>> ^deedub81:

promote


That's so nice of you, thank you!

Love reptiles, the convention would probably be awesome, but the guy doing the video .... not sure if he's a big dick or just stupid.

>> ^Jinx:

>> ^dracoirs:
In reply to this comment by Payback:
A REALLY shocking secret about your favourite dinosaurs would be THAT THEY WEREN'T DEAD.

Pro tip, today's birds are yesterday's dinosaurs

Yeah ok, and todays mammals are yesterdays reptiles? :3

HOMOSAPIESAURUS


he's right...

>> ^dracoirs:

In reply to this comment by Payback:
A REALLY shocking secret about your favourite dinosaurs would be THAT THEY WEREN'T DEAD.

Pro tip, today's birds are yesterday's dinosaurs

Yeah ok, and todays mammals are yesterdays reptiles? :3


HOMOSAPIESAURUS

I'm not at all a scholar of the bible. I've read parts, I've been to
Sunday school before i was confirmed (age 14) and I have at times had
fun reading it.

Well, I would encourage you to try to understand it. Every conversation I've ever had with an atheist about the bible either brings up the same five things from the old testament or their doubts about who wrote the bible..and that's it. I've never actually spoken to an atheist, and I've spoken to many atheists, who even understood the basics. I think that if you're going to criticize something, you should at least try to understand it at a basic level..maybe that's just me. Although, the lack of understanding matches what the bible says, that the truth is spiritually discerned. Without the Holy Spirit, the atheist is going to find it fairly impossible to comprehend.

Arguing from authority is not a strong argument. Just because "the
intellectual scholarship" is much greater than I understand, doesn't
change what the book says. And since new evidence is not uncovered, it
is what it is, you are forced to "interpret new evidence" and that's
not the way the world works.

What you, and many others try to imply, is that what is the bible is simplistic, and for people without any intellectual standards. The truth is that what is in the bible is complex, and it takes a real intellect (supplanted with godly wisdom) to be able to understand it. The intellectual scholarship is vast because the bible is inexaustible. It functions as a cogent whole, and address all the deep questions that human beings have. It is not simple by any stretch of the imagination.

1) Personal evidence cannot be verified. What things were revealed to
you before you ever read or understood them? How were they revealed,
what was revealed, how did you later understand them / where did you
read them?

I would like to understand your thought process, which is why I ask.

Is it possible that you already had a forgone conclusion when you read
X, and therefore you interpreted X the way you wanted?

God had revealed to me through signs that He is a triune God, and that He has a Messiah, someone whose job it is to save the world. So when I finally read the bible, those signs are what initially confirmed it to be true. I didn't have any foregone conclusions about the bible before I read it. I had no actual idea what Christianity was all about.

What happened? How has your life improved, what did you do before,
what do you do now? How can you tell that it happened supernaturally?
Is there any difference from that to just having a profound change of
heart. If you are talking about addiction, it is possible to fill the
void of that addiction with other things - some people exchange
cigarettes with food, why not religion/faith? Does your faith take up
as much of your time as "the unhealthy things" you did before?

Before I became a Christian I was a theist, and before I was a theist I was an agnostic. When I became a theist my bad behavior didn't change. I was like Enoch, in that I believed that none of the religions were true, or that all of them just had pieces of who God is. I believed in a God that loved you the way you are and didn't particularly enforce any kind of behavior upon you, as long as your heart was in the right place. I would think that God, knowing me intimately, and knowing my good intentions, was very understanding if I did something which was out of line. Of course God is very patient with all of us, but the point is that I had plenty of faith in God at the time, and spent my time thinking about Him and pursuing the truth. The difference is that once I accepted Jesus into my heart as my Lord and Savior, everything changed.

It was only when I became a Christian that my behavior changed, and much of that practically overnight. When you're born again, you are spiritually cleansed and start out with a blank slate. You become like new. I had addictions, depression, anger, pain, sadness, and other issues that left me in short order. Some of those things I never thought I would give up, some of them I never wanted to give up, but I immediately lost the desire for them. It was a change of heart; God gave me a new one. It was supernatural because as I said, I didn't do any work. People spend their entire lives in therapy or counseling and spend tens of thousands of dollars or more to get rid of just some of these problems, and often don't see any results. I lost almost all of my baggage in just a few short months.

