So does the guy now not believe in God? I mean the equation was pretty simple and it failed...

ooh, speaking of *fail

Also, I always get pissed off when people say that "god gave us the gift of doctors." Fuck you. Doctors went to medical school for 4 years and studies SCIENCE. They didn't get "blessed" with some "magic" power allowing them to wave their hands around and cure people... After all, these doctors also perform abortions and stem cell research, how do you know which ones are god-approved?

As for the Israel thing... oh just stfu... I don't even know where to begin with that crap. The religious significance of a shitty piece of desert has the world in turmoil and none of them can see that they are all delusional followers of fairy tales? All I got to do is watch idiots carrying crosses down a street, dopes bobbing their heads in front of a wall, or lemmings walking in circles around a rock to know that none of these religions (or any for that matter) know a damned thing about the nature of the universe.

Adding video to channels (Fail) - requested by ponceleon.

Oh, and *lies while we are at it.

Adding video to channels (Lies) - requested by ponceleon.

As for the Israel thing... oh just stfu... I don't even know where to begin with that crap.

i want to have ponce's babies

I don't want that guy on my side
That was all kinds of *terrible.

Adding video to channels (Terrible) - requested by demon_ix.

It's not "faith AND science". Faith picks up where science leaves off. As science pushes our understanding of the natural universe further and further, science and faith will always be in conflict at the boundaries of our understanding.

What's the difference between science challenging your faith concerning the age of the Earth and science challenging your faith in the healing power of god? The argument against science as a source of healing is just a natural extension of the argument against science as a source of knowledge of the age of the universe. If you deny science and place your faith in god in one respect, you're a hypocrite if you do not do the same in every case where science and faith conflict in their explanations.

To examine the truth underlying the misguided actions of these parents would require a person of faith to examine all of their own choices concerning faith over reason. This is not something that's going to happen and so we get trite little commentaries from the leaders of the faith community that sound good in small bites but do not acknowledge the core conflict between faith and science.

So when they choose people to put on Fox news, is it immediately obvious who is suitable material or do you have to show your lobotomy scars to be chosen?

Faith and reason go together like a boy's mouth and a priest's penis.

Is it me or is god getting fucking lazy? He used to heal people himself, now he has us do it. What's he want from us next, to answer our own prayers? pfffff

"There's no such thing as a god who asks us to do irrational things."

What kind of messed up definition of rational does he have? The entire basis of religion is irrationality.

Seems to be quite a few religious haters in the crowd here. Alot of 'religious doesnt do anything, but science does'. In this case, the father and mother, should have gone to the doctor's office (since believe it or not, there are alot of medical doctors, who are Christian), to help treat their child. They decided to go the unwise and unrational method. So, alot of you, whom claim are rational, thinkers of science, fall in to the same trap. What would you have said, if the daughter was healed, and the only thing that was administered, was deep prayer? You would fall in to the same trap, and try to justify your own petty arguements.

The main problem with science, is, that its extremely cold. Tell someone who will suffer for years and die, using only science that all of that suffering is worth enduring? The concept of 'Hope', is not a scientific thought. Hope, is pure faith, and it is what drives so many right now, to endure illnesses and conditions, that some medical cure or process is discovered to help them lead better lives.

THAT, is wisdom. Another concept we learned from faith.

^Nithern

There are people that have miraculous recoveries and no one disputes that, but I'm using the term miracle loosely because you cant really define what a miracle is. If the only thing administered was prayer I would argue perhaps the initial diagnosis was incorrect or there was data that was not accounted for (since this isnt exactly a controlled experiment where we know EVERYTHING that happened to the girl)

That being said I dont think the arguments here are petty. It was stupid for the parents of this girl to have not taken her to a doctor and their religion led them to make that choice. People make similar, ill informed, choices regularly because of their faith.

Also I dont agree with your idea that wisdom is learned from faith. Wisdom is defined as an understanding of all available choices and an ability to pick the best one in a situation. Faith seems to hinder your wisdom; or at least it did to these poor people who let their daughter die needlessly.

>> ^Nithern:

Nithern, is your argument that "the faithful ill should go to doctors because some doctors are Christian?" Do you really want to run with that one?

And science is cold? Huh?!

Hope is an utterly useless concept. I could be falling from a 100 metre building and hopeful of a speedy recovery or some of god's attention for a moment. Or I could be falling from a 100 metre building and be in despair of my soon to be mangled dead body. Either emotion is pretty much useless. I'm almost certainly going to die. Yet, people have survived such falls. Sure, you can stick with your hope and maybe god will deliver you from almost certain death, but I sure as hell wouldn't mind some jet-powered rocket pants to Junior Birdman the hell out of here!

There are situations where believing you are going to die actually has a very bad impact on your condition. Scientists (and others) are well aware of this. A really interesting off-shoot of this is the nocebo response. You might find it interesting.

