*promote

Title should be: Elmo accidentally startles Dog; can't stop laughing
+Channel: Catsndogs, kids

The Mighty Siftbot's rage is cold and empty.

I'm with the majority of the LiveLeak comments, looks fake to me. I'm no scientist but wouldn't the flash be much brighter for a lightning strike that close? And wouldn't all that energy and the resulting thunder have at least some noticeable effect on the camera, the car, the leaves, his shoes? He just drops to the ground like one of those startled goats.

Wow you're certainly going to have to ask forgiveness for that.

Let that little light shine.
>> ^shinyblurry:

Did you just tell me not to be a dick? hehe. Look, it's clear that your views aren't very sophisticated, and that you know virtually nothing about theology, philosophy, and are even startling ignorant about what you personally believe..but not everyone is that ignorant and realizes that these questions are a little bit deeper than the puddle you're playing in. mmkay?

Did *you* just tell *me* not to be a dick? hehe. Look, it's clear that your views aren't very sophisticated, and that you know virtually nothing about theology, philosophy, and are even startling ignorant about what you personally believe..but not everyone is that ignorant and realizes that these questions are a little bit deeper than the puddle you're playing in. mmkay?

>> ^KnivesOut:
Shiny, don't be a dick. Spell people's user-names correctly. It doesn't help your position in any way, and makes you look like more of a petulant child.
On topic, you're just making shit up. There's no point arguing with you the specific capabilities of your imaginary friend. Is he everything, or just what he wants to be? Is he purple? Is he an old man with a great bushy beard?
Seriously, don't care.
>> ^shinyblurry:
That's just depressingly pedantic, rryjkyjdhu..
Omniscience is the capacity to know everything. Deliberately limiting Himself does not reduce that capacity. God is not the combination of every possible state of being. God is only good and not evil, for instance. God is not a combination of the two, he is just wholly good. Perfection is the overriding attribute here. Because it is more perfect to be wholly good instead of good and evil, He is just wholly good. Just as it is more perfect for God to limit Himself to give us free will than to not limit Himself and have puppets.

>> ^10677:

Can someone please explain Jazz to me? So much of it just sounds random and dissonant to me - like that entire stretch from 1:00 to 1:17 or 1:53 to approx 2:50. It just sounds so gross. I'm almost physically repulsed by the ugly sounds coming from that sax, and it is a startling constrast with the beautiful intro of this song. What is the merit and reasoning behind Jazz?


It's improvisation. Sometimes you have to really be in the musicians head, so to speak, to get it. Because it mostly depends on how they feel at that time. Listen to the one in Norsueleffanti's link, that one is a little more melodic.

>> ^JiggaJonson:
>> ^shinyblurry:
The Universe had an absolute beginning, including all matter energy time and space.

@<A rel="nofollow" class=profilelink title="member since January 21st, 2011" href="http://videosift.com/member/shinyblurry">shinyblurry
As loathe as I am to continue debating with you I will quipple with you on one point that I think you are likely wrong on. The universe is likely infinite, that is to say it has no end, and thus, no beginning either. If it had no beginning, then it never was created. Therefore, since it never was created and has always existed, there is no creator to be had, and thus, no god.
Want to prove me wrong? Find evidence that the universe is finite (you cant) or you can continue to quote a 2000 year old book. You could also try to prove that infinity doesn't exist I suppose (think the highest number and the lowest number OH SNAP THERE IS NO LOWEST/HIGHEST NUMBER BC INFINITY EXISTS [albeit as a value since it would be impossible to measure])


lol..wow..yes you should stop trying to debate with me, I agree..

From your site:

How Old is the Universe?
Until recently, astronomers estimated that the Big Bang occurred between 12 and 14 billion years ago. To put this in perspective, the Solar System is thought to be 4.5 billion years old and humans have existed as a genus for only a few million years. Astronomers estimate the age of the universe in two ways: 1) by looking for the oldest stars; and 2) by measuring the rate of expansion of the universe and extrapolating back to the Big Bang; just as crime detectives can trace the origin of a bullet from the holes in a wall.

