@ trippie
And frankly, I think the stories of Abraham being willing to sacrifice Isaac and the suffering of Job are two of the most powerful lessons in the bible. If they don't say anything to you, fair enough, but for me they have deep meaning.
existence of supernatural gods: points for and against
Fri, 2010-09-03 15:13
#52
Fri, 2010-09-03 15:22
#53
@ Snert #51
Comfortable enough that practically the entire Christian religion - right down to their holidays and customs - is built on a framework of pantheist and pagan beliefs.
And lest anyone think this ended in Roman times, check out any European art right up until the end of the 19th century (when we suddenly got a lot less literate). There are at least as many, if not more, cultural references to classical pantheism than there are to Christian tradition. So no, even orthodox christianity wasn't threatened by ideas unless they were in the form of an organized living threat, or something they wanted to use as a scapegoat.
Greco-Roman ideals did not fall under that category.
Fri, 2010-09-03 15:29
#54
Snert, you must have very limited social-cultural relations. I suspect that most of my RC relatives (huge extended family) have long believed that I was a pagan (which in some ways I am), and that's never bothered them in the least, far as I can tell. It was never a problem for my mother, who went to mass every day. Most good people know what goodness is about and they recognize and appreciate it in others.
God is a straw man necessary to atheists. Heaven is a straw haystack necessary to atheists. And literalists don't know how to read except in the most banal technical sense.
Fri, 2010-09-03 15:59
#55
I very much agree with what Skdadl has been saying. It is very interesting that the athesist position demands a literalist and fundamentalist interpretation of any scripture and in doing so there arguments become a literalist and fundamentalist. The atheists presume to know what people mean when they speak of god and this presumption again assumes that everyone believes in the old guy in the sky. Anyone who has done a minimal reading in any theology knows this is not the case. When people speak of god or the devine I do not preume to know what they mean. There are vast number of ways of contemplating the devine. The mystics of all traditions state that any mental construction of the devine or even the use of the word actually creates a barrier to the experience of the devine. My favourite way of framing this is the statement " When the saint points at the moon the fool sees the finger." The atheist and some believers will argue endlessly about whether the finger is the devine.
I've been told before on this board that I am a bad agnostic due to my refusal to denounce. Others think that we agnostics are just hedging our bets. I maintain that as I grow older I find it less and less necessary to know any definitively. This is of course the same positon of Socarates the only thing that I know is that I know nothing. It is also an error to think that one need subscribe to the believe or not dichotomy, one can always maintain an openess to possibilty. My readings in Buddhism,( i do not consider myself a buddhist or feel the need to) have helped me to consider the necessity of deep attachment to any belief system. The demand that we believe or not is in itself a believe. I am quite content to imagine that possibly there are fairies loch ness monsters, ghosts or flying spaghetti monsters. There are certainly things that I consider more implausible(the guy in the sky being most implausible) yet I resist the demand for certainty. This is the similarity that many atheists share with many believers the demand for certainty it must be this way and you must believe it to be this way otherwise there is something wrong with you.
I'm heading up North to a place I consider sacred, in otherwords profoundly and deeply comforting and meaningful so I will miss the opportunity to say things any more clearly.
Fri, 2010-09-03 18:39
#56
My biggest problem with the Judeo-Christo-Islamic family of religions, aside from their constant internecine squabbling, is the basic premise that its God chose the Jews for His people - and didn't tell anyone else! That was unkind.
(Incidentally, re Dawkins. It's not the contradictions in the Bible that he objects to so much as the atrocities. The Israelites in the Old Testament stories behaved in a fashion similar to the modern Israelites - which none of you seem to approve of! - and it was not merely okay but good and right and holy, because God told them to.)
I have no problem with spirituality, with awe, with a perception of the sacred or an experience beyond rational explanation. People have those experiences and they are quite real. People very possibly need those experiences: there is something in the human mind that yearns for contact - let's say intimacy - with the universe, however we think of the universe at any given time.