3) Not really. It only accounts for a visual interpretation of how men act. The writers of it has observed how people act and guessed at reasons why that is. Some are close to reality, some are way off. Which human behaviors does it predict? How and where does it describe in finite detail how those behaviors are created? I'm looking for actual citations here, because this is complete news to me.

It predicts all kinds of human behaviors by describing the mechanisms which motivate them to act. It shows the fundemental dichotomy of the heart of man. As an example:

James 3:3-10

When we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we can turn the whole animal. Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go. Likewise the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.

All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles and creatures of the sea are being tamed and have been tamed by man, but no man can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison.

With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in God’s likeness. Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers, this should not be. Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring? My brothers, can a fig tree bear olives, or a grapevine bear figs? Neither can a salt spring produce fresh water.

and

Matthew 12:34

O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.

A good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things: and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth evil things.

and

Matthew 15:19-20

But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man.

For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies:

4) I disagree. It describes a point of view. The morality of the God of the bible is hardly any good morality. We have an ingrown moral compass, I can agree on that, it's been naturally selected against because it helped our ancestors to survive and procreate. "His moral law" is atrocious, if the bible is any indicator.

If everyone followed the morality that Jesus taught us, this planet would be as close to a utopia it could possibly get. He taught us to love one another, to forgive as a rule, to do good to even those who hate you, to help everyone in need, and to follow the moral law. Your idea of Gods morality being atrocious is plainly false. The passages that you feel are atrocious have an explanation, its just whether you want to hear them or not. As far as natural selection goes, all it cares about is passing on its genes. That is the only criteria for success. This doesn't explain noble behavior in the least, such as sacrificing your life for someone else. That's a bad way to pass on your genes.

5) Which prophecies have been fulfilled? You don't think Israel chose their currency based on the bible instead? Which captivities have been prophecied down to the year and where in the bible?

http://www.khouse.org/articles/2004/552/


6) This is hardly uncontested. There are parts of the bible that seem to be true, but because some of it is true, does not mean that all of it is. http://www.theskepticalreview.com/tsrmag/982front.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_and_history#Historical_accuracy_of_biblical_stories

It's positive evidence in the bibles favor when it is verified by archaelogical evidence. There are many things in the bible that historians denied were true in the bible, like the hittite civilization, until archaelogy proved the bible correct.

7) Citation needed. Saying that the universe has a beginning is hardly proof of anything. That's the easy way to say it, anyone apart from earlier theories said that, so of course they did it in there too. In actuality the bible claims that God is eternal, which there is no basis for.

These claims are just claims, there is no basis for saying them in the bible. Blood clotting could be found by trial and error back then, ocean currents can to a great extent be measured by fishermen even back then. Scientists who believed in an eternal universe have since changed their mind, when evidence discredited the theory. It's all about being able to back up your claims. the bible just claims.

This guy discovered and mapped the ocean currents, and he did so being inspired by psalm 8, which is the one that mentions the "paths of the seas"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Fontaine_Maury

Abraham didn't learn from trial and error. They were doing circumcisions on the 8th day from the beginning.

You must think something is eternal, unless you believe something came from nothing. So your problem isn't really with eternal things, just an eternal person.

Here is a list of them

http://www.inplainsite.org/html/scientific_facts_in_the_bible.html

8 ) How did you experience the holy spirit?

It's really impossible quite impossible to describe since it effects every level of your being at the same time, but experientially you could say it's like going from 110 to 220v. It's like you lived all your life being covered in filth and suddenly you're washed off and sparkling clean. It's like being remade into something brand new.

>> ^gwiz665

They seem to miss the point that it doesn't matter if god blessed Job more in his latter life, what matters is that a kind and loving god felt the need to prove something to the devil by letting the devil destroy that man's life. Who cares if god was right, it is a jerk thing to do, and not the actions of a god who loves his children.

God wasn't proving anything to Satan, He was acting as a Judge. Satan is like a prosecuting attorney in the court of God. Satan brought Job to trial by laying a false accusation against him, and Job was tested and tried and found innocent.

If that was a human dad who let some people in to destroy his children's lives they would condemn him, it is their dual standards. They let god get away with stuff they would find reprehensible in humans simply because some blokes thousands of years ago picked Jehovah out of a local pantheon and promoted him to the top spot. If they are young Earth creationists, they somehow ignore the part that says the Earth doesn't move and that the heavens move around it.

