Rap music is far, far worse than rape jokes for perpetuating violence against women. A rape joke gets told by one person, once. Rap music is used, over and over, like a mantra. Even girls and women singing about bitches not being anything but hoes. Over and over again. Till the words mean nothing and the idea becomes subliminal.

No, I don't mean ALL rap music, but I can't remember the last country and western song talking about a slut that will sit at the ranch with no panties on. Knowing she can say no, but never will.

There's a future we can all wish on our daughters. Mmmhmmm. Yep.

--------------------- I saw this on the interweb and laughed and laughed.

I would hope shineyblurry is NOT a creationist with his strong religious beliefs, but if so it's dedicated to him.

*language*insults*dissing religion*wall of text* (if these things offend DO NOT READ)

Dear Creationists,
You are stupid.
Genuinely stupid.
By every conceivable metric that we can assess intelligence, intellect, mental ability, reasoning and sense. Even the very ability to string words together in coherent ways. You fail at this. You are stupid. There is no way of getting out of this accusation; it is as close to an absolute, proven fact, that a scientific assessment can get.

Not ignorant. No, that’s something else. Ignorance is merely the lack of knowledge. That’s fine. I cannot blame someone for merely not knowing, or not being exposed to information. You don’t get a choice in ignorance and merely not knowing. For a start, you’re born ignorant of everything in the entire world. New born babies don’t even know what things in the world are part of their own bodies and what things aren’t – they really do have to learn this for themselves. So, no, you’re not just ignorant because if you were, I wouldn’t be here writing this.

No, this is something fucking different, far fucking worse. What you stand not only accused of, but proven guilty of, shits and pisses all over the innocence of ignorance and goes into dark territory of deceit and lies. This is wilful ignorance. This is prideful ignorance. You take your ignorance and wave it around at every opportunity to say “hey, look at me, I’m so fucking stupid” and expect people to respect you for it. Do I want to blame you for it? When your elders, and priests, and preachers, and the unqualified crank pseudo-scientific quasi-philosophers they get to back them up, have all conspired to brainwash you into thinking this is a good thing? Yes, I fucking do. You have made a choice to stay ignorant, and be happy with it. You’re a fucking idiot, and you damn well know it. You know it, and you Just. Don’t. Fucking. Care.

Why do I bother with you? Just why? Why do I drag myself down to that sort of level?
Let’s look at some clear facts here.
I have a fucking masters degree. I took four years out of my life learning quantum mechaincs, management, nuclear physics, organic, inorganic, analytical, green, environmental, atmospheric chemistry, mathematics, and a fuck-ton of life skills and problem solving skills possessed by a tiny fraction of people.

I can write, I can draw, I can play and compose music, and I can program a computer to do a little jig. Importantly, I know the difference between “there”, “their” and “they’re” – and fuck knows that’s a rare skill. I’m even nice on occasion and, if I try, even likeable. I’m just going to blow a trumpet and say I have most talents bar singing (sigh).

I wrote a whopping four-hundred-fucking-page book to get a doctorate. It’s sat there on a table right now, all bound and shiny with gold letters and my name on it, looking thick enough to bludgeon someone to death with. To get that far, I was locked in a room with two experts who read it and who spent nearly three hours ripping it to shreds and finding any excuse they could not to give the final award to me. At the end of it all, half a dozen people with the same level of qualification and beyond have all conspired to say “you’re good enough to be one of us”. I fucking starved. I fucking wrote ’til I dropped. I stayed up late and got up early. All to get that. And as blasé and modest as I try to come across in public, I wouldn’t have done any of that if I didn’t think it was all worth it.

And I’ve taught students. People even better than me, who have fought their way through the same shit and more, have said I’m good enough to be their proxy or their replacement to teach the next generation. I’m actively passing on knowledge, whether established or cutting edge, to students who one day will grow up to be the next me. Some days I hate those little shits, but to be fair to them, one day a good chunk of them will also be locked in that room with a pair of experts, shitting themselves and wanting to all go away. They will come out of it alive, as One Of Us, and they will fucking well deserve every bit of it. I am a cog in that machine, and damn well proud of it.

In short, I’m smart. I’m intelligent. I’m rational. I’m reasonable. I’m brainy as fuck. By every conceivable metric, I am at the top of the grey matter tree. If I believed in the absoluteness of the IQ test, I’d be bragging my ass off about being in the 98th percentile (I dunno, actually, last time I took one I was 15).
That’s me.

You, however, as someone who thinks the planet magically poofed into existence 6,000 years ago, you’re at the bottom of that tree. I’m may well be in the 98th percentile, but you, you dumb fuck, wouldn’t even know what “percentile” means without Google – which, by the way, has been built by the kind of people who know what “percentile” means without using Google. Because they had to have some way of knowing what it meant before they fucking built the thing – since you, you dumbfuck imbecile, need every little fucking thing explained to you in small words that don’t tax your brain too hard.

