I think it varies. I think some of you have more than a suspicion, but don't want to stop living the way you do so you're in denial. Others, like HQPQ are deliberately suppressing the truth.

Romans 1:18

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.

For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

Meaning, that Gods eternal power and divine nature are revealed through the Creation itself. This is how I came to know there was a God, because it was clearly revealed to me that there is a higher power working in this world. Before that, I had no real opinion on it and wasn't even looking for an answer.

Perhaps God has yet to make it clear to you. If that is the case, if you ask God to reveal Himself to you He just might do it. It depends on what is in your heart, whether you are interested in the truth or comfortable with lies. Faith is a gift from God, and no one can come to Jesus unless the Father draws him near first, so the unrighteous remain blinded by their own wickedness.

John 3:19

This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.

btw, i have a star? Am I just an idiot because I'm not seeing one..







>> ^shuac:
>> ^shinyblurry:
You're not lucifer but occassionally you speak his mind. As far as what you hate, it's the same as anyone else who is in rebellion; you hate Gods authority over your life. You're obviously not secure in your beliefs, and the reason is..God has made His existence plain to you. Although you have supressed the truth, you know there is a God and that you are under His authority. What you hate is the fact that you will account to Him one day, but still you do what you do knowing the consequences. You said you were once some manner of Christian..which means that the truth has become common to you..you rejected the Holy Spirit so you no longer understand it, but in your eyes you think you understand it better than people who do have the Spirit. It's caused you to become supremely arrogant towards God, and thus it is unlikely you will realize your error. It's not hopeless..you're obviously still pretty young and might grow up one day..but as it stands now you are in serious trouble.
As far as what you really feel about me..who knows? You don't know me, and in any case the persona you project here is always putting on a sarcastic little show..nothing real to be seen as of yet so its impossible to tell.

Firstly, congrats on the star, sb. Sincerely. You might actually be on your way to acquiring your downvote powers. If that happens, fellas...watch out, we'll have another ant on our hands. <IMG class=smiley src="http://cdn.videosift.com/cdm/emoticon/wink.gif">
Secondly, a serious question: Are you doing the whole "you're-just-angry-with-god" thing for hpqp's benefit or do you believe that is the case with all people who claim to be atheists?
In other words, do you accept the fact that there are people who are genuine non-believers for whom all these admonitions are moot? I realize they're real for you and that you think they're real for us too. But do you accept that we, that is to say: those of us who identify themselves as such, are genuine non-believers who do not lose a nanosecond of sleep worrying about whether we've made a terrible mistake?
Or is it your position that we're all secretly in denial?

>> ^shinyblurry:

You're not lucifer but occassionally you speak his mind. As far as what you hate, it's the same as anyone else who is in rebellion; you hate Gods authority over your life. You're obviously not secure in your beliefs, and the reason is..God has made His existence plain to you. Although you have supressed the truth, you know there is a God and that you are under His authority. What you hate is the fact that you will account to Him one day, but still you do what you do knowing the consequences. You said you were once some manner of Christian..which means that the truth has become common to you..you rejected the Holy Spirit so you no longer understand it, but in your eyes you think you understand it better than people who do have the Spirit. It's caused you to become supremely arrogant towards God, and thus it is unlikely you will realize your error. It's not hopeless..you're obviously still pretty young and might grow up one day..but as it stands now you are in serious trouble.
As far as what you really feel about me..who knows? You don't know me, and in any case the persona you project here is always putting on a sarcastic little show..nothing real to be seen as of yet so its impossible to tell.


Firstly, congrats on the star, sb. Sincerely. You might actually be on your way to acquiring your downvote powers. If that happens, fellas...watch out, we'll have another ant on our hands.

Secondly, a serious question: Are you doing the whole "you're-just-angry-with-god" thing for hpqp's benefit or do you believe that is the case with all people who claim to be atheists?

In other words, do you accept the fact that there are people who are genuine non-believers for whom all these admonitions are moot? I realize they're real for you and that you think they're real for us too. But do you accept that we, that is to say: those of us who identify themselves as such, are genuine non-believers who do not lose a nanosecond of sleep worrying about whether we've made a terrible mistake?

Or is it your position that we're all secretly in denial?

Due to entropy, the 2nd law of thermodynamics, etc, we know that there isn't such a thing as a perpetual motion machine. Everything which begins to exist does appear to end, including the Universe. For instance, the expansion of the Universe into heat death. A record player will wear out, a DVD player will break down. I believe that the temporal is temporary because it was created with a specific purpose which will end. After that, only that which is perfected and can co-exist with God eternally will remain.