The problem with this analogy is that you're comparing God to a human being. God isn't like a human dad, he is God. He deals in matters of life and death, matters which extend to every human life. He is the sovereign King and Judge over this world. It is His job to bring judgement, and to decide the course of life. He is the only one who could.

I also see that you're misinterpreting I Chronicles 16:30. It's fairly clear it is saying that nothing is going to move the Earth off its course, not that it doesn't move.

Despite cultures being over 6,000 years old, trees being over 6,000 years old, not to mention stars billions of years away, somehow all that was put in place by God to full the wise and make the believers rely on faith... again a jerk move. It is like the dirty cop who plants evidence against an innocent man, but here it is god so it is okay.

This idea that God plants evidence is a myth, and the people who perpetrate it are the same kind of people who think that Satan rules in hell. No one has a handle on distant starlight; it is a problem with big bang cosmology, check out the "horizon problem". Tree ring dating, much like radiocarbon dating, is predicated on unprovable assumptions, such as a constant rate of growth. The specific trees you are talking about have been proven to grow multiple rings per year in drought conditions and in other circumstances. You say that there are cultures that go beyond 6000 years but its funny that written history only begins around 4000 years ago.

It is also funny that written history begins with advanced civilizations that suddenly spring into existence out of nowhere. You would think if we had been around for 100k years after evolving, there would be 100k years of history, cities, civilizations, etc..but it isn't there. It is much like the cambrian explosion where every major animal body type suddenly sprang into existence into the fossil record. All the major families, orders, classes, and phyla can all be found there, which turns darwinian theory on its head. Which is why they came up with "punctuated equilibrium", which is theory that explains that the reason there is no evidence for transitional forms in the fossil record is because reptiles laid eggs that would sometimes hatch birds. This is also known as the hopeful monster theory.

They ignore the documented evidence of copy errors made in the Bible while it was a written piece, let alone the errors that would have cropped up while it was a verbal tradition. Who cares if the story of the woman at the well doesn't appear in any copies of John, or the commentaries on it, for hundreds of years after the earliest copies of the book, it is there now, which means god wanted it there.

There is greater manuscript witness for the New Testament than any other historical document. The accuracy and integrity of the copies is proven, with over 24000 manuscripts for the NT alone. We can see from the earliest to the latest there is very little discrepency. The same is proven for the OT, when the dead sea scrolls were found. There was virtually no difference in copies with over thousand years between them. In regards to the woman at the well, I have failed to find any controversy about it.

And the hundreds of other biblical texts that were existed when the books of the bible were picked were not discarded for the social/political reasons they appear to have been ignored, but because the books that are there now are the only ones god wanted, and those guys were divinely led to pick just those ones... of course the Catholics or the Protestants have it wrong since their versions don't match. Still, it many cases, save for the King James only crowd, it is okay to use newly found, more reliable texts in modern translations, but still ignore other texts found at the same time.

There isn't any conspiracy. The texts you are referring to were either written by pagans, the gnostics, or were always known to be heretical. Feel free to bring up any examples and I will show you works that have been thoroughly discredited from the outset.

I look at shame during my blind faith period. I would point out all the typical talking points, and get angry at those who challenged what I perceived as the truth. I was never a young earth creationist, but would still point out the stupid things even old earth creationists like pointing out, not caring that those points have been disproved over and over again. I went from Republican to Libertarian and would get mad at the lazy out of work people on welfare and the poor for believing the lies of the liberals and the Democrats, thinking if only they would educate themselves on the truth, they would see the Republicans and Libertarians were their best hope.

It sounds like you were raised in the faith and only believed because of what other people told you. Then, when your faith was challenged by the unbelieving secular world, you fell away because you had no foundation.

Then I did something, I opened my mind. I started watching the sources of information. They said in church and on right wing media that the Constitution doesn't say "separation of church and state" and that comes from a letter by Thomas Jefferson, true enough, but then they said that if you actually read that letter, you'll see that he was talking about keeping the government out of church affairs not the other way around. And I repeated that for years. Then, during my awakening, I actually read the letter in full context, I read the original drafts, and I realized they lied. He clearly was talking about keeping the church out of government. I also read the bible critically for the first time, not just accepting the traditional meaning. I saw Jesus as a man who hung out with the sinners, and cared about the poor and sick, and keeping what belonged to god just to god and what belonged to the government with the government.