You, because you manage to be mentally retarded in such a way that it’s actually an offence to those with genuine learning difficulties, couldn’t fucking understand the mere basics of anything I could possibly teach you about anything. About chemistry, biology or physics. Even the fucking basics of logic, or language, or how to frame an argument, or what evidence is, or why it’s important, or how science even works. Hell, the hurdles I would have to leap just to get you people to the point of discussing actual evolutionary biology or actual geology or actual radiometric dating would require me to type thousands of words, and spend months of my life. And it wouldn’t be worth it because you would ignore it. You wouldn’t even address the basics. I could try to exemplify every nuance, meaning and deconstruction of, say, the phrase “evolution is a religion”, and you’d zone out as soon as I broke into polysyllabic words and then, just as a little bit of drool came out, you’d say “but evolution is just a religion”.

It’s all just fucking voodoo shit to you, something you’re actively scared of and don’t want to understand. You’ve rendered yourself physically incapable of understanding and basic comprehension and so I find myself almost constantly, every time I see one of you dumb shits opening your mouths, struggling not to outright scream from the rooftops. Every single word in this extensive rant has been compressed in my head into a single thought and that thought fires in my brain every time I see you people speak or type or even making a motion to open your mouths or put fingers to a keyboard.

You sit and worship people like Kent Hovind, whose entire thesis wouldn’t even count as a winning entry in NaNoWriMo (which requires 50,000 words in a month) and has a Flesch reading age of a pre-teen (by contrast, the Flesch-Kincade reading complexity for my own thesis goes to the part of the scale where “reading age” stops being a meaningful concept, and a single chapter is larger than Kent Hovind’s entire derp-fest, and there’s fucking diagrams to boot). Or you shout “amen” after every little tiny piece of faeces that oozes out of the mouth of Ray Comfort – a man, lest we forget, who thinks the word “bibliophile” is a fucking insult derived from “paedophile”. These aren’t just people amongst your ranks, these are your fucking experts.

You repeat mantras that have been refuted countless times. Even if you ever get around to addressing one of these refutations all you can ever come up with is restating the point again or whining about some other pathetic and irrelevant detail. I’m not even going to bother with examples here. I’m breaking plenty of my usual rules about dealing with you stupid-as-fuck individuals already, so I’m going to break another and tell you to do your own simple cursory fucking research on this. Not that you’d manage that, as anything you ever cite must always come from an approved source like “CreationWiki” – a site, may I add, that actively makes a point, and a proud point at that, of stifling any potential disagreement. Do you see that on skeptic or “evolutionist” websites? No. You don’t. You want to know why? Because we want the world to see the best you dumb-fucktarded intellectual rejects have come up with, in all their mundanely pathetic glory, just so everyone can see how fucking terrible each and every one of your so-called arguments are. Sometimes, we don’t even bother responding, we just quote you verbatim (that means “unaltered” (which means “we didn’t change it” (ooh, look, nested parentheses (that means “brackets”) I bet that’s blown your tiny fucking mind))) because even casual scrutiny makes your points look terrible, and frankly, a full refutation just isn’t worth the fucking effort. Not because we can’t, but because – as I said above – I’d practically have to teach you the English Fucking Language from scratch to point out the flaws.

You, who thinks a fucking single man and rib-clone woman and their two sons populated the entire earth without any freaking-frakking-fucking incest occurring because “hey, don’t ask awkward questions”, hold in high regard people who aren’t even worthy of pissing in the academic shadow of people like me. So where does that place you in that pecking order? You intentionally refuse to understand simple things; like how irrelevant evolution by natural selection is to abiogenesis; like the fact that “macro” and “micro” evolution are just things you made up (at least in the way you morons use those terms); or like how natural selection has nothing at all to do with eugenics. It’s all OH-YOUR-FUCKING-GOD-IT’S-HITLER all the fucking time. I mean, seriously, you intentionally avoid learning. You avoid understanding. You actively train yourself to not to understand and you revel in all this. You memorise your silly little one-sentence replies that mean sweet fuck all, and by some magic expect educated people like me to bow down to your right of free expression; well here’s my “free expression” in response you fucking lunatic, you’ve damn well driven me to it over the years. You have no intellectual rights to this “debate” at all because you cannot even speak the language it requires. Even worse, you seem to think this actually qualifies you more. It doesn’t. It never will. Get with the fucking programme already; if you cannot comprehend basic facts, you cannot expect to be invited to the debating table as an academic equal. You’re not my academic equal. In terms of intelligence and knowledge you’re fucking scum rotting at the bottom of a dark and forgotten barrel while I’m basking in the sun. I would love, genuinely love, to help raise you up to being on my level. I would love it. But you wouldn’t listen. I would tell you to read X, Y and Z. Hell, I’d even write my own summary of X, Y and Z, but you wouldn’t listen or care. It would fall on intentionally deaf ears.

