I appreciate your comment, and I understand what you're saying. I once wrote a 16-page paper on the "Problem of Evil," so I understand it a little bit. It took me at least 16 pages to write a sufficient solution to the Problem of Evil, but I feel that I did it. To me the solution is extremely simple, but I can never seem to convince anyone of this. Frankly, I don't have the time or the energy to try and convince you, but I'll give some highlights.

God is a perfect being, yet he is eternally progressing. He progresses through his creations. His creations increase, his children grow, etc. We, as his creations, are extensions of the progression of God. I think that you understand that in order for us to grow or be anything more than biological robots, we must have choice. God allows us to make evil choices and hurt ourselves and each other. He has provided the means for us to learn "the rules," but because of agency, people are free to choose what they will believe. This always worries people when I talk about it. We are all born with the ability to tell good from evil, but many people are never given a fighting chance to be "good" because of the evil of others or for whatever reason. The simple truth is that God is perfectly just. Because he has given us agency and because he will not intervene in our agency, some people do not have the same choices to be good as you or I, but it would be crazy to believe that God condemns people for things that they do not have a choice in. Whatever the inequites of this world that are created by man, God will make sure that all is fair, all is resolved, all is right. People worry about death and despair in this life, saying that a just God would not allow people to suffer so much. But to God, death is not a punishment. This life is so incredibly short in the grand scheme of eternity that it is not hard for me to believe that God will take care of it. If we suffer because of floods and famine, it will be for our good. You might say that people who live their entire lives in poverty are not benefitting from hardship, but God will reward us and make up a million times for our sufferings. You'd better believe that impoverished people are humble, and God has promised to reward the humble and meek. In the scope of eternity, suffering is a blessing. He has promised rewards in heaven for enduring our trials well that are beyond our comprehension. I think that's benevolent.

A couple more things concerning the Atonement. I do not believe that we will be punished or condemned for our sins unless we make them with full knowledge and consent. Even then, we have the chance to repent.

Here's a really corny video that is a brief explanation of why the Atonement is necessary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gdc8rKcc4t4

How does sending his son to be brutally executed better equip God to forgive us? Even if it does, how is that a moral thing to do? Did everyone that died before 1AD go to hell? If not, then what made Jesus necessary later?

Like the video explains, in order for justice to be satisfied, Christ had to "pay for" our sins. In the garden of Gethsemane, not on the cross, Christ suffered for our sins. This is a matter of faith that I cannot explain. He was a mortal god, and because of this he was the only one who could suffer all of that exquisite pain. It had to happen the way that it did because Christ had to suffer as we will suffer. He had to

1. Have a body, because we have bodies
2. Be separated from God, because we are separated from God
3. Die, because we will die

It was moral because Jesus volunteered and knew what he was doing. And of course everyone before 1AD isn't going to hell. Time is a mental construct. The Atonement pays both past and future debts. Another thing is that we are not punished in eternity for mistakes that we make in a limited amount of time. If we do not repent, we have to pay the debt for our own sins instead of Jesus doing so, and then all but the vilest of sinners will be rewarded. I believe that only those that have a perfect understanding and knowledge of God and then deny him will be cast off forever. And maybe a few other really, really bad people. And that's almost no one.

I'm not done and there are lots of holes, but I want to go to bed. As a general rule, if something about Christian doctrine seems unjust or unmerciful or illogical to you, it is probably because it is wrong.

In reply to this comment by xxovercastxx:

I should have known your exquisite tastes matched mine.

The funny thing is, you wouldn't call the president those names to his face.

That makes you a coward, QM..

Are you retarded? Never mind, that's not a fair question. Here, play with these colorful blocks.

Know what Obama can't do to MY face? Show me a real birth certificate proving he's a native-born American.

Doesn't it feel good to be allowed the freedom to spout your bullshit?

It sure does. And there's not a damned thing you can do about it, doofus.

I would take that freedom from you if i were in charge..

Of course you would! That's why there are 200 million privately-owned guns in this country. The Founding Fathers knew your kind would skulk out of the shadows one day.
But I admire your honesty, as your left-wing brethren are still pretending they want to hear ALL sides of an argument. You skip all that and admit you're a liberal-fascist.

Be glad you have Obama, who will pander with exquisite skill to all sides as a president should.

Lincoln said you can fool some of the people all of the time. We call them Obama voters.

Speaking of trollin', you haven't said a damned thing addressing either eminent domain, or my comment, which was about the abolition of private property by the liberal-fascist thugs you hold in such high regard.

Really, stop bringing the intellectual equivalent of a toothpick to a gunfight.

Dickweed!

The funny thing is, you wouldn't call the president those names to his face.

That makes you a coward, QM.

An antagonist. A troll. Useless and worth less than the average person.

Doesn't it feel good to be allowed the freedom to spout your bullshit? I would take that freedom from you if i were in charge.. be glad you have Obama, who will pander with exquisite skill to all sides as a president should.


Energy production and communication networks MUST be nationalized. Do you not understand any fucking thing in the world?? Things that concern all people must not remain privatized for profit as the world population expands exponentially. It's illogical and stupid.

