The Golden Rule was around long before Jesus supposedly uttered it.
Ancient Egypt.- circa 2000 BCE “Do for one who may do for you, That you may cause him thus to do.” – The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant 109-110,
Hebrew Bible – circa 700 BCE “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your countrymen. Love your fellow as yourself: I am the LORD.”
Zoroastrianism.- circa 600 BCE “That nature only is good when it shall not do unto another whatever is not good for its own self.” – Dadistan-i-Dinik 94:5,
Buddhism.- circa 500 BCE “Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.” – Udana-Varga 5:18,
Confucianism.- circa 500 BCE “What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.” Analects of Confucius 15:24,
Socrates.- circa 400 BCE “Do not do to others what would anger you if done to you by others.”
Monday, September 12, 2011
Monday, September 5, 2011
Does abortion cause mental break-downs in women?
There is much discussion regarding a new study which claims to show a link between abortion and the mental health of women.
The meta-analysis in the latest edition of the British Journal of Psychiatry examined 22 studies from 1995-2009 involving 877,000 women, including 163,000 who had experienced an abortion.
The paper’s author, Priscilla K. Coleman of Bowling Green State University, said there actually are “hundreds of studies” showing a link between abortion and serious mental health risks, and that three recent studies that reached a very different conclusion had major flaws. One of those studies by an American Psychological Association task force received significant media attention and concluded there were no risks.
However, there are many who are showing that the study was flawed. Below is the link to one such review.
Critiquing the “Critique”: Efforts to Distort the Post-Abortion Mental Health Literature Become More Obvious with each Successive Attempt
Robinson, Stotland, Russo, Lang, and Occhiogrosso recently published a paper in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry entitled “Is there an “Abortion Trauma Syndrome”? Critiquing the Evidence” This is the latest in a series of attempts to review the world literature on abortion and mental health in an effort to “substantiate” the claim that abortion does not carry risks for psychological harm. Prior efforts included the American Psychological Association’s Task Force Report and a review piece published by Johns Hopkins University researchers in the journal Contraception. In the most recent review, the authors’ primary conclusions that “the most well-controlled studies continue to demonstrate that there is no convincing evidence that induced abortion of an unwanted pregnancy is per se a significant risk factor for psychiatric illness” is entirely unfounded for serious scientifically-based reasons. A few of the problems are highlighted below.
1) The most glaring problem with the article is the arbitrary number of papers selected to review and the manner in which the authors chose particular published reports to analyze. The authors mention having identified 216 peer-reviewed papers on the topic of abortion and mental health and then note selection of a sample of studies that “exemplify common errors in research methodology” as well as “major articles that attempt to correct the flaws.” Their choice of studies in each category was based on the conclusion derived as opposed to the integrity of the design. Numerous methodologically sound studies that have yielded results counter to the authors’ politically driven conclusion are entirely ignored with no rationale offered. In a valid scientific review, criteria for selection (e.g., sample size, representativeness, type of comparison group, how well controlled it is, etc.) are specified at the outset and then the results of each study meeting the criteria are examined to identify general trends. This review lacks a systematic methodology for selection of studies to evaluate rendering the conclusions entirely invalid.
A sampling of important studies with good methodology which were omitted from the review are detailed below. Readers are encourage to visit the Alliance for Post-Abortion Research and Training's website, www.standapart.org, for straightforward, systematic, unbiased synopses of the literature including details pertaining to the studies listed below.
http://wiki.afterabortion.org/index.php?title=Is_there_an_%E2%80%9CAbortion_Trauma_Syndrome%E2%80%9D%3F_Critiquing_the_Evidence
The meta-analysis in the latest edition of the British Journal of Psychiatry examined 22 studies from 1995-2009 involving 877,000 women, including 163,000 who had experienced an abortion.
The paper’s author, Priscilla K. Coleman of Bowling Green State University, said there actually are “hundreds of studies” showing a link between abortion and serious mental health risks, and that three recent studies that reached a very different conclusion had major flaws. One of those studies by an American Psychological Association task force received significant media attention and concluded there were no risks.
However, there are many who are showing that the study was flawed. Below is the link to one such review.
