^ Nithern, hope and perseverance has absolutely nothing to do with faith. How does religion even remotely make all of someone's suffering suddenly worth enduring? If anything, looked at past the surface, it exacerbates it, since it would imply that there is some sadistic arbiter of suffering living in the sky, deciding that you deserve one thing over another.

I'll take a naturalistic world where things happen but follow natural rules, over a sky dictator, any day. To me, knowing that bad things happen but aren't initiated by a conscious agent, is extremely reassuring and fills me full of hope - after all, such knowledge means that we have a high level of control over our world and lives, if we wish to exercise it. Faith, on the other hand, runs the risk of giving all that up. To me, religion ultimately becomes the antithesis of hope, since it is an entire lack of control. The natural world, however, can certainly provide hope that we find scientific discoveries to improve our situation in life - we can hope this, because we take control of our situations, rather than relying on faith... faith being the only thing learned from religion, an enormous flaw to overcome and NOT a virtue.

The answer is;

If you believe the bible word for word your a moron. That or you've never taken even a half-arsed attempt to understand the natural world and it's actual history. And yes.. I am calling the 65% of Americans who believe the bible word for word.. morons.

As to the Catholic Church. They have become surprisingly progressive in the last decade or so. They've apologized for their wrong doings, to the pagans, the jews, etc. They have abolished the idea of Hell. They have openly stated the bible is not a direct link to god and was written by followers of the apostles.. ie men, fallible men and should be looked to as a guide, stories to teach, not literal truths. They have even basically accepted evolution, saying that faith and evolution are not at odds.

Surprisingly progressive for the largest branch of the church in the world. Not surprising, it is the smallest denomination here in the US. Sucks our first settlers were the most puritanical Christians since the middle ages, a taint that still interferes with our countries progress in every way on a daily basis.

Now let's see - Deltron Z
Art avenger, let's start the adventure
Hit ya with nerve gas, absurd blasts
Crashin space craft, I'm bio-enhanced
Hiero advanced series, monstrous evolution
Headed, tooth and nail, scoop the trail
Super-sleuth, a new race
Mad creator, savage nature
World Wide Web, the ebb and flow
Light years from watchful eyes while my thoughts provide
objectives to ostracize the pompous prophecies
Underground societies are hard to lead
Asteroid surfing, castor-oil burping
The darkest side of humanity animated
The grand awakening, plan to take it in
I demand your patronage, mobilize my battletanks
With clusters small, NTR's to empty Mars
Many MC's cruise low earth orbit
Easier for me to use my search warrant
Drift by a star, absorb it, and store it
Leave tourists pourous, my galaxy's gorgeous
Quantum jump - I'm right at your doorstep

Now I catch more wreck with fast ignition
My last decision, pulse amplification
Terror with napalm, I want y'all to stay calm
Alien annihilation, I stay armed to the grill piece and kill beef
20 percent matter, 30 percent is energy
Assimilating to become a living being
Evaporative radiation fades your station
I get high as aviation

I rise like helium, you're falling rapidly
Trapped in apathy, while I track your speed
I'm what you call a legend, dominance with armageddon
Gives me a warm reception
Verbal war with weapons, installation
Blowin the star dust, distance twelve parsecs
Enthuse your phalanx with my literary talents
Just a bit of balance, rip the silence
in space, all-star systems are our victims
Atomics, anonymous with ominous
implications of information, or information, and entertainment
Cyber-tech dialect, you gotta earn my respect
I'm like Gamera to amateurs, hit em with a cannonball
And in all this confusion
The fusion of music and mind precipitates translucent illusions
Search the ruins with Automator
Hit the walls with a carbonator
Hit-or-missiles, just regenerate
The sonic soldiers allow us to demonstrate
Emergency dispatch, skyscrapers ripped back
from the impact, their flow is mismatched
My style's protected by heat shields and ceramics
Don't panic, I landed on planet Mercury
Gave it atmosphere, set up my headquarters
I'll never get captured here
Rap your tear clap your ear with Soulsonic Mantronik phonics
Turn your brain to an omelette
I'll hold a comet in bondage, with my dominance
Take a space shuttle to escape trouble
Bounce through the Milky Way
Not many MC's feel this way

Thank you for this, and your many other promotes.

In reply to this comment by eric3579:
*promote

That's f'ing disgusting. But it's just one example of many natural systems that work like that.

And yes, we don't need any alien viruses to take over our minds when it happens all over in the natural world. Thankfully our brains are far to complex for these viruses to actually work on us. But who knows what could happen, with evolution and time.

Have you ever looked at the natural world...


ON WEED

The natural world can be so horrific but so incredible at the same time. I don't think I'll ever stop being amazed by the world around me.

Government should stay the fuck out of it.

Neither create a law for or against any way or the other, marriage is an issue between a couple and their church. If their church wants to marry them, then the govt. has no say in it.

They have to recognize it is a legal relationship, regardless if its a man / woman, or man/man, or woman/woman.

Also, it isn't an aberration of nature, homosexuality is rife in the natural world.
Lions, tigers, all of the ape/chimp/monkey species, mice..etc.

>> ^BicycleRepairMan:
>> ^jonny:
As you mentioned, the amount of evidence required to sustain a belief is partially dependent upon the nature of the belief. So, for instance, how much evidence do you require to believe that a painting is beautiful? Do you trust your own eyes when everyone else is telling you different?
That wouldn't require evidence at all. It's subjective opinion, or reactions inside my brain to what I'm seeing.

Beauty isn't entirely subjective. There are certain forms, combinations of sound, etc., that do have universal appeal. Golden ratio stuff for example.

