There doesn't, which is why I said "if any." I doubt there is one, but many people take solace in believing that there is a purpose to their existence. I am very contempt with knowing that there is most likely no purpose to the existence of human life or the universe at all, and that when I die, I'll rot in the ground, and that's it. It would be nice to live forever in paradise, but then again, when I'm dead, I won't care. Because I'll be dead. I think what people call the soul is just human conscientious, which is purely a function of the electrochemical computers we call brains. When they stop working, the "soul" ceases to exist.

Exactly.

Everything does, or is getting phased out. Our appendix had a purpose at some point in time, and still does minor filtration in our body. It's not necessary but it does/did have a purpose.

I believe everything has a purpose, or it dies. I'm not gonna pretend I know what all the purposes are, and I don't believe in any existential overall purpose, just that everything has a purpose--I think humanity's purpose is the propagation of intelligent thought in our universe, and maybe further. Maybe intelligent enough to bring life on our planet elsewhere.

Hmm, that's interesting. Are you talking about purpose assigned by a higher power, or purpose obtained by ourselves? I certainly would say that there could be a purpose to humanity, but I believe that we must define it ourselves.

I don't think humans have any purpose whatsoever. What have we done that matters in the scope of the universe?

Nothing, yet. I think he's just saying that we could have a purpose if we made one out for ourselves. He's not talking about purpose given by a higher power.

Oh god, here comes the "we are not unique snowflakes" bull****. Sorry, that **** just makes me wanna barf.

I think we have a purpose, I can't say what it is yet, but I think we do. It's not the optimist in me either, I just don't see why we wouldn't have a purpose. Everything on this earth has a purpose--frogs are there to eat flies, flies are there to spread bacteria etc etc. A lot of the purposes are self-fulfilling or only fulfilling to another species, but the purpose exists. Everything has a purpose, though it may not be immediately obvious, and I think ours is mostly to propagate intelligent life forms on earth. We may not be the last of our kind, but we're definitely a step out into the wild blue yonder as far as intelligence is concerned.

Okay, but the universe wouldn't be much different at all if humans didn't exist. One tiny blue dot in the cosmos would be slightly different. Big deal.

Freudian slip?

Really though.

Six Billion people, on a planet not even as big as a sperm on your Princess Leia sheets in the scope of this universe.

So what makes this planet, and these people so special to a being that is beyond time? Your god could fart and totally miss your insignificant little life.

I know if I were God I'd be busy blowing up stars and crap. People are sorta boring.

I saw the special these two numbskull's had on the Exodus. I did find it entertaining, but it seemed to be iffy at best. I'm not saying I doubted that the event happened, it's just that they went out on several limbs to make their case.

Having said that, I expect the same of this special. If you read through all the little tomb pages, you find the same speculative talk over and over again. Hell, they can't explain the tomb of Matthew because of lack of evidence, so they say it couple be the disciple Matthew. They also state that the odds of it being Jesus's family tomb at 600:1. Those are very low odds.

They also make statements that basically back down from their arguments by saying, "if this is the case, that doesn't mean that this didn't happen the way think it did." I also find the whole DNA testing to be a load of garbage. It would be one thing if the samples were preserved in some manner, but they're in somewhat busted pieces of rock that have been sitting around for centuries. Even if you could get a clean sample, how could you really claim anything except that people in that region have been ****ing each other long after these people died a couple thousand years ago, and that a lot of people are related to a degree.

I think this is all a big load of crap designed to stir up a lot of controversy and get both sides pissed off at each other.

I'm not Yoshi, but wouldn't it be appropriate to call the UNIVERSE a higher power? It has, after all, created stars, planets, life and scientific "laws", created everything that surrounds us and connected it all. It is what some people would call God. Not sure whether it's sentient or not, but you never know.

Dj Yoshi, is there something that seperates your belief in purpose from the belief in God? Both seem to take faith, and aren't universally accepted.