Critiquing the “Critique”: Efforts to Distort the Post-Abortion Mental Health Literature Become More Obvious with each Successive Attempt
Robinson, Stotland, Russo, Lang, and Occhiogrosso recently published a paper in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry entitled “Is there an “Abortion Trauma Syndrome”? Critiquing the Evidence” This is the latest in a series of attempts to review the world literature on abortion and mental health in an effort to “substantiate” the claim that abortion does not carry risks for psychological harm. Prior efforts included the American Psychological Association’s Task Force Report and a review piece published by Johns Hopkins University researchers in the journal Contraception. In the most recent review, the authors’ primary conclusions that “the most well-controlled studies continue to demonstrate that there is no convincing evidence that induced abortion of an unwanted pregnancy is per se a significant risk factor for psychiatric illness” is entirely unfounded for serious scientifically-based reasons. A few of the problems are highlighted below.
1) The most glaring problem with the article is the arbitrary number of papers selected to review and the manner in which the authors chose particular published reports to analyze. The authors mention having identified 216 peer-reviewed papers on the topic of abortion and mental health and then note selection of a sample of studies that “exemplify common errors in research methodology” as well as “major articles that attempt to correct the flaws.” Their choice of studies in each category was based on the conclusion derived as opposed to the integrity of the design. Numerous methodologically sound studies that have yielded results counter to the authors’ politically driven conclusion are entirely ignored with no rationale offered. In a valid scientific review, criteria for selection (e.g., sample size, representativeness, type of comparison group, how well controlled it is, etc.) are specified at the outset and then the results of each study meeting the criteria are examined to identify general trends. This review lacks a systematic methodology for selection of studies to evaluate rendering the conclusions entirely invalid.
A sampling of important studies with good methodology which were omitted from the review are detailed below. Readers are encourage to visit the Alliance for Post-Abortion Research and Training's website, www.standapart.org, for straightforward, systematic, unbiased synopses of the literature including details pertaining to the studies listed below.
http://wiki.afterabortion.org/index.php?title=Is_there_an_%E2%80%9CAbortion_Trauma_Syndrome%E2%80%9D%3F_Critiquing_the_Evidence
Saturday, September 3, 2011
What makes a nation prosperous?
I was asked this odd question during an online exchange recently. "Can a nation continue in un-Biblical methods and believe that it can prosper"?
Hmmm, let us think about that. According to the bible, loaning money, wearing blended fabrics, eating shellfish, trimming beards and approaching any woman during the time of her "uncleanness" are abominations in the eyes of your god. Therefore, for a nation to avoid all of these things, they need to outlaw banks, clothing stores, tailors, laundry matts, fishermen, restaurants, barbers and of course, make sure all women are quarantined once a month for a week.
I am sure with these proper biblical concepts in place, a nation will prosper much better.
Hmmm, let us think about that. According to the bible, loaning money, wearing blended fabrics, eating shellfish, trimming beards and approaching any woman during the time of her "uncleanness" are abominations in the eyes of your god. Therefore, for a nation to avoid all of these things, they need to outlaw banks, clothing stores, tailors, laundry matts, fishermen, restaurants, barbers and of course, make sure all women are quarantined once a month for a week.
I am sure with these proper biblical concepts in place, a nation will prosper much better.
Thursday, September 1, 2011
How to justify a belief in god
I was listening to someone on the radio talk about how being in war and having to order people to engage in combat matures one very quickly. It occurred to me that this issue could explain how religion became so widespread with humanity so early on with our societies.
I am sure it must be a very difficult process to order someone to go to a war zone and engage in a fight that could result in their death. How do you rationalize that order? It could help if you believe that the person who died is going to some heavenly reward. It can also help in explaining to the person why they should obey the order to engage in an activity that may kill them.
A belief in a supernatural afterlife makes it easier for the commander to give these orders. But how do you make the solders believe? You now have to start creating an entire belief system to support the assertion that this supernatural afterlife actually exists. One person cannot do this, so they find people willing to help. This develops the clergy, who quickly recognises the financial and social benefits of being in charge of this activity. The commander states his ideas come from this god and therefore, are not to be questioned.
It is harder to convince adults of a new idea, so they start with the young children. After hundreds and thousands of years, the ideas become entrenched in the society. Entire families are raised with this supernatural concept. Believers are rewarded, the skeptics are killed or run off. The other leaders in other societies around this group embrace this idea because they also need people willing to follow their orders without question that will fight to the death.
You now have a self sustaining belief system in place. The people commanding the deaths have also been raised from birth to believe the lie. The people being killed have been raised from birth to accept the lie. The clergy have been raised from birth to accept the fables as truth. And the story continues to be told and accepted because the children are told from their most trusted source, their parents, that the story is true.
I am sure it must be a very difficult process to order someone to go to a war zone and engage in a fight that could result in their death. How do you rationalize that order? It could help if you believe that the person who died is going to some heavenly reward. It can also help in explaining to the person why they should obey the order to engage in an activity that may kill them.