You know what the worst thing is? Some creationist out there, probably you because it’s being addressed to you, is probably going to find this rant and say “oh look at the little evolutionist, running out of points and resorting to insults”. Well fuck off. You think this is my attempt to prove you wrong? No. This is my attempt to insult you. This is my attempt to degrade and belittle you, your beliefs and your reasons all in one; because they’ve already been shown to be wrong. I don’t need to add to that. If you want to complain that I’ve ran out of legitimate responses by writing this, then that just proves every single point that I’m making in this profanity ridden rant; that you don’t fucking listen, and are even proud of the fact that you’ve left yourself bereft of the ability to do so.

You’re not stupid because you believe the world appeared out of nowhere sometime more recently than the domestication of the dog – and no, I’m not going to tentatively say something like “evidence suggests that”, no, it’s a Fucking Fact that the dog became domesticated in the tens of thousands of years ago. You’re a fucking shit faced idiot because of why you believe it. If you haven’t got the gist of this already; you’re proud of being stupid, you actively refuse to learn, you don’t examine anything critically, you fall for any piece of shit “evidence” your masters tell you. You don’t question them. You don’t realise they’re just out there wanting to keep you stupid, keep you ignorant and keep you not wanting to learn about the universe from sources that actually took the time to look at the universe. They want to keep you that way because you buy into their shit, with money. Your actual hard-earned money. You actually value these people with your working time. That’s galling to the rest of us who have a working and fully functioning brain that we deign to actually use.

You pay them. You donate to them. You buy their books and DVDs that they produce for fuck-all money and sell at a premium. You show them to your kids so they grow up stupid and buy more DVDs and books by the Comforts and the Hovinds and the Hams and the Gishes of this world. You show them Jesus riding a fucking dinosaur and pictures of Noah mucking out a boat that’s chock-full of animals that somehow managed to survive and reproduce to form every living thing we see on the planet in a geological blink of an eye – and you think this is right? You don’t think this is the most ridiculous idea in the world? If it wasn’t for the coincidental fact that you’re backed by a non-falsifiable belief shared by a significant proportion of the population, you would actually be declared clinically insane. No joke, there are actually people with more coherent and rational beliefs in their head being secured in mental health wards.

Despite being as embedded as you possibly can in the evidence for it, you don’t realise that there’s an entire industry that makes a fortune from retarding your ability to think. You accept this, and refuse to actually exercise your innate abilities to think, question and explore so long as you say the magic words “but I am thinking, questioning and exploring”. No you’re fucking not. If you were, you’d be in my position. You, too, would find yourself locked in that room, actively battling and fighting with people tearing your ideas apart and demanding that you defend them and stand by them and justify every single thing you say. But you’re not. You never will be. Though, let’s be fair to the non-doctorate holding non-creationists reading this for a brief moment; you don’t even have to be in that position of getting an academic qualification, you just want to be in the position where you’re willing to explore, and learn, and discuss and adapt. You refuse even that, and you think it’s a good thing.

There are a lot of people I think are stupid. Really fucking stupid. I mean, you might think it’s a long way down to the shops, but that’s peanuts compared to this stupid. There are people who think the World Trade Centre wasn’t hit by planes, but by holograms. There are people who think the skies are filled with mind-altering chemicals that can be dispersed – from miles away, no less – by spraying vinegar in the air. There are people who think we’re not being faced with a potential disaster of epic proportions because of how our society has polluted the planet. There are people who think vaccines cause autism and will find any old piece of shit evidence to prove it no matter how many times even the mere correlation is disproved.

But creationism is something else. It has that industry supporting it and perpetuating it, and it has people who buy into it so willingly. And you, because you think that everything came from nothing in a fucking click of a magic man’s fingers, are part of this. You’re out there derping on daily on something that we, using the entire knowledge collectively gathered by the human race, know is a lie. Honestly, you probably think it’s a lie too – but you’re both too damn proud of yourself and too damn proud of your stupidity to admit it. That’s your problem. It’s not about fossils, or genetics, or radiometric dating, it’s about your unwillingness to learn and better yourself. And it always will be.

In conclusion. Fuck you. Go fuck yourself. And may the god you believe in have mercy on your pathetic, idiotic, morally and intellectually bankrupt soul."

I understand now why you garner such hostility from other Sifters . Still at least your trying to engage me intellectually, in that respect at least you may consider yourself light years ahead of most of your brethren.

I garner hostility here because most of the sifters here grew up in Christian households and they've rebelled against their parents and God and they don't want to hear anything about Him. This is their sanctuary where they enjoy mocking God and Christians without any dissenting voices. I'm here because I care but I wouldn't be here unless God told me to be here. I've tried to leave a few times and He keeps sending me back. Although not so much lately.

There appear to be two fundamental points of disagreement/misunderstanding here.

