Not following the advice of the Bible: never argue with an idiot, it is hard to tell who the idiot is: hoping there is someone here who is more interested in the truth than an ideology, (yeah agnosticism and atheism are ideologies), as well as Christianity. I wise man will hear council and rebuke.
Seriously, I hesitate to say this because it screams out so obviously: this is such a ridiculous argument based on probably an underlying wound from Christianity, or more likely a poor Christian role model. It is designed and constructed on emotion and inflammatory to Christians, so we get so mad we cannot think straight and give a good answer. So let me explain why his founding presumptions are wrong:
He states: Any God that allows such suffering of Children and parents is either impotent or evil.
Really? You can’t think of any other possibilities? How about freedom is more important than suffering? Foremost in the Bible we are all free moral agents. God will not step over this except in exceptionally rare instances. I have the freedom to do good or evil. If I choose to pull out a gun and kill a person, good or evil, that person will die. There are consequences of actions and mitigating consequences frequently leads to a reoccurrence of the action. I am not saying a baby dyeing of malaria is a result of someone’s action but how we (human race) grows is by learning most often by mistakes and pain and suffering. Pain and suffering is what life is all about.
How about looking at the long term consequences over the short term? This is a common mistake made among liberals. It should have been written in scripture no pain no gain. Are you going to say you should avoid the short term pain of a needle to inoculate malaria? The short term pain nets a good result in the end. I know this is a stretch but nobody knows the results of all the suffering going on in the world but as for me I trust God does and is working on us the best way. I like to look at the whole planet and all the living organisms as one thing God is working on. He is out for our best. I can tell you this, there is a purpose for everything, despite the fact that we can perceive it, comprehend it or like it.
You should read the whole series Dune by Frank Herbert, I won’t spoil it for you but the series looks at the Human race in a similar perspective.
I could go on and on but I have to work. I hope this offends.

March 21-2013
Best -selling English horror author James Herbert Died yesterday, never read one of his novels but love this cinematic adaptation of his best-seller, "Fluke."

Herbert?

this was a children's show in the 1980s on a children's network called Nickelodeon. The show consisted of about 4 or 5 scientific "experiments" that Mr. Wizard (Don Herbert) introduced to one of these kids each week.
>> ^EvilDeathBee:

so who is this old paedo?

I just can't get enough of this series I haven't heard a story so complex, intelligent, and full of political intrigues since the Dune series by Frank Herbert.

I'm pretty cynical myself, but what is inspiring is not that this guy did this but that he didn't give up. Screw you all when the best you can come up with is that you didn't like the song. So? What the hell does that have to do with someone's ability to overcome their own perceived limitations?

"Argue for your limitations and sure enough they're yours" - Richard Bach (flaky yes, but well thought and spoken.)

"“There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance - that principle is contempt prior to investigation” - Herbert Spencer.

I totally saw Binoche in this. Pattinson not so much.

Also, here's a link to the Zbigniew Herbert poem about rats becoming the unit of currency:
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/report-from-the-besieged-city/

>> ^shagen454:

That is an interesting piece of info I did not know about. I never really understood why they went with Lynch for Dune, either. Not that that was a bad idea, I know a lot of people complain about Lynch's adaptation but I liked it a lot. I bet Jodorowsky's version would have been absolutely insane and even less on point with the Dune novel. I can only imagine all of the shit Jodorowsky could shove into that.
wiki: "he planned to cast the surrealist artist Salvador Dali as the Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV, who requested a fee of $100,000 per hour. He also planned to cast Orson Welles as the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, who only agreed when Jodorowsky offered to get his favourite gourmet chef to prepare his meals for him throughout the filming.[23] The book's protagonist, Paul Atreides, was to be played by Jodorowsky's own son, Brontis Jodorowsky. The music would be composed by Pink Floyd, Magma, Henry Cow and Karlheinz Stockhausen"
Damn, man has some fine taste in music. And yep, looks like it would have been insane.
>> ^poolcleaner:
>> EDIT: oh yeah, it's all there on IMDB but I won't spoil it for anyone.

That's because Dan O'Bannon recruited Giger for the alien creature design after working with him on Jodorowsky's failed attempt to make Dune.



Weird times. The days of hiring directors like Lynch to take over a science fiction epic are over. It didn't work and it's not what people want to see.

If Jodorowsky had made Dune, it would have given a handful of people hard ons and Rocky Horror would have fallen to the way side as the midnight movie standard. All in all, I think there'd be less trannys and Hedwig and the Angry Inch would never have been made.

Frank Herbert, Dan O'Bannon, Jodorowsky, Dali, Welles, and Pink Floyd all under one roof? The entire movie would have been one big water of life spice orgy. Pregnant women viewing the movie would've given birth to abominations possessed by Orson Welles.