So basically you just proved yourself wrong. You see the big bang theory is pretty much universally accepted in modern cosmology. Almost everyone agrees the Universe has a beginning..how could you not know that? This shows your startling amount of ignorance..you just did a little search and clicked on the first thing that seemed to agree with you, and didn't even bother to read it! If you had you would have seen that it actually disagreed you. hahahahaha

Grew up in the mountains of New Jersey, and this lady gets it half-right. Yeah, the bears are usually more scared of you than you might think... but notice this video is taped in autumn. That bear would have reacted a lot differently in the spring, when it wakes up from hibernation and is literally starving. Now imagine this woman trying to get between a starving bear and its acorns....

Bears get shot a lot in NJ (I'm referring here to out of season), but usually it is in the spring. Some are so hungry they will eat just about anything including your pets who happen to be tied up outside. One broke into our neighbor's house while the guy was cooking dinner to get at the steak that was being grilled. The thing literally knocked down the back door to get in. Once it was inside it ransacked the place. Eventually the cops came and had to kill it.

Another situation you want to watch out for is cubs... if there are cubs around and you startle the mama bear, it's a really bad situation. She's not going to bluff charge--she's going to maul you until you are either dead or have the sense enough to stop moving and play dead so that she thinks you're not a threat anymore.

Yeah, it sucks that New Jersey is rapidly depleting its woodlands and the bears have no place to go. Yeah, it sucks that some jerks shoot the bears just because they are a "nuisance" and tip over the garbage cans occasionally. I get the point this lady is trying to make with this video, but she's just advocating reckless behavior that in the wrong circumstances is likely to get someone seriously injured or killed.

Don't know, but there should be something in options that lets you choose which keys move your character (or at least tell you which ones do).

Generally it's W,A,S,D.



In reply to this comment by Deano:
>> ^Psychologic:

>> ^solecist:
next time play amnesia: the dark descent, you fucking pussy.

I thoroughly enjoyed that game... played it with headphones and no lights on (as intended).
The atmosphere was wonderfully effective, and not just in a "suddenly startled" way. Unfortunately it lost some of that atmosphere towards the end in favor of depicting torture, but it was worth playing either way.


I downloaded the trial for that but couldn't actually move my character. I tried all the keys. What was I doing wrong? (I'm not much of a PC gamer)

>> ^Psychologic:

>> ^solecist:
next time play amnesia: the dark descent, you fucking pussy.

I thoroughly enjoyed that game... played it with headphones and no lights on (as intended).
The atmosphere was wonderfully effective, and not just in a "suddenly startled" way. Unfortunately it lost some of that atmosphere towards the end in favor of depicting torture, but it was worth playing either way.


I downloaded the trial for that but couldn't actually move my character. I tried all the keys. What was I doing wrong? (I'm not much of a PC gamer)

>> ^solecist:

next time play amnesia: the dark descent, you fucking pussy.


I thoroughly enjoyed that game... played it with headphones and no lights on (as intended).

The atmosphere was wonderfully effective, and not just in a "suddenly startled" way. Unfortunately it lost some of that atmosphere towards the end in favor of depicting torture, but it was worth playing either way.

>> ^shinyblurry:

