ScottSA

The Tory signs always go up early in River Heights in both provincial and federal elections. It is my old riding. The Liberals, by all accounts, have been introducing some good policies but the message is lost because people just don't think very highly of Gerrard. They think of him as decent man but not charismatic or dynamic. Indeed there is a part of the population that will never vote NDP but the people love Doer. The majority is in the bag. It remains to be seen if he will steal a few seats. The campaign is running flawlessly. I'm not voting NDP but I can see why people do. Surely Tuxedo and river heights still vote Tory.

Is there some way to more actively ignore Polly? I used to think he was a first year university student, but it's apparent that his critical thinking skills are at about a 10th grade level. Not to be offensive or anything, but wow...

I thought you thought homosexuality was just peachy. No pun intended.

Ah, speaking of Aztec sun gods...and now poor Cortez has a bum rap for stopping the poor indigenies from ripping human hearts out with stones knives...

I love it!

Oh dear, it looks like the Liberals knew all the time: Crickum rink

What's with the leftist love of that term?

Usually trimming the buds off below the lights helps the life of the bulbs. When all that gooey resin starts smearing on the light, it blows really fast. How do you manage to get a one-month grow cycle though? *chortle*

Making people spend more helps people in the pocketbook? Only in Liberal lalaland...

I wonder who is dancing at the 59th anniversary of Israel? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRafIJExOQE The more he's seen, the less he's liked. What an insipid little man.

It'll be a frosty day in hell before the NDP becomes anything more than a rump party. It'll certainly never be the official opposition. Especially if a used car salesman's wife is running it.

Betcha there are less insane people there too.

Do you think those April stats go right to April 30? Do you figure Iraq exists in the future and it's May there already? More likely for that to happen than there to be civil war there.

Well, we sure ain't doing so well so far...

The fact that I can conceive of a million dollar check in my name is not evidence of such a thing's existence. But you are not the collective of Man.

Explain to me how fags are being "oppressed" by not being accepted as normal people. Are incestuous couples also "oppressed"?

Russell wrote this to show that the burden of proof lies on the religious to prove their claims. By simply rejecting something as implausible, it is not the atheist or agnostic who is bringing something to the table that needs to be proven. It lies squarely on the shoulders of the religious. But why should the religious have to justify their beliefs? Richard Dawkins probably says it best in The Devil's Chaplain: It is precisely because of a belief in the teapot known as God that this type of division and suffering happens. I think it is reasonable to suggest that those who believe in this teapot, be made to justify such insane claims. Let's parse out the argument a bit, and start by rejecting the latter, since I am not arguing in support of organized religion, I am arguing in support of God. But before we dispense with it entirely, I will say again that I am not an adherent of any organized religion, but my children all attend private Catholic schools. They do not attend Catholic school because I think Catholicism is flawless or because I think God wears a hat slightly bigger than a pope's, they attend Catholic school because Catholics have not yet turned morality on its head and have not given in to relativism. That brings us to teapots, which were all the rage as an allegory at one time, no less with Dante's upside down teapot or Carroll's March Hare's teapot than Russell's, and indeed Carroll, a much brighter man than Russell, used his teapot to mock Russell's: "...the last time she saw them, they were trying to put the Dormouse into the teapot." I'll leave it to you to figure out what he means by this. But anyway, the fallacy Russell commits is obvious. There is no question answered by Russell's teapot, no anecdotal evidence of it, no reason for it to exist, and every evidence that such a teapot, by it's design, would be made by the hands of man if indeed it did exist. It's a cheap and tawdry analogy, and to make matters even worse it rests its point on the singular argument that the only evidence of God's existence is the fact that people believe in God. That's a bit of a fabricated tautology, and really doesn't address the issue in any but the most superficial way. A pox on lesser minds like Russel. The literature dealing with God is incredibly rich in its philosophical roots, but let me take just one stream of thought and apply it to the ideation. There are many many more, but this one will do for now: Lukacs was one of the alleged "Western marxists", and one of the main ideas he espoused was the idea that theory could become praxis by the mere fact of theory's existence; that is to say that if a man begins digging a basement, it is because he envisions a house, and the fact of him envisioning a house means the house exists; it is merely a matter of time before what he envisions becomes fact, theory becomes praxis. Lukac's central thesis in asserting this is the very reasonable proposition that anything we can conceive of is likely true. Secular society has its own similar idea, in that the capabilities of Man are endless; that whatever we can conceive of can come true. The envirofreaks like Woody are so set in this notion that they think unlimited clean energy is just a switch away. What secular society fails to realize is that the same argument applies to the existence of God on a number of different levels, not least that every society everywhere and always, from stoneage to advanced industrial, conceives of and largely believes in a Maker. I realize the atheists among us imagine that they are more clever and more numerous than they really are, but people who believe in God range from the simplisticly faithful to the incredibly intelligent. Russel has nothing on Thomas Merton, let me tell you, but the point is that atheism is not a "progress" toward the future, but merely a bit of humanist conceit. Applying Lukac's thesis, the fact that Man can conceive of God is itself evidence of God's existence. I fully admit that I have faith in a God and in an afterlife, but that is not to say that I merely have faith, or that I embrace faith as a shortcut to explain away the unexplainable. On the contrary, I rather suspect that atheists are the ones who don't think very deeply, but instead simply reject the existence of God with very little thought.

I love it!

It's not at all obvious. I took the dating mechanism out, and aside from those who are familiar with certain triggers of epochal English, or alternatively history, there is no way to date it...and even those are murky, given the tendency of most translations to hearken from the same period. Of course, being sweal, you got it wrong anyway, since scriblett got it right.

What nonsense. That's like saying that if I believe in a Ford, then all other cars are wrong. I believe in cars. I make no silly distinctions between brands. I think some levels of undersatnding of God are faulty as hell, and other's incomplete, but I certainly don't believe in one religion's idea of what God is. Once again, we have no testable evidence of the existence of God, but we have reams of anecdotal evidence. We have no testable nor anecdotal evidence of the non-existence of God. The burden of proof therefore lies with atheism, and I have not even seen a vague attempt on the part of atheism to prove its thesis...aside from schoolyard scoffs.

Don't put words in my mouth. Who do you think my "chosen God" is? As I have said repeatedly, I believe in God. I do not believe in anyone's particular God. I don't know what God is, never having had the pleasure of meeting him.

How does someone saying they don't have faith, mean they have faith? Are you serious? You don't have faith in all the other religions beside yours, but you're not characterized by that point. Atheists simply reject the idea of an all-powerful all-knowing creator. It's not a faith at all, by definition it's a rejection of faith. Faith is choosing to believe in something without any kind of testable evidence to back up that claim. She is choosing to believe in the absence of something with no testable evidence to back her supposition up. Since we have to rely on anecdotal evidence in the absence of testable evidence, by far the greater burden of proof lies with her.

But you have faith in its absence; a philosophical stance that is every bit as unknowable as its opposite.

That's a nice version, but it doesn't make the US a democracy and I don't think the word democracy appears in the US constitution anywhere. Although this is not the original pledge, it probably should have been. The Pledge of Allegiance I Pledge Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Why are you having so much trouble understanding that a republic can and usually is democratic? Why do you feel that they are two oppositional forms of government?

Really? What was all that stuff about animism and the great spirit and stuff?