You mean current presidential candidate Herbert Cain?! OH nooooes, Heeerb!

>> ^bareboards2:

Herbert! Run for it!!!!

Herbert! Run for it!!!!

>> ^marinara:

Jobs created are less than we need for natural growth of population (but we're in a recovery)

I think people get pretty hung up on the technical terms. "Recession" means all the growth indicators are trending downward. "Recovery" means all or most growth indicators are trending upward.

Most people think "recession" means "the economy is bad" (aka below peak), and "recovery" means "the economy is good again" (aka in record territory). That's not what economists mean when they use those words.
>> ^marinara:
bank bailouts cause the 'lost decade' period. Contrast to iceland, which is in recovery, and they bailed out no banks.


Bailing out the banks doesn't cause the lost decade, it's the fuckup that made the banks need bailing out that causes it. Letting them collapse catastrophically doesn't make the economy better, it just makes the recession deeper and longer; just ask Herbert Hoover!

What Iceland did differently wasn't that they didn't bail out the banks, it's that they didn't ask their taxpayers to pay for it. They let the banks default on their international debts (which was most of it), had their central bank print up the money to cover their domestic debts (and then some), and instituted capital controls (taxes on international investment) to prevent people from pulling their money out of the country.

In other words, they did the polar opposite of what people like Peter Schiff or Ron Paul want anyone to do, and it's working out pretty well.

My thoughts:

I've struggled with depression for much of my life, I think I'll probably be struggling with it for most of the rest of it but a few things have made the struggle somewhat easier, mostly this notion of living in the now. Be aware of where your minds eye is wandering, attempt to always bring it back to your present moment. When you live in the past or future you're not really living at all, life just sort of blurs past in front of you as you contemplate your failings or worry about your future. Generally this idea of mindfulness, which has origins in Buddhism, helps me a lot.

Related to that is also learning to detach yourself from your emotions, simply identify them and just understand that they are transitory. I actually picked that up from the SciFi masterpiece, Dune. I read it at a very stressful point in my life and the litany against fear really stuck with me. I really believe fear, above any other emotion, is the most destructive to our ability to think critically and hence live a meaningful existence. Despite being from a fictional religion I think those words contain more truth, at least for me, than anything else I've ever stumbled upon. This idea was reinforced, strangely, by Day[9] of SC2 fame when he replied to a question about how he is so happy.

So our personal philosophies are patchworks of ideas cut from the strangest sources. I'm not a buddhist or a Bene Gesserit, but none the less there are grains of truth in each, as I believe there is some truth in what this video describes. So while I'm not dismissing mainstream medicine when it comes to treating mental illness, but I also think our conscious thoughts are as much a sympton as a cause. When I am in control of my thoughts and emotions I am a happier more productive person, and for that I have to thank not my Dr, but Frank Herbert, Buddhism and Sean Plott (among others).

Anyway, there is a small glimpse into my brain mr anonymous internet stranger.

I have Dune on blu-ray and the movie makes sense to me after seeing it 4 or 5 times over the years. It's really stirring and unique in a lot of ways. Not having read any Herbert books, I wouldn't change the movie. To me, the movie Dune is all about one thing: scale.

I've been thinking lately that one of the biggest reasons that the Bible appears as a sham to me is that it starts so simple and gets more and more complicated as it goes along.

Think about it. At first, the authors are just rounding up local word-of-mouth legends and parables. Which is why so many early religions share so much of the same information, stories, themes, etc. But then, as people become more educated via industry and technology, the stories have to get more complicated to deal with more problems and more questions that people have. Then by the time you get to Revelations, which was written hundreds of years after everything else, it gets really, really complicated. Dealing with matters of early globalization and world government. AND, those things aren't hard to predict, really, if you think about it. Anyone trying to control a large amount of people would know that if they all tried to join together, that would be the end of the reigning power. So they try to fight that by planting the idea early in people's minds that it's a sign of evil. And so they preemptively attack the "leader" saying that "you'll know him, because you'll be really impressed by him". And you don't have to be a student of history to know that people usually attribute revolutionary ideas to one person so that they can hide behind that one person when the powers that be try to persecute them for trying to change things.

The whole thing seems like such a recipe for control. I mean, maybe this idea isn't new (Hell, Frank Herbert wrote about them a long time ago) but it seems to me that it's the biggest evidence showing that the bible was created by men, for the purposes of control. I'd like to think that a supreme being would be so obvious about it.

>> ^gwiz665:

Frank Herbert just turned and died in his grave.
>> ^Shepppard:
I may be thinking too hard on this..
but.. Spice?
As in.. The major "Drug" of Star Wars?



What else are you going to dump into space at the first sign of an imperial starcruiser while doing the kessel run?