Yes, talk of the eternal is intelligible. It doesn't mean we can't grasp a few concepts about it. One, it lasts forever, always has been, always will be. It never began to exist and it will never end. Two, it is essentially perfect, because it doesn't break down. It has no real flaw or weakness. It is self-contained and nothing could be added to it to make it better than it is in this sense.

Yes, you can doubt anything, but reality is orderly. It has a way which works and makes sense. I'm not sure why you believe time is only in the mind, because we can do very precise experiments on forces which show time as an emergent conception. What we perceive of time may be faulty, but clearly everything isn't happening at once; there is a logical progression to events which suggests time is more than in our minds.

As far as astronomical history you're talking about a history which is completely speculative and not based on observation, ie the origin of the moon, dinosaurs etc. If you doubt so much, why do you accept the secular narrative as truth? There are certain things such as the existence of the short period comets that proves a young earth. IE, if they're still here it means the Earth can't be that old. The secular narrative inserts the illusive and unobservable "Oort cloud" which supposedly replenishes all the comets.

Yes, I believe knowledge is certain and true, but I think you must see how limited beings with limited perceptions and knowledge take quite a bit on faith. Just in your normal life, you must see past your senses to navigate and interact with reality. You don't know everything that is going to happen, or even what you do know is even reliable, but you make the best of it. I don't see how anything could pass the "certainty" test.

I said what is spiritual couldn't be empircally proven, but I believe God has material evidence because He is a part of history. Where the rubber meets the road is the resurrection of Christ. God did interact with this world; He redeemed it. God isn't beholden to the world though, as if He needs anything..it is by Grace that He interacts with us. I will also tell you that God proves Himself. He promised to reveal Himself to those who come to Him in repentance of sin, who believe in Him and His resurrection and confess Him as Lord. To those He reveals Himself and grants eternal life. God can change a skeptic to a believer in a nanosecond, but He isn't going to show Himself to the world until the right time. What He wants is a heart willing to change, a broken and contrite heart coming to Him in total humility.

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:
@shinyblurry
There is no logical necessity for time to have an ending only because it had a beginning. A record player spinning with no end comes to mind. There is no reason to assume the end is necessarily destruction. A comparable analogy would be would be when a DVD is over; the fact that it has ended has nothing to do with its eradication. Either is plausible. There is also no reason to assume that something eternal will arise from temporal. It isn't impossible either, mind you, just not necessarily or shown to be the case.
I don't think it is possible to think about what is more plausible about eternity. We have no idea how to predicate eternity. We don't know "Being" is a consistent idea with "Eternal". Any type of talk about eternal is unintelligible. I don't mean that in a rude way, what I mean is I have no reason to believe anything that is said. If 2 things are logically possible, and I have no understanding of what it means to be eternal, then any talk about what is the more "likely" mode of an eternal metaphysics is a fruitless debate, rife with personal bias and little else.
And once again, this whole line of thought revolves around the very subjective idea of time. I have had no compelling argument to show time to be anything more than an experience of minds any more than the color blue. I have no reason to accept time as anything more than the way in which minds alter the information of the universe to make us more successful creatures.
I don't understand, beyond bias, why you would accept data about a young earth vs an old one with any less skepticism. Assuming they are using the same dating methods, why trust 10k year old earth and not 13 billion? The detective work that goes into the methods of age aren't perfect, prone to mis-calibration, and lack true modes to calibrate with, but it never claimed to be exact, just a rough cut. When they talk about the ages of dinosaurs, it usually has 50ish million year give or takes. Even our own solar history, and the history of our moon, and of Mars speak far more about a much older universe than a 10k year old one. I also can't see the Grand Canyon being made in 10k years. But isn't is a debate on the Christion bible, but on a more basic idea.
I am not an empiricist. I believe my classification is either a existential phenomenologist, or perhaps an transcendental idealist...most likely a combination of the two great schools of rationalism and empiricism. For me, knowledge is the same as Descartes put it. It is certain, and it is true. By certain, that means it passes Cartesian doubt. More to the point, it means that it has the right stuff to have an answer to every criticism. It is the opposite of doubt, it is certain. In that, religious evidence fails the certainty test, as the main element of all the great religions isn't knowledge, but faith. So to your point, prove that it can be known, with certainty and without any doubt any of the claims you have made, you would be the first in history to do so, to my knowledge. And to say that God can not be empirically proven seems rather lonely, for it means that God does not interact with this world; as empirical study is the world as it is beholden to man. If God is not beholden to the world which man exists, then he isn't really our God.

From 60 to narcoleptic in one nanosecond?

Yes. Now can you please upload the vid so I can be bad too?


>> ^Xaielao:

I once saw this show with a little dog with severe of nacrolepcy. When ever this dog would get excited, it would fall asleep. So as you can imagine a puppy gets excited a LOT. So this little guy would go screaming down a hallway toward something or someone and half way they'd just slump over and slide for a few feet. It was terrible but also.. extraordinarily funny.
Does that make me a bad person?

