Secu-Socialist war on Jesus Christ

[Smallc]

That's a presupposition that has no basis in scripture...just ask Noah's neighbours...

I'm not sure where the basis comes from, but I know its constantly brought up in a philosophical context. Either way, scripture has very little meaning to me anyway.

Edited January 2, 2009 by Smallc

[Mr.Canada]

Narrow will be the path to Heaven. The one to Hell will be huge.

[M.Dancer]

I'm not sure where the basis comes from, but I know its constantly brought up in a philosophical context. Either way, scripture has very little meaning to me anyway.

Prolestizers like to use presuppositional aplogetics to win souls for Jesus...they start with a question that most agree with at face value becauoise even atheists tend to believe if there was a god, god would be a certain way, all knowing, all loving, compasionate etc etc...

I'm of the school that beleives god tends to be a mean son of a bitch with superiority and separation issues and is likely to be violent if provoked.

[Smallc]

I'm of the school that beleives god tends to be a mean son of a bitch with superiority and separation issues and is likely to be violent if provoked.

I certainly hope not. I would be unwilling to accept such a being as my god.

[Chuck U. Farlie]

If there is any god that is acting 'hands-on' and any of the organized religions are right, then it is obviously running some kind of cruel experiment. In that case I am not playing ball. I am like the rat in the cage that doesn't bother to navigate the maze.

A more likely scenario that involves a god would be a 'hands-off' god that set the rules (physics) and hit the start button. In that case religion is irrelevant.

The most likely scenario is that there is no god.

At the end of the day all I can say is I don't know, and I am pretty sure no one else on earth has a clue as to what the reality is either. Anyway I don't really care if there is a god or not - I just care when people that think they know what is going on infringe on my life.

[LesterDC]

A more likely scenario that involves a god would be a 'hands-off' god that set the rules (physics) and hit the start button. In that case religion is irrelevant.

That's what I believe.. I can only believe that if there is a God out there, he doesn't mess around (or cannot) mess around with free will - and there is enough evidence for this. Perhaps free will was some form of pre-existing chaos which was there before the beginning of the universe.

In our universe, nothing can come out of nothing, so there must have been a first cause. Some sort of creator would be the supernatural first cause, and it had the ability to act outside of the laws of our universe. But you are right, in this case, religion may be irrelevant. That opens up another can of worms, do we get saved like the Christians say? Does this creator even care about us?

[Mr.Canada]

In our universe, nothing can come out of nothing, so there must have been a first cause. Some sort of creator would be the supernatural first cause, and it had the ability to act outside of the laws of our universe. But you are right, in this case, religion may be irrelevant. That opens up another can of worms, do we get saved like the Christians say? Does this creator even care about us?

It's pretty tough to really believe in nothing at all. That the Earth and universe were all created by random chance. Think about how everything on Earth relates to one another, pretty much in perfect harmony. Nature, all living things, all the animals in the sea, humans all living on he same planet. This is all just random chance? There must be some sort of intelligent design behind it.

As a Christian I obviously believe that believers get saved and that God does indeed care about us. God wants to be asked into our lives and once we have asked Him in we have to live accordingly in order to show that we mean what we said, basically. It seemed far fetched to me too before I truly believed in the Holy Trinity, since that day I feel God with me everyday. It sounds hokey I'm sure but seeing isn't believing, believing is seeing. This saying is so true. If one never give it a chance many will never know.\\

Edit- A miracle witnesses by 100,000 people.

Edited January 3, 2009 by Mr.Canada

[WIP]

It's pretty tough to really believe in nothing at all. That the Earth and universe were all created by random chance.

Ye Old Argument From Incredulity -- it looks like a really big problem to explain, it must have occurred by magic! Check out these sorts of arguments from wonder that ancient people used to explain what they thought was magical or supernatural sometime. For instance, when God appears to Job in a whirlwind beginning in Ch.38, he demands Job answer how the "foundations of the earth were laid," and fastened together because the little that was known about the earth they walked upon was that they were living on a flat earth that someone must have made and built on a foundation, just like constructing a temple or some other significant building. There are more silly points to follow about closing the "sea doors" because they believed their world was floating on water; storehouses in the heavens for hail and snow; causing lightning and thunder also, because there were no natural explanations for those things either back then.