Of course there are no gods of the kind various peoples have described in their various mythologies. And i do not make light or fun of myth, nor do i confuse it (as many people do nowadays) with lies or fantasies: mythology is far more serious and important than to be assessed by ignorant outsiders' standard. All those deities, all those belief-systems, have a legitemacy and a reality too profound to be dissected and judged as if they were as simple and accessible as an essay on the mining of copper, or a contract for a shipment of beef. Whole different category; needs a whole lot more understanding and finesse... and doesn't need to be done at all, because it serves no useful purpose.
We can see that the vast majority of Christians don't really believe in Jesus or they wouldn't behave so contrarily to his teaching. They obviously don't believe in the heaven, hell and judgment they preach, or they would be very frightened. I'm not sure of the others - don't know how much leeway they think Jahovah and Allah give their followers. I do know about the Christians. The ones - few enough and powerless - who do believe, who do act according to the new commandment, are very much worth having on one's side.
The problem is not belief but power, not the gods but the institutions built in their names. Organizationas that have unchallenged authority gain ever more power and wealth; the most ruthless, unprincipled people always take over, and they always use the power destructively.
Fri, 2010-09-03 20:27
#57
My biggest problem with the Judeo-Christo-Islamic family of religions, aside from their constant internecine squabbling, is the basic premise that its God chose the Jews for His people - and didn't tell anyone else! That was unkind./.../The problem is not belief but power, not the gods but the institutions built in their names. Organizationas that have unchallenged authority gain ever more power and wealth; the most ruthless, unprincipled people always take over, and they always use the power destructively.
I'm trying to remember when the last internecine war occurred. Was it the 30 years war? Today our rich and powerful warfiteers don't need religion to wage profitable wars. I guess it's true that people like Ronald Reagan through to dubya have aligned themselves with God and said that war is God's will. But they were obviously lying in order to convince millions of the need for millions to take on massive war debts and spending wildly on war. And war is always a resource grab and to project the power of one nation's elitists on another. Today, any excuse for war will do. It doesn't have to be a religious conquest. Today's wars tend to be waged for reasons that aren't very clear to the public.
Fri, 2010-09-03 22:20
#58
The last ones are going on now, in several places. By internecine, i mean usually Christians vs Muslims, or Christians vs Jews, or Jews vs Muslims (all three have the same roots, the same chief god), but a squabble doesn't have to be betwen nations, it may be a conflict between Catholics and Protestants, or two different Jewish or Muslim sects - anyway, it's always some damn thing, and innocent people are always getting killed and hurt, beggared and exiled.
Gods never make war. Men make war. They are always obviously lying. It's never really about religion: it's always really about getting the other people's land and resources, but God sure is a great way to fire people up. Literally, sometimes. Right now, truly frightening forces of hatred are massed under all three of God's flags - and i don't think the people who put them in motion can control them.
Fri, 2010-09-03 22:22
#59
It says right there in the Bible that it's the word of God. QED.Plus, I *need* there to be a God, because the complexity of our universe would terrify me otherwise, and also because I can't process the concept of a world without me in it somehow, so I need a Heaven too.
I think the major religions of the world tend to teach a non materialist view of reality, and that our existence here is only a temporary one. This is more or less an opposite point of view of things compared to 18th and 19th century science that said that mortality is the way, and that that there are strict boundaries between inanimate objects, and the view that people are more or less individuals reliant on only ourselves. The old story of science said that things and people are made of irreducible and indestructible bits of inanimate matter.
But that scientific view changed since Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg etc. Scientists today understand that merely observing an electron or photon changes it in some way. The smallest bits of matter comprising reality all around us are not independent of the mind of a scientific observer. In the post-Newtonian era of scientific truth, the division of mind and matter, between the individual and the world, is no longer true. Therefore we can't really talk about the concept of I, me, you and yourself without speaking of nature all around us at the same time, or at least, not in a scientific way.
What we are left holding the bag with today is an old world ideology that suggests riches and material wealth are individual rights, and knowledge can be stored up individually in a person's mind. Knowledge is power, and knowledge can be commodified. But how does one own things without affecting some one else or effecting the material wealth or poverty of others, or nature itself? We are all connected with nature and with one another according to modern science, but not according to the science of economics producing so much inequality. We seem to be living a way of life today that is at odds with the laws of nature. We don't live as if we are connected to very much and only "plugging-in" to other people and nature whenever the overriding economic system allows us to.
