Shinjula

Ok sure, then you are of a slightly different orientation to the people i have met before who have talked about bible infallibility, and I'll say very little more about things like translation errors and the like (which is something I often debate about with others) and I have to say I do appreciate your position a lot more than theirs, it is on a lot more firmer ground just going for the very most original documents. There are of course problems with it which may or may not occur, such as the switch in translation which i believe occurs transposing though shalt not suffer a poisoner to live, to thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, and also what seem to be translation errors regarding homosexuality, versus homosexual rape/male prostitution/paedophila. But I'm not convinced that the logical argument about godel and relativism arent a lot more interesting and/or justifiable. But I'll kinda leave the ball in your court as to which you'd prefer to debate

Actually the exclusion of its usefulness for no humans, doesnt work successfully against it, godels theorem applies even if you shrink the system we are talking about, to one just involving humans, thats the beauty of the argument, it applies to ALL systems. So it cant be complete and consistent as a system for humans either. And since you've now specified a meaning for infallibility which does include both consistent and complete, im now convinced that bible infallibility must be disprovable with the incompleteness theroem. Nope. That seems to have little to do with Godel's theorem as much as cultural subjectivity. Yes cultural subjectivity is a very important topic to consider in this subject. Absence of a morality is still a moral system, whether it is one you would subscribe to yourself is irrelevant to that fact. And yes I suppose the vultures do have to descend on the topic of moral subjectivity, although I hope from our brief exchanges so far you have realised, I am an open minded man who is only interested in a good debate and will not insult you or your intelligence or look down on you for simply having a different opinion to my own. So, yes, you state that a concrete standard of morality does exist, would you mind justifying that statment, cos I cant see any basis for it? (Just to state my own position - I dont believe moral relativity is a trap at all, i believe it is the source of enlightenment)

Most people take it to mean that everything in there is true. But, in actuality, it's meant in the way that it's correct regarding the interpretations of God, Jesus and their promises. It does a couple of historical date inaccuracies, which would to be expected given the numerous author's of the Bible. Not sure I quite understand that, could you be a bit clearer about what you mean by "correct regarding the interpretations of God, Jesus and their promises." who's interpretations? the authors or the readers? and how are we supposed to distunguish between our interpretation of it and someone elses? No translation is contextually pure. The original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek scrolls are, though. Which is why we have (Forgot name of it atm).[/quote Thats a very uncommon position, at least as far as those christians I personally have encountered? Does that mean you yourself speak aramaic/hebrew/greek and have read them? Also, doesnt that have implications, particularly in the case of aramiac which is a dead language now. It also implies that each individual book of the bible, should be read in its own language, and so no complete translation of the bible into a single language would suffice, that sounds incredibly fragmentary. it puts very harsh conditions on it infallibility, conditions which would negate any argument ive ever seen which involved the words bible infallibility. No one I've ever heard talking about bible infallibility has ever been talking about the original content before translation, its almost always been people talking about the new american bible or the king james. [incidentally if you dont agree with their position feel free to say so]

I think its the completeness aspect which alot of us find difficult to get our heads around, the incompleteness theorem implies that since its asserted that the bible is consistent in some way (see above post for questions on the meaning of infallibility) it can't be complete. So most of us are wondering, ok if its not complete, how do we know how incomplete it is? Does its incompleteness include the fact that to a lot of people it doesnt seem to have relevance to the time we are in now? Because to us it certainly seems to. It certainly doesnt encompass any aspects of post modernism, or relative morality, something modern man has discovered to be of vital understanding in today's world - the question of... we know morality has changed, how do we judge our own morality without judging it relative to anything else?

Dont worry, those of us interested in an actual debate do all know that argument by ridicule is no argument at all, just ignore him and enjoy the more intelligent responses, dont feel you need to argue with silly people [unless of course thats what your here for :)]

Perhaps I'd better ask, what is meant by infallible? Does the bible contain everything of important to humanity? Does it imply there are no incorrect statements in the bible? Are there any other things bible infallibility means? Or does it just mean every word in there is true? What about subtext? Is every interpretation of every meaning behind each story is also true? Which meaning of the words is infallible? Secondly, which version is true? Is the bible so infallible that no matter which version you read, all the words are still true? (Edited cos i think i got something wrong, going back to check)

Argument by Ridicule is no argument Serephus, but I really do think that Godels incompleteness theorem works here. Still working on it.