The difference today is that there are fewer things that are in the gray areas left to explain, and those gaps are where you are inserting God to make it happen. But even claiming that the Universe can't be created out of nothing is wrong today, ever since the study of sub-atomic physics revealed that things really do appear and disappear out of nothing:

The uncertainty principle implies that particles can come into existence for short periods of time even when there is not enough energy to create them. In effect, they are created from uncertainties in energy. One could say that they briefly "borrow" the energy required for their creation, and then, a short time later, they pay the "debt" back and disappear again. Since these particles do not have a permanent existence, they are called virtual particles. (Morris, 1990, 24)

Even though we can't see them, we know that these virtual particles are "really there" in empty space because they leave a detectable trace of their activities. One effect of virtual photons, for example, is to produce a tiny shift in the energy levels of atoms. They also cause an equally tiny change in the magnetic moment of electrons. These minute but significant alterations have been very accurately measured using spectroscopic techniques. (Davies, 1994, 32)

And on the large scale of making a universe, the mathematics of quantum physics allows an entire universe to be seeded from a fluctuation in false vacuum energy, and from there 1 x 10 *85 particles and antiparticles can be created using the same principles that allow force-carrying virtual particle pairs mentioned previously, to appear out of the space-time fabric and come together, annihilate each other and become part of space-time again, all in a brief instant in time.

The article also quotes a piece from Stephen Hawking's classic "Brief History of Time" which explains:

The matter in the universe is made out of positive energy. However, the matter is all attracting itself by gravity. Two pieces of matter that are close to each other have less energy than the same two pieces a long way apart, because you have to expend energy to separate them against the gravitational force that is pulling them together. Thus, in a sense, the gravitational field has negative energy. In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that this negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero. (Hawking, 1988, 129) [thanks to Ross King for this quote]

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mar...tic/vacuum.html

In other words, you really can have a universe made out of nothing, because once you subtract the negative gravity field from the positive mass and energy contained in those fields, you end up with a universe in a state of zero energy!

Think about how everything on Earth relates to one another, pretty much in perfect harmony. Nature, all living things, all the animals in the sea, humans all living on he same planet. This is all just random chance? There must be some sort of intelligent design behind it.

And the fine tuning of the Universe and galaxies and planets will more likely have natural explanations also, than to end up with a supernatural push start to get it going.

Edit- A miracle witnesses by 100,000 people.

I noticed the Wiki article about Fatima includes some questions of the miracle claims from Joe Nickel and others. It's only a miracle if you want to believe it's a miracle.

[LesterDC]

The uncertainty principle implies that particles can come into existence for short periods of time even when there is not enough energy to create them. In effect, they are created from uncertainties in energy. One could say that they briefly "borrow" the energy required for their creation, and then, a short time later, they pay the "debt" back and disappear again. Since these particles do not have a permanent existence, they are called virtual particles. (Morris, 1990, 24)

Even though we can't see them, we know that these virtual particles are "really there" in empty space because they leave a detectable trace of their activities. One effect of virtual photons, for example, is to produce a tiny shift in the energy levels of atoms. They also cause an equally tiny change in the magnetic moment of electrons. These minute but significant alterations have been very accurately measured using spectroscopic techniques. (Davies, 1994, 32)

Yes, I have heard of these arguments, but you would still need a prime catalyst that would set everything into action..

"The uncertainty principle implies that particles can come into existence for short periods of time even when there is not enough energy to create them."

This still implies that something was there before the creation of these particles.

[WIP]

Yes, I have heard of these arguments, but you would still need a prime catalyst that would set everything into action..

Well, I'm glad somebody noticed that I left off with the theorizing about this universe we are living in since our universe used to be viewed as the be all and end all of the discussion. But that was before supersymmetry string theories started proposing multiple, unseen dimensions and universes seeded from the energy provided by collisions of aging, pre-existing universes. In the multi-universe and cyclic models, we have to re-interpret our particular universe that we are bound to as more like a Black Hole - a gravity well that we are trapped inside of, but not everything that exists, than to understand it as the totality of existence. But if there are an infinite number of universes that have been popping into existence like particles and decaying and vanishing, that requires some sort of stage, a sort of megaverse for it all to play out.

Two physicists, Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok, who have been working on developing these multiverse models say that their approach won't likely lead to an understanding of what the stage of infinite, eternal space-time is that supports these many worlds. Is the megaverse created by an intelligent creator? Maybe, but who created the creator of the megaverse? The only difference is that it pushes the debate about infinite regresses outside of our Universe, back a step further. But it won't provide an ultimate answer of how and where everything comes from.

http://www.actionbioscience.org/newfrontiers/steinhardt.html

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/n...008/02/qa_turok

"The uncertainty principle implies that particles can come into existence for short periods of time even when there is not enough energy to create them."

This still implies that something was there before the creation of these particles.

Yes, and that would be the space-time fabric of our Universe; which according to string theorists, it always existed because space-time is eternal.

[Mr.Canada]

This topic is about the secular war on Jesus Christ not this crap. Can you stop spamming my topic please?

[LesterDC]

Two physicists, Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok, who have been working on developing these multiverse models say that their approach won't likely lead to an understanding of what the stage of infinite, eternal space-time is that supports these many worlds. Is the megaverse created by an intelligent creator? Maybe, but who created the creator of the megaverse?