A belief in a supernatural afterlife makes it easier for the commander to give these orders. But how do you make the solders believe? You now have to start creating an entire belief system to support the assertion that this supernatural afterlife actually exists. One person cannot do this, so they find people willing to help. This develops the clergy, who quickly recognises the financial and social benefits of being in charge of this activity. The commander states his ideas come from this god and therefore, are not to be questioned.
It is harder to convince adults of a new idea, so they start with the young children. After hundreds and thousands of years, the ideas become entrenched in the society. Entire families are raised with this supernatural concept. Believers are rewarded, the skeptics are killed or run off. The other leaders in other societies around this group embrace this idea because they also need people willing to follow their orders without question that will fight to the death.
You now have a self sustaining belief system in place. The people commanding the deaths have also been raised from birth to believe the lie. The people being killed have been raised from birth to accept the lie. The clergy have been raised from birth to accept the fables as truth. And the story continues to be told and accepted because the children are told from their most trusted source, their parents, that the story is true.
Friday, August 26, 2011
Does Evolution explain how life was created?
Evolution does not care about how the universe started or how life was formed on Earth. When people make this claim, they are creating a straw man argument. The Theory of Evolution discusses how existing life changes over time. That life could have been created by the biblical god, the Greek gods or Quetzalcoatl, The Aztec Plumed Serpent god. It makes no difference to the theory whatsoever. The theory of evolution applies as long as life exists. How that life came to exist is not relevant to evolution. Claiming that evolution does not apply without a theory of abiogenesis makes as much sense as saying that umbrellas do not work without a theory of meteorology.
They are actually arguing over Abiogenesis, which is the theory of how life was started and the Big Bang Theory, which is the current idea of how the universe was created. However, even if those ideas are completely wrong, that would not change one thing about the Theory of Evolution. They are not interdependent and do not require each other to be accurate. However, Abiogenesis is a fact. Regardless of how you imagine it happened (note that creation is a theory of abiogenesis), it is a fact that there once was no life on earth and that now there is. Thus, even if evolution needs abiogenesis, it has it.
This is an article of one creationist site trying to discount evolution. I am showing it since it is common of the arguments against evolution.
There is a great deal about abiogenesis that is unknown, but investigating the unknown is what science is for. Speculation is part of the process. As long as the speculations can be tested, they are scientific. Much scientific work has been done in testing different hypotheses relating to abiogenesis.
There is still the same, single, fundamental problem with all these statistical calculations, one that I mention in my review of Foster: no one knows what the first life was. People like Morowitz can try to calculate what is, at a minimum, possible, and laboratory experiments, like that which discovered the powers of tetrahymena (see Addenda C), can approach a guess, but these guesses still do not count as knowledge, and it is not sound to claim that simply because we don't know what it was, therefore we can't assume there was such a simple life form. And even if we accept such an argument, to go from there to "god" is essentially a god-of-the-gaps argument. When we did not know how the bumble-bee flew, was that an adequate ground for positing god as the answer, or was it instead cause for further scientific investigation aimed at finding out the natural explanation? All of science is the result of choosing the latter approach. Once there was a time when nothing was explained. Since then, everything which has been explained has been found to have a natural, not a divine, explanation. Although this does not prove that all future explanations will be of like kind, it shows that it is not at all unreasonable to expect this--and it is not a very reliable bet to expect the opposite.
Theories which make the origin of life plausible are hypotheses like any others, awaiting future research--in fact, generating that research. On the other hand, in the words of Frank Salisbury, "Special creation or a directed evolution would solve the problem of the complexity of the gene, but such an idea has little scientific value in the sense of suggesting experiments." And the experiments suggested by Salisbury and his colleagues led, in fact, to a simplification of the very problem that vexed Salisbury in 1969. Science, once again, gets somewhere. Creationism gets us nowhere. Coppedge suspected in his day "many evolutionists have avoided such investigations [into the odds against life forming] because they intuitively recognize that it will threaten evolutionary doctrine" (p. 234). Yet scientists hardly avoided the matter at all. Quite to the contrary, while creationists engaged in no actual research for twenty-five years and contributed nothing to our understanding of biology, scientists chewed away at the very problems Salisbury and Coppedge discussed, and solved a great many of them (see Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution, 1993). That none of them thought to make arbitrary and groundless guesses for the purpose of calculating a useless statistic is a testament to their wisdom, just as it is a testament to the ignorance of those, like Coppedge, who actually do this. We only need consider which has added to our knowledge to see who is making better use of their time.