Even the most unkind and biased analysis of the founders intentions will be forced to conclude that they intended to found this nation on biblical principles. Do you think our freedoms being based on unalienable rights granted by our Creator are just mere words? Or are they the foundation?

this nation was founded not by religionists, but by christians, not on religion, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ

Patrick Henry

You are correct about one thing. The church is completely apostate, and has strayed far from the teachings of our Lord. You cannot frame Jesus as a mere man, however. He claimed to be God, the judge of the living and the dead, and the Savior of this world.

All things 100% opposite of what the church, the Republicans and Libertarians seemed to be promoting. I noticed how the bible in Genesis call god...well, god, and then in Psalms, the exact same word is suddenly translated as Angels, because it talks about how god lifted us up to be level with him, and that won't do, we are below god and with the angels... and more and more I noticed that while we are not Jesus, we are equal heirs, and equal children, which doesn't take away any of the majesty, but again pointed to deception on the part of the church leadership. I then noticed other biblical contradictions, and started studying the origins of Christianity and how similar it was to much older religions.

Perhaps you missed these passages?:

Romans 8:17

And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.

Galatians 4:7 So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and since you are a son, God has made you also an heir.

No, we are not Jesus, but we are co-heirs and sons. Again, there isn't any conspiracy. As far as the translation of Elohim, this has led to many errors. Check out http://www.gci.org/God/Elohim2

How the Israelites, while in captivity in Babylon, would have known about the Babylonian god of the harvest who sacrificed himself and resurrected... and boy this seems to be a reoccurring theme among ancient pre-Christian religions, a god, sometimes mono-theistic, sacrificing himself for mankind...

Sounds like you've seen Zeitgeist, which is filled with actual bald faced, blatant lies. For example, it makes a connection between Jesus and the various sun gods by drawing a parallel between the word "son" and "sun". The problem with this connection is that they are only similiar words in the English langauge, and not in the langauges of the time. The connection between Jesus and the so-called dying and rising gods in paganism has been thoroughly debunked. Watch:



I went to a pagan service with an open mind and had the same deep, spiritual, emotional connection that I had at the most charismatic of Christian churches... and things started clicking, this whole thing... is fake.

It's no wonder that you had the same spiritual experience in charismatic churches as you did at pagan rituals. That's because they're fueled by the same spirit, which is *not* from God:



I read more, became more educated, and realized the deep and purposeful misleading of the faithful, and my switch became complete. Now I get angry at the Republicans and Libertarians and the religious leaders who keep their flocks in ignorance, while making them think they are free thinking people by controlling the information and encouraging a wrong view of the information that is there..

Even if by some miracle I came to have faith in god again, I could never go back to church again. The lies and nonacceptance of potent truth is just too much. They don't even believe what Jesus himself taught, which was love and compassion, the modern day church is the Pharisees that he campaigned against

Friend, what you never realized is how true this verse is:

Revelation 12:9

And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.

Just as 2+2 has an innumerable number of wrong answers, there are uncountable lies and deceptions, half-truths and myths about Jesus Christ. They are in the church and they are outside the church. All you've done is just go to the other extreme but you still have no idea who Jesus really is.

What you've missed is that to know Jesus is God is to know Him personally. It isn't merely believe what the bible says, it is to invite Him into your heart, to mold you, to change you, and to accept His Lordship over your entire life.

You're right about one thing. To be restored to faith in God would be a miracle, because faith is a gift from God. If you want to know the truth, then ask Him. Pray to Jesus, invite Him into your life, and ask Him to show what the truth really is. Once you know He is everything that He claimed to be, the rest will sort itself out.

>> ^RFlagg:believe what Jesus himself taught, which was love and compassion, the modern day church is the Pharisees that he campaigned against.
</preaching to the choir time

Well, at least you're honest.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:
I'm very upset that I chose profit and performance-rewards when it came to my own employment path. I didn't choose to be a social worker, because everyone knows that's a shit job with shit pay. But now that all my free market bullshit is blowing up in my face, because I'm at the bottom of the pyramid that I bought into, I'm going to do the most pathetic cowardly thing that I can:

I'm going to advocate that anyone who chose to help their fellow man, and take the slow, plodding, mediocre route to success be publicly exposed for their shameful weakness. Then my friends and I are going to steal our future from them instead of working for it ourselves like we always said we were going to do. Here's the thing, I could have joined the public sector and sacrificed some pay for more security. But those people all smelled, and worked in dingy offices with people who had real problems. How was I supposed to know they were making the wise decision!?!?