I also accept the view that perception of beauty is indeed a real, material reaction, entirely non-supernatural in origin. Studies show this all the time, scientist can measure brain activity when showing different faces, pictures etc, and different parts of our brain "lights up", in the same way as when we taste things etc.

What fMRI actually measures is known as the BOLD response - Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent. It is thought to correlate well with neural activity, but there is some debate about that. (This may have been settled - it's been some years since I worked with fMRI.) More importantly, it's still only correlating some neural activity with a particular mental state. AFAIK, no one has ever conducted a study demonstrating a causal relationship between neural activity and particular mental states. The closest we've gotten to that is nerve stimulation during brain surgery. But that is very anecdotal.


Of course we dont know exactly how the brain does all this, but thats why we keep working on it, and its very exciting. But I do not see how all this relates to a divine presence. Infact, it shows the opposite.

The connection is the kind of evidence required to believe something and how we go about analyzing that evidence. I think I've pretty clearly shown that in many cases anecdotal or non-verifiable evidence is plenty good enough.


If you believe love to be some kind of spiritual "force", independent of our brains and all material existence, I suppose the same thing applies, when you feel love, it confirms for you the existence of these supernatural phenomena, including the ever-elusive "higher power".

This is really getting to the heart of it. I'm not suggesting that the possibility of a divine presence is in any way supernatural. It seems possible to me that divinity may be as much a part of the natural world as anything else. For me, divinity does not have to be a creator or controller of the universe, but is something that suffuses every part of it. That we don't understand by what mechanism that happens is incidental. It may be that we are incapable of doing so.

I expect you will respond by saying any such thing could not be divine, because that's how you define it. "Just what is it that you're talking about?" you might ask. It's basically impossible to put into words. It's like trying to describe the taste of steak using the menu. Or describing what the color red looks like. I can describe the wavelength of light and how that affects the neurons involved, but I won't have done anything to convey the mental state of perceiving red.

Thanks for the promote. I could scarcely believe what I was seeing when I watched it on television for the first time.

That's quite the can of worms they've opened if they do have any success with their verifiability claim. I'm pretty sure it's doable to show God is statistically improbable ("probably" doesn't exist), but good luck proving "Jesus died for your sins."

>> ^Thylan:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7818980.stm :-
An atheist campaign claiming "There's probably no God" has been reported to the advertising regulator.
Posters with the slogan appear on 800 buses in England, Scotland and Wales, as well as on the London Underground.
But organisation Christian Voice has complained to the Advertising Standards Authority saying they break rules on substantiation and truthfulness.
The British Humanist Association, which backed the campaign, said it was not taking the complaint seriously.

There is plenty of evidence for God, from people's personal experience, to the complexity, interdependence, beauty and design of the natural world
Stephen Green
Christian Voice
The ASA's code states "marketers must hold documentary evidence to prove all claims". The regulator said it would assess the complaint and decide whether to contact the advertiser.

"There is plenty of evidence for God, from people's personal experience, to the complexity, interdependence, beauty and design of the natural world"
Um... none of that is evidence. Man they are full of crap. Sure you can believe there is a god, but don't try to suggest there is any evidence of one.

People's personal experience? Sorry... just because someone feels that because they asked for Aunt Mary to get better and she did is some proof of the existence of god, don't make that evidence.

The natural world? Sorry again, science shows how it all works. The complexity comes from the billions of years of evolution of it, as does the interdependence (things are interdependent because they developed in a world where the other things existed... nothing magical or god like there)...

And beauty and design? Man I hate that defeatist attitude... a shell
Both parties: 'Wow, that sure is amazingly beautiful, the intricate spiral design of the shell is stunning'...
Party One: 'Must be the work of a divine being... no other explanation for that, it's just too pretty'
Party Two: 'Really? You don't think that it's even more amazing to think that nature, and living things created this design, and that by its very nature it's quite simple as it is, at its core, a radially repeating simple shape?'
Party One: 'Nope, it was god... I do not wish to think about it any deeper'
Party Two: 'But, come on, the more you look into these things, the more amazed and thrilled you can be by the beauty of nature and how it works'
Party One: 'I don't care, it's god that did that... let me get back to my simple life where I don't have to think too deeply'.

Just ARRRGH... if these people spent any time reading and learning about what science has discovered about this planet they could have, rather than having a stupidly superficial and trite understanding of things, be amazed and humbled by the way that nature works WITHOUT some bloody divine being who just 'made it all'.

Grrrr.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7818980.stm :-

An atheist campaign claiming "There's probably no God" has been reported to the advertising regulator.

Posters with the slogan appear on 800 buses in England, Scotland and Wales, as well as on the London Underground.

But organisation Christian Voice has complained to the Advertising Standards Authority saying they break rules on substantiation and truthfulness.

The British Humanist Association, which backed the campaign, said it was not taking the complaint seriously.


There is plenty of evidence for God, from people's personal experience, to the complexity, interdependence, beauty and design of the natural world
Stephen Green
Christian Voice

The ASA's code states "marketers must hold documentary evidence to prove all claims". The regulator said it would assess the complaint and decide whether to contact the advertiser.

I have to upvote for just that line, "It's not that we're better then the universe, we're part of the universe".

It's hard for me to understand, but many people think we are better then the universe. So much so that there must have been something outside the universe to create us. And since they can't see this creator, they use all of their imagination trying to envision how awesome and brilliant the he must be. Never understanding that even their imagination is just one small product of the natural world that they dismiss.

I'm reading a fascinating book called The Spell of the Sensuous and the ultimate philosophy is the same.. except it explores how our sensations, perceptions, and language are, also, inextricably stitched to the natural world.