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/addendaB.html
If someone wants to argue against an idea, they should learn what the idea is in the first place.
They are actually arguing over Abiogenesis, which is the theory of how life was started and the Big Bang Theory, which is the current idea of how the universe was created. However, even if those ideas are completely wrong, that would not change one thing about the Theory of Evolution. They are not interdependent and do not require each other to be accurate. However, Abiogenesis is a fact. Regardless of how you imagine it happened (note that creation is a theory of abiogenesis), it is a fact that there once was no life on earth and that now there is. Thus, even if evolution needs abiogenesis, it has it.
This is an article of one creationist site trying to discount evolution. I am showing it since it is common of the arguments against evolution.
Schroeder cites a Wistar institute conference as showing evidence of the improbability of evolution. The symposium was transcribed from audio and published in 1967 as Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, a Symposium Held at the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology April 25 and 26, 1966, Paul Moorhead and Martin Kaplan, eds. Needless to say, this is quite out of date. Worse, it does not support Schroeder at all. Only one paper comes anywhere near proposing that the origin of life and subsequent evolution is improbable: Murray Eden, "Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory" (pp. 5-20). He does not really argue that evolution is improbable, but rather that no present theory accounts for certain peculiarities of life on earth, especially the fact that all living organisms are composed of a very tiny fraction of all the possible proteins.
In particular, Eden argues that given all "polypeptide chains of length 250 [amino acids] or less...There are about 20^250 such words or about 10^325" (p. 7). This number is ripe for quoting, but it does not stand as the odds against life, and even Eden did not even imply such a meaning--to the contrary, he admits that perhaps "functionally useful proteins are very common in this space [of 10^325 arrangements]," and facing tough criticism in a discussion period (where his paper was torn apart, pp. 12-9) he was forced to admit again that perhaps "there are other domains in this tremendous space which are equally likely to be carriers of life" (p. 15). But his main argument is that life is concentrated around a tiny fraction of this possible protein development "space" and we have yet to explain why--although his critics point out why in discussion: once one system involving a score of proteins was selected, none others could compete even if they were to arise, thus explaining why all life has been built on one tiny set of proteins. One thing that even his critics in discussion missed is the fact that his number is wrong: he only calculates the number of those chains that are 250 acids long, but he refers to all those and all smaller chains, and to include all of those he must sum the total combinations for every chain from length 1 to 250. Of course, the number "250" is entirely arbitrary to begin with. He could have picked 100, 400, or 20. He gives no arguments for his choice, and as we have seen, this can have nothing to do with the first life, whose chain-length cannot be known or even guessed at [5].
Among the huge flaws in Eden's paper, pointed out by his critics, is that he somehow calculates, without explanation, that 120 point mutations would require 2,700,000 generations (among other things, he assumes a ridiculously low mutation rate of 1 in 1 million offspring). But in reality, even if only 1 mutation dominates a population every 20 generations, it will only take 2400 generations to complete a 120-point change--and that even assumes only 1 point mutation per generation, yet chromosome mixing and gene-pool variation will naturally produce many at a time, and mix and match as mating proceeds. Moreover, a beneficial gene can dominate a population faster than 20 generations, and will also be subject to further genetic improvements even before it has reached dominance. I discuss all of these problems in my analysis of Schroeder above. But in the same Wistar symposium publication, C. H. Waddington (in his "Summary Discussion") hits the nail so square on the head that I will quote his remarks at great length:
The point was made that to account for some evolutionary changes in hemoglobin, one requires about 120 amino acid substitutions...as individual events, as though it is necessary to get one of them done and spread throughout the whole population before you could start processing the next one...[and] if you add up the time for all those sequential steps, it amounts to quite a long time. But the point the biologists want to make is that that isn't really what is going on at all. We don't need 120 changes one after the other. We know perfectly well of 12 changes which exist in the human population at the present time. There are probably many more which we haven't detected, because they have such slight physiological effects...[so] there [may be] 20 different amino acid sequences in human hemoglobins in the world population at present, all being processed simultaneously...Calculations about the length of time of evolutionary steps have to take into account the fact that we are dealing with gene pools, with a great deal of genetic variability, present simultaneously. To deal with them as sequential steps is going to give you estimates that are wildly out." (pp. 95-6)
There is a great deal about abiogenesis that is unknown, but investigating the unknown is what science is for. Speculation is part of the process. As long as the speculations can be tested, they are scientific. Much scientific work has been done in testing different hypotheses relating to abiogenesis.