>> ^ponceleon:
So does the guy now not believe in God? I mean the equation was pretty simple and it failed...
ooh, speaking of fail
Also, I always get pissed off when people say that "god gave us the gift of doctors." Fuck you. Doctors went to medical school for 4 years and studies SCIENCE. They didn't get "blessed" with some "magic" power allowing them to wave their hands around and cure people... After all, these doctors also perform abortions and stem cell research, how do you know which ones are god-approved?
As for the Israel thing... oh just stfu... I don't even know where to begin with that crap. The religious significance of a shitty piece of desert has the world in turmoil and none of them can see that they are all delusional followers of fairy tales? All I got to do is watch idiots carrying crosses down a street, dopes bobbing their heads in front of a wall, or lemmings walking in circles around a rock to know that none of these religions (or any for that matter) know a damned thing about the nature of the universe.



Your doctors have only 4 YEARS of college!!?
That's fucked up.

OH and it's called MEDICAL SCIENCE. It's not a branch of physics and you don't have to know squat about math. It's also the only "science" where having a smile on your face helps the the experiment go more smoothly. And where the "object" that's experimented on has it's own voice.

> ^bluecliff:

And where the "object" that's experimented on has it's own voice.


Umm.. what about people who do research into the mating habits of South American tree frogs?

Are you mental? Science is not cold, it doesn't care. There is nothing that has ever been miraculously healed, that could not have happened anyway. No one has miraculously, through prayer, grown back a severed limb.

"I had a cold, then I prayed, then I got better... it's a miracle!"

NO IT'S NOT!!

>> ^Nithern:
Seems to be quite a few religious haters in the crowd here. Alot of 'religious doesnt do anything, but science does'. In this case, the father and mother, should have gone to the doctor's office (since believe it or not, there are alot of medical doctors, who are Christian), to help treat their child. They decided to go the unwise and unrational method. So, alot of you, whom claim are rational, thinkers of science, fall in to the same trap. What would you have said, if the daughter was healed, and the only thing that was administered, was deep prayer? You would fall in to the same trap, and try to justify your own petty arguements.
The main problem with science, is, that its extremely cold. Tell someone who will suffer for years and die, using only science that all of that suffering is worth enduring? The concept of 'Hope', is not a scientific thought. Hope, is pure faith, and it is what drives so many right now, to endure illnesses and conditions, that some medical cure or process is discovered to help them lead better lives.
THAT, is wisdom. Another concept we learned from faith.

"God gave is the gift of human reason" and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.

^ Nithern, hope and perseverance has absolutely nothing to do with faith. How does religion even remotely make all of someone's suffering suddenly worth enduring? If anything, looked at past the surface, it exacerbates it, since it would imply that there is some sadistic arbiter of suffering living in the sky, deciding that you deserve one thing over another.

I'll take a naturalistic world where things happen but follow natural rules, over a sky dictator, any day. To me, knowing that bad things happen but aren't initiated by a conscious agent, is extremely reassuring and fills me full of hope - after all, such knowledge means that we have a high level of control over our world and lives, if we wish to exercise it. Faith, on the other hand, runs the risk of giving all that up. To me, religion ultimately becomes the antithesis of hope, since it is an entire lack of control. The natural world, however, can certainly provide hope that we find scientific discoveries to improve our situation in life - we can hope this, because we take control of our situations, rather than relying on faith... faith being the only thing learned from religion, an enormous flaw to overcome and NOT a virtue.

>> ^gwiz665:
"God gave is the gift of human reason" and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.

Now get him to say Black = White and get run over at the next zebra crossing!

>> ^ledpup:
>> ^Nithern:
Hope is an utterly useless concept. .


tell that to POW vets. Ask them how useless it is

Lol just look how irrational and fucked christains can be , Really obvious evidence that faith dose not heal + the fact there have been loads of duble blind tests + societies with less faith are often healthier. and yet you have people beliving in faith and there specific god and book thats full of shit. we should send all these people to north Korea they should be fine with it as god will protect them and it would have been the will of god anny way.

"What would you have said, if the daughter was healed, and the only thing that was administered, was deep prayer?"

@Nithern


If prayer worked then it would be used and it would be considered the scientific way to heal people because it would work, Ie sum one would discover it/have a idea about it . then thay would come up with a theory and then prove that thery by testing it repeatedly and demonstraiting the same results. they would then write a papper on it which would show how to do this and how to test it and then other people would be able to do the same thing to get the same results. im sorry to brake it to you but prayer dose not work it has been tested and noone had managed to get it to work , prayer is as affective as rolling dice and taking a shit on sum ones forehead.

If prayer worked it would be proven by science and people would use it , the fact is it dosent work in the same way that I cannot read harry potter and then fly around on a broom stick.

Let's talk about "miracles" and "prayer" a second...

