AZMike
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Everything posted by AZMike
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I think we all need a thread like this about once a year, that meanders around about religious and tangential issues and lets us all vent and blow off steam. Have we run our course?
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This is true. St. Thomas Aquinas believed the universe was eternal, but was created - at a point before the existence of the universe causally, but not temporally.
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Sure. Atheists can hold all sorts of screwy beliefs, like the non-existence of God. I just hold one less screwy belief than the atheists do... Some scientific hypotheses just accept views that veer towards magic, without trying to posit a reason, or trying to invoke any known laws of physics or chemistry, Merlyn. The Copenhagen Interpretation insists that all potencies exist until the particle is actualized by measurement. The equations don't tell us how a particle’s properties "solidify" at that moment of measurement, or how reality picks which form to take. But the calculations work,
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And how did those first constituents of life "evolve," Merlyn.? To avoid accepting that many atheists and agnostics do, in fact, believe in the supernatural, you've changed the definition from "supernatural" to "magic" now, I've noticed.
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Darwin has gotten a bad rap as a racist, as he was opposed to slavery. Some of his followers, however, took his ideas and ran with them into some pretty racist territory - such as his cousin Sir Francis Galton, who invented the pseudoscience of Eugenics, and whose ideas had a greater influence on Hitler and the Progressive Movement than Darwin ever did, and led to the American fad for laws against racial intermarriage, and for the forced sterilization of more than 60,000 Americans who were designated as "moral and mental defectives." It's not well known, (and certainly not well-taught) in
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Many cosmologists believe that quite a number of supernatural things exist, Merlyn - whole universes (billions and billions of them, as Carl Sagan might have said) that are outside nature, per the Multiverse Theories. These universes that exist outside our own universe cannot in any way be observed, examined, tested, only inferred on the basis of theories that only some regard as valid. (Gosh...sounds a little like religion.) One could argue (and I have heard atheists try to do so) that such supernatural universes should still be included under the concept of "_the_universe" and cannot be
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Yeah, I was a day late. Noticed that after I posted. Still worth commemorating, though.
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Ref S.I. Hayakawa, IMO.
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Which religion has taught that the earth is flat?
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Daaaaaang. I have to admit, though - I find it peculiar that so many people want to make belief or disbelief in evolution a litmus test for scientific literacy. Why? A man can believe that Eve was literally formed from Adam's rib and that the serpent convinced her, etc.... And what difference would it make to me? There are any number of other non-scientific, or anti-scientific shibboleths that are held by many quite respected people (*cough*RobertKennedyJr*cough*) that are held up as examples or admired, and those non-scientific beliefs can have a far bigger impact on my life
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I'd agree with you about the lack of a good argument against religion (by which I'm guessing you mean a belief in God, and the duty to worship Him). I should also add that the trad Catholic viewpoint holds that while evolution can be accepted as a finding of science by the faithful (heck, we owe the science of genetics to a priest, after all), it is not acceptable to believe that the human soul evolved and was not a creation of God, or that there was not an event where the first man and the first woman were imbued with a unique human soul. When that occurred, or what form of human that was or
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Say what now? That makes no sense whatsoever.
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Gives one hope for Alley Oop, doesn't it?
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No, but certainly some have argued that natural selection not only eliminates the need for religion, but can be applied to a wide range of issues which Darwin would probably have scoffed at. From the traditional Catholic viewpoint (which, with the Orthodox, comprises about 2/3 of all the Christians in the world, so it's not an outlier position), natural selection is one of the many natural processes by the natural world is shaped, just as volcanism, tectonic plate dynamics, atomic degradation, and so forth are. In Genesis, God is referred to as both the maker and shaper of creation, and
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Jesus also referenced and quoted from the deuterocanonical texts, of which He was obviously aware. As the Old Testament was included in the canonical Christian Bible (after much discussion and debate - some early schools of Christianity (the Marcionites) insisted it should not be, and that the God of the Israelites was not the God of the Christians), one of the keenest arguments for the inclusion of the OT texts was that they prefigured, prophesied, and were referenced by Christ and the apostles. For those reasons alone, it makes sense to include the deuterocanonical texts.
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Today is the feast day of St. George, the patron saint of the Scouting movement. Lord Baden Powell wrote a rhyme to honor the day: My warmest good wishes I am sending to you And hoping that the winter is through You will start out afresh to follow the lead Of our Patron Saint George and his spirited steed; Not only to tackle what ever may befall, But also successfully to win through it all And then may you have an enjoyable spell Of hiking, and jolly good camping as well. Stamp honoring 50th anniversary of the Boy Scouts in Greece:
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Corporations had legal status as persons long before the Hobby Lobby decision. It's why the New York Times Corporation can assert its First Amendment rights to Freedom of Press, just as Hobby Lobby can assert its First Amendment rghts to Freedom of Religion, and why the BSA can assert its First Amendment rights to Freedom of Assembly. I don't think the Indiana Pizza case resulted in any legal action, so SCOTUS won't be involved. It was based on a hypothetical ("would you serve pizza to a gay wedding?") asked by a reporter, they answered they have and do serve pizza to gay people, but woul
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Don't stick your arm Out too far It may go home In another car. Burma Shave!
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I think the fault lay not in the software but in me. I hit the quote button instead of the edit button. It's like the old tombstone said: Here lies the body of Jonathan Blake. Hit the gas Instead of the brake.
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Packsaddle - No idea. I presume I'm at about a median of intelligence, so some scouters will be better than me, some worse. We'll probably muddle through as we always do. I think most people involved in Scouting want to give a boy every chance he can, so I don't think this will suddenly cause a new Inquisition or anything. Faith is a big part of most people's lives, but it's become kind of a taboo to bring it up in polite face-to-face conversation (other than on the Internet, of course, where we obsess over it.) We are happier discussing the latest diet fad or sports scores or a celebrity
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It gets more complicated once we get into the theological weeds. Not every adherent of a religious faith necessarily believes in God (about 1% don't), and about 1 out of 5 atheists do believe in God or some kind of universal spirit. That seems more than a little counter-intuitive, but it is what it is. The same rate of belief shows up in atheists in both the Pew and GIS surveys. For what it's worth, about 1 in 5 atheists also believe in some kind of an afterlife: One of the possibilities is that atheism has many denominations, just as theism does, and because a boy may be fli
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I was glancing through a copy of Ernest Borgnine's autobiography {"Ernie") that was in a relative's house and saw this: "One of the other activities that helped me become a man and reinforced the notion of teamwork was joining the Boy Scouts. I almost missed the boat on that one because - i kid you not - they couldn't find a shirt that fit me. I only had a shirt that looked like a Boy Scout shirt, something my mother found and dyed. So I put my insignias on that and they let me get by with it...I had thick fingers and I had a hard time making knots. Eventually, though, I got the hang of it
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You are also probably Politically Correct if you feel judges can't be adult leaders in the BSA because you might be prejudiced against gays when on the bench, but feel that atheist judges could not be prejudiced against religious defendants, or that gay judges could not be prejudiced against boy scout leaders who are plaintiffs. If you feel that need to presume that a sitting judge is an infant who cannot separate his personal life from his views on the law, then you are "politically correct." http://nypost.com/2015/02/16/blacklisting-boy-scouts/