There is still the same, single, fundamental problem with all these statistical calculations, one that I mention in my review of Foster: no one knows what the first life was. People like Morowitz can try to calculate what is, at a minimum, possible, and laboratory experiments, like that which discovered the powers of tetrahymena (see Addenda C), can approach a guess, but these guesses still do not count as knowledge, and it is not sound to claim that simply because we don't know what it was, therefore we can't assume there was such a simple life form. And even if we accept such an argument, to go from there to "god" is essentially a god-of-the-gaps argument. When we did not know how the bumble-bee flew, was that an adequate ground for positing god as the answer, or was it instead cause for further scientific investigation aimed at finding out the natural explanation? All of science is the result of choosing the latter approach. Once there was a time when nothing was explained. Since then, everything which has been explained has been found to have a natural, not a divine, explanation. Although this does not prove that all future explanations will be of like kind, it shows that it is not at all unreasonable to expect this--and it is not a very reliable bet to expect the opposite.
Theories which make the origin of life plausible are hypotheses like any others, awaiting future research--in fact, generating that research. On the other hand, in the words of Frank Salisbury, "Special creation or a directed evolution would solve the problem of the complexity of the gene, but such an idea has little scientific value in the sense of suggesting experiments." And the experiments suggested by Salisbury and his colleagues led, in fact, to a simplification of the very problem that vexed Salisbury in 1969. Science, once again, gets somewhere. Creationism gets us nowhere. Coppedge suspected in his day "many evolutionists have avoided such investigations [into the odds against life forming] because they intuitively recognize that it will threaten evolutionary doctrine" (p. 234). Yet scientists hardly avoided the matter at all. Quite to the contrary, while creationists engaged in no actual research for twenty-five years and contributed nothing to our understanding of biology, scientists chewed away at the very problems Salisbury and Coppedge discussed, and solved a great many of them (see Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution, 1993). That none of them thought to make arbitrary and groundless guesses for the purpose of calculating a useless statistic is a testament to their wisdom, just as it is a testament to the ignorance of those, like Coppedge, who actually do this. We only need consider which has added to our knowledge to see who is making better use of their time.
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/addendaB.html
If someone wants to argue against an idea, they should learn what the idea is in the first place.
Interesting Quotes
"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
-George Orwell
"It's important to acknowledge that strictly speaking, the gospels are anonymous."
"I had no need of that hypothesis."
-Pierre-Simon Laplace responding to Napoleon's inquiry: 'M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator.'
"I believe there is something out there watching over us. Unfortunately, it's the government."
-Woody Allen
Prayer: How to do nothing and still think you’re helping.
"Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer."
~Author Unknown
"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not. "
-Thomas Jefferson
"Bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be oppression ."
-Thomas Jefferson
"In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to Liberty."
-Thomas Jefferson
"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise."
-James Madison
"A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words?"
- W. Somerset Maugham
"To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy."
- David Brooks
"---if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking."
- Ayn Rand
"--- the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind.
- Ayn Rand
"I always distrust people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows."
-Susan B. Anthony
People who want to share their religious views with you, almost never want you to share yours with them."
-Dave Barry
"When I became convinced that the universe is natural, that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell. The dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts and bars and manacles became dust."
-ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL
"Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but live for it."
-C.C. Colton
"The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men are quite capable of every wickedness."
-Joseph Conrad
"When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?"
-Quentin Crisp
"The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right."
-G.K. Chesterton
An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No," said the priest, "not if you did not know." "Then why," asked the Inuit earnestly, "did you tell me?"
-Annie Dillard
"It is not hardness of heart or evil passions that drive certain individuals to atheism, but rather a scrupulous intellectual honesty."
-STEVE ALLEN
"How can the Church be received as a trustworthy guide in the invisible, which falls into so many errors in the visible?"
-John W. Draper
"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything. "
– Frietrich Nietzsche
"The Bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals, and 362 to heterosexuals. This doesn’t mean God doesn’t love heterosexuals, it’s just that they need more supervision."
-Lynn Lavner
"Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties."
-Erich Fromm
"If you are right to believe that religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers. In fact, they should be utterly immoral. Are they? Do members of atheist organizations in the United States commit more than their fair share of violent crimes? Do the members of the National Academy of Sciences, 93 percent of whom do not accept the idea of God, lie and cheat and steal with abandon? We can be reasonably confident that these groups are at least as well behaved as the general population. And yet, athiests are the most reviled minority in the United States."
-SAM HARRIS
"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today."
— Isaac Asimov
"No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means."
- George Bernard Shaw
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
-Voltaire
"When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."
