier -- that rather than saying God creates this or that I hold that communities of spiritual entities do the creating -- can serve as a difference for our purposes. So if you have some scientific evidence that shows your TOE to be right and my wrong, please provide it. Otherwise, I don't see how you can maintain your original claim.

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[Ashvin]

Look, people, stop scapegoating me for Christian spiritual discussions. You are the ones who brought it up...

I have been quietly posting my articles on my own PC thread, and then I asked RE to cross-post my article, and he and Surly agreed if I cross-posted one of theirs. I agreed if I could also present my own objections to some of the points made in the article.

That is exactly what I did, and I did not engage in any apologetics in the process. Then RE and others started asking me about the Genesis genealogies and lifespans, as well as other things in the Biblical accounts, so I responded. YOU GUYS are the ones who started attacking evangelical Christianity and opened the door for my defenses.

You asked me a bunch of questions about the Bible and science, and I gave you answers. Now that you don't like the answers (presumably because they threaten your established worldview), you are whining about there is too much spiritual debate on these threads. Give me a break... if you don't like, stop asking questions! And I have no problem if any Mod wants to split those comments into another thread, where Ka, I and anyone else interested can continue, and preserve Chloe's original points about "cannabalism"... that is completely up to their discretion.

I only ask that you stop being disingenuous about how these back and forth discussions the Bible and Christianity REALLY start.

Ka, I will respond to your points a little later...

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[RE]

Aaaand - Snowleopard, Monsta666 and I will now go for a quiet drink together, and wonder if even a steamroller could stop the fundie Christian vs Everything Else here .... 

Do they even NOTICE the other posts?!   (Would they notice a steam train coming towards them, if they were arguing on the railway tracks?     - SPLAT ...! )

As you can see, Watson has precisely the same Board Disorder Syndrome Futilitist has.  Just as Futilitist thinks only Futilitism is worth talking about, Watson thinks only Fundyism is worth talking about.  He no longer concerns himself with any other topic, unless the other topic can be hijacked to a discussion of Fundyism.  Just as Futilitist thinks Futilitism expains all things, Watson believes Fundyism is a "Theory of Everything".  Finally, just like Futilitist, once Watson gets one of these threads rolling he can't stop himself and he keeps taunting people more and pasting still more endless Biblical Text or Apologetics.

Anyhow,  I'm the Steamroller here and I can stop this.  I sent Watson a Warning and he now has to limit himself to 1 Post per Day with any references to God, the Bible or Christianity in it.  If he can't show enough self-control to do that, I'll throw him in the Dungeon with Futilitist.

RE

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[WHD]

Chloe,

Hunger can derange. Should food shortages arise, I've no doubt we will see cannibalism in America. Are we being primed for it? I think the zombie meme arose as a response to the office, the corporatization of the Western world, mindless consumers sitting at a desk all day, while their rulers play nuclear chicken. I think it has far transcended that, as the greatest consumers of the zombie meme are the very sort of people the zombie meme was designed to mock. I should know, I managed a Halloween store in the city where the zombie pub crawl began. Corporate types and students angling to be corporate types, mostly. The very sort of empty people, many of them, who might resort to eating each other, if they got hungry enough, not having much of an original thought in their heads otherwise.

I digress a little. If we are being primed for a zombie apocalypse, I'm sure the ruling class would like nothing more than for the people to direct their madness at each other, rather than up the hierarchy, as resource constraints weigh more heavily on humanity, which continues to grow at the shocking pace of 200,000 people A DAY. Widespread cannibalism would have the effect of whittling down our numbers real quick - solving the resource constraint problem - as people don't grow fast enough to make them livestock. Our relatively slow growth being due to our big brains. Oh, the irony.

Metaphorically, you could say that humans are already cannibalizing widely, insofar as heedlessly, we are devouring the body of the earth, of which our bodies are made, making the earth increasingly inhospitable for mammals, what with all the toxic shit we have insinuated throughout.

As for cannibalism becoming a culturally acceptable thing, human consciousness is capable of rationalizing ANYTHING. It's not near so far as most people think, from industrial feed lots for pigs, chickens and cows, where we feed them each other and in some cases their own kind, to industrial food recycling of humans, for humans.

   

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[Ashvin]

Like I said before, if you want me to show you how it has been YOU, not I, that has used all of the above against me, I can prove it you easily enough. I really don't want to waste my time doing so, but if you continue making false accusations against me, I will be forced to expose your deceit.

Seriously, your cognitive dissonance is a bit disturbing to me, because I know you are usually a very reasonable person who can appreciate logical analysis and discussion. Ever since I started talking about Biblical scientific models, though, you have gone on a tear of ad hom attacks and fallacious generalizations against me and against all evangelicals, while projecting all of that bigotry on me.

And, make no mistake, that's what you are engaged in - bigotry, plain and simple. You despise evangelicals almost as much as Karpatok despises Jews. Either that, or you are in some kind of bigoted phase right now, and it will pass. I truly hope it is the latter. You can rationally disagree with my evangelism without being such a rude A-hole about it.

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[Karpatok]

@ ASHVIN PANDANGURI: The only thing I ever asked you ASHVI was whether Stoneleigh and Illargi on TAE were fundamentalists like your self because I could not understand the relevance to what they were writing. So you banned me from TAE and on the DINER I asked you to SHUT THE FUCK UP!

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[Karpatok]

And yes ASHVIN: I hate the KIND  of Jews that have destroyed and enslaved the world in debt with USURY!

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[Ashvin]

Just as Futilitist thinks only Futilitism is worth talking about, Watson thinks only Fundyism is worth talking about.

You're right about this. All your endless bickering about finance, deflation, HI, gold, markets, collapse, etc. is boring and irrelevant if its not connected to spirituality. You are seeking truth in vain, and you always will be on this blog. That's my honest opinion, but I have never hijacked any threads without someone first asking me a question or, more often, attacking my faith. So please, RE, show some integrity and stop lying.

Anyhow,  I'm the Steamroller here and I can stop this.  I sent Watson a Warning and he now has to limit himself to 1 Post per Day with any references to God, the Bible or Christianity in it.  If he can't show enough self-control to do that, I'll throw him in the Dungeon with Futilitist.

That's fine, my one post per day will be links to my articles on my PC thread. As I've said before, I've never thought the DD forum to be anything worth participating in... its filled with arrogance, vitriol, animosity, bigotry and hatred. I pray God will penetrate your hardened hearts, but I'm done with that. Please enjoy your new concentration camp of groupthink and oppression that you laughably call a blog and forum...

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