warri0r45

Ignore this, sorry.

It was my understanding that you could be forgiven for your sins and thus avoid an eternity in hell. Guess I was wrong huh?

Too bad God doesn't pay the bills if the father, the only working person of the family, rather dies after being kidnapped by a terrorist than temporarily lie. Everybody is allowed to have as much faith in anything as they want. Still, trusting your family to 'God' is naivety. God will not look after some children who starve to death on a daily bassi, neither will he specificly help a family living in a first world country just because their living standard dropped a little. That wasn't a belief by the way, just looking at death statistics for starvation/thirst of children. Mustn't be important for God. You are not looking at it from a Christian perspective, though. You're looking at it from a perspective that says Earthly life and comfort is vitally important, a Christian doesn't see it in exactly the same way you do. It's not to say that your point isn't logical, I'm only pointing out that it is secular. You view 'paying bills' as more important than salvation, because you do not believe in salvation. I think that it's just a point that Christians and non Christians will never be able to see eye to eye on. How about this. Say the father of a family is the only Christian in that family and is posed with the gun example that Barihawk suggested. He dies for his faith and basically his family are in emotional and financial ruin. Justified? I'm not sure but I'm just throwing ideas around here. So do you think the father should show empathy towards his families situation if he dies or stay steadfast in his faith, which, if I'm not mistaken, is redeemable due to te salvation of Jesus Christ?

Too bad God doesn't pay the bills if the father, the only working person of the family, rather dies after being kidnapped by a terrorist than temporarily lie. Everybody is allowed to have as much faith in anything as they want. Still, trusting your family to 'God' is naivety. God will not look after some children who starve to death on a daily basis, neither will he specificly help a family living in a first world country just because their living standard dropped a little. That wasn't a belief by the way, just looking at death statistics for starvation/thirst of children. Mustn't be important for God. Hmm. That's basically what annoys me about the whole cyclone catrina fiasco. Christians saying things along the lines of 'my faith in god has been strengthened.' People can believe what they want, I could mind in the slightest, but I'd have to agree BlueLancer, people relying on god to help them is naieve and almost rejecting of the harsh reality we exist in.

My apologies for not being clearer with that originally. I dont want this to slip into an evolution debate so to respond I am going to merely say do you think I did this on my original post? This is unrelated to the original topic but I will say that in the steps of the scientific method hypothesis comes before experimentation. After experimentation you re-analyze it and see how it compared to your original hypothesis. Bold 1: It's been a little while since I read the original post, but no, you don't come across that way at all. I can easily tell a fundamentalist from a conservative by thier persona, even on the internet. Bold 2: Your right, we do originally form a hyothesis as to what we think will happen or as an explination of nature, but a hypothesis is completely different to a conclusion. What I'm trying to say is that fundamnetalist creationists say I have come to this conclution, not becuase my hypothesis is correct, but because this is the position I want to defend for my own non-scientific reasons. It's basically the opposite to saying I have come to this conclusion because my hypothesis was strengthened by the experimentation i did or evidence that became apparant to me, which is a much more sound and non biased way to achieve knowlege.

That's kinda why I don't smoke. :P It's not so much that it has X chemicals with Y side effects, but it denies you something which is essential for life - oxygen, and replaces it with what is known to be complete waste to the human body - carbon dioxide. #-o Here's a fun fact: smoking actually makes a change in your blood. It has been shown that smokers blood has more haemoglobin, i.e. the stuff that carries orxygen and carbon dioxide on your blood cells, than non smokers. Don't be fooled, this does not make you healthier than a non smoker by a long shot. I heard this a while ago so feel free to correct me if neccesary.

Well said Ambassadar, you just made me remember (although it sounds wierd) I am a better person because of my parent divorcing (among other random crap life has served up at me).

In the last months at least I've made it a habit of mine to drink an iced coffee a day. =P~ It's my substitute for a normal coffee.

I would love to see a reference to back up what you claim. Sadly, if what you say is true, I have been fed a furphy from other sites. Watch the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" by former presidential candidate Albert Gore.... it's all in there. The sources are also included at teh end of the DVD. Ok, i'll definately have to give it a look at some point or another. Sounds interesting from what I've heard.