Well not anymore. Even though social programs fix more problems than they cause, it's time for them to go. Sure, I could work against the culture that pays their elite 500 times more than the average person makes, but that would actually take innovation and intelligence. Besides, I'm willing to overlook those people, because they share my greedy, corporate, business-reptile mentality.

No, it's the people with master's degrees who make thirty-thousand dollars a year that I'm after. Anyone who's willing to accept punishment like that has already made themselves easy prey. And how! All we have to do is present enough "evidence" accumulated by bogus, business advocacy groups to convince the rest of the tired and desperate people out there that there's a really really easy solution to their problems that involves no hard work whatsoever! We just cut all the funding to anything that involves helping people besides ourselves and all of our problems will simply go away! Well... except for the hippies.

Leucism is a desirable trait that many reptile breeders strive to create through selective breeding. Never heard of a leucistic alligator before though.

I understand why this is confusing as hell;

http://science.kennesaw.edu/~jdirnber/InvertZoo/LecIntro/TreeTime.jpg

... here is a relatively straight-forward 'evolutionary tree' cartoon,... the biggest thing to note is the Time axis... you have to trace the lines to see where species diverge and then look around to see if that line split happens before other line splits with respect to the Time direction.

Even in this simple diagram, you have to look at it for a minute to realize that reptiles, birds and most of the dinosaurs we think of split off from what became mammals, then reptiles split off from that group, then some dinos split off, then birds... So this is to illustrate that the split between what became mammals is farther back in time than the split separating birds and most dinos, and birds and reptiles. So this illustration really functions like a family tree, showing relationships with time and allow you to pick out that birds are closely related to dinosaurs, and that we have to go pretty far back to see where animals diverged into what became mammals and what became reptile/bird/dinosaurs.

If you're interested you should look for bigger ones trees,... when you start including plants, bacteria, archaebacteria, etc.... stuff gets pretty wild because you're reaching the edge of the science... and the complex smaller trees that just cover one group of critters can be really interesting to see... so much variety.

Oh, last note for transparency; they generally make these 'family trees' by researching comparative anatomy and tons of fossils, but have been using DNA to produce new and correct old 'phylogenetic trees' for 20 or 30 years now.

(image from this page, which focuses on terminology, but has good pictures: http://science.kennesaw.edu/~jdirnber/Bio2108/Lecture/LecPhylogeny/LecPhylogeny.html )


>> ^Jinx:

>> ^heathen:
>> ^Jinx:
Same logic: What are we then?

Mammals - which birds aren't and dinosaurs weren't.

Yes ok, but Mammals are as much Reptile as Bird are Dinosaur.

Perhaps I can be more clear. Christ existing is obviously a necessary condition for Christianity to be true - but it's not sufficient. I suppose some people might say "Oh, Christ never existed so Christianity isn't true", but I don't think anyone's doing that here - and that's why I thought it was an odd thing to bring up. I think most non-Christian people here would say something more like "Jesus probably existed, and probably said more or less the same stuff that's in the Bible - but he didn't do miracles, isn't the Son of God, and didn't come back from the dead".

The belief that Jesus is a myth seems to be more prevelent, actually, and many of the people I have debated here have claimed this. I think only a very unthoughtful and intellectually incurious person could actually believe it, as you'd be hard pressed to even find a secular historian who does. He is by far the most influential person in history, which continues to this day. That in itself speaks to His claims. Our great land was founded on judeo-christian values, and the freedom that we enjoy today was predcated upon those values of personal liberty.. Even the pursuit of science was founded upon Christian understaniding; It was thought we could determine the operation of the cosmos because the Universe is orderly and has regularity due to Gods oversight. Yet, even with all this some people close their eyes to the simple truth that Jesus Christ even existed. Yet, these are the same people who champion their own rationality as being superior.

This martyr argument is another one you come back to, but surely with any reflection you understand why it isn't convincing. Christianity doesn't have a monopoly on martyrs - there's been plenty of, for example, Muslims who've chosen to die for their beliefs in a great variety of circumstances, sometimes very pro-active ones. But even if Christianity has the most (or most spectacular martyrs), certainly there are many people who've died for all sorts of causes: religious, secular, or personal.

