More fundamentalist style confused literal befuddled thinking from the spawn of a Holy Roller... "symbolic cannibalistic ritual" Amazing what childhood resentments can manifest as in the imagination of adults...the Catholic ritual is symbolic, but not of carnal behavior. You have any evidence of a large group of Christians currently practicing cannibalism? Was there a time when cannibalism was big in the Catholic Church in the past millennium or two? Stick to your "symbolic" fantasies of blowing Gilbert, and please... Seek treatment for your childhood wounding...
Is this understandable? To live eternally is to be like God. But you say to desire to be like God deserves a death sentence. Then you say He sent me to undo death so you can now be like God? Which witch is which? Aha. You just want to be a "new creation" among a hierarchy that lives eternally. There is no hierarchy but that you were created equal to God, and given everything. It is only when you imagine you can be your own creator that you run into trouble. Brother, you remain as God created you. It is this "new creation" you've made of yourself that dies. It dies because it is unlike God in every way. What else can it be when you are already like God in every way? You imagine that what God created can change. Not! God created you eternally alive...life itself. If you imagine that can change, then what must be the result? You'll need to make a world where you can die...because nothing dies in the Kingdom of God. When you arrive in this world, you will make up all kinds of silly reasons why you must die. It doesn't matter how ridiculous the reasoning, so long as you die as you wish. "Man" is your means for "dying". How is this not self-immolation? The Holy Spirit promised God that he would change your mind about your death wish, and bring you back to the Kingdom. This promise was fulfilled. You are merely loitering in a world long gone which never really was. You stay while you value something the world has to offer. I have "given" you the Holy Spirit only to the extent that I remind you of what God has given to bring you home. I merely show you how to think in order to hear his voice. Jesus
Ztroll: >You have any evidence of a large group of Christians >currently practicing cannibalism? Was there a time >when cannibalism was big in the Catholic Church in >the past millennium or two? >Seek treatment for your childhood wounding... LOL Seek treatment for your inability to read or discern the meanings of the word "symbolic". JB
You remind me of the typical failed theist, who cannot recover from the disappointment of their youth...I bet you put your whole heart and soul into your Holly Roller early years, an innocent true believer of a child, and you still have not adequately mourned the loss...seek some help for Gilbert's sake. Then, you go beyond the stereotypical failed theist who just walks away and doesn't care at all, but you palm yourself off as someone who is an expert in what Christian/Catholic symbolism or ritual "really means" applying your failed theist logic to those practicing theism or engaging in ritualistic religious practices. Beyond absurd. You are like some complete dimwit who couldn't learn to play an instrument, flunked out of music school, can't read music, has taste in music that is up his ass...and thinks he knows enough to criticize working musicians... You can't even see how senseless your incoherent ramblings are concerning symbolism of something you failed to be successful at... Tell me, if your brain actually has any capacity for thought beyond acting out on childhood wounding and resentments...how do you know that the words that are attributed to Christ's comments are referring to a carnal physical human body, and not a Divine body, that the nourishment from the "body of Christ" is not temporal or carnal, but 100% spiritual in nature and could not possibly be cannibalism, which even children know requires eating human beings or members of the same species? I am not a Christian, don't practice their religion, but it doesn't take the status of a Pope to figure out that someone who is supposed to be both God and man in human form, when he speaks of Himself and His body, he ain't talking like he is your average Joe trimming his toenails. You don't know, you have no clue, you just have your own childhood programming, filtered through an angry, resentful mind of a failed theist. Are you really dumb enough to think Christians and Catholics are imagining taking a fork and knife and carving up the human body of a man for dinner, or taking a straw and drinking the blood of a human being? What a cook you are... Let's see, say a someone doesn't know about Christianity. Who should he ask? A failure in Christianity who grinds his axe every chance he gets, or those who are actually practicing Christianity? Like asking an ignorant illiterate homeless severely retarded person how to make money trading... You want understanding of a practice? Ask the winners of a practice, not the losers...