For the win!

In reply to this comment by DrivelsAdvocate:
I would love to wake up next to Beyonce's sleepy kitty, but she already has Jay-Zzzzzzzzz...

>> ^blankfist:
Pssst, Lawdeedaw, you mucked up the motifZZZzzzz...



^^^^^^^^^^^^^
edit to the post above, FYIzzzz
"Edit added later; Blankfist, I could fuck up hot threesomeZzzzzz"

Ugzzzz...

The more eclectic and obscure something is, the less chance that people will watch it. The more eye-popping the title, the higher chance people will watch it. Some people don't want to think this, but that's the way it works.

Once in a blue moon, your super obscure video will catch a lucky break, stars align and the right people see it at the right time and it powers through - once you get over a certain number of votes, it's sorta self-reinforcing, usually.

An "ok" video, can be propelled to lots and lots of votes with the right timing, title and tags. Like @dag suggests, while we're technically not allowed to vote by member name, it does have an effect on whether or not you watch a sift. Some people you know have good taste have a larger chance of having their sift watched by you, people you have no idea about, you look at the title, thumbnail, number of comments and decide "am I gonna watch this or not". We all have an attention span of nanoseconds, so the stuff better hit well and hit hard, or people skip it.

Or you can just sift something with cats.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

^From the outset you have to make an assumption that ETs are trying to make contact with other ETs. That might be a pretty irrational assumption- but it's one that we could easily make. After that, it's just a matter of finding the medium.

You're right, it could be something so far beyond us- that we have no way of grasping it.

All of our rapid advances in communication tech over the last 100 years has given us some species hubris that we are cutting edge- to a type III civilisation, we would be ants building nests - but even ants have a kind of ambition- so maybe we shouldn't lose hope.

Also, with regard to pulsars, or any stars for that matter- there could be barely discernible fluctuations in the light strength that would form a kind of modulation. The pulsar pattern might be the bigger signal saying "hey look at me" and then the subtle message comes after you know that's where to look. If I wanted to create a message beacon that many galaxies could tune in to, I would use something like a pulsar- so at least people would know where to look.

This snippet from the Wikipedia article on pulsars is very interesting:

In 2003 observations of the Crab nebula pulsar's signal revealed "sub-pulses" within the main signal with durations of only nanoseconds. It is thought that these nanosecond pulses are emitted by regions on the pulsar's surface 60 cm in diameter or smaller, making them the smallest structures outside the solar system to be measured.

I hear ya, I need to get on that meself. 100 star points ain't going to accumulate themselves.

In reply to this comment by alien_concept:
Might be good enough for you my dear man, but these bastards will have it away in nanoseconds!

Thanks though, it's easy to get confused by what you've seen on the sift and what you've already seen on YT. I tend to stash stuff in my favourites for ages

Might be good enough for you my dear man, but these bastards will have it away in nanoseconds!

Thanks though, it's easy to get confused by what you've seen on the sift and what you've already seen on YT. I tend to stash stuff in my favourites for ages

In reply to this comment by BreaksTheEarth:
Cough...

http://www.videosift.com/video/QI-with-Stephen-Fry-How-Many-Times-Can-You-Fold-Paper

But the ringtone link is good enough reason for an upvote

That Jonathan Wells guy has a PhD in biology and he doesn't think this is evidence for Darwin's theory? I can see the massive hole in his argument and all I'm going on is 10th grade biology. Life forms have had BILLIONS OF YEARS to evolve. BILLIONS! Its no surprise if we don't find new species emerging over a mere 150 years. In comparison to the time that life has been evolving, 150 years is like half a nanosecond. However the fact that we can clearly see great changes within one species over a small amount of time IS evidence for Darwin's theory, because it doesn't take much effort to imagine how such changes could accumulate over BILLIONS of years and cause massive changes, resulting in entirely new species. There is no boundary one species has to go across to become a new species. When it becomes different enough we call it a new species.

*beg for nanosecond attention spans.

>> ^therealblankman:
> I loved Brian Cox in "Rob Roy" and his Hannibal Lecktor was very subtly portrayed and a lot scarier than the later one by Anthony Hopkins.

don't even get me started, dude. Adaptation? handpicked by McKee to play himself?

>> ^deathcow:
Any black hole we create in a laboratory will be so small that it evaporates in nanoseconds.

absolutely! unless we're wrong, of course. in which case, we'd never even realize it anyway. much better than if we had been equally wrong about the first nuclear detonation, and torching a hole in our atmosphere.
so, yeah. i'll take that bet. light 'em up.