I sank the ark guys.

You guys (who don't believe in God) realize that there are those people out there who still believe fully in a God of some form, or a higher being of some form, but do not totally follow everything the bible (a book written by MAN and rewritten several times over again by MAN)?

You're calling someone stupid because they believe in something that they cannot prove, but something that you cannot disprove either. Where is the logic in that?

I'm not saying Moses split the sea, nor did he load the boat with that many animals, and I will say that as far as my beliefs in something like that goes, it did not happen. But, did you ever stop and think, that maybe perhaps the bible is exaggerated truths? To make the stories seem larger than life? They've done scientific investigations which lend credence to the possibility that the "STORY OF MOSES" was in fact true, and he did create a boat and such during a flood and all the other details, but that the statistics and nuances about the story were exaggerated when written by man? For example, the flood obviously wasn't over the entire world, and could very well have been only in that known area of the world. Or, the amount of animals on the boat was largely (and obviously) exaggerated upwards from the original number?

It is entirely possible. And it has nothing to do with a God really, just an event happening or not, and whether or not the people that wrote it into the bible wrote it as truth, completely false, or exaggerated here and there in places.

Just something to think about before you go calling someone stupid because of their beliefs. Even if they seem unbelievable to you.




This is kind of what I was referring to before with the "Scientific research" being done. I cannot recall what show it was exactly, but the title was something like "The real NOahs Ark" and was on the Discovery channel a few months back. They took a look at the area around the mountains that Noah supposedly read the tablets from the 10 commandments, the sedament, etc and they did find that there was in fact a great flood and placed it between the timeframe of when the great flood was supposed to happen. However they also took a look at the rest of the world and found there was no such evidence, and thus God could not have "flooded the entire world" since the evidence would be everywhere, which it was not. They concluded that the story was exaggerated, but that this did not rule out the possibility of it happening altogether based off the other evidence supporting it that they found and instead suggested that the flood could have been one that was just in that area of the world.

plagiarism.

I quit reading this when I realized that you were confusing Moses and Noah.

I pose a question: What impact does this have on the theory of an Afterlife? If there are no Gods, God, or higher beings, does that essentially rule out the existence of anything living on after a human being passes?

In order to believe that you cease to exist upon death you must have already accepted the idea that there is more to you than your physical body.

As I see it, we have two choices : Either there is nothing more than the physical body. The consequence being that we do not have free will. (Why? Because our consciousness is an illusion constructed by the brain, which operates on nothing more than physics. The only random variable is quantum mechanics; if that is even truly random. So everything everywhere is either determined by the initial state of the universe or is random, and either way we have no free will.) Or, there is something more than us which grants us free will.

It does bring into question the traditional christian/catholic/(how many branches are there again?) idea of intelligent design.

What would bring you to this assumption? To "believe" that you conciousness ceases to exist after death, all one must "believe" is that the brain can not continue to live and function without a supply of oxygen. This is science. Philosophy need not apply.

I disagree. The 'physics' of the human mind, and of every creature with a brain, is survival. What is hard-wired is the information we need to live, reproduce, and ensure the survival of our species.

The underlying structure may be physics - our hard-wired structuring for survival - but we can disregard it for no rational reason.

In my instance, yes, free will could be considered an illusion, along with our reality. But why is this such a terrible thing?

We're apes, animals just like everything else on this planet. Our species has no divine purpose and our conciousness is not a spiritually divined construct. Yet we have transcended mere survival for survivals sake and created an immensely complex world where little of it has any relevance to life, survial or furthering the species. The fact we behave so differently from other life on this planet is less an indication of our sepearation from them, but rather that we have reached a level of intelligence that our evolution is still very far from perfecting.

It may not be the spiritual free will you have in mind, but then I'm trying to be realistic about the whole thing.

Dalf is a crappy republican.

the same cannot be said of other popular theories such as Newton's Laws of Motions

But anyway, something I've never seen brought up: HOW does the flood happen? How do you cover the entire Earth with water? It's essentially a closed system. Rain water is the same water as in the oceans and lakes. In order to flood the entire planet, god would have to literally ADD water to the Earth and then remove it later.

Ice caps melting? End of the last ice age?

GLOBAL WARMING!?!? OGMZZ ITS THE SECOND COMING OF THE FLOOD

Actually quantum electrodynamics is the most accurate scientific theory every devised.

But anyway, something I've never seen brought up: HOW does the flood happen? How do you cover the entire Earth with water? It's essentially a closed system. Rain water is the same water as in the oceans and lakes. In order to flood the entire planet, god would have to literally ADD water to the Earth and then remove it later.

It's far more reasonable to believe, as mentioned, that it was just a very large regional flood that people thought was flooding "the entire Earth." It's also interesting to note that they wouldn't have understood cycles of evaporation and condensation, and thus would assume that rain water, coming from the sky, is coming from heaven/god/whatever.

You are not your consciousness.

That's not physics. I said physics, with no quotes. Why are you talking about 'physics'? I said physics, not 'physics'

Irrationality can not be pre-ordained? Be careful here; this is very close to an argument that the random functions of quantum mechanics are responsible for your actions. The mistake you make here is that you look at the whole result, and not the individual steps. Assume for a moment that if you knew everything about every atom in a brain, you could simulate the physics in that brain perfectly. Wouldn't, then, this copy of a brain have the exact same chemical reactions and electrical signals as the real brain? Wouldn't they have the exact same thoughts, even though they are only connected through that original state?

I did not say either choice was terrible, did I? No, I did not.

On the contrary. Every living being is perfect just the way it is.

Realism does not apply in matters of spirituality. And it only applies in matters of free will in that it makes it impossible.