Well this is a good one to refute, speaking as a mathematician. I'm not sure quite how to apply this, but Godel's Incompleteness theroem would probably be able to disprove this one. The Incompleteness Theorem which is proved by logic along essentially states that no system can be both complete and consistent. I would think this can be applied here, so i'll look into how to specifically apply it to "The Bible is infallible" statement. If nothing else, its a good mental exercise.

Just a quick interdiction to say that Maths stuff about the proof of 2+2=4 is absolute rubbish. I have here a quote from XKCD forums for the proof for 1+2 = 3, I'm not going to mess around and alter it for 2+2=4 but here it is. It really aint that difficult, and its perfectly formal, I dont know where that guy came up with the idea that it takes 25,933 steps to prove it, but thats [cabbage] I dont know whether this affects your arguments, on either side, but please feel free to involve it with your discussions if you wish. Please feel free to return to your various points.

I'm not labelling anyone alive today as an oppressor, I'm not sure where you got the idea that I was, I'm labelling the precursors of our culture as repressive, specifically, the cultures of the Americas, and the Europeans but also that of the Russias. What I'm describing as 'celebrating your dominance' are the actions of those people who are currently about who do talk about "white pride". the only people I've actually heard of who use the phrase "white pride" are nazi skinheads and to a lesser extent some of the more over the top (and obviously less respresentative) deep southerners in the US and I think it is fair to say that those sorts of people are indeed racist and celebrating their "dominance". If you have to go back two thousand years to find a black culture being repressive I think that argument starts to lose it's strength, very little of that culture survives and most of their culture today is based on the arrival of Islam rather than the remnants of the culture you mention, most of which seems to have been kept/revived for the sake of the tourist industry. But Durfur is an inportant point and you are quite correct, but I think it's more of a case of inter-tribal conflict which is a very strong part of black culture and something black culture has yet to get to grips with. I'm not sure whether it would fit the same repeating pattern that the white cultures have in oppression of others, however I'm perfectly prepared to conceed that its a valid point. That is not remotely what I'm alking about and I'm sorry if I didnt express myself well enough to get it across, I'm talking about racism embedded in a culture and then overcome to become the cultures we have today. Individuals have nothing to do with it. Are you implying that the British Empire, for example was not a repressive culture?

There is a massive difference between White Pride and Black Pride, and the difference is cultural. Black Pride is simply pride in the way that Black people have coped and over come the commonalities in their culture, most of the people engaging in Black Pride have, in their history or ancestry, dealt with slavery, racism and segragation, for the most part they have, through engaging with their opponents used political will and intelligent debate and peaceful protest to overcome those horrendous difficulties. Now look at white pride, the commonality within the culture is that of the oppressor rather than the repressed, and if you look at the people who are engaging in White Pride this is mostly what they are celebrating, their dominance over other people. In fact as a white man I find it very difficult to have pride in my roots, I am quite simply ashamed of what my ancestors did. In order to overcome this myself I have to go much further back in time to my celtic roots and I find myself able to take pride in being a Celt, but this is a much smaller group than White. There is no overarching theme to being white others than Empire building at the expense of others, and who can take pride in that in good faith?

Thats a bit of a shame, I would encourage you to look past the uncomfortable feelings and use the experience to increase your own understanding. The feelings of discomfort should give you a good window into how women feel when chatted up by someone they arent at all attracted to. Inappropriate attention from men is something women often find very difficult to deal with because explaining it to men is often very challenging as most men can't imagine getting discomfort from being hit on by a woman, we have quite a different sexual makeup, and most of us are flattered by the attention even if we don't actually want to go out with them. The feelings you are getting, being hit on by a guy are a good mirror for the way women feel, please try to remember this. Also remember negative feelings are not gods way of telling you things are evil, they are there to help you understand the world around you.

Wahey, yet another belief held by people who choose to discrimminate which has been shown to be completely unfounded by science, seriously many research projects have been done which show this is totally false. Its nothing to do with hormones and nothing to do with dysfunctional genetics. The result which comes across from the surveys is that its partly genetic, and in that case just a very complicated set of switches, rather than any sort of dysfunction and partly its environment, and there is most likely to be that in repressive cultures it manifests less because people are scared to come out. In a very very high proportion of cases where it does get repressed it causes great pychological scars and much difficult and a high amount of depression and anxiety disorders.

Isn't that just emotional repression though? Psychologically its actually really quite bad for peoples emotional health to be unable to express emotion or see emotion expressed in others. So on that basis I would recommend you work on yourself to open yourself up to those experiences. After all, what you seem to be having is a negative reaction to those around you displaying joy and happiness in themselves and their lives and their partners - not really something to encourage in yourself or in others.