You know Lourdes? That place in France where people go on a pilgramige to be healed? Did you know that statistically you have LESS of a chance to be healed "miraculously" if you go to Lourdes than if you don't?

The reality is that people DO go into remission naturally without the aid of prayed or god or faith or anything. The illogical assumption here is that treatment is necessary for someone to get better from something serious. The second illogical assumption is that if someone gets better, it must be because of god.

The reason miracles SEEM "miraculous" is because they are EXTREMELY RARE.

Now you tell me, which is more likely: that a person got better out of a rare case where their body was able to fight off something usually fatal and this hardly ever happens, or that a magical guy in the shy (and again, we have to take into account WHICH magical guy in the sky is "right") used unseen, unknown, and unprovable/unmeasurable forces to cure someone?

And before anyone goes down the path of "prayer helps because of the psychological effects of positive thinking..." GUESS AGAIN. Statistics have shown that positive thinking and such have no effect on getting better. You are just as likely to die if you think positive than if you don't.

http://www.livescience.com/health/080829-happy-thoughts.html

Here's a nice snippit:

"However, when Coyne and other researchers tried to intercede and treat depression among heart attack patients, they found the patient's moods improved, but the rates of second heart attack didn't. Ironically, Coyne said, the most evidence for emotion affecting health actually favors negative emotions, not positive ones. For instance, he said, we know anger and depression are correlated with having a second heart attack, however, what's unproven is whether being positive can reduce the risk."

Stress can make you get ill, but happy happy Jesus isn't going to do shit for you.

Faith is to reason as:

(I'll start it off)

Saint Augustine is to Galileo Galilei

An F-16 Fighting Falcon is to Peanut Butter

Crack-Cocaine is to long-term-health

Truckchase

Yah but what if your eating peanut butter in a F-16 ?

If "god gave us the gift of human reason" and my ability to reason tells me there is no god is that god's way of saying you shouldn't believe in me?

So is this guy saying he's pro-palestinian? Pro-Nazi? Pro-North Korean? Aren't they people?

This is the same Father who was stumped by this question: http://www.videosift.com/video/How-Did-Adam-Eve-s-Kids-Have-Kids

MAGIC IS REAL!

That comment about Lourdes Ponceleon made reminds me of something Richard Feynman said on the subject of miracles, supernatural events and other things people have faith in - proponents of a scientific world view shouldn't be so quick to just dismiss claims of miracle cures as nonsense, it makes them look conceited. Instead the claims should be approached critically and logically. He used Lourdes as an example, saying, essentially, that if there is healing, then that can be put to the test.

His questions for those believing in Lourdes were along these lines: Do you have to bathe in the waters of the fountain to get benefits or is presence near it enough? How close do you have to be? If you need to have contact with the water, does it work if you carry the water away? How far can you take the water from the fountain and still get effects? Splashing it onto your face with your hands? Cupping it in your hands and moving a metre away, then splashing? Putting it in a bottle and going to a different city?

Everything can be tested and subjected to rational analysis. If something truly can't be tested, then it doesn't have an effect on the universe as we perceive it, and there is nothing we can reasonably say about such things, except that they may or may not exist but we have no way of knowing, and little reason to care.

God gave us doctors. What a convenient line. Anything good that us hairy little apes figured out on our own is actually from god. Then when the shit goes down, god gets all mysterious. Or he has a plan.

Sounds like a bad James Bond villain. I mean who else would dangle you over a pit of fire for 50-80 years with one simple method of escape?

im sorry..what were guys talking about?
im still trying to process this nugget from nithern:
"THAT, is wisdom. Another concept we learned from faith."
wisdom is a concept of faith.............
processing.....LOADING..please wait.............
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*alert* this application has performed and illegal operation and shall be shut down

I love how all these "faith healers" and "acting in the name of" are all about God, but when real shit goes down, it's not God that judges them, convicts them and puts them in jail, it's people. Amen to that.

Ponceleon, I'm sorry but I'm a bit confused about the logic of positive emotions not having an effect on one's health. If it does seem that negative emotions have a negative effect, then wouldn't feeling happy imply less feeling crappy, meaning less negative effect? Wouldn't that make it a positive effect?

I remember reading a study that showed some positive results of healing, not faith healing, but some kind of healing where the patiente had psysical contact with the healer. I'm not sure what kind of healing this would be because I've only heard on changing energy fields in the air and placing stones and crystals on the patient.
But anyway, the positive result simple came from having physical contact with another person and that this released chemicals and whatnot that had a positive effect on your health.
So the positive effect had nothing to do with what the healer thought helped (energy and all that crap) but it could show some positive results from something.

'God gave us the gift of reason'

Which you can ignore if it relates to talking snakes, evolution and contraception but can freely be applied to sick people.

"Trust in Allah,
but tie your camel." - Arab Proverb

"Faith and Reason go together."

Quote of the year.


"Sometimes god chooses to heal us, through doctors."


/palm-to-face

*dead

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