Me? As a rule of thumb, those practicing Christianity would not be dying. So it's just a matter of doing the math. Jesus
no reason to respond to the quotes of hoyle, greenstreet and davies where they conflict with the scientific method. Let Susskind do it himself. " I have been accused of advocating an extremely dangerous idea. The explanation of some numerical coincidences will necessarily be that most of the multiverse is uninhabitable, but in some very tiny fraction conditions are fine-tuned enough for intelligent life to form. That's the dangerous idea and it is spreading like a cancer. " Leonard Susskind
It's one thing to say you believe in a universe by intelligent design. That indeed is a belief. It is quite another to say there is a scientific basis for the universe being designed, as all scientific basis require definitions. Design defined as intelligent has no scientific basis, neither does the belief in an appearance of intelligent design. It never has. In direct comparison , there is the overwhelmingly sound scientific basis for self organizing arrangements of parts or elements, defined as design.
Hitchens vs Hitchens By PETER HITCHENS - More by this author » Last updated at 22:40pm on 2nd June 2007 Comments Comments (31) Am I my brotherâs reviewer? A word of explanation is needed here. Some of you may know that I have a brother, Christopher, who disagrees with me about almost everything. Some of those who read his books and articles also know that I exist, though they often dislike me if so. But in general we inhabit separate worlds â in more ways than one. He is of the Left, lives in the United States and recently became an American citizen. I am of the Right and, after some years in Russia and America, live in the heart of England. Occasionally we clash in public. We disagreed about the Iraq War â he was for it, I was against it. Despite the occasional temptation, I have never reviewed any of his books until today. But now, in God Is Not Great, he has written about religion itself, attacking it as a stupid delusion. This case, I feel, needs an answer. Most of the British elite will applaud, since they see religion as an embarrassing and (worse) unfashionable form of mania. And I am no less qualified to defend God than Christopher is to attack him, neither of us being experts on the subject. People sometimes ask how two brothers, born less than three years apart, should have come to such different conclusions. To which Iâd answer that Iâm not sure theyâre as different as they look, and that itâs not over yet. Christopher has quite often written and spoken about our upbringing and background, whereas I havenât, but I think Iâm now entitled to give a small account of what we have in common. Because my father was in the Navy, we were brought up in a very old-fashioned Britain. Looking back, it often seems to have been a sombre landscape of grey warships and the stench of fuel-oil â but also of cathedral towers, bells and choral evensong. Our boarding-school education, mainly on the edge of Dartmoor, took place in conditions closer by far to the Thirties than to now. Our ancestry, so far as I have been able to dig it up, is a volatile mixture. On my fatherâs side, fierce West Country nonconformists mixed with gentle, rather saintly Hampshire Anglicans. One grandfather was a pioneer of the National Union of Teachers and a straggler from the First World War, saved from the trenches by being sent to India. Well into the Sixties his house was a museum of the world before 1939: no telephone, no TV, but a quietly singing kettle always on the hob and a mangle in the porch, and he refused to read fiction because he thought it immoral. As for the other grandfather, I have yet to track him down, and we were always told he was "killed in the war", which is true in the sense that he was run over by a bus in the blackout. From what I can gather, nobody was sorry about this, least of all his wife, my motherâs mother, who had long before thrown him out of the house for his misdeeds. She was partly Jewish, granddaughter of an immigrant from Prussian Poland, who confused things greatly (from the point of view of the racially obsessed) when he married a nice English girl. Thereâs enough material in that background for quite a lot of fraternal variety, I think. Christopher is an atheist. I am a believer. He once said in public: "The real difference between Peter and myself is the belief in the supernatural. "Iâm a materialist and he attributes his presence here to a divine plan. I canât stand anyone who believes in God, who invokes the divinity or who is a person of faith." I donât feel the same way. I like atheists and enjoy their company, because they agree with me that religion is important. I liked and enjoyed this book, and recommend it to anybody who is interested in the subject. Like everything Christopher writes, it is often elegant, frequently witty and never stupid or boring. I also think it is wrong, mostly in the way that it blames faith for so many bad things and gives it no credit for any of the good it may