Why should we apply the same laws of our universe to the laws of some sort of intelligent creator? According to the theory of cosmological causality, everything happens because of something thing - cause and effect. So of course, there has to be a beginning. However, if some sort of intelligent creator initiated the universe, it does not need a catalyst like things do in our universe.

This doesn't really help the religious cause however, this creator could be anything. Could we justify applying "human" characteristics to this creator?

[WIP]

This topic is about the secular war on Jesus Christ not this crap. Can you stop spamming my topic please?

Tough s___! Do I need to point out all of the threads, INCLUDING ONES THAT YOU HAVE STARTED, that you have turned into lame attempts to do religious conversion? For example, here's what you've added lately to this thread that you claim is supposed to be about some socialist war on christ:

Post #196

Chuck U. Farlie. Seeing isn't Believing, Believing is seeing.

What if Christians turned out to be right all along? What then?

Post #202

Narrow will be the path to Heaven. The one to Hell will be huge.

And this is the one I was responding to. You claim everyone who doesn't share your childish view of the world believes in "nothing" and paint the only alternative as "random chance." If you are going to make grandiose religious claims, be prepared for a counter-argument, especially when you are trying to disparage the ethics and motivations of everyone not willing to believe things without good reasons for accepting them.

Post #207

It's pretty tough to really believe in nothing at all. That the Earth and universe were all created by random chance. Think about how

everything on Earth relates to one another, pretty much in perfect harmony. Nature, all living things, all the animals in the sea, humans all living on he same planet. This is all just random chance? There must be some sort of intelligent design behind it.

As a Christian I obviously believe that believers get saved and that God does indeed care about us. God wants to be asked into our lives and once we have asked Him in we have to live accordingly in order to show that we mean what we said, basically. It seemed far fetched to me too before I truly believed in the Holy Trinity, since that day I feel God with me everyday. It sounds hokey I'm sure but seeing isn't believing, believing is seeing. This saying is so true. If one never give it a chance many will never know.\\

Edit- A miracle witnesses by 100,000 people.

[WIP]

Why should we apply the same laws of our universe to the laws of some sort of intelligent creator?

Do you mean regarding that problem of infinite regresses? I don't think it's a question we have an intuitive grasp at anyway, since we are creatures of time and space, we can't make sense of anything always existing, whether we're talking about the Universe, a megaverse or a God that is supposed to make all these things. Do Christians really attempt to understand how their God can be eternal, all-powerful, all-knowing and everywhere at once? No, they just talk about divine mysteries when it comes to God's attributes. The difference is that the skeptics, rationalists, atheists, agnostics, deists etc. are waiting for some actual evidence before claiming to have an answer to the question of where it all comes from.

According to the theory of cosmological causality, everything happens because of something thing - cause and effect.

Well, actually the rules of cause and effect that seem so obvious to us, don't even apply at the subatomic scale of quantum physics, where particles move from one quantum state to the next based on their probabilities, and without any causal relationship determining its outcome. One of the founders of Quantum Theory, Erwin Schrodinger, developed a thought problem that became known as Schrodinger's Cat, to show how strange our world would be if the rules of quantum mechanics applied on the large scale in our everyday world.

So of course, there has to be a beginning. However, if some sort of intelligent creator initiated the universe, it does not need a catalyst like things do in our universe.

This doesn't really help the religious cause however, this creator could be anything. Could we justify applying "human" characteristics to this creator?

Inserting any kind of creator is still just putting a smiley face on the problem of answering why there is something instead of nothing, as Stephen Hawking puts it. If might give us something familiar that sounds like an answer, but saying Goddidit doesn't answer any questions a cosmologist would want answered, so what good is it? And the stage keeps growing all the time. The first cosmologies had a metal roof with starlights suspended from it, and God, angels etc. above that. Then we discovered that stars were suns; about 80 years ago, we discovered that most of the stars we see are part of a galaxy of about 100 billion stars, and the fuzzy looking blobs called nebulas, were other galaxies like our own. Eventually we discovered our universe has at least 100 billion other galaxies, and now, if our entire universe is just one of an infinite number of universes, the scale is too great to make any sense of; and trying to put a man-like personal God in charge of it all, who considers us his special creation, just doesn't make any sense.

[Mr.Canada]

It isn't my view. It's the view of any Christian Church. It's in the Bible.

[Melanie_]

It isn't my view. It's the view of any Christian Church. It's in the Bible.

The bible is a collection of folk stories and fairy tales. Read "The Uses of Enchantment", by Bruno Bettleheim, or "The Power of Myth", by Joseph Campbell, to understand the value of these stories, but don't confuse them with reality.

