@shinyblurry

Your assuming time is a real element of existence and not an element of minds. In addition, a "Being" is not the only logical necessary/essential element of the starting point of existence. If anything, a "Being" has more baggage to explain than an arbitrary set of meta rules governing all things that exist. Hawking had an explanation close to this, though, like most scientists, his philosophy missed the mark ever so slightly (100% claims to materialistic causes don't have concrete foundation).

The big bang, however, has certain problematic elements to most religions creation explanations, mainly the element of their self contained explanations of the passage of set amounts of time. A 14 billion (or so, it keeps changing!) year old universe is way off the mark for most of the creation events we have from the larger religions. Even if the big bang isn't entirely accurate, if the time window for the universe is even marginally accurate, the 10k year old earth proposition seems highly dubious. There is some wiggle room, but it mostly seems like an equivocation of the actual text of Genesis.

In closing, it isn't any more certain that the cause of all things is an "eternal being" anymore than it is an "eternal formula". It also isn't certain that; time is a real thing, events are causally linked, or that a human can making any intelligible claims to the way "Noumenon" MUST exist. </lunch break rant>

She's so meta.

>> ^Sagemind:

Give in to your inner 14-year-old!
You're sounding like an old man trying to justify away your inhibitions.:P
Movies like this are a 14-year old fantacy. It's a delve into all that is comic book cool. Super power invincibility, Cyberpunk, Steam Punk, Mech-Warriors, Martial Arts, Sci-Fi, Ancient Wisdom, Fighting for your life, Frailty, Wisdom, Sensuality, Sacrifice, Cute girls, Fantasy, Thoughts within thoughts and so much more. Like the ogre said, "The onion has layers!"
"Let's have hot chicks! with guns! fighting samurai! with more guns! and dragons!" - YES, Lets!
If you go into this movie, leave behind your common-sense brain and take with you, your fourteen-year-old brain. If you expect reality, you're watching the wrong movie!
>> ^ChaosEngine:
while there's no doubting Snyders technical skill, he really has no original ideas at all. This movie played like it was written by a 14 year old boy. Let's have hot chicks! with guns! fighting samurai! with more guns! and dragons!
Honestly, I went into it expecting mindless fun, so my standards weren't high. But not only was it boring, it was downright creepy, like watching an old man hit on a teenage girl.
edit: actually while I'm on this soapbox.... the costumes on the lead actress were borderline paedophilia. And she was rubbish.



The merits of hot chicks (babydolls creepiness aside) fighting dragons, steampunk nazis, etc are lost on me. Which was why it was so surprising that the whole thing was boring at best and lurid at worst.

Even watching the action sequences, you're aware that what you're actually watching is a fantasy within a fantasy. At one layer removed you are watching women forced into sex slavery and "reality" is not much better.

If you wanted to make a straight up action movie, with awesome set-pieces and a ridiculous plot, go for it. But what plot there was made the whole thing feel seedy.

I tried, believe me. I went with a bunch of mates. We had beer and ribs beforehand. And we still came out genuinely wondering if Snyder was that stupid.

Or maybe not...

and here is really the only excuse I can give this. Maybe it's meant to be creepy and weird. There's a infinitesimal chance that there is actually a meta-narrative, that the whole thing is a work of subversive genius; a commentary on how comfortable we are with fetishizing things that are in many ways genuinely wrong.

But somehow, I doubt it.

its still misleading to think vaccines cause the autism--
---
A literature review identified 40 studies suitable for meta-analysis. For each exposure, investigators calculated a summary effect estimate by means of a random-effects model.

Collectively, the studies examined more than 60 perinatal and neonatal factors. Meta-analysis showed that 16 of the factors had significant associations with autism:

Abnormal presentation, umbilical-cord complications, fetal distress, birth injury or trauma
Multiple birth, maternal hemorrhage, summer birth, low birth weight
Small for gestational age, congenital malformation, low five-minute Apgar score, feeding difficulties
Meconium aspiration, neonatal anemia, ABO or Rh incompatibility, and hyperbilirubinemia
The magnitude of the risk conferred by any one factor ranged from a relative risk of 1.14 for summer birth (P=0.02) to 7.87 and 7.34 for neonatal anemia and meconium aspiration, respectively (P=0.02, P=0.001). Use of healthy versus abnormal control groups for comparison increased the effect size for all of the factors.

Additionally, the analysis ruled out several factors as possible etiologic culprits:

Anesthesia
Assisted vaginal delivery
Post-term birth
High birth weight
Head circumference

http://www.medpagetoday.com/Pediatrics/Autism/27484

"Removed from Meta cafe" - *dead

Meta comment fight!

Tags for this video have been changed from 'pub, weird, wall, meta, brick' to 'pub, weird, wall, meta, brick, recursive' - edited by xxovercastxx

>> ^shuac:

Very meta. Someone get Charlie Kaufman on the phone.