...Instead we apply Hegel's Dialectic:

Thesis- all statements are false

Antithesis- therefore the above statement must be false and some statements must be true

Synthesis- statements can be both true and false simultaneously!!!!!!!!!!!!

There are two ways, and only two ways, to know truth. Either you are omnipotent, or an omnipotent being reveals it to you. Since humans are not omnipotent it is impossible to know truth unless it is revealed to us by an omnipotent being, ie God. If you think there is another way to know truth, name it. Otherwise what is there to debate? If you don't think it's possible to know truth then you don't know anything. If you don't know anything then you have nothing to talk about.

"Nothing is true" is mere expression. It is a poetic sounding mantra which contains therein a deeper wisdom about the foundations of all human knowledge. You are not specially equipped to break the problem of "under-determination" as outlined by Philosophers like David Hume. God himself could appear to you and say/do anything he liked, it would not change the fundamental limits of the human condition.

Could God reveal Himself to you in a way that you could be absolutely certain of it? It doesn't matter what we can prove to one another; God could sufficiently prove Himself to me (He has) or to you and it would transcend every piece of rationale you've offered.

How could you possibly know for certain that it was not Satan out to trick you? Satan is a deeply powerful being after all, powerful enough to fabricate a profound spiritual experience don't you think? How could you ever prove that the God you worship is not the greatest impostor in the cosmos beyond all doubt?

I know it for certain because God has made me certain. I've seen things only an omnipotent God could do, such as arranging and timing circumstances which would require Him to be in complete and precise control of everything and everyone. Satan certainly can generate profound spiritual experiences (and blindness), which is why he is able to deceive the whole world.

I ask this because the God you worship DEMANDS that you do in fact worship him (and only him) on threat of divine punishment. No true God would ever require worship, let alone demand it! What kind of sick egotist are we dealing with? (the changes in the system related to that whole Jesus thing don;t make a difference here. Either This "God" started perfect or it is not what it claims to be! Past crimes count no matter what token amends were made later on)

God doesn't need us, woo. He had perfect love within His Trinity relationships before He created anything. He doesn't demand that we worship Him because He is egotistical, He commands us to worship Him to put us in right relationship with Him as the supreme good and sustainer of all things. He is the only appropiate object for our adoration, which also puts us in right relationship with other people. Human beings are built to worship; that is why the world is littered with the carcasses of false idols. I don't just mean pagan deities, I mean power, money, fame and all of the other things human beings lust and pine away for. The thing man most likes to worship is himself. Humanists worship the intellect, and the accomplishments of human civilization. These too are idols. Everyone has something they worship, when God is the only appropiate object of our worship. The love that we have to give to all of those things comes from Him, and that is why we return it to Him, which in turn leads to greater love for all people and things. Every other kind of worship is selfish and ultimately spiritual dead(and destructive). Thus this command to worship Him alone (we were created to be in relationship with Him) is for our growth, our protection, and so that we can be who He created us to be.

Your not the only one to have experienced encounters with things you might call "Gods" or "Angels/Daemons". But the God I found lies entirely within and demands/threatens ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, and sets ABSOLUTELY NO CONDITIONS. It knows that all Monads (souls) will inevitably make their way back to it, and that it has the patience of eternity with which to wait.

How do you know that?

The fundamental difference is that this God did not create the universe (an absurd answer which demands infinitely more explanation than it provides), this God is created BY THE UNIVERSE!

The explanation you provide only pushes the "absurdity" back one step; you're still left with the same problem as you say I have. Yet, it is not a problem to believe in something eternal. To believe something came from nothing wouldbe the absurdity. Do you believe the Universe is eternal?

We are all "God" experiencing itself subjectively as it evolves teleologically towards perfection. If Consciousness is eternal then this is the only outcome that makes any sense. God being perfect and beyond all time experiences everything it is conceivably possible for a perfect being to experience within an instant of non-time. With all of eternity stretched it before it does the only sensible thing it could do, it commits suicide and returns the universe to a state of pure potential, ready to undergo the experience of evolving from the most basic "mathematical" principles to fully actualised and all powerful consciousness (i.e. back at God again). A fundamental part of this entire process is the journey from elemental and animalistic unconsciousness to fully self aware enlightened consciousness, the highest truth then is to discover that you yourself are God (at least in-potentia), not some mysterious external power.

If God is perfect, which He is, then He isn't limited. His joy never ends; it is the limitation of the human intellect that prevents you from understanding an infinite being, so you have devised a scenario based on those limitations where you impose a limitation on Gods experience so that He is forced to "commit suicide" in order to have new and enjoyable experiences. An infinite being experiences infinite joy. A perfect being will always be perfect. God doesn't evolve; a perfect being has no need to evolve or ever become "basic". He is eternally perfect, and we are not.