-Stephen F. Roberts
"An athiest is a man with no invisible means of support."
-John Buchan
"An atheist is a guy who watches a Notre Dame-SMU football game and doesn't care who wins."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Atheism is a non-prophet organization."
-George Carlin
"If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever."
-Woody Allen
"Faith is what you have in things that don't exist"
-Homer Simpson
"If there really was one true god, it should be the ultimate entity of the entire cosmos. If a being of that magnitude ever wrote a book, then there would only be one such document; one book of God. It would be dominant everywhere in the world with no predecessors or parallels or alternatives in any language, because mere human authors couldn’t possibly compete with it. And you wouldn’t need faith to believe it, because it would be consistent with all evidence and demonstrably true, revealing profound morality and wisdom far beyond contemporary human capacity. It would invariably inspire a unity of common belief for every reader. If God wrote it, we could expect no less. But what we see instead is the very opposite of that."
-Aronra
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."
-Bertrand Russell
"If you want to live under sharia law, go back to the hellhole country you came from, or go to another hellhole country that lives under sharia law."
-Mahfooz Kanwar
"Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it."
-Andre Gide
"Any religion which prohibits doubts abandons any hope of growth or development. A religion without doubt is fixed and unchanging. Such a religion is useless to dynamic thinking individuals who are curious about the truth of reality."
-Donavan Hall
"To deny, to believe, and to doubt absolutely -- this is for man what running is for a horse."
-Blaise Pascal
"If your god won't answer a molested child's prayer what makes you think he'll answer yours?"
-Chris O'Rourke
"Faith consists in believing not what seems true, but what seems false to our understanding."
-Voltaire
"Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation."
- Charles Baudelaire
"Some excel in rhyme who reason foolishly."
- Nicholas Boileau
"We can only reason from what is; we can reason on actualities, but not on possibilities."
- Henry Bolingbroke
"You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into."
- author unknown
"Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms. The passions may rage furiously, like true heathens, as they are; and the desires may imagine all sorts of vain things: but judgment shall still have the last word in every argument, and the casting vote in every decision."
- Charlotte Bronte
"As reason is a rebel to faith, so passion is a rebel to reason."
- Sir Thomas Browne
"A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason."
- Thomas Carlyle
"Reason is the wise man's guide, example the fool's."
- Welsh Proverb
"Never try to reason the prejudice out of a man. It was not reasoned into him, and cannot be reasoned out." - Sydney Smith
"Reason has never failed men. Only force and repression have made the wrecks in the world."
- William Allen White
"I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect."
- Oscar Wilde
"People are governed with the head; kindness of heart is little use in chess."
- Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort
"Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice."
- Allan Bloom
"If you can once engage people's pride, love, pity, ambition (or whatever is their prevailing passion) on your side, you need not fear what their reason can do against you."
- Lord Chesterfield
"He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; and he that dares not reason is a slave."
- William Drummond
"Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up."
- Robert Frost
"A person possessed with an idea cannot be reasoned with."
- James A. Froude
"What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational."
- Georg Hegel
"To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual."
- Georg Hegel
"Reason gains all people by compelling none."
- Aaron Hill
"Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason."
- Immanuel Kant
"Reason can in general do more than blind force."
- Gaius C. Gallus
"The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. He is the man who has lost everything except his reason."
- Gilbert K. Chesterton
"Reason should direct and appetite obey."
- Marcus T. Cicero
"Let reason govern desire."
- Marcus T. Cicero
"The common dogma [of fundamentalists] is fear of modern knowledge, inability to cope with the fast change in a scientific-technological society, and the real breakdown in apparent moral order in recent years.... That is why hate is the major fuel, fear is the cement of the movement, and superstitious ignorance is the best defense against the dangerous new knowledge. ... When you bring up arguments that cast serious doubts on their cherished beliefs you are not simply making a rhetorical point, you are threatening their whole Universe and their immortality. That provokes anger and quite frequently violence. ... Unfortunately you cannot reason with them and you even risk violence in confronting them. Their numbers will decline only when society stabilizes, and adapts to modernity."
-G Gaia
It is very difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.
-Upton Sinclair
"A wise man makes his own decisions, an ignorant man follows public opinion."
-Chinese Proverb
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. An ailing world would do well to reach for the right bottle in the medicine cabinet.
- Adam Smith
"When the end comes, Armageddon outta here ----------!"
- J.F. Bierlein
-George Orwell
"Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know"
- Michel de Montaigne"It's important to acknowledge that strictly speaking, the gospels are anonymous."