Douglas Hofstadter

@Psychologic

Now this I agree with. "Gangs" or tribes of people dominating other people is the more natural condition, not libertarian ideals. The notion of individual rights is very new, and defies the natural order of our evolution. The drift towards collective authoritarian systems is only natural, as a result. This is why, often times, I overstress the need for liberties and freedoms, because they are destined to erode, it is our natural tendency.

However, I still see the only answer to the plagues that humanity unleashes on itself as personal, individual choice and responsibility. Someone here on the sift said something to the effect that he believes that Aspergers is the next stage of human evolution, I am starting to see the wisdom in the statement. Only when the violent, overly competitive sections of our DNA are extinguished can we ever have uncompromising peace.

Commander Adama said it best "We never asked ourselves, are we worthy of survival?" It isn't enough to live, or to kill people. It isn't enough to have laws that punish evil doers. We must not have evil doers, it is the only solution that has humanity survive for any geologically significant time frame. The Meta game for humanity is only just begun.

Very meta. Someone get Charlie Kaufman on the phone.

I'm impressed with the time-lapse meta-art setup but the rotoscoping of T2 is rather crap.

>> ^wraith:

Did she just say that you CAN compress water into a smaller space?


That was a bad analogy; unless you're a physics person. More like throwing a pebble into a pond and yet watch it hit the ground in the pond with no waves. The material structure and atomic setup allow for photons to hit one side without disturbing "the pond" (a.k.a. the atoms) nearly at all; meanwhile, it it is re-emitted as was on, where, or at the point scientists wish it--hence invisibility.

Look up NIMs or what they say in the video. Meta-materials are awesome.

(And no on the water, not unless you put it under pressure first. It's hard to shrink atoms -- density however ...)

@TheGenk @Skeeve @Boise_Lib @gwiz665 @packo @IronDwarf @MaxWilder @westy @BicycleRepairMan @shuac @KnivesOut

Evolution is pseudo-science. It exists in the realm of imagination, and cannot be scientifically verified. At best, evolution science is forensic science, and what has been found not only does not support it, but entirely rules it out. I don't think any of you realize how weak the case for evolution really is. None of them quotes, as far as I know, are from creation scientists btw

No true transitional forms in the fossil record:

Darwins theory proposed that slow change over a great deal of time could evolve one kind of thing into another. Such as reptiles to birds. The theory proposed that we should see in the fossil records billions of these transitional forms, yet we have found none. When the theory was first proposed, darwinists pleaded poverty in the fossil record, claiming the missing links were yet to be found. It was then claimed that the links were missing because conditions conspired against fossilizing them, or that they had been eroded or destroyed in subsequent fossilization.

120 years have gone by since then. We have uncovered an extremely rich fossil record with billions of fossils, a record which has completely failed to produce the expected transitions. It has become obvious that there was no process that could have miraculously destroyed the transitionals yet left the terminal forms intact.

The next theory proposed was "hopeful monster" theory, which states that evolution occurs in large leaps instead of small ones. Some even suggested that a bird could have hatched from a reptile egg. This is against all genetic evidence, and has never been observed.

The complete lack of transitional forms is not even the worst problem for evolution, considering the big gaps between the higher categories, and the systemic absence of transitional forms between families classes orders and phyla.

"I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualise such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic license, would that not mislead the reader?"

Dr. Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History (and a hardcore evolutionist), in a letter to Luther Sunderland, April 10, 1979 admitting no transitional forms exist.

"Contrary to what most scientists write, the fossil record does not support the Darwinian theory of evolution because it is this theory (there are several) which we use to interpret the fossil record. By doing so we are guilty of circular reasoning if we then say the fossil record supports this theory."

Ronald R. West, PhD (paleoecology and geology) (Assistant Professor of Paleobiology at Kansas State University), "Paleoecology and uniformitarianism". Compass, vol. 45, May 1968, p. 216

"Lastly, looking not to any one time, but to all time, if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking closely together all the species of the same group, must assuredly have existed. But, as by this theory, innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?"

-Charles Darwin

"In fact, the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another."

-Evolutionist Stephen M. Stanley, Johns Hopkins University

Fossil record disputes evolutionary theory:

According to evolutionary theory we should see an evolutionary tree of organisms starting from the least complex to the most complex. Instead, what we do see in the fossil record is the very sudden appearance of fully-formed and fully-functional complex life.

If you examine the fossil record, you see all kinds of complex life suddenly jumping into existence during a period that evolutionists refer to as the "Cambrian explosion".

None of the fossilized life forms found in the "Cambrian period" have any predecessors prior to that time. In essence, the "Cambrian period" represents a "sudden explosion of life" in geological terms.

Evolutionists try to disprove this by stretching it over a period of 50 million years, but they have no transitional fossils to prove that theory before or during.

"The earliest and most primitive members of every order already have the basic ordinal characters, and in no case is an approximately continuous series from one order to another known. In most cases the break is so sharp and the gap so large that the origin of the order is speculative and much disputed"

-Paleontologist George Gaylord

What disturbs evolutionists greatly is that complex life just appears in the fossil record out of nowhere, fully functional and formed.