1 John 1:5 This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.

The other is your conviction that the Gospel is absolutely true and that you appear to see everything related to it and the greater human spiritual quest via this filter. I'm not going to trade scripture with you on matters of pedantry it'll take all day and get neither of us anywhere. Instead I shall focus on one key argument that undermines the entire house of cards. If the God of Abraham and the old testament is one in the same as the God of which Jesus preaches (/is in corporeal form) and further more that the Old testament is in some way a true account of his/its actions......Then the God of Abraham and Jesus is demonstrably A. not perfect and B. malevolent/incompetent.

Yes, the God Abraham is the God Jesus is referring to. The error is that you think you understand God better than Jesus did. Jesus is the perfect representation of God; His exact image. If you've seen Jesus you have seen the Father. They are one and the same in terms of their character and every other attribute. You don't see that because you don't understand the scriptures. Jesus did, which is why He said things like this:

John 17:23 I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.

The atheist version of studying the bible is to look for something that seems to contradict the claims of Christians so that they can throw it in the garbage and be done with it. You would see the same God that Jesus represents in the Old Testament if you understood the history that it presents.

Go ask the Benjamites or the Canaanites how they feel about this "God". Or how about the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah? The firstborn of Egypt? etc. etc.

Go ask the criminals on death row how they feel about the judge and prosecutor who sent them there. Does that mean they don't deserve to be there?

Yaweh demands Abraham sacrifice his own son, truly the act of a benevolent creature no? And while were on the subject what kind of "God" demands a blood sacrifice for anything? Even if it was a legitimate test of Abrahams faith (a highly dubious notion unto itself) what about the poor goat sacrificed in his sons stead?
This leads into the key difference between the Gnostic God/The Buddha/Dau/Chi etc. (Esoteric) and the Abrahamic God (Exoteric).....

God didn't ask Abraham to do anything that He wasn't willing to do Himself, but unlike Abraham God did sacrifice His son. This is what I mean when I say that you you're not understanding what you're reading. The sacrifice of Issac is a picture of Jesus Christ. You don't see these things because you don't know what to look for.

One merely offers the wisdom to transcend the suffering inherent in mortal life and make ones way back to union with that which we were all along. It is not invested in the material world, it is merely a higher expression of consciousness no longer bound by emergent natural laws. It never judges, it never condemns or punishes and it helps only those who are ready to help themselves.

The other demands blood sacrifices, incites genocides, sets strict rules and threatens you with damnation if you don't obey, demands worship (WORSHIP! WTF!!!!), inspires/authors deeply contradictory and difficult to understand written works (it expects you to accept on faith alone), claims to be a perfect creator of a universe into which suffering and imperfection are inherent (perfect beings do not create imperfect things) etc. etc.

Here is the difference..the God you describe wants to "help" you out of a situation that it created because of its own limitations and need for self-gratification. It is not only responsible for evil, but it does nothing about it. The God you describe is limited, selfish and immoral.

The way you describe my God is a strawman argument in itself. It is not an accurate representation of the biblical account. The God of the Universe created a perfect Universe and endowed His creatures with free will. The creatures He created freely chose to do evil and this is what brought sin and death into the world. This is the reason for the imperfection, and God, at great personal cost to Himself, restored and reconciled His creation through Jesus Christ.

You won't be able to understand the bible without Gods help:

1 Corinthians 2:14 But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.

That's why I suggested you read the gospel of John, if you really do want to understand God accurately, and pray for assistance.

I don't side with Lucifer (I think she has the opposite problem to Jehova i.e. enlightenment at all costs as quickly as possible and damm the journey to get there), but I do recognise her as the fundamentally opposing force to Jehovah/Allah out of which a higher synthesis emerges (Abraxas the Gnostic God of light, or whatever you want to call it). Jehovah represents supreme attachment to the material world (R>0),

It's a false dichotomy. What you're describing when you refer to God is the gnostic demiurge, which bears no resemblence to the God of the bible. There are no opposing forces to be spoken of because there is no actual duality. God is only light and the only thing He is attached to is His children, because He freely loves them. He is the only power in the Universe. Satan has a paper kingdom; it is just shadows on the wall. In any case, you can't escape the corruption caused by your sin nature. If you shatter a mirror, no matter how well you glue it back together it will never reflect purely again. It doesn't need to be repaired, it needs to be replaced. This is why Jesus said you need to be born again:

John 3:3 Jesus answered him, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God."

When you receive Jesus as Lord and Savior, He will send the Holy Spirit to live inside of you and make you a new person. You are spiritually dead in sins and transgressions, but the Holy Spirit will regenerate your spirit and cleanse you from all of your sin.

while Lucifer supreme attachment to the spiritual/mental (R=0). A wise man see's the two as a personification of the two highest drives in the human psyche and thus concepts to be transcended/mastered.