Yes, and in the same way I can never truly know that I am sitting on a chair, that my pen is real, etc.
In science you do tests and things and when more and more evidence adds up then you say "Okay, for all practical purposes, this fact is most likely true with a fair degree of certainty."


Have any of you guys seen the documentary done by the two guys that snuck into Saudi Arabia (not legal) and flimed the mountain where Moses got the ten commandments? The whole mountain is freakin charred at the top. There are statues of calves on the bottom, and not far from that sight is a giant rock that got ripped in half from a intense surge of water... There's SO much stuff like that in the world, but people don't seem to 'splore it for themselves.

Science damn you.

I haven't, but it sounds pretty nifty. What was it called?

That's where you say one thing but mean your mother.

Oh geez, I'm assuming you're talking about al-Lawz site.
1. Big rocks with multiple animal petroglyphs !== Altar built by one man for a golden calf. If it was, why would Moses have left the depictions of the calf on the rock after he threw his *****-fit? Seems odd he'd leave idols laying about... (That's completely ignoring the fact that archaeologists say the images are much older than Exodus, and that hundreds of similar sites can be found through-out the region)

2. Blackened rocks "returned from the site for geological analysis" have been conveniently "unavailable" for some 20 years. The "Split Rock at Horeb" has only been presented in photos, but the polished rock could be the result of sand/dust storms or a flash flood that's not entirely uncommon in the Midian Valley.

3. The "Cave of Moses" is a Nabatean tomb from the first century, and the "altar of Moses" is a site of Nabatean pottery.

4. A Molecular Frequency Generator to find gold. ...a man with a fake degree somehow managed to create a device with a snazzy name to find gold of the Exodus in a region with known gold deposits.

But Roach, that's the great thing about christianity. If something happens that YOU, and it only need be YOU, not the rest of mankind, if something happens that you don't understand, it's OBVIOUSLY god.

That is a matter of philosophy.

You're making the mistake of labeling all Christians as people who don't believe the popular scientific theories that explain portions of our universe.

Christian != lack of critical thinking

Actually I was being sarcastic.

Glyde, "The Search for the Real Mt. Sinai" by Bob Cornuke and Larry Williams.

Roach, I'm not sure what you're talking about. Have you seen the documentary?

Actually there were a good number of Mormon Martyrs. And of the people who saw the gold plates, none recanted. They said they thought Joseph Smith as an *******, but they didn't deny that he was talking to God on the 1830s Myspace. It's true other key people did, though, but not people who claimed to have seen angels and gold books..

And I have heard some pretty nasty stuff about the lives of the apostles. And, well, about Jesus too.

Point is, Believing something because of martyrdom or not believing it because you heard something bad about someone, doesn't quite fit.

And I know I missed a lot of posts in the thread but I had to finish my own train of thought.

Actually there were a good number of Mormon Martyrs. And of the people who saw the gold plates, none recanted. They said they thought Joseph Smith as an *******, but they didn't deny that he was talking to God on the 1830s Myspace. It's true other key people did, though, but not people who claimed to have seen angels and gold books..

And I have heard some pretty nasty stuff about the lives of the apostles. And, well, about Jesus too.

Point is, Believing something because of martyrdom or not believing it because you heard something bad about someone, doesn't quite fit.

And I know I missed a lot of posts in the thread but I had to finish my own train of thought.

Also, it's going to take a lot more than a book full of words to convince me of Jesus, or that Joseph was talking to him.

No. All my senses tell me that I am sitting in a chair and that my pen is real. There is very little reason to believe that it is all an illusion. Basically, all evidence that we can perceive points to it being real. God, however, has no evidence in favor of his existence. The belief that the reality we live in is not blind, there is a whole lot of evidence to say it's real. There's no evidence for god.

You'd probably think more about it if you were on drugs.

I don't see that as being an absolute statement. From your point of view, yes, there is no evidence for God. From my point of view, evidence for God is everywhere.