While it certainly says Christianity is a powerful idea that so many have died for it, I don't think an idea has to be true to prompt this level of conviction.

I think the martyr argument is very powerful when you consider the original disciples. They were the ones who truly knew if Jesus was in fact risen. If Jesus was not raised from the dead, there isn't any plausible explanation as to why they would all willingly die for something they knew to be a lie, when all they had to do was recant their testimony. It is also powerful for the early church because it was formed in the times of the living witnesses of Christ, and it was under very heavy persecuation. It was to a persons great disadvantage to follow Christ, socially, economically, and was often putting your life on the line. Being a Christian then was like being a Christian in Iran today. There is no good reason why the church should have ever survived under those conditions, but it did more than; it thrived and expanded expodentially. Yes, people martyr themselves today..most notably members of Islam. Islam isn't under persecution though..people are indoctrinated from birth and told if they even think one bad thought about Allah they will face eternal torment. There is no atonement in Islam, so if you screw up once you're done for. Under these conditions, and considering that Islam advocates exterminating all other religions and people, it isn't surprising it creates conditions in which people willingly martyr themselves. These situations however are night and day in regards to motivation.

First off, I should say that I appreciate the effort you're putting into legitimate debate here. I do. While I disagree with your recent points, I also accept them as honest reasoning and I think we're discussing things on a better level than we have in the past. So thanks, and I'll try to rein in my own douchebag forum persona.

Anyways, I'll (hopefully) explain what I was trying to get at better. It is my belief that religions often effectively "poison the well" for detractors by saying that the detractors are doing so for alternative motives, or that those detractors cannot understand the truth because of some flaw. To illustrate this, I was saying that Scientologists are quick to call out detractors (who are, to be fair, usually former members with a grievance) for their character flaws or crimes. Facetiously (because I don't actually know Scientologist beliefs), I was suggesting that they might also blame detractors' disagreements on confusing Thetans.

I was attempting to illustrate how awkward this attack is to refute for the detractor. The detractor certainly does have "crimes" (because, as I think we all agree, people all do things they aren't proud of). And he certainly can't be convincing if he says he has no Thetans. How can he make the case for that, when he doesn't even believe in Thetans anymore, and is definitely no longer being cleared of them?
From a perspective of a non-believer, a Christian detractor is in a similar position. Many (or even most) will have personal grievances that make their arguments sound suspect. And all will have sins. Many will have sins associated with their departure. Given that it's common Christian thought that sin clouds thought (or bars revelation or conscience or similar), we're left with a tidy way to undermine almost all detractors.

The most common objection I hear from someone is not that they haven't done evil, or that they aren't guilty of crimes against God. It's not even that they would disagree that they deserve to be punished. It's that they just defacto reject Gods authority over them because they don't want to stop living the way they do. In a very real way, they reject God over their preference to sin as they wish. This is exactly what the bible means in John 3:19-21 when it says:

This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil

Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.

But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.

Even Christopher Hitchens outright admits it. Skip to 6:26 for his confession.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AX1CswHCkA

A person who is railing against Christianity due to personal grievances is not only not rational, but is completely disingenuous. Such a person willfully avoids the truth, because their objection isn't based on rational grounds, but emotional ones. I have yet to meet a single person who has a legitimate gripe against Christianity as it is described in the bible. It is all due to the failings of men who didn't live up to Gods word. Yet, to the world you're a Christian if you say you are, and every evil thing man has done in the name of Christianity is ascribed to it, ignoring the fact Christ specifically taught against it.

I understand your argument..but you're basically saying it's unfair because the bible accurately describes the condition of man. That it's easy for a Christian to pigeonhole unbelievers because man is in fact habitually evil and hypocritical as the bible describes.. Man has a sin problem, but how is it any different when one might reference a scientific worldview. To blame the wickedness of human beings on animal instincts, or the "reptile brain" (serpent consciousness), or chemical reactions. Survival of the fittest. Science even says that people who believe in God have it in their DNA to do so, and even associate it to a certain area of the brain. There is no real empirical evidence for any of this, so how is it much different than saying man is corrupted by sin? It really isn't. They are competing worldviews. Science says it's a physical issue, but the bible says it is spiritual. Only one can be right.