[Mr.Canada]

The bible is a collection of folk stories and fairy tales. Read "The Uses of Enchantment", by Bruno Bettleheim, or "The Power of Myth", by Joseph Campbell, to understand the value of these stories, but don't confuse them with reality.

Check out Mere Christianity by CS Lewis. It's outstanding.

The number of people who believe in God far outnumber non believers such as yourself. More evidence of the secular socialist war on Jesus Christ.

[Smallc]

The number of people who believe in God

Believing in God and believing in what you do are two very different things.

[CANADIEN]

Check out Mere Christianity by CS Lewis. It's outstanding.

The number of people who believe in God far outnumber non believers such as yourself. More evidence of the secular socialist war on Jesus Christ.

No, it's evidence of the number of believers vs the number of non-believers.

[Mr.Canada]

Every other religion is great and welcome except Christianity which is attacked every chance the socialist gets.

[Melanie_]

Check out Mere Christianity by CS Lewis. It's outstanding.

The number of people who believe in God far outnumber non believers such as yourself. More evidence of the secular socialist war on Jesus Christ.

I've read Mere Christianity, many years ago. It's an interesting read, but I don't share his belief in some universal moral code we are all supposed to know and adhere to. Maybe I'll find a copy again and give it another go, but its unlikely I'll change my views based on his logic.

If the people who believe in god far outnumber non believers, what are you so worried about? And how is the higher number of believers evidence of a secular socialist war on Jesus Christ? You're just not making sense.

[WIP]

I've read Mere Christianity, many years ago. It's an interesting read, but I don't share his belief in some universal moral code we are all supposed to know and adhere to. Maybe I'll find a copy again and give it another go, but its unlikely I'll change my views based on his logic.

It's promoted as an evangelizing tool for Christianity, but it's doesn't make a convincing case to anyone who has already walked out the door. It's real effect is to keep wavering Christians from leaving.

BTW, I would be willing to bet that Mr. C hasn't actually read the book himself, since it is a Protestant apologetic and in the preface Lewis says that he sees Christianity as a great house with a large hall. Different rooms leading off the hall are the different denominations. He is not primarily concerned about which room a Christian chooses, as long as they are in the hall. And that certainly doesn't jibe with the Catholic belief that they have the one true church.

[Mr.Canada]

It's promoted as an evangelizing tool for Christianity, but it's doesn't make a convincing case to anyone who has already walked out the door. It's real effect is to keep wavering Christians from leaving.

BTW, I would be willing to bet that Mr. C hasn't actually read the book himself, since it is a Protestant apologetic and in the preface Lewis says that he sees Christianity as a great house with a large hall. Different rooms leading off the hall are the different denominations. He is not primarily concerned about which room a Christian chooses, as long as they are in the hall. And that certainly doesn't jibe with the Catholic belief that they have the one true church.

Yes, it is a Christian apologetic but is widely read by Catholics as well. The forums on Catholic.com, many people there recommend it as well. CS Lewis is a revered writer by both sides of Christianity.

[Progressive Tory]

Mr. Canada. Sometimes I think you're a few beads short of a Rosary. You claim to be Catholic, but I was raised Catholic and have never ever heard any Catholic spew such hatred and intolerance.

If you had asked me 30 years ago what my religion was I'd have said Roman Catholic. 20 Years ago - Christian. 10 years ago - Agnostic. But today, I'm a full blown card carrying athiest and not at all a Secular Socialist. I don't even think you know what the term means, since you think Liberals, who are mostly Christian, are Secular Socialist; out to get fellow Christians, because they want to separate church and state.

I assume you know what the Rosary is, and perhaps have heard the prayer of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Fatima (every 10 beads) "O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to Heaven, especially those who have most need of your mercy."

Where's your mercy?

You can't force children to pray because it means nothing. When I was young Mass was in Latin and my favourite part was R. Deo grátias. "Thanks be to God", only because it meant it was finally over.

My gov't did not turn me away from Christianity...it was Christians who did that, mainly because they justified War. Both World Wars were Christians against Christians. The Crusades were the brutality of Christians against Muslims for gold and precious gems. 100 Years War, French/English Wars, US Civil War - all Christians against Christians.

Religion should inspire and if you are really devout, no matter what your gov't tells you, you will STILL BELIEVE what you believe.

[michele]

Hear hear.. The point of secularism is to get everybody to get along with each other.. Secularism does not mean atheism.. It means religious harmony and tolerance. Atheism takes as much faith as believing in God, so the point is: you believe in whatever you want to believe and I will believe in what I want to believe.

Lester...Get along with each other? Religious harmony? Jesus says l didn't come to bring peace but a sword!

"Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.

Matt 10:34

Luke 12:51 "Do you suppose that I came to grant peace on earth? I tell you, no, but rather division;

This is why people leave Christ out. Because he opposes all but the truth.