Since you asked, I'll tell you why I believe in God. Up until 8 years ago I was agnostic. I was raised agnostic, without any religion. We celebrated Christmas and Easter, but that was about it. I wasn't raised to like or dislike religion, I was simply left free to decide what I believed.
At the time I became a theist, I didn't believe in a spiritual reality, or any God I had ever heard of, because like most of the people here I saw no evidence for it at all. I actually used to go into christian chat rooms and debate christians on what I saw to be inconsistances in the bible. A lot of what people have said in this thread are thoughts that I once had and arguments I used to use myself.
Then one day it all changed. I guess you could say my third eye was opened. I had something akin to a kundalini awakening, spontaneously out of nowhere. When it was over, I could suddenly perceive the spiritual reality. I didn't quite know what I was looking at, at the time..didn't truly understand what had happened to me (though through intuition i understood the great potential of it). It was only after researching it online and finding out about the chakras did I start to understand.
It's an amazing, truly truly amazing thing to find out everything you know is wrong. It is really utterly mind blowing. This however, was the conclusion I was forced to immediately reach however, because the evidence for it was right in front of my face. Everything that I had known up until the point I could perceive the spiritual was missing so many essential elements that I may as well have been just born.
I started to receive signs..little miracles, I would call them..like stepping in front of a vast panarama of nature and suddenly seeing it at an angle impossible to human sight, where everything is in focus at the same time, that produced such startling beauty it filled me to overflowing with estatic joy. I started to perceive there was a higher beauty, a higher love that had always been there but I had somehow missed it. I started to get the point, that there was something more. That there was a God.
When I conceded it was possible, to myself, it was then that I started to hear from Him directly. He let me know a couple of things, and proved to me that I wasn't just imagining Him. He showed me that He had been there my entire life, teaching me and guiding me as a child on, only I had been totally unaware of it. He showed me how we "shared space", and that not only could He read my mind, but in some essential way that He was what my mind is. That He is mind itself. He showed me how my thought process was more of a cooperative than a solitary thing.
Now before you say I just jumped at all of this because everyone wants to imagine a loving God, etc etc..untrue in my case. When I first found out He was definitely real, i was scared shitless. Up until that point, my thoughts about God were all negative. I figured if He did exist He probably hated me. You see, that is what I had gleaned growing up in a Christian society without actually knowing anything about it.
At this point I became a theist. I thought of God as a He because He seemed masculine rather than feminine, and also I thought of Him as the Creator. I didn't know anything about the bible, or the Holy Trinity, or what a messiah was, or any of that. I thought the God I knew must not be generally known because I had never seen anything out there that pointed to a loving God.
For the next 6 yeears I was on a spiritual journey. I studied all the various belief systems, spiritual or otherwise, all the religious history..east and west, north and south. I studied philosophy and esoteric wisdom, gurus and prophets. The one I really hadn't studied though, was Christianity. The reason being I didn't believe Jesus actually ever existed so I dismissed it out of hand.
Before I knew anything about Christianity, God taught me three important things about who He is. One, He taught me His nature is triune, that God is three. I didn't understand what that meant precisely, I just knew that was His nature. He also taught me that there was a Messiah. He taught me that there was someone whose job it was to save the world. The third thing and most important thing He taught me was about His love. That He loved everyone, and that He secretly took care of them whether they believed in Him or not. He showed me His perfect heart.
What led me to the bible was this: I asked Him who the Messiah was and He told me to look in a mirror. At the time I had been away from civilization for a few months and my beard had grown out for the first time in my life. I hadn't seen a mirror since I was clean shaven. I sought one out and when I saw my reflection I couldn't believe my eyes. I looked exactly like Jesus Christ. I mean to a T.
It was then I was forced to accept the possibility that Jesus was real. To be honest, I really didn't want to. I felt like I had a really special relationship with the Father and that Jesus could only get in the way of that. I didn't even feel like I could pay Him any real respect, because I knew the Father was greater than He was. But, I couldn't ignore what He was showing me, so I started to read the bible. To my surprise, I found out it was about the God I already knew.
Everything I read in the bible matched what I already knew about God . The Holy Trinity matched His triune nature. That there was a Messiah and Jesus was it. And most of all His love, His great and majestic love, for all people, was perfectly laid out in ways I had never before comprehended. The bible was the only information on Earth that accurately described what I already knew about God. That is how I knew it was true from the outset.
So that's when I became a Christian. I couldn't ignore the evidence. My journey to Christianity was based on rationality and logic, believe it or not, albiet with miracles and spirituality mixed in. Even the miracles themselves were logical, as God showed me how He worked from a meta-perspective, and that time and space didn't restrict Him at all. So there you have it..an interesting testimony to be sure.
I am unusual in that I didn't come to God on my own. God chose me, I didn't choose Him. I might never have come to God if He hadn't. I found out later that this means I was elected..in that, before God made the world He had already planned to create me to do His will. After He woke me up it never really took much faith to believe in God because He demonstrated to me His amazing power and ASTONISHING intellect in ways that were impossible to refute. Whatever brick wall I would put up, He would smash it down into oblivion. He favored me because I stayed hungry. I knew the truth was knowable, and I gunned for it 200 percent. I would have died for it.
So I empathize with the people here. Some of you might actually be elected too, it just is not your time to know. Some are probably angry/scared/rebelliious, while still others are intellectually incurious and swayed by hyperbole. I'm pretty sure not many people here have actually read the bible. I hadn't either..I was simply arrogant at the time.
So what I would say to people here is..there is far more going on than seems apparent..if you don't believe at least that there is a spiritual reality, you're practically rubbing two sticks together. God definitely exists and will prove it to you if you humble yourself, come to Him in sincerity, with your total heart and pray. Admit you're a sinner, and ask Him to be your Lord and Savior. Anyone can know God is real. I wish I had read it earlier..would have saved me a hardship. Save yourself the trouble and find out the truth for yourself, that God is real He loves you. God bless..