So my overall point is an analogy. Both the Scientologist and the Christian believer have similar reasons to doubt the detractor. However, I think we'd both agree that the Scientologist detractor is right despite those reasons. So while I understand that you still would not accept the Christian detractor, my point would be that we can't completely refute him on these grounds because he could (in principle) be the same as the Scientologist detractor. The differences between the Christian and the Scientologist detractor (with regards to these ideas) are generally only differences from the perspective of someone who already believes Christianity and not Scientology (and certainly I think we'd agree that believing Christianity is more rational than believing Scientology - I'm just using it as a convenient analogy).

My point was that instead of looking at him (the detractor) in terms of his grievances, or in terms of factors (like sin or Thetans) that could cloud his judgement - it's safer to just consider his arguments, which will stand or fall on their own qualities regardless of the speaker.

Yes, I do understand your analogy. Yes, a scientologist might reject a detractor because they think he has thetans, but we know those are made up. There is a similarity in that basic approach, but since Scientology is easily disproven, there aren't any arguments to consider. In that case, people are rejecting his truth because its clearly not true, not because it isn't possible that people reject truth because they are corrupted by evil. It's still a strawman any way you look at it. The point here is, what is the best explanation for reality and the human condition. If it is true that everyone sins, and that people are hypocrites, then that is something you as an unbeliever have to come to terms with. If I can accurately portray the human condition better than you can, and give reasonable explanations for human behavior according to biblical truth, those are obviously points in favor of the bible and not some cheap tact. It's perfectly legimate to point out that the objective stance people claim to take (and the claim they lay to reason itself) is mostly just smoke and mirrors for their personal prejudices and very real rebellion against Gods authority.

>> ^heathen:

>> ^Jinx:
Same logic: What are we then?

Mammals - which birds aren't and dinosaurs weren't.

Yes ok, but Mammals are as much Reptile as Bird are Dinosaur.

This is so unfair. Depraved, cock-sucking, business-reptiles shouldn't have to take the blame just because they're good at fucking humanity out of the return for their labor.

Great video. I think I'll play this in class next Spring. Thanks Hybrid!

>> ^MaxWilder:

I'm not surprised there's no such thing as a jellyfish, because there's no such thing as a fish!


That's because "fish" is polyphyletic - not a genetically distinct group. You could say the same thing about prokaryotes and reptiles.

I read Jerry Coynes refutation so you don't have to..

"The movie repeatedly hammers home the message that the sudden appearance of all “animal forms” at the Cambrian boundary contradicts evolution’s central tenet that things evolve gradually from ancestors who were different. No matter that trace fossils and some remains of animals appear before the Burgess Shale fauna, so that that fauna didn’t represent the first animal life on Earth, and no matter that the “Cambrian explosion” was not instantaneous, but lasted between 5 and 20 million years. No, the film states that the animals arose instantaneously and implies (but does not state) that this reflects God’s creation.

One, that's an outright lie. The film clearly states that best estimations are at least 5 millions years. It also states it could have happened much quicker, but it never asserts it happened instantaneously.

That there might be trace fossils and some remains of animals completely misses the point. According to darwins theory, the pre cambian should be loaded with these transitional forms leading up to the cambrian explosion. None have been found.

The movie not only claims that there were no transitional forms representing the ancestors of the Cambrian fauna, but implies that there are no transitional forms in general. That is, of course, a lie. We have transitional forms between fish and amphibians, amphibians and reptiles, reptiles and mammals, dinosaurs and birds, land mammals to whales and seals, and so on. If sudden appearance reflects the actions of a Designer, then how do IDers explain these transitional forms? Did they — God help us — evolve?

Here is a list of the best transitional forms science has to offer:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_fossils

Here is the disclaimer:

Ideally, this list would only recursively include 'true' transitionals, fossils representing ancestral specie from which later groups evolved, but most, if not all, of the fossils shown here represent extinct side branches, more or less closely related to the true ancestor

IE, no true transitionals have been found. IE, nothing that shows one kind of thing changing into another kind.

The "refutation" also rants about various people the author doesn't like, and speculates on their motivations. The film stands on its own as honest criticism on darwins theory. It's amusing a hardcore antitheist immediately leaps in to try to prevent people from even watching it..however, I'll give people more credit than that and say it's an interesting view no matter what side of the issue you fall on. The cambrian explosion is a mystery and cannot be explained away by darwinian theory no matter how loudly people shout and stomp their feet.