Satan desired one thing, which was to be God. He became prideful because of his great beauty and intellect and based on his ignorance of Gods true nature, he tried to form a rebellion against God to replace Him and was kicked out of Heaven. This is essentially the process you are describing for those who believe they are God. All Satan is trying to do is duplicate his errors in you and as many other people as he can so that he can destroy them before his time comes. He can't strike back at God directly so he goes after his creatures. Satan is an imitator; he is a potter just as God is a potter. He is doing everything possible to shape and mold you into his image and character, and he has entire universes of deception waiting for you, filled with as much "secret knowledge and wisdom" as you desire. He has a door for every kind of person, every kind of philosophy; his is the broad road that leads to destruction. Jesus said enter through the narrow gate:

Mat 7:13 "Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many.

Mat 7:14 For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.

Either way I regard worshipping the God of Abraham as the "one true God" to be a supreme mistake, if Jesus professes to preach that same God's gospel then following him would be a supreme mistake also. I show no fealty to torture Gods, I have more self respect than that.

You surely prefer the idol you have created in your own mind, because that is the god who allows you to do whatever you want. That's all this is really about. Do you know what Jesus said the reason is that men won't come to God?:

John 3:19-21

19 And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.

20 For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed.

21 But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God.”

You don't get to decide who God is, and just because you don't think you should be accountable for what you've done in this life doesn't mean you won't be.

For the record. I love you as much as any other creature in this cosmos but I don't pray to anything for your soul to be saved. Truly it was never in jeopardy in the first place! That part of you which lies beyond the limits of mortality will find its way back to the highest state eventually no matter what, even if it takes eons. In the mean time however I'm happy to waste a small portion of said eons arguing (I suspect futilely) with you on the internet.

God loves you and I love you, and that's why I am telling you all of this. The highest state is the lowest state:

Mat 23:11 The greatest among you shall be your servant.

Mat 23:12 Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

(I'll get back to you on some of your other more specific points at a later point, I don't have the time or inclination to dig out the texts to make those counter arguments right now.)

Take your time. God bless.

I suspect you've heard it all over the place in various different forms . Crowley merely translated and expounded upon it, the fundamentals of the mantra itself have done the rounds in the Occult and Esoteric circles for millenia. ("nothing is true..." goes back 1000's of years also).

I understand now why you garner such hostility from other Sifters . Still at least your trying to engage me intellectually, in that respect at least you may consider yourself light years ahead of most of your brethren.

There appear to be two fundamental points of disagreement/misunderstanding here.

First if your reliance on Aristotelian Logic to attack my Dialectic argument. When I said you were using the language with which I described to counter instead of addressing the underlying concept it was to this I was alluding (not clearly enough it seems).
Philosophers (good ones anyway) have largely up on traditional Aristotelian logic as a means to extrapolate objective truth because it functions only upon linguistic syntax. The very fact that such a fundamental assertion as "nothing is true" is mutually contradictory as a prime example of this. The language we use to describe and frame the problem simultaneously limits our ability to comprehend it. As I suspect you well know deeper conceptual matters are often too deep to be fully expressed by mere syntax based language.
Instead we apply Hegel's Dialectic:

Thesis- all statements are false

Antithesis- therefore the above statement must be false and some statements must be true

Synthesis- statements can be both true and false simultaneously!!!!!!!!!!!!

"Nothing is true" is mere expression. It is a poetic sounding mantra which contains therein a deeper wisdom about the foundations of all human knowledge. You are not specially equipped to break the problem of "under-determination" as outlined by Philosophers like David Hume. God himself could appear to you and say/do anything he liked, it would not change the fundamental limits of the human condition.

How could you possibly know for certain that it was not Satan out to trick you? Satan is a deeply powerful being after all, powerful enough to fabricate a profound spiritual experience don't you think? How could you ever prove that the God you worship is not the greatest impostor in the cosmos beyond all doubt? I ask this because the God you worship DEMANDS that you do in fact worship him (and only him) on threat of divine punishment. No true God would ever require worship, let alone demand it! What kind of sick egotist are we dealing with? (the changes in the system related to that whole Jesus thing don;t make a difference here. Either This "God" started perfect or it is not what it claims to be! Past crimes count no matter what token amends were made later on)


Your not the only one to have experienced encounters with things you might call "Gods" or "Angels/Daemons". But the God I found lies entirely within and demands/threatens ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, and sets ABSOLUTELY NO CONDITIONS. It knows that all Monads (souls) will inevitably make their way back to it, and that it has the patience of eternity with which to wait.
The fundamental difference is that this God did not create the universe (an absurd answer which demands infinitely more explanation than it provides), this God is created BY THE UNIVERSE!
We are all "God" experiencing itself subjectively as it evolves teleologically towards perfection. If Consciousness is eternal then this is the only outcome that makes any sense. God being perfect and beyond all time experiences everything it is conceivably possible for a perfect being to experience within an instant of non-time. With all of eternity stretched it before it does the only sensible thing it could do, it commits suicide and returns the universe to a state of pure potential, ready to undergo the experience of evolving from the most basic "mathematical" principles to fully actualised and all powerful consciousness (i.e. back at God again). A fundamental part of this entire process is the journey from elemental and animalistic unconsciousness to fully self aware enlightened consciousness, the highest truth then is to discover that you yourself are God (at least in-potentia), not some mysterious external power.