Fri, 2010-09-03 22:31
#60
And I always thought it was a cold war thing with the US propping up a succession of fascist regimes in Israel with billions of dollars in aid and weapons every year, and then arming Israel's enemies to the eye teeth as well.
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game
Sat, 2010-09-04 02:46
#61
On this idea that atheists need god as a straw man, or that we have a literal interpretation of the meaning of god:
Isn't that kind of a circular argument though? For the non-believer to "need" the god? There would be no such thing as atheism if there wasn't theism. In other words, it's the theists who brought up the whole idea, we're just saying we think it's all made up.
And one of the arguments many atheists make is that it's quite true the whole story is a metaphor and anything but literal, it's the believers who have decided the story is real. I think the content of the bible is rather irrelevant to the discussion beyond what believers claim to be true: the existence of a supernatural being with power, creation of the universe and the existence of an after life.
Also, is it just me or is when anyone is forced to be a bit specific on their beliefs in this area and defend them with something other that "i just believe it okay?" then everyone starts saying the discussion is really not important anyways since we probably won't agree in the end. One of the reasons i started this thread was i was hoping the folks here, who have generally shown themselves to be rational competent thinkers, would have a better reason for believing what they do or could elaborate on it a bit more. Obviously you must have thought about these things before you decided there is a supernatural being who created the universe that informs your approach to life, i'm curious as to what it is!
the one and only example put forth was a direct experience with the divine, could you elaborate? What was it?
Sat, 2010-09-04 04:50
#62
I've long ago come to the conclusion that many of the things I was taught about Christianity were fairy tales designed long ago to scare superstitious people into keeping the faith. Ditto for Judaism & Islam. And a 2000 year old book written in riddles translated from an obsolete dialect of a foreign language is hardly a great basis for the fount of all truth.
Still, none of this rules out the possibility of afterlife or even an omniscient, omnipotent being. There is indirect evidence of non-physical consciousness - ghosts, near death experiences. It really comes down to what you would rather believe.
Sat, 2010-09-04 10:58
#63
remind
Personally find it very offensive that "God" is being referred to as a she, in opposition to the historical depiction of God as a male, when one is stating their hatred of the belief in "God".
Sat, 2010-09-04 11:41
#64
@ remind
At least some of that is mis-translation. Certainly the church as it was interpreted by Paul was very opposed to Dianic and other god and goddess cults, but the god of moses was neither male nor female.
Actually I think it's kind of odd that the most patriarchal church of all - the Roman Catholic - is also the one that has incorporated the most graven images, the most pantheism, and the most goddess worship with their focus on the saints and Mary in particular.
Sat, 2010-09-04 13:48
#65
Personally find it very offensive that "God" is being referred to as a she, in opposition to the historical depiction of God as a male, when one is stating their hatred of the belief in "God".
Really? Personally, I find it very offensive when someone wanders into an interesting thread and disrupts it with an unsubstantiated allegation.
Throw out some vague allegation and let people troll through the thread to see if it has any merit. Nice debate, remind.
Sat, 2010-09-04 14:01
#66
bagkitty
Things would be so much better if we were still offering up sacrifices by hanging people from oak trees, drowning them in bogs, or cutting out their hearts and presenting them to the sun. We have all gotten away from the essentials these days, what is needed is painful sacrifice, to Odin, to Lugh, to Quetzacoatl, heck even dread Cthulhu wants its share of bloody sacrifice.
I would say more, but the dragon needs feeding and I have to go kidnap some puppies for it.
Sat, 2010-09-04 14:18
#67
I don't believe in god because god has never done sweet f***-all for me, but everything is negotiable.
Sat, 2010-09-04 15:25
#68
@ bagkitty
I think that tradition is still alive and well. It is called politics.