Wow, thanks for that detailed reply. Forgive me, but I've broken it down to basics here. Can you confirm that I've understood you correctly?:

OK, so in short:

- You were an atheist from birth.

- You had a dramatic and sudden spiritual awakening and began to perceive an extra spiritual dimension in the material world around you.

- You began to have visions that were akin to out of body experiences or remote viewing, but with an extra dimension of spiritual perception. You interpreted these experiences as little miracles, and that they were provided by a higher being: a god.

- At this point god spoke you directly and explicitly, and proved to you that you were not imagining him. He explained that he permeated *everything*, including your being, and that in many respects he *was* you.

- Over the next 6 years you studied, and were guided and tutored directly by god who explained to you more specifically about his nature, and what the bible was all about.

Or to break this down even further!:

You believe there is a god because, after a sudden spiritual awakening he spoke to you directly and proved to you that he exists.

Have I got the basics correct here? Just the very basics?

Since you asked, I'll tell you why I believe in God. Up until 8 years ago I was agnostic. I was raised agnostic, without any religion. We celebrated Christmas and Easter, but that was about it. I wasn't raised to like or dislike religion, I was simply left free to decide what I believed.

At the time I became a theist, I didn't believe in a spiritual reality, or any God I had ever heard of, because like most of the people here I saw no evidence for it at all. I actually used to go into christian chat rooms and debate christians on what I saw to be inconsistances in the bible. A lot of what people have said in this thread are thoughts that I once had and arguments I used to use myself.

Then one day it all changed. I guess you could say my third eye was opened. I had something akin to a kundalini awakening, spontaneously out of nowhere. When it was over, I could suddenly perceive the spiritual reality. I didn't quite know what I was looking at, at the time..didn't truly understand what had happened to me (though through intuition i understood the great potential of it). It was only after researching it online and finding out about the chakras did I start to understand.

It's an amazing, truly truly amazing thing to find out everything you know is wrong. It is really utterly mind blowing. This however, was the conclusion I was forced to immediately reach however, because the evidence for it was right in front of my face. Everything that I had known up until the point I could perceive the spiritual was missing so many essential elements that I may as well have been just born.

I started to receive signs..little miracles, I would call them..like stepping in front of a vast panarama of nature and suddenly seeing it at an angle impossible to human sight, where everything is in focus at the same time, that produced such startling beauty it filled me to overflowing with estatic joy. I started to perceive there was a higher beauty, a higher love that had always been there but I had somehow missed it. I started to get the point, that there was something more. That there was a God.