R>=0 (R= distance between two points)



The other is your conviction that the Gospel is absolutely true and that you appear to see everything related to it and the greater human spiritual quest via this filter. I'm not going to trade scripture with you on matters of pedantry it'll take all day and get neither of us anywhere. Instead I shall focus on one key argument that undermines the entire house of cards. If the God of Abraham and the old testament is one in the same as the God of which Jesus preaches (/is in corporeal form) and further more that the Old testament is in some way a true account of his/its actions......Then the God of Abraham and Jesus is demonstrably A. not perfect and B. malevolent/incompetent.

Go ask the Benjamites or the Canaanites how they feel about this "God". Or how about the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah? The firstborn of Egypt? etc. etc.

Yaweh demands Abraham sacrifice his own son, truly the act of a benevolent creature no? And while were on the subject what kind of "God" demands a blood sacrifice for anything? Even if it was a legitimate test of Abrahams faith (a highly dubious notion unto itself) what about the poor goat sacrificed in his sons stead?
This leads into the key difference between the Gnostic God/The Buddha/Dau/Chi etc. (Esoteric) and the Abrahamic God (Exoteric).....

One merely offers the wisdom to transcend the suffering inherent in mortal life and make ones way back to union with that which we were all along. It is not invested in the material world, it is merely a higher expression of consciousness no longer bound by emergent natural laws. It never judges, it never condemns or punishes and it helps only those who are ready to help themselves.

The other demands blood sacrifices, incites genocides, sets strict rules and threatens you with damnation if you don't obey, demands worship (WORSHIP! WTF!!!!), inspires/authors deeply contradictory and difficult to understand written works (it expects you to accept on faith alone), claims to be a perfect creator of a universe into which suffering and imperfection are inherent (perfect beings do not create imperfect things) etc. etc.

I don't side with Lucifer (I think she has the opposite problem to Jehova i.e. enlightenment at all costs as quickly as possible and damm the journey to get there), but I do recognise her as the fundamentally opposing force to Jehovah/Allah out of which a higher synthesis emerges (Abraxas the Gnostic God of light, or whatever you want to call it). Jehovah represents supreme attachment to the material world (R>0), while Lucifer supreme attachment to the spiritual/mental (R=0). A wise man see's the two as a personification of the two highest drives in the human psyche and thus concepts to be transcended/mastered.
Or if you want to put your scientific head on for a moment they represent the Left and Right hand brain (all truths are relative, one can approach this from a purely psychological/neuroscience position and argue the same case just with less colourful imagery ).

Either way I regard worshipping the God of Abraham as the "one true God" to be a supreme mistake, if Jesus professes to preach that same God's gospel then following him would be a supreme mistake also. I show no fealty to torture Gods, I have more self respect than that.


For the record. I love you as much as any other creature in this cosmos but I don't pray to anything for your soul to be saved. Truly it was never in jeopardy in the first place! That part of you which lies beyond the limits of mortality will find its way back to the highest state eventually no matter what, even if it takes eons. In the mean time however I'm happy to waste a small portion of said eons arguing (I suspect futilely) with you on the internet.

(I'll get back to you on some of your other more specific points at a later point, I don't have the time or inclination to dig out the texts to make those counter arguments right now.)

That wasn't my intent. I only wish that those who provide our entertainment were allowed to represent and function at the peak of our potential.
Though I'm sure I've failed in this as we all do from time to time, for a long time I've made my mantra to be "the moment you profess your intelligence/greatness/worth to be greater than another, the instant you lose any trace of it, along with any reality the proclamation might have had".

@00Scud00 if businesses collude to keep prices high, their enemy are other businesses not profiting from that collusion. Getting into the fold cuts into their profits.

Big businesses use government to regulate the market and skew costs in their favor, raising barriers of entry to competitors.

If government is removed from the picture, yes, it's one less person to bribe. It also removes all those barriers, and all unfair advantages big businesses currently enjoy.

With free markets, as with most freedoms, it's not all unicorns and rainbows, quite the opposite. There will be plenty of abuse and unfairness to go around. However, being free from a mountain of laws and bureaucracy, without anyone to come crying to, begging authority to right all wrongs, society will be more flexible, creative, responsible, and inclined to solve problems on its own. People are better at solving problems than bureaucrats, and they'll more likely do so if they have to do it themselves.

It's like the internet. I believe most problems on the internet today can be solved technologically. Is that magical thinking? I don't think so.