Sat, 2010-09-04 15:40
#69
Is the connection between man and the stars myth and legend, or might it be true that our ancient ancestors met with technically advanced people many thousands of years ago? Would they spin legend and myths for a long time afterward based on some sort of contact with strange visitors from afar? Would those ancient tales be passed on through the ages, each time made a little more elaborate and eventually read like so much science fiction today?
[url=http://www.hibla.com/hibla/index.htm]Hajar el Hibla[/url] The stone of the pregnant woman at Baalbek, Lebanon is the largest cut stone in the world. Was it some kind of astronomical aid used long ago?
The 2000 year-old [url=http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/is-it-real/2701/Overview#ta... Mechanism[/url] is an ancient “computer” that probably aided navigators by charting the motions of the solar system.
Were 3000 Roman soldiers really turned to stone at [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnac_stones]Carnac[/url] by Merlin or Saint Cornelius?
Are these really [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_astronauts]astronauts[/url] painted on a cave wall in Val Camonica, Italy 10,000 B.C.?
Sat, 2010-09-04 16:07
#70
Things would be so much better if we were still offering up sacrifices by hanging people from oak trees, drowning them in bogs, or cutting out their hearts and presenting them to the sun. We have all gotten away from the essentials these days, what is needed is painful sacrifice, to Odin, to Lugh, to Quetzacoatl, heck even dread Cthulhu wants its share of bloody sacrifice.
What if? What if those gods from the stars needed sustenance during their visit? What if they weren't benevolent gods and demanded food offerings on some regular basis? Some gods they were. Maybe they didn't eat solid food and required flesh of pigs or even people to be sublimated by fire. They inhaled nutrition, because their digestive tracts didn't work the same as their human hosts. They gave specific instructions to a designated slaughterer to be clean about it. Leave the person on some altar turning on a spit, and then banish the people to the forests so as to conceal their hideous appearance. Or maybe it was to avoid direct contact with their hosts who carried alien germs that might make the gods sick? Come on, we have to use our imaginations here!
Sat, 2010-09-04 19:39
#71
Things would be so much better if we were still offering up sacrifices by hanging people from oak trees, drowning them in bogs, or cutting out their hearts and presenting them to the sun. We have all gotten away from the essentials these days, what is needed is painful sacrifice, to Odin, to Lugh, to Quetzacoatl, heck even dread Cthulhu wants its share of bloody sacrifice.
I would say more, but the dragon needs feeding and I have to go kidnap some puppies for it.
The whole point of Christianity is to replace the annual child or young man with a once-for-all redemptive godling. As such, it wasn't a bad idea. All that preaching he did beforehand was also a break with tradition - or should have been. I only wish fewer of the saved took the sacrifice for granted and more took the preaching to heart.
Sat, 2010-09-04 21:26
#72
Also, knowing that religion seems to have originated with worship of the sun and evolved from there into the many stories and versions that now exist, it seems odd to me that people can readily accept that greek gods for example were simply a story concocted by the greeks and not real.
What seems odd to me is how people in various parts of the world could concoct stories and myths about gods descending from the heavens to hand them important agricultural knowledge of the seasons, when to sew, harvest etc. It seems even odder for me to think of ancient people sitting around, thousands of years before the telescope was invented, and that they might imagine gods living somewhere out there among the twinkling stars. And especially when they didn't understand what a star is or that planets sometimes orbit around them. They might think that the earth is all there was of creation, and that stars in the sky were merely tiny lights appearing in the night after sundown and nothing more. Really odd.
Sun, 2010-09-05 10:10
#73
Spectrum
You can create myth out of a "ideological struggle" and represent it by recognizing a underlying psychology?
[i]Richards Wagners's Ring of Nibelung
Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D. Ring of Power was interesting.
Strange that we could have seen A Jungian Understanding of the Wagners Ring cycle, portrayed in todays world and how could have this been accomplished. But by re-introducing a fictional story and embueing it with the archetypal structures of what Jean Shinida Bolen called, "The Abandon Child, The Authoritarian Father, and the Disempowered Feminine."[/i]
But I think you have to find some comparison to understand how such construction could manifest allegorically the experience, and then realize how creative we can be by using language to transmit the ideas of that experience.