You're stupid and smelly. /re-rail thread

Great points made above.

EDD, you have such exquisite taste mate, thank you thank you. Stop trying to make me fall in love with you, you're married and shit!

On a sidenote I just watched this and it's completely fuckin great, a bit long at 7 minutes but totally worth it, maybe your thing?
http://www.videosift.com/video/You-Never-Know-Immortal-Technique#comment-695392

In reply to this comment by EDD:
A really great movie, great scene.
*promote

^Are y>> ^joedirt:
LOL.. what a fail poll.
If financial a great idea or the greatest.
What kind of coward doesn't include the option for STFU with you brilliant idea which you think is so brilliant that no one cares.


I'm just going to preserve this exquisite comment in time for all to see before the glue and painkillers wear off.

I haven't seen you around here since blankfist publicly humiliated you so thoroughly last month. Nice how you've adopted his beat down as your new avatar. He'll be proud to see how you've internalized all that shame. You certainly are a glutton for punishment. To each his own though, I guess.

I do @#$%face. And it's more like EXQUISITE torture.

Everyone here seems to think that Fahrenheit 451 is a book about censorship, and that's a reasonable interpretation, but somewhat disappointingly it's not what Bradbury intended. Quoth Wikipedia:

"Over the years, the novel has been subject to various interpretations, primarily focusing on the historical role of book burning in suppressing dissenting ideas. Bradbury has stated that the novel is not about censorship; he states that Fahrenheit 451 is a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature, which leads to a perception of knowledge as being composed of "factoids", partial information devoid of context, e.g., Napoleon's birth date alone, without an indication of who he was."

Somewhat contradicting this stance is the fact that Bradbury later added an introduction to the book which specifically addressed censorship, and does indeed make this video seem ironic:

"There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian, Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist / Zionist / Seventh-day Adventist / Women's Lib / Republican / Mattachine / FourSquareGospel feel it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse….Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by the minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the library closed forever. ... Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with the censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place."

I haven't seen my promotes do very well since the change, and I did a bunch of them just to see how they would do under the new system. None of them got more than a couple of votes. I can see one or two promotes being ineffective (hey, not everyone appreciates my exquisite taste in videos , but I've done at least 10 in the past couple of day and none of them did well.

Promotes suck now.

In my opinion this is the best horror movie around, exquisite rage and all.

1. Seeing great/weird/funny/unsettling/mysterious/scary/sad/happy/nostalgic/revealing videos I never would have discovered otherwise.
2. Intelligent and sympathic people with insightful commentaries on those same videos.
3. The exquisite humor of all involved.
4. That warm fuzzy feeling of contributing to making a great community better.
5. Seeing my real life slip away between my fingers.

*promote the exquisite rendition.

Yay, it finally got sifted! Congratulations, this is exquisite stuff.

Race, isn't that a social term that categorizes people apart from others because of socially defined physical characteristics ( hair texture, skin color, nose and lips, etc). Many of which are nothing more than mere expressions of dominant alleles in our genetic makeup?

How is it that somehow people continue to de-emphasize the biological functions (if any) of those characteristics and instead assign a social significance to them with no basis whatsoever. I am sure this did not pave the way to erroneously let race become an indicator of moral, intellectual, and psychological capabilities by ignorant people. Oh wait, it did.

"Proud Multiracial American"

Being proud about unavoidable and pre-determined characteristics whose social label is nothing more than that, a label.

Could you explain to me how does that make sense?
I am really asking because I want to know.

When you say that, are you also including ethnic history and heritage? because appreciating that is fine and everyone should do it, but race and ethnicity are not the same, and I don't see how pride is something positive or correct to say when you are dealing with things that you had no control.

Secondly, Last time I checked there was that thing in language called context, don't you think it applies here?

http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/082200sci-genetics-race.html

" As it turns out, scientists say, the human species is so evolutionarily young, and its migratory patterns so wide, restless and rococo, that it has simply not had a chance to divide itself into separate biological groups or "races" in any but the most superficial ways.

J. Craig Venter, head of the Celera Genomics Corporation in Rockville, Md. "We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the same small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world."

Dr. Venter and scientists at the National Institutes of Health recently announced that they had put together a draft of the entire sequence of the human genome, and the researchers had unanimously declared, there is only one race -- the human race.

"If you ask what percentage of your genes is reflected in your external appearance, the basis by which we talk about race, the answer seems to be in the range of .01 percent"

So what is it about the term multiracial, when genetics are telling us, there is only one race since by evolutionary terms, a couple of thousand years are not enough to divide a species as sharply as our silly lets-label-everything brain and society are saying?



Harold P. Freeman, the chief executive, president and director of surgery at North General Hospital in Manhattan, who has studied the issue of biology and race. "This is a very, very minimal reflection of your genetic makeup."

Unfortunately for social harmony, the human brain is exquisitely attuned to differences in packaging details, prompting people to exaggerate the significance of what has come to be called race.

"There's no scientific evidence to support substantial differences between groups," he said, "and the tremendous burden of proof goes to anyone who wants to assert those differences."

Again, I am just asking.

Exquisitely racist.