And if it were two girls would you find it sick? yes, any way its not intended its wrong, I dotn care if gays do it in private, i just hate when they do it in public :? Gays do it in public, where the hell do you live? I mean like hold hands, talk in there gay high pitch tone, dress gay, hug gayly,etc. im not talking about full blown :? But why should any feelings you have, which are learned responses, rather than anything based on ethics or morality, taught to you by your parents and those around you as a simple (and psychologically speaking - no offense meant) child reaction, be allowed to have any sanction by society? After all words like "makes me want to go kill the 2 homos!" are what is called hate speech, and certainly in the country I live in, is illegal. Those sort of words have no place in a civilised debate.

Because we want equal rights, we want the same thing and dont see why, if people are OK with everything else being the same, they can object to calling it the same thing.

I have some decals from the Enterprise D (Star Trek the Next generation), they were a bit blurred so they never used them on the actual sets, I got em at an auction, they seemed like an unusual item. Theres a couple for engineering, and a couple for sick bay (They're the small labels/signs you see on the enterprises doors). They have weird sayings on them, like "Dont eat the yellow snow, don't piss into the wind and dont tug on Supermans cape" and "The princlple of Gravity - its not justa good idea - its the LAW!"

As far as im aware there are only three things we can prove. 1) I exist. This one is self evident, you can't prove anyone else exists, although the turing test is quite useful for a day to day guesstimate of whether or not someone exists, but you can prove to yourself that you exist, simply by asking yourself who is asking the question "Do I exist?" 2) I percieve. Although it is impossible to know whether or not your perceptions are correct representations of the world around you, it is true that you do percieve the perceptions coming in. If I percieve a chair, I cannot know whether or not it actually is a chair, but I do know that I percieve it as a chair. 3) Conditional Logic If 1+1 = 2 and 1+1 + 1+1 = 4 and the rules of mathematics work the way I believe them to, then 2 + 2 = 4 As far as I'm aware those are the only thing we can be sure of, anyone got any more?

Oh and I almost missed of a vitally important reward - all of your needs met no matter what your circumstances, so if your a farmer and your farm is hit by a hurricane you will still be able to eat, you will have access to the best medical care no matter what sort of job you do, the education of your children will be provided free. In a decent communist society, you would also be provided with your entertainment free - currently this isn't something many of the modern communist societies have gone for but I think I would count it as an essential in any communist utopia - and I am talking about a utopian version of communism where mankind has evolved past the need for greed. I am not talking about creating on out of the humans currently living on the planet, you humans are far too dumb and self centred for my liking, but hey, I didn't choose this planet to live on. I'd also like to point out that we are still ignoring the main thrust of my point, that whilst communism doesn't work (currently) neither does capitalism (except that in Capitalsims case, it never can). Capitalist countries are chock full of homeless unemployed people, its a competitive society and in any competition there are losers and having a system which has built in 'losers' in life is a very bad idea. Especially when it is not due to effort. People lose their businesses due to random chance and actions out of their control. Downward spiral are also a hallmark of capitalism, one bad choice and you can be on your way downwards for the rest of your life. This is not a system which can in any way be described as good for it's citizens. Sure its great if your one of the people who have been given all the resources available, education, savings and medical aid, as a child, but this only applies to less than half of most capitalist populations. But for the rest of your population it is mostly a hard slog of a life with no reward.

I well I'd like to introduce you to someone who is now doing a menial and mundane task and quite enjoying it thanks very much i.e. me. I currently work as a cleaner and it suits me fine. OK its not dangerous, like mining. But I'd happily do it if I were in a Communist society. I'm also one who's hoping for us to get out technoogical butt moving regards working, many jobs can, with todays technology be made completely machine based, yet because we have a weird [wagon] work ethic (I.e. that a person should be working, and also must be working in order to recieve money) we can't lose those jobs to machines for fear of depriving people of a job (???)