[i]Mount Olympus:View from Litochoro
In the Greek mythology, Mount Olympus is the home of the Olympians, the principal gods in the Greek pantheon. The Greeks thought of it as built with crystal mansions wherein the gods, such as Zeus, dwelt. It is also known in Greek mythology that when Gaia gave birth to the Vols they used the mountains in Greece as their thrones.[/i]
Why don't we just come out and describe the experience? Why does our situation in life have to be metaphorically distilled irrational tidbits of experience in our dreams for deciphering? Is Myth then a use of language that we never considered before?
[i]In the modern age of science and space flight the idea that Heaven is a physical place in the observable universe has largely been abandoned.[citation needed] Religious views, however, still hold Heaven as having a dual status as a concept of mind or heart, but also possibly still physically existing in some way on another "plane of existence", dimension, or perhaps at a future time.[citation needed] According to science there are unobservable areas of the universe (everywhere beyond earth's Particle horizon), although by their very nature it is not possible to observe them.[/i]
Culturally adapted myths used to send information from one generation to the next?
So, the divine is a personal experience? How do you measure it? Could such parameters of truth be established that regardless of religion or denomination or as one holding atheistic views, that what is at fault here is "language and how it is used?"
Do you now recognize the parables of one's bible as holding a different meanings now that you understand how information can be transmitted? How you hide "experience" behind your choice of language.
[i]Science and TA by Chris BoydIf deduction is another way of knowing in TA, where and when is it applicable? Berne did use Venn diagrams, circles either distinct or overlapping, which were borrowed directly from symbolic logic to visually describe transactions. Perhaps TA in part can be considered a theory that analyzes ones own deductions based on childhood primitive assumptions. Perhaps it focuses on how people become irrational in decision making. In this case, TA provides critical thinking skills for human relations and can be considered a basis for analyzing the accuracy of our reality testing. Much as mathematics provides the language for science, TA may provide the logic for human relations and can be at least in part a deductive language.[/i]
Sun, 2010-09-05 10:29
#74
Spectrum
The point is, is to distill the information to it's ultimate source?
Mathematically this may be real as if seen in context of "Game Theory?" How it is applied to all negotiation processes.
[i]This science is unusual in the breadth of its potential applications. Unlike physics or chemistry, which have a clearly defined and narrow scope, the precepts of game theory are useful in a whole range of activities, from everyday social interactions and sports to business and economics, politics, law, diplomacy and war. Biologists have recognized that the Darwinian struggle for survival involves strategic interactions, and modern evolutionary theory has close links with game theory.
Game theory got its start with the work of John von Neumann in the 1920s, which culminated in his book with Oskar Morgenstern. They studied "zero-sum" games where the interests of two players were strictly opposed. John Nash treated the more general and realistic case of a mixture of common interests and rivalry and any number of players. Other theorists, most notably Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi who shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize with Nash, studied even more complex games with sequences of moves, and games where one player has more information than others.[/i]
A lot of dynamics "like experience," but ultimately its reducible to an interactive relation that brings the process to fruition, whether it is liked or not, by each relevant negotiator?
While we may have figure our whole being "as complex by any rational standards" there were patterns established by producing parameters around that experience which can help us to see the underlying psychology that is presented by our own collage of personal experiences.
On some ephemeral level this may appear as interactions of entanglement when see in relation to drawings of Venn Logic and seeing our makeup in TA as circles overlapping as experiences in our makeup??
Sun, 2010-09-05 18:32
#75
@ Pants of Dog Post #48:
Like I said, until proven differently; there is no god.
Your arguement did not prove anything other then you trying to slick talk your way around it.
Sun, 2010-09-05 18:43
#76
@6079 Smith W Post #52.
Yes you are correct , they are stories. Kind of disturbing stories, but stories none the less.
Think about it. This God that created the universe wants one of it's creations, Abraham, to kill anther one of it's creations, Abrahams son.
It's like going to the theatre and watching one of the SAW movies. In those movies no one would question who the sicko is. But the bible, oh thats just God teaching a valuable lesson.
