Well, obviously believers in a god like the Christian god are going to try and counter with "free will," "God works in ways our mortal minds can't imagine," and whatnot.

And many theologians have tried, but there are usually pretty strong arguments against those types of arguments too.

Well, only if you're using just logic and not faith.

(I'm not arguing with you, actually, I'm very familiar with the arguments you're talking about, I'm just saying it before they can.)

Not getting at anything. I'm just asking in regards to the article.

Ah. After reading a better definition of ossuary I've answered my own question.



Nevermind.


(Still this whole thing doesn't make sense to me. You wouldn't be able to stick bones into an ossuary unless you had a body. If you had a body floating around, Christianity would have died. Heck, even if you had a box with his bones in it, someone could have said "Dude, Jesus is in this box. Cut it out.")

I hate to say this, but I really want to watch the documentary.

Yeah, I mean, if it was more reasonable that they ressurected than their body was hidden by close followers, then Apollonius of Tyana probably wouldn't have had any followers either.

(You know, there are people that don't think Elvis is really dead. We can show them pictures of him, dead on a table, and they'll still believe he's still alive somewhere, doing rock 'n' roll adventures or something..)

Well when all the close followers died saying they saw him come back from the dead... by things like spears, stones, and upside-down crucifixion....

Yeah. I'm sure they were just liars, and hid the body. That would make sense.... not.

But whatever.

And Elvis could be doing rock 'n' roll adventures.

i find it rather interesting that the ONLY definition of faith as being blind is one involving science...





um... not so much. your mind and personality, i would consider to be part of human consciousness. the soul however i would consider to be independent of the body, and thus not affected by its functions even death.

simply put i think humanities purpose on earth is to experience life,

if i were "god" i think that it would be appropriate to create a universe and life to experience, and enjoy it. maybe not exactly in line with "Christian" dogma but oh well.

also the gospels were not "written" at the council of Nicaea they were only compiled. and much of the new testament was written within the lifetime of the "apostles" such as acts the letters to the romans, etc.


while i have almost no faith in the Vatican, your looking at this the wrong way. they don't go "hmm.... what is this? well we don't know so therefore it must be a miracle." usually they start with something that is assumed to be a miracle and before they will concede that it is in fact a miracle they go through every possible explanation. but still i generally dont give the vatican much credence.

...

Exactly.

That's what many believe, yes. I was stating what I believe.


Yes, that is what I meant to say. The point was the appeal to ignorance fallacy. They assume that because science can not explain it, then it must be a miracle. No doubt they have retracted prior declarations of miracles once science has explained them. Or maybe they just shove it under the carpet and feed their followers some inane bull**** excuse. It wouldn't be the first time.

No, theres two things that come from that.

One was a story that Martin Harris denied seeing the tables. That was something started by a Missouri (IIRC) newspaper.

The other is someone asked if he thought Joseph Smith was a liar. He said "he is a liar and a cheat". When asked if he had seen the golden plates shortly before he died he said he had seen them, but would never forgive Joseph for waht he viewed as personal injustices.

Doesn't prove much to me, but that's the generally accepted version of how things went down in the LDS historical community, for both those for and against the Church. There are still dissenters, notable Gerald and Sanra Tanner, but I think they are loons anyway.

Just so we're clear, I said The Bible to be an ***.

I'm pretty sure 3 apostles left the church because he publicly denied seeing the plates.

Yeah I gathered that from your posts after that, so it wasn't really a point specifically to you, but to those who actually try to use that argument.

this explains it all.

Science can only explain certain physical properties of the universe, what about one time events or abstract ideas that cannot be tested by experiments? Say truths about a certain relationship. Here's another example, say a person has a ufo contact. The person has now a better understanding of the universe (assuming it really was a ufo) because of this truth, but this truth cannot be assimilated by the scientific community or academia because it was a one time event that cannot be repeated by experimentation. Or lets say certain actions led you to believe a friend really loved you, but you cannot get a group of people to accept it as true because you cannot conduct experiments where the friend responds the same each time.

The world would be so much better without this kind of ****.

Both ways.

First, we'd all be better off without religion.

Secondly, since there is religion, let the people who want to believe it believe it and don't try to antagonize them unless you have irrefutable evidence to disprove their beliefs because otherwise (and probably with irrefutable evidence) they'll deny your evidence and make up some saving-face reasoning that God did all this to test their faith.

If you cannot duplicate your results each time to support your theory then your theory is null and you need to come up with a better hypothesis. Drrrr.

"We'd be better off without religion, but don't tell people that."

But a religious way to approach this event would be to have an answer and claim to know the answer is true, whereas a scientific attempt at explaining the event would be more along the lines of "it was probably ____" or something along those lines.

People aren't just walking minds or robots. We need to look at the world with intellectual eyes, as well as spiritual non-physical eyes. To close either one of those eyes is to leave us with impared vision.

How many eyes do you have?

The beauty of science is that it asks not for your faith; science asks only for your eyes.

I actually know a girl who believes this. She is an Elvis fanatic

She's coo coo for cocoa Elvis

And your money.

I'm going to go ahead and assume this was a joke to be ironic.

Even science demands a level of faith.

Like what? Everything I learn in science can either be verified experimentally or derived mathematically; if it couldn't, it wouldn't be science.

If you really believe that, then you don't know what science is.

Then you can correct me, but don't you have faith in the scientific method? Faith in the tools used to measure science. Faith in your senses to tell you what is true? Faith that when certain things happen, a certain result will come about.
If I'm wrong, show me my error here and I'll correct my view.

So wait, you're telling us we have to have "faith" in the scientific method? The scientific method works. There's no faith about it. We don't have to "believe" the scientific method because it's been proven that it works. Many, many, many times.

I think you're just misusing the word "faith" here or at least using it in a different context than religious faith.

Wow people on both sides are just angry and wasting your time. Let people believe what they want. I'm a Christian and I do, so please stop making in a personal vendetta against it like you hate. Man, why can't everyone just chill down?

TSM, I've been thinking that way about faith through this whole thread. Denominator is right, though. I love you guys even though you believe differently from me. We just have different beliefs. (I'd be fine with ending this thread, actually...)

I don't see where there are any hateful posts here. For the most part I see object arguments.

Axis: faith in the sense that you used it to explain science isn't applicable really. Here you're mistaking faith for reason which are different things.

And I agree that this thread should probably end only because it has gotten quite off topic.

I see. (and understand)

Well, kudos to those of you that made it through all these pages. It's always fun to find out what other people believe.

Not the sort of answers that are in the area of religion. Everything is fundamentally based on assumptions, no matter where you go.

If you disagree, please explain how you know that

a) We can depend on our senses to correspond to reality
b) We can depend on logic to properly interpret the data we receive from our senses
c) Explain how any force fundamentally works
d) Explain what other experience you have out side this universe that makes the above assumptions reasonable?

Science is great. It make my life much easier, but it doesn't give you free licence to by an arrogant jerk about work and data derived by people who are not you, and aren't really applicable to the questions being discussed.

This is probably the most retarded thing anyone has said on this forum ever.

And this is the forum with where people like Tiberium_Empire, Warlockmish, and SF_Gold post.

Don't worry, Rob. You still win the gold medal.


As far as faith and science goes, most of the faith is in the results of science.

Explain.