Everyone knows that peer pressure to start smoking is bad. I think smoking is a good thing, however. I smoke tobacco out of a bong primarily (filters tar and many other carcinogens out of the smoke), and when I do smoke cigarettes I enjoy organic additive-free American Spirit tobacco. Smoking helps calm my anxiety and is good for my mental health. It is likely that some point down the road I will experience negative physical effects, quite possibly even death, but it's a price I'm more than willing to pay. In fact, living past 50 or 60 doesn't sound to appealing to me anyway. I believe the personal right, of any individual who wishes it, to inhale the burning leaves of a plant, for whatever purpose, is a good thing. Can't say I agree with your philosophy there mate. Oh well, whatever floats your boat.

"Fair" doesn't exist in real life. "Fair" is something in kindergarden when everybody gets an equal slice of the cake to prevent whining. In real life, some people are already born with a whole cake while others only have the cherry so to speak. Why isn't everybody a musical genius, a master football player or a millionaire? Because, life isn't "fair". ...you can't just diss me off with 'life isn't fair' crap. Sure maybe it isn't, but it should be. That is what I'm complaining about. on a more positive note: I really like what some of you guys had to say in this thread. thanks. I'll give you a scientific explination on why life isn't fair. Ok, you'd agree that it's peoples differences that make us dislike/be intolerant towards/stereotype/hate/etc others, correct? Genetic variation occurs when there is a random selection of one or the other of all pairs of chromosomal information from mother and father and basically occurs in all complex organisms to help our survival rates as a species. How does it help survival rates? The genetic variations makes us difficult and somewhat impervious to predation (obviously not totally impervious) due to the fact that we will all react in a different manner i.e. not predictably as something like a bacterial colony will. Also, on the topic of bacteria, genetic variation makes the spread of such microbes much more difficult than if we were all the same. Image if we were all genetically identical; bacteria that overrun one human could do so to the whole population due to the fact that we are all genetically indentical. Just a brief explination of why life isn't fair. :lol: I hope it makes sense. :ohnoes:

I would love to see a reference to back up what you claim. Sadly, if what you say is true, I have been fed a furphy from other sites.

Once again an opinion with no facts to back it up. This OT forum is never going to get anywhere until people back opinions with facts. That is the only way for educational positive dialogue to take place. Hmm. It's not so much an opinion as a valid observation of the method through which fundamentalist creationists gather thier evidence to support thier original conclusion (i.e. there is a god and were were created by his hand). Now logic and a basic understanding of science would tell us we don't gather evidence to support a conclusion; thats incredibly biased. What we usually do is gather evidence presented by nature and come to a conlusion afterwards. Read over what I've typed slowly and with care and you will realise that it's not biased opinion nor does it need facts to back it up.

It came across to me that he was laughing at the fact that suicide bombers gave up thier lives for a fallacy. I don't think he was laughing at the fact that they murder people, that would be sick.

If you want to give into a life long addiction and severe adverse effects in later life to be someone you are not, then go ahead. This question you have posed to me is a total no brainer. Don't give up your health just to impress someone, trust me. If they are really your friends, they wouldn't care whether you smoke or not.

I don't think either could be classed as technically death metal, could they?

fundamentalists are zealots and will firstly try and force thier views on you and secondly not tolerate or accept science or logical argument. Not every christian is a fundamentalist, thank god.

The lure of TV, radio and computer lately have been keeping me up till past midnight the last few nights. As a result i've been waking up at later times such as 10. I'd much rather wake up at the latest 8 every morning (on holidays at the moment). It just makes my day way better if I do.

They are things that Christians make excuses for, but their excuses contradict and then they revert back to the whole "Jesus is God. Amen. Praise God" That's because these fundamentalist creationists you see build thier evidence around a conclusion i.e. they pick and choose what facts suit thier conclusion and nothing else. Now logic would tell you that you come to a conclusion after evidence is presented. That's basically all that annoys me about creationists. They keep saying 'but this is why scientists are full of crap' as if they are afraid of getting proven wrong and as if faith is beyond them. As a disclaimer I realise the overwhelming majority of christians these days are not fundamentalist creationists as they obviously have the ability to put 2 and 2 together and use logic. I have nothing against any christian either, just the fact that the minority of them choose to deny logic and pick and choose what suits them and thier conclusion. Narrow mindedness FTL.