-Dr. Craig L. Blomberg, The Case for Christ (26)
"The man who invented the telescope found out more about heaven than the closed eyes of prayer ever discovered." - Robert G. Ingersoll
   “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” | |
"I had no need of that hypothesis."
-Pierre-Simon Laplace responding to Napoleon's inquiry: 'M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator.'
"I believe there is something out there watching over us. Unfortunately, it's the government."
-Woody Allen
Prayer: How to do nothing and still think you’re helping.
"Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer."
~Author Unknown
"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not. "
-Thomas Jefferson
"Bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be oppression ."
-Thomas Jefferson
"In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to Liberty."
-Thomas Jefferson
"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise."
-James Madison
"A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words?"
- W. Somerset Maugham
"To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy."
- David Brooks
"---if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking."
- Ayn Rand
"--- the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind.
- Ayn Rand
"I am not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief is positively harmful. Reviewing the false claims of religion, I do not wish, as some sentimental materialists affect to wish, that they were true. I do not envy believers their faith. I am relieved to think that the whole story is a sinister fairy tale; life would be miserable if what the faithful affirmed was actually the case."
- Christopher Hitchens"I always distrust people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows."
-Susan B. Anthony
The legitimate powers of government extend to only such acts as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say that there are twenty gods, or no God."
-THOMAS JEFFERSONPeople who want to share their religious views with you, almost never want you to share yours with them."
-Dave Barry
"When I became convinced that the universe is natural, that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell. The dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts and bars and manacles became dust."
-ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL
"Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but live for it."
-C.C. Colton
"The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men are quite capable of every wickedness."
-Joseph Conrad
"All religions, with their gods, their demi-gods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the prejudiced fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties."
-MIKHAIL BAKUNIN"When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?"
-Quentin Crisp
"The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right."
-G.K. Chesterton
An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No," said the priest, "not if you did not know." "Then why," asked the Inuit earnestly, "did you tell me?"
-Annie Dillard
"It is not hardness of heart or evil passions that drive certain individuals to atheism, but rather a scrupulous intellectual honesty."
-STEVE ALLEN
"How can the Church be received as a trustworthy guide in the invisible, which falls into so many errors in the visible?"
-John W. Draper
"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything. "
– Frietrich Nietzsche
"The Bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals, and 362 to heterosexuals. This doesn’t mean God doesn’t love heterosexuals, it’s just that they need more supervision."
-Lynn Lavner
"Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties."
-Erich Fromm
"If you are right to believe that religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers. In fact, they should be utterly immoral. Are they? Do members of atheist organizations in the United States commit more than their fair share of violent crimes? Do the members of the National Academy of Sciences, 93 percent of whom do not accept the idea of God, lie and cheat and steal with abandon? We can be reasonably confident that these groups are at least as well behaved as the general population. And yet, athiests are the most reviled minority in the United States."
-SAM HARRIS
"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today."
— Isaac Asimov
"No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means."
- George Bernard Shaw
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
-Voltaire
"When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."
-Stephen F. Roberts
"An athiest is a man with no invisible means of support."
-John Buchan
"An atheist is a guy who watches a Notre Dame-SMU football game and doesn't care who wins."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Atheism is a non-prophet organization."
-George Carlin
"If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever."
-Woody Allen
"Faith is what you have in things that don't exist"
-Homer Simpson
"If there really was one true god, it should be the ultimate entity of the entire cosmos. If a being of that magnitude ever wrote a book, then there would only be one such document; one book of God. It would be dominant everywhere in the world with no predecessors or parallels or alternatives in any language, because mere human authors couldn’t possibly compete with it. And you wouldn’t need faith to believe it, because it would be consistent with all evidence and demonstrably true, revealing profound morality and wisdom far beyond contemporary human capacity. It would invariably inspire a unity of common belief for every reader. If God wrote it, we could expect no less. But what we see instead is the very opposite of that."
-Aronra
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."
-Bertrand Russell
"If you want to live under sharia law, go back to the hellhole country you came from, or go to another hellhole country that lives under sharia law."
-Mahfooz Kanwar
"Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it."
-Andre Gide
"Any religion which prohibits doubts abandons any hope of growth or development. A religion without doubt is fixed and unchanging. Such a religion is useless to dynamic thinking individuals who are curious about the truth of reality."
-Donavan Hall
"To deny, to believe, and to doubt absolutely -- this is for man what running is for a horse."
-Blaise Pascal
"If your god won't answer a molested child's prayer what makes you think he'll answer yours?"