A major problem in proving the theory has been the fossil record; the imprints of vanished species preserved in the Earth's geological formations. This record has never revealed traces of Darwin's hypothetical intermediate variants - instead species appear and disappear abruptly, and this anomaly has fueled the creationist argument that each species was created by God.

-Paleontologist Mark Czarnecki (an evolutionist)

"It is as though they [fossils] were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists. Both schools of thought (Punctuationists and Gradualists) despise so-called scientific creationists equally, and both agree that the major gaps are real, that they are true imperfections in the fossil record. The only alternative explanation of the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is divine creation and both reject this alternative."

-Richard Dawkins, 'The Blind Watchmaker', W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1996, pp. 229-230

Evolution can't explain the addition of information that turns one kind into another kind

There is no example recorded of functional information being added to any creature, ever.

"The key issue is the type of change required — to change microbes into men requires changes that increase the genetic information content, from over half a million DNA ‘letters’ of even the ‘simplest’ self-reproducing organism to three billion ‘letters’ (stored in each human cell nucleus)."

Species just don't change. Kind only produces kind:

"Every paleontologist knows that most species don't change. That's bothersome....brings terrible distress. ....They may get a little bigger or bumpier but they remain the same species and that's not due to imperfection and gaps but stasis. And yet this remarkable stasis has generally been ignored as no data. If they don't change, its not evolution so you don't talk about it."

Evolutionist Stephen J. Gould of Harvard University

Not enough bones:

Today the population grows at 2% per year. If we set the population growth rate at just 0.5% per year, then total population reduces to zero at about 4500 years ago. If the first humans lived 1,000,000 years ago, then at this 0.5% growth rate, we would have 10^2100 (ten with 2100 zeroes following it) people right now. If the present population was a result of 1,000,000 years of human history, then several trillion people must have lived and died since the emergence of our species. Where are all the bones? And finally, if the population was sufficiently small until only recently, then how could a correspondingly infinitesimally small number of mutations have evolved the human race?

"Evolutionism is a fairy tale for grown-ups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless."

-Professor Louis Bounoure, past president of the Biological Society of Strassbourg, Director of the Strassbourg Zoological Museum and Director of Research at the French National Center of Scientific Research.

Try to debunk this if you can
http://www.youtube.com/watchv=tYLHxcqJmoM&feature=PlayList&p=C805D4953D9DEC66&index=0&playnext=1

More fun facts:

There are no records of any human civilization past 4000 BC

"The research in the development of the [radiocarbon] dating technique consisted of two stages—dating of samples from the historic and prehistoric epochs, respectively. Arnold [a co-worker] and I had our first shock when our advisors informed us that history extended back only for 5,000 years . . You read statements to the effect that such and such a society or archeological site is 20,000 years old. We learned rather that these numbers, these ancient ages, are not known accurately; in fact, the earliest historical date that has been established with any degree of certainty is about the time of the First Dynasty of Egypt."—*Willard Libby, Science, March 3, 1961, p. 624.

Prior to a certain point several thousand years ago, there was no trace of man having ever existed. After that point, civilization, writing, language, agriculture, domestication, and all the rest—suddenly exploded into intense activity!

"No more surprising fact has been discovered, by recent excavation, than the suddenness with which civilization appeared in the world. This discovery is the very opposite to that anticipated. It was expected that the more ancient the period, the more primitive would excavators find it to be, until traces of civilization ceased altogether and aboriginal man appeared. Neither in Babylonia nor Egypt, the lands of the oldest known habitations of man, has this been the case."—P.J. Wiseman, New Discoveries, in Babylonia, about Genesis (1949 ), p. 28.

Oldest people/language recorded in c. 3000 B.C., and were located in Mesopotamia.

The various radiodating techniques could be so inaccurate that mankind has only been on earth a few thousand years.

"Dates determined by radioactive decay may be off—not only by a few years, but by orders of magnitude . . Man, instead of having walked the earth for 3.6 million years, may have been around for only a few thousand."—*Robert Gannon, "How Old Is It?" Popular Science, November 1979, p. 81.

Moonwalk disproves age of moon:

The moon is constantly being bombarded by cosmic dust particles. Scientists were able to measure the rate at which these particles would accumulate. Using their estimates according to their understanding that the age of the Earth was billions of years, their most conservative estimate predicted a dust layer 54 feet deep. This is why the lander had those huge balloon tires, to be prepared to land on a sea of dust. Neil Armstrong, after saying those famous words, uttered two more which disproved the age of the moon entirely "its solid!". Far from being 54 feet, they found the dust was 3/4 of an inch.

Evolution is a fairy tale that modern civilization has bought, hook line and sinker. Humorously, atheists accuse creationists of beiieving in myths without any evidence..when they place their entire faith in an unproven theory even evolutionists know is fatally flawed and invalid. Evolution is a meta physical belief that requires faith. Period.

Evolution is false, science affirms a divine Creator
http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Books,%20Tracts%20&%20Preaching/Tracts/big_daddy.htm

Though most of this is undisputable, I'm just getting started..

>> ^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?