Of course, you'd have to be psychotic to invade the US, I was more suggesting the resistance thier army would put up to a US invasion.

THEY DIDNT HELP IN RAWANDA, THATS THE WHOLE DEAL! the UN sent 5000 "peacekeepers" to rawanda. 30 got killed, the UN pulled out and let a genocide run on, and then for the kicker, THEY MADE A DECISION NOT TO CALL IT A GENOCIDE! can you beilieve that. 1 of the first times they can really do their job and they back out on a technicality. the US had its hands full with somalia so they couldnt really help, but still, this is just the UN screwing over one more country because they dont have the guts to help. At least they tried. I'd much rather have the UN there than not, but they need more firepower and authority in my opinion. Anyway, your comments sparked my memory of a documentary I saw about the Canadian General who lead things in Rwanda. Yea, it was kind of a mess, wasn't it.

Ehhhh..... there's a whole globe full of water. That's drinkable and won't have acute side-effects? Recycled water is drinkable and does not have acute side affects. It's been done in Singapore with no apparant ill affects whatsoever and the science behind it is sound. I was talking about how the writer remarked there's a whole globe full of water (including sea). Sorry, thanks for clearing that up. And yeah, drinking sea water kills you via osmosis.

Supporting Iran is one thing, the Ayatollah is another. He is singlehandedly the most dangerous man in the world. All he has to do is speak and millions of extremist Islamics will do whatever he asks. The gigantic US nuclear and chemical weapon arsenals (which are enough to destroy and infect the entire planet earth many hundreds of times over) and it's 500 billion dollar+ defense budget absolutely pale in comparisons of dangerousness to the rusty AK-47s and boxcutters of the muslim extremists. In all seriousness, I don't think Iran is a huge threat to the world. If it was, my spider sense would tingle. No tingle, no threat. I think Iran has something like the 8th largest army in the world. No threat... :-k I say a little threat, at least. With nuclear weapons though... :ohnoes:

We all live in the same reality. We simply build unique models of this reality in our minds, based not only on our perceptions of reality from our physical senses, but from other factors such as societal pressures or faith in a higher being or the use of mind altering drugs. Because we are each living in our own model of reality, yet still existing and interacting with actual reality, which has no definable substance (is there a world if there is no mind to apply logic to it? of course not, everything is just matter floating around, mass is frozen energy, etc...). Consider for a second that you spend a huge amount of your mental resources simply logically parsing what you see, hear, touch, smell, and feel at any given moment. You do not think about all the process your brain must go through to achieve this understanding of self. And yet, by meditating or using certain substances you can easily reveal the workings of this unseen mechanism, and train your minds eye upon it, showing you how to see music, or hear coors. There is no reality without a mind to apply logic to it, and therefore everyone creates their own reality. Yet, in the same token, we all live in the same ineffable "Real" space. Anyone can make god real, by believing. Therefore god exists, and he does not exists. He is a girl, and her name is eros. I generally agree with you on most accounts there pault, we all have a unique perception of the world and hence we all put our own spin on the one objective reality in which we all co-exist. In other words, to some people a god exists, to others he dosen't. And to some peole god is a leperchaun on thier shoulder. In my opinion reality and existance is highly subjective, yet if it is indeed objective, it is highly warped by perception. So in my view something can both exist and not exist at the same time. For example, my mate Frank exists to me, his family, his friends and anyone who has ever seen him or had some perception of him. Seeing as Frank is never on the news and lives a fairly secluded life, the pm John Howard has no perception of Frank's existance and hence, to Johnny boy, old mate Frank does not exist. The lesson here, I suppose, is that there is not one true definition of existance, it varies with the perception of the individual who makes the definition. But, of course, your definition and views on existance could be different. :? Ouch. Metaphysics FTL. #-o :P

For what purpose? To keep the public afraid and docile. :P