-Chris O'Rourke
"Faith consists in believing not what seems true, but what seems false to our understanding."
-Voltaire
"Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation."
- Charles Baudelaire
"Some excel in rhyme who reason foolishly."
- Nicholas Boileau
"We can only reason from what is; we can reason on actualities, but not on possibilities."
- Henry Bolingbroke
"You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into."
- author unknown
"Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms. The passions may rage furiously, like true heathens, as they are; and the desires may imagine all sorts of vain things: but judgment shall still have the last word in every argument, and the casting vote in every decision."
- Charlotte Bronte
"As reason is a rebel to faith, so passion is a rebel to reason."
- Sir Thomas Browne
"A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason."
- Thomas Carlyle
"Reason is the wise man's guide, example the fool's."
- Welsh Proverb
"Never try to reason the prejudice out of a man. It was not reasoned into him, and cannot be reasoned out." - Sydney Smith
"Reason has never failed men. Only force and repression have made the wrecks in the world."
- William Allen White
"I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect."
- Oscar Wilde
"People are governed with the head; kindness of heart is little use in chess."
- Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort
"Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice."
- Allan Bloom
"If you can once engage people's pride, love, pity, ambition (or whatever is their prevailing passion) on your side, you need not fear what their reason can do against you."
- Lord Chesterfield
"He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; and he that dares not reason is a slave."
- William Drummond
"Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up."
- Robert Frost
"A person possessed with an idea cannot be reasoned with."
- James A. Froude
"What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational."
- Georg Hegel
"To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual."
- Georg Hegel
"Reason gains all people by compelling none."
- Aaron Hill
"Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason."
- Immanuel Kant
"Reason can in general do more than blind force."
- Gaius C. Gallus
"The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. He is the man who has lost everything except his reason."
- Gilbert K. Chesterton
"Reason should direct and appetite obey."
- Marcus T. Cicero
"Let reason govern desire."
- Marcus T. Cicero
"The common dogma [of fundamentalists] is fear of modern knowledge, inability to cope with the fast change in a scientific-technological society, and the real breakdown in apparent moral order in recent years.... That is why hate is the major fuel, fear is the cement of the movement, and superstitious ignorance is the best defense against the dangerous new knowledge. ... When you bring up arguments that cast serious doubts on their cherished beliefs you are not simply making a rhetorical point, you are threatening their whole Universe and their immortality. That provokes anger and quite frequently violence. ... Unfortunately you cannot reason with them and you even risk violence in confronting them. Their numbers will decline only when society stabilizes, and adapts to modernity."
-G Gaia
It is very difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.
-Upton Sinclair
"A wise man makes his own decisions, an ignorant man follows public opinion."
-Chinese Proverb
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. An ailing world would do well to reach for the right bottle in the medicine cabinet.
- Adam Smith
Tench Coxe, James Madison’s friend, on the 2nd Amendment
Whereas civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as military forces, which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms.
Tench Coxe, Federal Gazette, June 18,1789, A friend of James Madison, writing in support of the Madison’s first draft of the Bill of Rights.
"When the end comes, Armageddon outta here ----------!"
- J.F. Bierlein
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Did Jesus do away with the Old Testament laws?
I love how Christians claim that the OT and the NT are in complete agreement with each other and then run for the hills when the atrocities of the OT are pointed out. But Jesus did away with the OT, they will mutter.
Since Jesus is god and created the universe, that means he is the god of the OT who created the OT laws. Especially since he specifically stated he did not come to do away with the OT laws.
In Matthew 5:17 He begins answering their unspoken questions: "Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets." In effect He was telling them: "If you think I came to destroy the law or prophets, you are not thinking clearly." He makes it plain that anyone who thought He was abolishing the law or prophets was mistaken. He assures them of His respect for God's law: "I did not come to destroy but to fulfill."
In Matthew 5:18 Jesus validates this perspective when He adds, "For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled." As long as heaven and earth exist, Jesus said, we can be sure God's law will exist.
Since Jesus is god and created the universe, that means he is the god of the OT who created the OT laws. Especially since he specifically stated he did not come to do away with the OT laws.
In Matthew 5:17 He begins answering their unspoken questions: "Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets." In effect He was telling them: "If you think I came to destroy the law or prophets, you are not thinking clearly." He makes it plain that anyone who thought He was abolishing the law or prophets was mistaken. He assures them of His respect for God's law: "I did not come to destroy but to fulfill."
In Matthew 5:18 Jesus validates this perspective when He adds, "For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled." As long as heaven and earth exist, Jesus said, we can be sure God's law will exist.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)