have done. I think it misunderstands religious people and their aims and desires. And I think it asserts a number of things as true and obvious that are nothing of the sort. At the heart of this book are two extraordinary, bold statements. One is a declaration of absolute faith, faith that religion has got it wrong, a mental thunderbolt of unbelief. Christopher describes how at the age of nine he concluded that his teacherâs claim that the world must be designed was wrong. "I simply knew, almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher had managed to get everything wrong." At the time of this revelation, he knew nothing of the vast, unending argument between those who maintain that the shape of the world is evidence of design, and those who say the same world is evidence of random, undirected natural selection. Itâs my view that he still doesnât know all that much about this interesting dispute. Yet at the age of nine, he "simply knew" who had won one of the oldest debates in the history of mankind. It is astonishing, in one so set against the idea of design or authority in the universe, how often he appeals to mysterious intuitions and "innate" knowledge of this kind, and uses religious language such as "awesome" â in awe of whom or what? Or "mysterious". What is the mystery, if all is explained by science, the telescope and the microscope? He even refers to "conscience" and makes frequent thunderous denunciations of various evil actions. Where is his certain knowledge of what is right and wrong supposed to have come from? How can the idea of a conscience have any meaning in a world of random chance, where in the end we are all just collections of molecules swirling in a purposeless confusion? If you are getting inner promptings, why should you pay any attention to them? It is as absurd as the idea of a compass with no magnetic North. You might as well take moral instruction from your bile duct. Two pages later, speaking for atheists in general, he announces: "Our belief is not a belief." To which one can only reply: "Really? And that thing in the middle of your face. I suppose thatâs not a nose, either?" Christopher is not tentative about his view on God. He describes himself as an "anti-theist", so certain of his, er, faith that he wars with bitter mockery against those who doubt his truth. Well, I wish I were as certain about any of these things as Christopher is about his anti-creed. He reminds me rather more of the bearded Muslim sages of the Deoband Islamic university in India I met last year, than of the cool, thoughtful Anglicanism that we were both more or less brought up in. For the purposes of this book, religion is identified as a fanatical certainty. No doubt there are plenty of zealots who suffer from this problem. But it is obvious to anyone that vast numbers of believers in every faith are filled with doubt, and open to reason. The Church of Englandâs greatest martyr, Thomas Cranmer, was burned at the stake for changing his mind once too often. The noblest thinker of that Church, Richard Hooker, enthroned reason, alongside tradition and scripture, as one of the governing principles of faith, and warned against crude literal use of the Bible to justify or prohibit any action. Yet Christopher repeatedly asserts that believers "claim to know", not just to know, but to know everything. This simply is not true. Nor do we take the Bible literally. I never imagined that scripture had the fact-checked authenticity of, say, an account in The New York Times â though as we know even that grand newspaper sometimes publishes made-up stories without realising it. Did the Supper at Emmaus really take place? How I hope that it did, but I do not know that it did, in the way that I know a British soldier has recently been flown home dead from Basra or Helmand, or even in the way that I know that another such soldier will soon make the same sad journey. Many decades have passed since I fancied the story of Adam and Eve was literal truth, if I ever did. Rather more recently I have realised the great warning against human arrogance that is contained in it, the serpentâs silky promise that if we reject the supposedly foolish, trivial restrictions imposed on us by an interfering, jealous nuisance of a God, then we shall be liberated. As the serpent promises: "Ye shall be as gods." These may be the most important words in the whole Bible. Take the enticing satanic advice, and you arrive, quite quickly, at revolutionary terror, at the invention of the atom bomb, at the torture chamber and the building of concentration camps for those unteachable morons who do not share your vision of a just world. And also you arrive at the idea, embraced by Christopher, that by invading Iraq, you can make the world a better place. I hesitated about mentioning this. Was it unfair, a jab below the belt? No. Much of his book is devoted to claiming that religious impulse drives Man to do, or excuse, or support wicked and terrible things in the name of goodness. Is this not a perfect description of the Iraq War, which he backed?