Nah, the guy hasnt described what hes talking about very well, so you have a misconception about what he means. What he's talking about is something called "Qualia" the intrinsic experience of life. When you look at red, you experience something, if you look at the sun you experience "YELLOW", you then label it 'yellow' because when youve two your mum tells you that the sun is yellow. However, there arent any crossovers in your experience and any one elses, you cant see what any one else sees, you can only see through your own eyes and not someone elses, you can also only relate perceptions in terms of other perceptions. So what you see as "YELLOW" and label 'yellow", for all you know someone else sees differently and also labels it 'yellow'. You can then take it further and extrapolate that for all you know, what you see as "YELLOW" and label as 'yellow' someone else sees as "GREEN" and labels 'yellow'. It's not that the label has changed, its just that you've no way of knowing how other people percieve the universe around them, you can only know your own perceptions. It's not remotely that one person is wrong and one person is right. There's a thought experiment to highlight what qualia is. Imagine a girl brought up in a room from birth that only contains black and white furniture, she has black and white books to read, black and white utensils to eat out of, everything in the room is black and white. She is taught from those black and white books of all the things in the outside world, she is told red is the colour of apples, fire trucks and cherries, she is given information about the interaction of light waves, of frequency, primary colours and secondary colours in short she is taught everything humanity knows about colour but without ever actually experiencing it. On her sixteenth birthday she is taken out of the box and shown a red apple. Suddenly she knows what RED is. That experience of RED is a qualia, it is not connected to any piece of information she has learnt about the colour red, it is an experience of perception without regards to knowledge. Nothing she could have learnt in her room could have given her that perception of red, no matter how much she had learnt. Of course there are arguments against this experiement, but ill go into those later if people are interested. What the guy above is talking about, is that ther is no way to tell whether or not my qualia match your qualia.

Equal income isnt a part of socialism at all, Socialism is completely different to communism, in communism, its rarely looked at as equal income, thats essentially what happens, with some provisos, its "Each according to his needs, each according to his abilities". You work for the benefit of the society as a whole,you'd get your housing and food and anything else you need for basic living and then any profit the society makes can then be split amongst every in terms of luxuries. As for incentives, they aren't as direct as in a capitalist model, greed isnt encouraged, instead a feeling of well being from a job well done, and the knowledge that you are working together and helping your fellow man. Unfortunately, humans on this planet are terribly greedy and whilst (in my opinion) this is a thing very bad thing and needs to be strongly discouraged (in contrary to the values of most capitalist countries - one of which I happen to be living in) so it currently wont work in the country I'm living in, I believe that evenutally we will evolve in that direction and that the communist society will be what we end up with. Its probably too much of a stretch for most people to believe that they could find the above incentives enough to want to work, but in my expierence I have met many many people who take such pride in their work, who dedicate themselves to others that it would take only a small change for them to be happy in a communist society. And I'm not talking about highly paid people here but your average joe on the street doing jobs like emptying bin and surfacing roads.

Racism comes in all sorts of sizes, sure the stuff you mentioned is stuff to be very concerned about, all I was saying was that there are racist sentiments in the statement given, clearly even by having this debate the guy has shown that hes not a racist, but just cos your not a racist doesnt mean you can't accidentally make a statment which is racist. I'm not a Racist myself, but if I say "All Black men are sub human", thats still a racist statement. A racist statement is simply one that makes a blanket judgement over a race. And its best avoid A) because it wont be true and B) because it can upset people.

Well, if one person is poor in Communism, everyone is. Which means a communist nation has to have some serious wealth and power, or a tiny population (preferably both). The difference is, Communism doesnt *HAVE* to have poor, Capitalism does. In what sense is Barbarism an economic system? There are primitive societies most of them operate with communistic economies within their tribe and either socialist or capitalist (trading freely) outside the tribe, whats a barbaric economic system? A Utopian Capitalist society would/should still have the poor, or if you are defining your utopia to insist that there are no poor, it is impossible to have a Capitalist Utopia (not sure what defines a Utopian Capitalist society), but generally Capitalism is a competing market system, in a competition there are always losers, its kinda a given. The only way not to have the poor in capitalism is to not have the competition, lose the competition and you stop having capitalism.

Its a little bit racist actually, but not something to worry about because its easily changed. Its just a matter of re thinking whats actually going on. Theres an implication from "I'm not attracted to Indian girls" to "I couldnt be attracted to indian girls", and then to "I couldnt be attracted to indian girls because theres something wrong with them" which by the sound it is not actually true in your case. If you actually look at yourself, youll probably find the truth is more like "I am generally not attracted to indian girls" and "I have not found an indian girl i have found attractive yet" Racism generally occurs when blanket statements are given about a race without leaving a gap for the unexpected. And although this sounds a little like political correctness, in a lot of cases political correctness is simply a rude word used in the place of "Caring about other peoples feelings" and its often so easy to think of things slightly differently and end up with a result that your still happy with and takes into account the way your words may sounds to another person.