When I conceded it was possible, to myself, it was then that I started to hear from Him directly. He let me know a couple of things, and proved to me that I wasn't just imagining Him. He showed me that He had been there my entire life, teaching me and guiding me as a child on, only I had been totally unaware of it. He showed me how we "shared space", and that not only could He read my mind, but in some essential way that He was what my mind is. That He is mind itself. He showed me how my thought process was more of a cooperative than a solitary thing.

Now before you say I just jumped at all of this because everyone wants to imagine a loving God, etc etc..untrue in my case. When I first found out He was definitely real, i was scared shitless. Up until that point, my thoughts about God were all negative. I figured if He did exist He probably hated me. You see, that is what I had gleaned growing up in a Christian society without actually knowing anything about it.

At this point I became a theist. I thought of God as a He because He seemed masculine rather than feminine, and also I thought of Him as the Creator. I didn't know anything about the bible, or the Holy Trinity, or what a messiah was, or any of that. I thought the God I knew must not be generally known because I had never seen anything out there that pointed to a loving God.

For the next 6 yeears I was on a spiritual journey. I studied all the various belief systems, spiritual or otherwise, all the religious history..east and west, north and south. I studied philosophy and esoteric wisdom, gurus and prophets. The one I really hadn't studied though, was Christianity. The reason being I didn't believe Jesus actually ever existed so I dismissed it out of hand.

Before I knew anything about Christianity, God taught me three important things about who He is. One, He taught me His nature is triune, that God is three. I didn't understand what that meant precisely, I just knew that was His nature. He also taught me that there was a Messiah. He taught me that there was someone whose job it was to save the world. The third thing and most important thing He taught me was about His love. That He loved everyone, and that He secretly took care of them whether they believed in Him or not. He showed me His perfect heart.

What led me to the bible was this: I asked Him who the Messiah was and He told me to look in a mirror. At the time I had been away from civilization for a few months and my beard had grown out for the first time in my life. I hadn't seen a mirror since I was clean shaven. I sought one out and when I saw my reflection I couldn't believe my eyes. I looked *exactly* like Jesus Christ. I mean to a T.

It was then I was forced to accept the possibility that Jesus was real. To be honest, I really didn't want to. I felt like I had a really special relationship with the Father and that Jesus could only get in the way of that. I didn't even feel like I could pay Him any real respect, because I knew the Father was greater than He was. But, I couldn't ignore what He was showing me, so I started to read the bible. To my surprise, I found out it was about the God I already knew.

Everything I read in the bible matched what I already knew about God . The Holy Trinity matched His triune nature. That there was a Messiah and Jesus was it. And most of all His love, His great and majestic love, for all people, was perfectly laid out in ways I had never before comprehended. The bible was the only information on Earth that accurately described what I already knew about God. That is how I knew it was true from the outset.

So that's when I became a Christian. I couldn't ignore the evidence. My journey to Christianity was based on rationality and logic, believe it or not, albiet with miracles and spirituality mixed in. Even the miracles themselves were logical, as God showed me how He worked from a meta-perspective, and that time and space didn't restrict Him at all. So there you have it..an interesting testimony to be sure.

I am unusual in that I didn't come to God on my own. God chose me, I didn't choose Him. I might never have come to God if He hadn't. I found out later that this means I was elected..in that, before God made the world He had already planned to create me to do His will. After He woke me up it never really took much faith to believe in God because He demonstrated to me His amazing power and ASTONISHING intellect in ways that were impossible to refute. Whatever brick wall I would put up, He would smash it down into oblivion. He favored me because I stayed hungry. I knew the truth was knowable, and I gunned for it 200 percent. I would have died for it.

So I empathize with the people here. Some of you might actually be elected too, it just is not your time to know. Some are probably angry/scared/rebelliious, while still others are intellectually incurious and swayed by hyperbole. I'm pretty sure not many people here have actually read the bible. I hadn't either..I was simply arrogant at the time.