And Job, his family dieds and his life is in ruins. But does he blame the God that created everthing for this situation. Oh no that would be bad and sinful. No he's respectful to the God that created and distroyed everything in his life.
Sun, 2010-09-05 18:52
#77
I can understand ancient people creating myths about gods from the sea or the earth itself. Forces of nature must have been the source of a sense of awe for ancient man . Even the air above them possessed powerful forces in wind and sunlight.
But those stars way out there in the blackness of night - they are just dots of light for ancient man who had neither telescopes nor binoculars. Had there been binoculars thousands of years ago, it would have been a shocking experience for the observer. It would be like us looking down from atop the tallest mountain at a village of people thousands of feet below and seeing what look like ants running around - not very impressive from our ancient point of view. But then to see the people walking around inside the metal tubes in our hands would have been a magical experience in itself. Why should ancient people in various places all over the world believe that anyone could travel to and from the stars, tiny points of light suspended in the blackness of the heavens above?
Sun, 2010-09-05 18:53
#78
@ posts 54 and 55:
Let me state it this way.
Until proven differently; there is no divine entity, of any kind, anywhere in the universe(s).
Having fictitious friend(s), so that you can cope with the complexities of life, is one thing and must be understood as such. But thinking that this invisible being, thing or what ever actually exists is another.
Sun, 2010-09-05 19:11
#79
@ trippie #75
Of course, it's gory and sometimes plain weird (Jacob wrestling an angel all night until his hip is broken? Magic food falling from the sky like in Lost?) But in that it's not much different than any other tradition's mythical stories. It reads a bit differently when you realize that probably no actual humans were harmed during the making of this story (the oldest part of it anyway - certainly up to the exodus, and probably a good deal of it afterward).
And like any other myth, it makes a lot more sense if you interpret it in the same way a dream might make you feel. THings start to get screwed up when people start to interpret it literally and expect to pattern their lives directly after it.
Abraham's story is an indication to me of how far a person can go in devoting or sacrificing his or herself for a greater ideal - that's one way of looking at it, anyway.
Sun, 2010-09-05 19:14
#80
Myths:
I love the new ones. The ones that come out of Hollywood and make people believe that the USA is out there saving the world.
Sun, 2010-09-05 19:21
#81
How the Jews got their singular God.
Moses came out of Egypt during the time of Ramsis II.
Ramsis's II father invended the singualr God above all other Gods.
The End.
Sun, 2010-09-05 19:38
#82
the Real reason why humans invented religion?
I am in agreement with the argument that humans invented religion and God(s) because or our need for social contact.
God(s) and relgion brings social cohesion to humans.
The thing is, humans understanding has surpassed such need and religion should be exposed for what it is; outdated philosophy.
Sun, 2010-09-05 19:44
#83
@Smith w Post #78:
I think you missed the point of Abraham and his son.
Abramhan is God and his son is Jesus. It's just the same biblical story repeated.
Abraham has to sacrifice his son to save_____. Just like God has to sacrifice his son to save humanity.
Sun, 2010-09-05 19:56
#84
the Real reason why humans invented religion?
I am in agreement with the argument that humans invented religion and God(s) because or our need for social contact.
God(s) and relgion brings social cohesion to humans.
The thing is, humans understanding has surpassed such need and religion should be exposed for what it is; outdated philosophy.
I think this is true but would add to it. We (humans) also need god because we are afraid of death. With god, death is just a stepping stone to somewhere totally groovy. Without god, death is just stopping living.
Sun, 2010-09-05 20:14
#85
yup.
How about this one... Oh in this life it does not matter if you live in the gutter. Because in the after life you will live in paradise and those rich people that just walk over you will live in hell. Yup it's better to wait for the after life.
Actually, if you are talking about the bible. It says 'ashes to ashes and dust to dust'. Basicly when you die you will turn to dust. There is no one going heaven in the bible.
Just say the Lords prayer and you will see is says 'peace on earth just like heaven'. But there is a resurrection, were everyone comes back to life and lives on earth and the devil is let loose for 1000 years and then he is taken away again and then ... What a story I tell ya . What a story.