Continued: On the few occasions where Christopher is prepared to admit that religious people have done any good, he concludes that they did so in spite of their faith, not because of it. He even suggests that the atheist Soviet tyranny was itself a form of religion. You canât win against this sort of circular absolutism. Yet he has this absurdly backwards. Religious and unbelieving people have both done dreadful things, and the worst of them have committed their murders and their tortures in the belief that they were doing good. Nothing is proved by either side in this argument, by pointing to the mountains of skulls piled up by evil atheists, and evil theists. What they have in common is that they are human, and capable of the sin of pride. The practice of religion does not automatically prevent this, and nobody said it did. It sometimes joins in with it, as Christopher points out. But if there is a voice raised against such arrogant pride in the heedless modern world, it is usually a religious one, and the death camps and dungeons of dictators always contain their ration of the faithful who â at the cost of all they held dear in the world â have listened to their consciences even when the message was so unwelcome. Perhaps they are just mad: I do not think so. My claims, you see, are much milder than his. When I skulk in the pew of a nearly-empty church, repeating the lovely, poetic formulas of the Church of England, I do not imagine that I am saved for all eternity. For all I know, Christopher is absolutely right â my prayers are pointless and a meaningless oblivion awaits. But if he is right, what a dispiriting, lowering truth it is. Atheists like to claim they behave no worse than believers, and often better. I donât deny it, in my case. It would be easy for almost anyone to have lived a more virtuous life than mine. But why should atheists care, or use such terms as "good" and "virtue" anyway? If we are weak and poor, we can all summon up self-interested decency, behaving in a kind way, in public, towards those from whom we hope for decency in return. But as soon as we have the power to do evil, we generally do. What is to stop us, unobserved, doing and planning acts of selfish unkindness against others, as so many of us do â for example â in office politics? What is to stop us, in the privacy of the home, taking advantage of the goodness of others more generous than ourselves? Who will ever know? If we become rich or mighty, how much worse the problem is. We can rob, wound and defraud our fellow creatures without any fear that they will be able to take revenge. A surprising number of us have power to act in this way. Look at the annual massacre of unborn babies, done away with for the convenience of adults. In the harsher parts of our great cities, strong, violent people rule their neighbours with pre-medieval savagery, demonstrating a fine understanding of what it means if there is no God: that if something works for you, and you can get away with it, then you may do it without fear of consequence in this world â and there is no next world. That is practical atheism. Those who follow it probably cannot even spell it. Comfortable, suburban unbelievers hate to have this pointed out to them. They would never behave like that, surrounded as they are by the invisible web of ten centuries of Christian law and morality, which still protects the nicer parts of our country. But it is the application of what they preach, the worship of self and power. Faith and belief can be and often are restraints on this arrogance of power. They offer the possibility of justice where human society fails to provide it â as it almost always does fail. There is one chapter in this book whose implications are sinister. It is Chapter 16, which attempts to suggest that religion is child abuse. On the basis of such arguments, matched by similar urgings from Professor Richard Dawkins, I can see a movement growing to outlaw the teaching of faith to children. Then what? Liberal world reformers make the grave mistake of thinking that if you abolish a great force you donât like, it will be replaced by empty space. We abolished the gallows, for example, and found we had created an armed police and an epidemic of prison suicides. We abolished school selection by exams, and found we had replaced it with selection by money. And so on. We are in the process â encouraged by Christopher â of abolishing religion, and so of abolishing conscience, too. It is one of his favourite jibes that a world ruled by faith is like North Korea, a place where all is known and all is ordered. On the contrary, North Korea is the precise opposite of a land governed by conscience. It is a country governed by men who do not believe in God or conscience, where nobody can be trusted to make his own choices, and where the State decides for the people what is right and what is wrong. And it is the ultimate destination of atheist thought. If you do not worship God, you end up worshipping power, whether it is Kim Jong Il, Leon Trotsky or the military might of George W. Bush. In which case, God help you.
"...there is the overwhelmingly sound scientific basis for self organizing arrangements of parts or elements..." If an argument from incompleteness and ignorance is sound scientific thought, then that sounds like someone isn't thinking. "Self organizing arrangements." What a crack up... Stewey, the true believer in "Self organizing arrangements." In Stewey's confused world, ignorant undirected parts just randomly, independently, purposelessly, ignorantly and mysteriously inexplicably organize themselves into a group/whole of composite parts that combine to appear as designed things which do serve a purpose (in case anyone didn't know, survival is a purpose...doh!)...and his only evidence to conclude non design at the heart of this process is scientific ignorance of why this process actually happens...so being ignorant of why, the faith develops and is practiced that it is just "the nature" of life, but of course this nature of life that they erect their belief system on is also concluded to be undirected and assumed to be the product of non design. What a completely and incredibly unbelievable assumptive circular argument passed off as "science."