No, but I have read their "findings" from the mountain. I don't know how you don't know what I'm talking about. You brought up scorched rock, the golden calf, and the split rock. My first three points explain why those aren't exciting, and my fourth point comes from the first team that journeyed to the site (Wyatt and Fasold) and claimed to have found the gold of the Exodus around Jebel al-Lawz.

Why not? Why doesn't it "quite fit" that someone hears that Jesus was just a great street magician and decides to not believe the Christian faith, or that someone hears Joseph Smith Jr. (as well as his father) were conmen and decides to not believe the "updated" Christian faith? Seems like pretty good grounds for me.

(Oh, and Martin Harris later denied seeing the golden tablets.)

I don't know if it was mentioned but the other articles on this that I've read say that it would be rare to get the exact same combination of names, even if they are common names, I saw that the chances were something along the lines of 1 and 1,000 of it being a different family.



As said before, it is just being used to prove what the certain relationships were (and has so far proven that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were not related. And Cameron never said he was trying to debunk Christianity, as a matter of fact, they made a point to say that they didn't want to offend anyone.



Cameron is just producing (I believe, don't know if he is also directing) the documentary, he isn't doing research as he isn't an authority on the subject.



From This Article





Coming into this with a strong bias eh?



Using the bible as proof that the bible is right or that God exists is a logical fallacy called "Begging the question"

[QUOTE=Vincent Valentine]The gospels were passed down orally until they were finally written down. Considering that, and the intentional mistranslations by the church, it's easy to see how there could be a drastic difference between the Bible and what actually happened.[/QUOTE]

True, plus the first Council of Nicea wasn't until 325 AD (As previously stated)



I think it's more that people attack Christianity more than Jesus himself.



If you refer to the article I posted above, you'll see that the people criticizing these claims are mostly Theologians.

[QUOTE=IRG SithLord]Heh...it turns out Cameron's "reasoning" for his "discovery" is quite laughable. However, I'll give him credit in admitting that his findings show no evidence against the ressurection.[/QUOTE]

He didn't discover it, nor claim to.



Again from the article I posted:



It is indeed a fallacy, the name for it in informal logic is "Appeal to Ignorance"




I suggest you read some William Rowe, he talks about this exact thing in the same context of the G.E. Moore shift (which is more of a response to Skeptics but Rowe uses it in the Atheism vs Theism argument) and he defines "Friendly Atheism" vs "Unfriendly Atheism" You'd probably find it interesting if you haven't already read it.

Alright this reply is getting quite long, but I suggest reading the article that I posted earlier in this reply

There is no physical evidence that can be quantified or tested. It's completely supernatural. Thus, worthless if used to determine his existence.

Well, to counter that, I never made the argument that Christians were perceptive.

But there are some pretty strong logical arguements that are pretty good in showing that an (1)omnipotent, (2)omniscient (3)wholly good God is contradictory.

I'll have to go check out this William Rowe fellow.

Also, I don't want to spark another three pages of thread, but why is it no one has mentioned Jesus being put in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Sanhedrin?

...can I ask what you're getting at with the tomb of Joseph thing? I'm honestly not seeing why that'd be brought up.

I'm familiar with a fair few of those and not many have any kind of proof of the assumptions they make.

Well it isn't really about "proof" but the fact that many believe that 1-3 is contradictory and impossible. And by "many believe" I don't mean some random people, I mean many famous philosophers.

So, you're saying it's not shown to be impossible but many believe it's impossible?

Not necessarily, but to an extent. Rowe, who I mentioned earlier, was an atheist, and believed that inductively that it was irrational to believe in a God that has those 1-3 properties, but believed that some are rational in believing that such a God exists (or he at least believed that they would be rational in believing in some supernatural being)

And the point in bringing up those 1-3 premises doesn't "prove" that it is impossible, but from just about everything written so far and when you use logic, it seems that they are contradictory with certain problems (Like when philosophers try to bring up things like the "Problem of evil")