Sure, there's a role for a few legal rules, but they should always be kept to a minimum. Let people figure things out creatively, without resorting to violence. Add too many laws to the internet, and it'll be bogged down. People will try less to come up with creative solutions, and resort more to petitioning their representatives.

I resent the insinuation that I use free market as a mantra. I'm trying to clear its name. It currently enjoys a terrible and undeserved reputation.

I'm always amazed how some people seem to treat the term "free market" as if it's some magical mantra, and that by just chanting it often enough it will somehow fix everything.
What if the market were allowed to push prices down? If there are enough big corporate interests involved what makes you think they won't collude to keep prices high, who's going to step in and offer cheaper services when business is all about making as much profit as possible?
Is the current government system corrupt and flawed? Hell yes, but that just means we need to fix the system so special interests can't just buy influence with truckloads of money. The special interests meanwhile want to end government influence simply because it's one less person they have to bribe once they are gone. The idea that everything will be unicorns and rainbows once the government is out of the picture is just a fallacy perpetuated by those who simply want to do away with annoying rules that prevent them from doing whatever the hell they please, or at least make it easier and cheaper.

"Drinking poison is fun" is a much better mantra. Until you take a consistent position, i.e. "the government should ban all things at least as dangerous as X no matter how much enjoyment myself or others derive from them", I can't respect your view. It's nonsense.

The "global economy" is the wake up call everybody in the US is thus far ignoring. You aren't competing, necessarily, with the guy down the street, or the workers in another State anymore. In the modern economy the US is competing against workers who are willing to work harder for less pay. You can ride your Hostess Twinkie Union to unemployment, or you can "work for less", as the mantra goes.
"All that corporations care about is the bottom line" is another mantra I love. These aren't charities. The term "corporation" is thrown around like it doesn't represent a person, or group of persons, that are trying to advance their lot in life. It's not out of a sense of altruism that the baker bakes his bread. All that being said, workers deserve a safe workplace. That should be accomplished through legislation, and it has been.

Look closely at Ryan while Biden points. If Ryan had a pistol, Biden would be ventilated.

Ryan's subliminal mantra "coronary, embolism, massive stroke, shotgun"

It started from the Longcat meme http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/longcat

The original was "longcat is long" as a response to something that was extraordinary. Its similar to the even older saying "it's xbox huge" in reference to the original Xbox being larger than any other game console prior.

For example if I posted an image of a stretch Hummer H2 limo someone would reply with "wow, longcat is long"

- I am an oldfag and have seen quite a few tubes in my day (adjusts onion on belt)

>> ^Auger8:

The title is in reference to a meme in which something is stated to be awesome followed by, is awesome.
ex. "Awesome title is awesome." I have seen this pop up around the web in various places likely thanks to 4-chan or reddit.
>> ^ulysses1904:
No doubt I'm showing my age with this but is there some mantra effect that results in using the word "awesome" so much? I'm referring to the title here, nothing to do with the video (although it's awesome how many levels of awesome they can pack into one pen).
I remember when little teen hipsters starting saying awesome around 1981 and it sounded stupid back then. Keep it up and future historians will use Moon Unit's "Valley Girl" as the Rosetta Stone to decipher modern American English.

The title is in reference to a meme in which something is stated to be awesome followed by, is awesome.
ex. "Awesome title is awesome." I have seen this pop up around the web in various places likely thanks to 4-chan or reddit.
>> ^ulysses1904:

No doubt I'm showing my age with this but is there some mantra effect that results in using the word "awesome" so much? I'm referring to the title here, nothing to do with the video (although it's awesome how many levels of awesome they can pack into one pen).
I remember when little teen hipsters starting saying awesome around 1981 and it sounded stupid back then. Keep it up and future historians will use Moon Unit's "Valley Girl" as the Rosetta Stone to decipher modern American English.

>> ^ulysses1904:

No doubt I'm showing my age with this but is there some mantra effect that results in using the word "awesome" so much? I'm referring to the title here, nothing to do with the video (although it's awesome how many levels of awesome they can pack into one pen).

We seem hellbent on destroying words. I mean, we now use the same word to describe Homer's Iliad as we do to describe facial hair and deep-fried, bacon-wrapped hot dogs. When something truly epic or awesome happens, how will we be able to describe it?

In principle, I agree; however, I am in awe of the penmanship. I wonder if this kind of thing will become the art that far eastern calligraphy has become. That would almost be a pity.
>> ^ulysses1904:

No doubt I'm showing my age with this but is there some mantra effect that results in using the word "awesome" so much? I'm referring to the title here, nothing to do with the video (although it's awesome how many levels of awesome they can pack into one pen).
I remember when little teen hipsters starting saying awesome around 1981 and it sounded stupid back then. Keep it up and future historians will use Moon Unit's "Valley Girl" as the Rosetta Stone to decipher modern American English.