Sun, 2010-09-05 20:26
#86
To me, i can't understand why people still accept the idea of a supernatural god being a real thing.
It probably is easier, as you suggest, to believe in a natural god.
Mon, 2010-09-06 02:11
#87
I think that imperialist adventurers have from time to time purged various religious and cultural beliefs of indigenous people around the world. European explorers and their priests were infamous for burning and destroying the writings and religious scriptures of the people they conquered in Latin America. Thousands of manuscripts preserved for centuries by indigenous cultures and valuable for, at the very least, an historical record and to anthropologists, were destroyed over the course of a few centuries. This is true of indigenous cultural and spiritual beliefs here in the western hemisphere as well as other parts of the world. It was thought by imperialists and church that native ways are inferior to those of the conquering forces. Imperialists tended to believe that because indigenous peoples are conquerable, then everything about them must be inferior WRT everything the conquering invaders have to offer them as a right of being on the winning side of things in general.
[url=http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc167.htm]Can Tales of Sirius Be Taken Seriously?[/url] Jay Ingram, Toronto Star
The story revolves around the Dogon people of west Africa. In the late 1940s, Dogon leaders laid out much of their tribal knowledge for two French anthropologists. Contained in that lore were intriguing references to Sirius - not just to the familiar, bright star, but to an invisible companion.This second star was said by the Dogon to be composed of an extremely dense material ("all earthly beings combined cannot lift it") and to move in a 50-year orbit around Sirius. The anthropologists estimated that this knowledge had been part of the Dogon mythology for several centuries.
What struck westerners as remarkable about these beliefs is that it wasn't until 1862 that astronomer Alvan Clark discovered that Sirius did indeed have a small, barely visible companion star. The Dogon had apparently beaten Clark to the punch by several hundred years. [...]
Pick your favorite explanation, because you'll never be proven wrong says TorStar science columnist Jay Ingram.
ETA:
[url=http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25699/]The Extraordinary Tale of Red Rain, Comets and Extraterrestrials[/url] 9.01.2010
For years, claims have circulated that red rain which fell in India in 2001, contained cells unlike any found on Earth. Now new evidence that these cells can reproduce is about to set the debate alive. [...] Panspermia is the idea that life exists throughout the universe in comets, asteroids and interstellar dust clouds and that life of Earth was seeded from one or more of these sources. Panspermia holds that we are all extraterrestrials.
More circumstantial evidence.
Mon, 2010-09-06 17:02
#88
@ Pants of Dog Post #48:
Like I said, until proven differently; there is no god.
Your arguement did not prove anything other then you trying to slick talk your way around it.
Please explain how my post was incorrect. Thank you.
Mon, 2010-09-06 17:46
#89
I'm your God.
I can't prove that statement is true. You can't prove it's false. The probabilities are that it's false. But what if having decided it's false, you're wrong? You're going to hell that's what. So I strongly encourage you to hedge your bets by worshiping me. Ask about the specially discounted family plan. At the Holy WingNut, Your Soul Is Worth Saving.
Mon, 2010-09-06 17:57
#90
@Smith w Post #78:
I think you missed the point of Abraham and his son.
Abramhan is God and his son is Jesus. It's just the same biblical story repeated.
Abraham has to sacrifice his son to save_____. Just like God has to sacrifice his son to save humanity.
That is not the point, trippie. It's certainly not the point for Jews. Some Christians have interpreted it that way, but only some. (I certainly don't!) It's likely that behind this story was a historical practice of child sacrifice. It's a horrible story, but at least at the last minute, God says, "don't do it". It's at least arguable that that's the point.
Mon, 2010-09-06 17:58
#91
I'm your God.
I can't prove that statement is true. You can't prove it's false.
Lord Wingnut, prove the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture for any curve with rank greater than 1. You've got one minute to solve it before being demoted and forced to turn in your god cap and gown.
Mon, 2010-09-06 18:00
#92
You're going to hell Fidel. As your Lord and Master I need not prove anything. You have one chance to save your soul. Do you have a PayPal account?
Mon, 2010-09-06 18:04
#93
ha ha