So what I would say to people here is..there is far more going on than seems apparent..if you don't believe at least that there is a spiritual reality, you're practically rubbing two sticks together. God definitely exists and will prove it to you if you humble yourself, come to Him in sincerity, with your total heart and pray. Admit you're a sinner, and ask Him to be your Lord and Savior. Anyone can know God is real. I wish I had read it earlier..would have saved me a hardship. Save yourself the trouble and find out the truth for yourself, that God is real He loves you. God bless..



>> ^TheSluiceGate:
>> ^shinyblurry:
Well, according to the dictionary:
dict.org
Atheism \A"the ism\, n. [Cf. F. ath['e]isme. See Atheist.]
1. The disbelief or denial of the existence of a God, or
supreme intelligent Being.
merriam-webster.com
Definition of ATHEISM
1archaic : ungodliness, wickedness
2a : a disbelief in the existence of deity b : the doctrine that there is no deity
a·the·ism   /ˈeɪθiˌɪzəm/ Show Spelled
[ey-thee-iz-uhm] Show IPA
dictionary.reference.com
–noun
1. the doctrine or belief that there is no god.
2. disbelief in the existence of a supreme being or beings.
The definition of atheism is very clear; the belief that there is no God. If you don't really believe that, IE .0001 percent, then you're not an atheist. You can't just reinvent the definition so you have no burden of proof. That .0001 might as well be 99 percent for all the difference it makes. Personally, I think the definitions people are trying to use today for atheism are extremely intellectually dishonest.

The problem here, as MaxWilder suggested, is that arguing about what the word atheist means is just semantics. We could both quote dictionaries until the cows come home, but it would make no difference to the central argument. It's for reasons like this that other new terms such as "rationalist" or "humanist" are being coined all the time as a way of distancing traditional atheism from the word atheist itself. I realise now that me trying to clarify the manner in which many people commonly define their lack of a belief in a god is actually quite pointless. I'm even going to disregard that you didn't respond to the reason why it doesn't take faith to be an atheist. This thread needs to be brought down to brass tacks.
Let's simplify the central point here, the central point of both the video you posted, and of all the arguments in this thread: Can you give one reason why you , shinyblurry, personally believe that there is a god? Just your one best argument for a god's existence.
For my part, and in the interest of fairness, I will tell you briefly how I arrived at being an atheist. (You can comment on this separately if you wish, but please, not before addressing the above question!)
I was about 13 years old when, as a child brought up a catholic and attending weekly mass, I began to question the morality of the god described in the bible. I looked at the atrocities he committed and asked myself what I would think of a real flesh and blood person alive today who behaved in the manner of the actions attributed to him in the bible, and whether or not this person would be worthy of the praise and admiration heaped upon him. This central idea led to an increased questioning of all the aspects of the religion I had been brought up in, and an awareness that although there were many great ideas and philosophical truths in catholic teachings, there was no conclusive proof either in the bible, or in the world in general, for the existence of a supernatural god of any kind.
So if you, shinyblurry, were recording a video in the style of the one that you have posted, what would you be saying on camera was the one central reason for your belief?

Yea, fixed!


(BTW, I liked the SNL performance just for the typical responses you see on Fox. Although, I did think Carl Rove's part could have used my outright lies set as truth--a lie that confuses and startles the Fox people till someone hits the camera again. Shep is what wins me over for this.)

(Jon's Glenn Beck was better as it had time and they developed it. I really think SNL could hold their own doing the same just cause Glenn is so shallow and ripe for the pickings.)

>> ^quantumushroom:

Lord Jesus Christ, physician, teacher, searching for a way to promote the hidden strength that all humans have.
Then, an accidental overdose of holy radiation altered his body chemistry.
And now when Christ grows angry or outraged, a startling metamorphosis occurs.


Oh well done, well done indeed.

Lord Jesus Christ, physician, teacher, searching for a way to promote the hidden strength that all humans have.

Then, an accidental overdose of holy radiation altered his body chemistry.

And now when Christ grows angry or outraged, a startling metamorphosis occurs.