Posted on 02/27/2007 5:57:42 AM PST by A. Pole
What sad people they must be.
This disease lasts about 70 years, the recovery is slow and painful (if the patient survives).
I would rather live my life as if there is a God and to find out after my death that he doesn't exist than to believe there is no God and find out after my death that he does exist.
Hey great title. Much better than the ones blaming me for cancer et al.
Who is this God Gene?
I've read of Isis and Zeus, JR "Bob" Dobbs, Quezecotl, and Beelzebub.
But no Gene.......
/s
watch for yourself:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6169720917221820689
These learned men are so presumptuous in their pronouncements; a publish or perish peace if ever there was one. Did they ever mention simple Faith…………?
Bigotry is a terrible waste of brain space.
"Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,"
Also it is better to live as if one were made in the image of God and to struggle to conform to this standard. But some chose to believe to be animals similar to the monkeys.
Seems there's "in fighting" within the ranks, lol. This story didn't get a lot of attention, I'm sure.
There is a God, leading atheist concludes
Philosopher says scientific evidence changed his mind
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6688917/
Here's an ok rebuttal of these a$$hats.
http://richarddawkins.net/articleComments,622,Interview-with-Alister-McGrath-author-of-The-Dawkins-Delusion,Belfast-Telegraph,page2
Alister McGrath (54,), Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University, and his wife Joanna Collicutt McGrath (52), lecturer in the psychology of religion at University of London, hit back in their book The Dawkins Delusion
What about his main argument, that religion leads to violence and oppression?
Dawkins treats this as a defining characteristic of religion, airbrushing out of his somewhat skimpy account of the roots of violence any suggestion that it might be the result of political fanaticism - or even atheism. He is adamant that he himself, as a good atheist, would never fly aeroplanes into skyscrapers, or commit any other outrageous act of violence or oppression. Good for him. Neither would I. Yet the harsh reality is that religious and anti-religious violence has happened, and is likely to continue to do so.
As someone who grew up in Northern Ireland, I know about religious violence only too well. There is no doubt that religion can generate violence. But it's not alone in this. The history of the 20th century has given us a frightening awareness of how political extremism can equally cause violence. In Latin America, millions of people seem to have 'disappeared' as a result of ruthless campaigns of violence by right wing politicians and their militias. In Cambodia, Pol Pot eliminated his millions in the name of socialism. The rise of the Soviet Union was of particular significance. Lenin regarded the elimination of religion as central to the socialist revolution, and put in place measures designed to eradicate religious beliefs through the 'protracted use of violence.' One of the greatest tragedies of this dark era in human history was that those who sought to eliminate religious belief through violence and oppression believed they were justified in doing so.
They were accountable to no higher authority than the state.
Dawkins is clearly an ivory tower atheist, disconnected from the real and brutal world of the 20th century.
If this is in the author's own words, then this is the achilles heel of their argument right here. Evil is a religious concept and means "that which is contrary to the Will of God" and not the secular meaning of "bad". If there is no God, then there is also no evil. They cannot argue that religion is a delusion by employing religious concepts to do so.
Just a bunch of homo-promos that hate anyone who disagrees with them.
In several cases, genetic constructs that perfectly fit the model of Dawkins' "selfish genes" have been found to have a function. (For example, the system that maintains the ends of chromosomes.) And most so-called "junk DNA" (protein-noncoding DNA, once assumed to be "parasitic") has been found to be conserved between different species, so must also be functional. Then there is the protein-noncoding DNA that codes for regulatory microRNAs. Welcome to the weird world of 21st century postdarwinian evolutionary biology!
There is, however, one abundantly verified case of a selfish gene. That, of course, is "Selfish Gene" Robinson!!!! Professional atheists Dennet and Dawkins, in their baseless bashing of religion, are coming close to "selfish gene" status!!!!
The following guy, Peter Singer, of Princeton University, is the leading atheist that everyone should be aware of (what's really sick is that he's a bioethicist and teaches "practical ethics"):
http://www.worldmag.com/articles/9987
Many readers may be saying, "Peter who?"—but The New York Times, explaining how his views trickle down through media and academia to the general populace, noted that "no other living philosopher has had this kind of influence." The New England Journal of Medicine said he has had "more success in effecting changes in acceptable behavior" than any philosopher since Bertrand Russell. The New Yorker called him the "most influential" philosopher alive.
"If the 21st century becomes a Singer century, we will also see legal infanticide of born children who are ill or who have ill older siblings in need of their body parts. Question: What about parents conceiving and giving birth to a child specifically to kill him, take his organs, and transplant them into their ill older children? Mr. Singer: "It's difficult to warm to parents who can take such a detached view, [but] they're not doing something really wrong in itself." Is there anything wrong with a society in which children are bred for spare parts on a massive scale? "No."
When we had lunch a month after our initial interview and I read back his answers to him, he said he would be "concerned about a society where the role of some women was to breed children for that purpose," but he stood by his statements. He also reaffirmed that it would be ethically OK to kill 1-year-olds with physical or mental disabilities, although ideally the question of infanticide would be "raised as soon as possible after birth."
These proposals are biblically and historically monstrous, but Mr. Singer is a soft-spoken Princeton professor. Whittaker Chambers a half-century ago wrote, "Man without God is a beast, and never more beastly than when he is most intelligent about his beastliness," but part of Mr. Singer's effectiveness in teaching "Practical Ethics" to Princeton undergraduates is that he does not come across personally as beastly."
Too bad these scholars cannot explain why Paul, formerly one who persecuted Christians, became a Christian and spread God's Word to us heathens.
Why would a forthright Jew be so convinced that he would give his own life to profess Jesus as our Saviour?
Because he was filled with the love and spirit of God. He spent the rest of his life spreading that love, instead of hate. He died in Christ. Therefore he lived.
Actually, you could say that religion motivated Oliver Cromwell and the English, when they murdered thousands of Irish women and children at such places as Drogheda. But these massacres were also the result of theories of warfare of that time, and they were also a matter of English vs. Irish, conquerors and conquered, resistence and oppression.
OTOH, the modern Irish revolutionary movement, beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing through most of the twentieth, was NOT motivated by Catholicism to any great degree. The two factions are conveniently known as Protestants and Catholics, but they are primarily native Irish versus English/Scottish conquerors, with religion to help keep the two groups separate over time. But also there were rules of the conqueror to keep the two groups separate, with the English and Scots firmly in the controlling positions and the Irish not permitted to own a horse, learn to read, or attend a university for a couple of centuries.
The modern IRA is primarily Marxist in orientation, not Catholic. It has never had much if any support from the Irish bishops or the official Church. It would be foolish to say that religion had nothing to do with the hatreds in Ireland, but religion was rarely a primary motivating force for the violence there, except to some degree on the Orange side.
If not for religion, would the bloodshed in Ireland not have occurred? Very doubtful. The primary motivators were conquest, colonialism, repression, and resentment for being oppressed by outsiders.
Did religion cause the split in South Africa? In that case, we turn to race for an explanation, because it marks the most prominent difference. But there is seldom a single cause for such problems. In South Africa there were three or four groups: Zulus, Xhosa, Dutch, English. The Dutch and the English hated each other as much as the Zulus and English. It was not simply a matter of black vs. white, although that came to be the accepted wisdom.
Some religion is stupid and some science is shamanism..
Truth seekers can find there way thru all that..
Dawkins and Dennetts have not.. yet..
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