No, you haven't. You have explained that you BELIEVE that they are.

They have a prophet and holy scriptures. Plus the Bible says that king Cyrus, a Zoroastrian, was a righteous king anointed by G-d.

Zoroastrianism is mentioned as a religion of the true G-d in the (Hebrew) Bible. Christianity is not. That's good enough for me.

I am perhaps making an intellectual mistake when I tell you something about Judaism which you didn't know. However, I do consider it useful to speak up when somebody makes up stuff about Judaism and then pretends to know what they are talking about.

I just want everyone here to know that what you say about Judaism is complete nonsense. That's all. It's up to you whether you can justify your own beliefs without misrepresenting other people's.

Your comments might "stand", but they still show a total lack of comprehension of what Judaism is and what the Jewish religion is about. If your own religion requires ignorance of others from you, that's fine.

And I have refuted what you said. You said Judaism stands for X, I, as a follower of Judaism, tell you it does not. There's your primary source.

wait, are we talking about Al Gore's "science?"

Because then, that is faith, also.

Faith backed by empirical data.

Oh, wait, was that your agenda I stepped on?

Load of rubbish! I don't believe in any major world religion. Does that make me a servant of Satan, when I want to make a positive difference to the world wether I'm religious or not? If we have to follow a seires of laws and never deviate why would we even be having this discussion it's against the rules.

ΑΩΑ - the beginning, the end, and the beginning

Yes, thanks Protocept00....we've been up, down and all around this topic and more...

I find no problem with "arguing" as long as it's conducted with civility.

Dialogue is good and it should be no surprise that discussions that last this long focus on differences.

Ha, ha, ha....I admit it...I enjoy trying to figure out this stuff! I enjoy defending Christianity and my belief in ALmighty God, the most important stuff (subject) of all!

In my work of apologetics, I use the writings of the early Chruch Doctors and Fathers and my could those people write! There was no such thing as a touchy-feely approach to religion....no moral relativism either. They thought the truth mattered and so do I. There weapons were words...they thought that good things arose from a grasp of truth and evil things from a rejection of truth.

If you think that the truth matters, why do you feel it necessary to misrepresent the Jewish faith?

you mean data? or that thing more scientists around the world, everyday, are refuting?

hmmm

Awww... no takers on my question. Ah, well. Have fun.

General-Ethan153 posts:

While Science and God aren't one and the same as the title of this article asks, there is a definite connection.

Science according to a 10th grade biology book can be defined as knowledge of the world around us and taken a step further the knowledge and study of reality including things which can be perceived beyond this world around us.  It goes on stating that this "Prove it" attitude encourages scientists to investigate phenomena and to develop new explanations and ideas.

Empirical science is knowledge or degrees of near certainty about the behavior of matter (which btw is always law-abiding) and the laws of nature by which the universe operates. Science really can't say anything about asbtract things as good, evil, truth, justice, beauty and love but it can, by deduction, shed light on the existence of an Intelligence Force and Designer at work in the universe...the fantastic complexity and law abiding DNA code impressed upon cells is one that comes to mind.

Empirical science is connected with God since He is the Maker of all matter, including time and space. I say this becasue it is written in Genesis, the first book of the Holy Bible, and God is the principal Author of Genesis and I have faith in the trustworthiness of God as a reliable eye-witness. My faith in God enables me to look at things with something more than a hunch.

POSTS # 68

I was looking for one of my earlier posts and just now read yours.

One bit of advice especially when it comes to Almighty God is to never say never!

As far as there being an All-Good and Loving God and all the terrible and evil things in the world, I'd say that God is not responsible for any of it. Evil comes from sin when the human race misused its freedom and abandoned God. Evil is the negation or privation of good and that He permits evil of any kind is only becasue He knows that He can draw greater good from it in the end.

But we must distinguish between God's positive will and His permissive will. He positively wills all the good that happens. Suffering, misery, and unhappiness He permits to occur and this only when He foresees that good can come from it.  This is pretty deep theology but consider this...

God positively wills that I be holy. If He foresees that I will make use of good health to sin and to thus lose my soul to eternal damnation, He may mercifully permit my health to be ruined, and thus lead me to Him where He would otherwise lose me. There would have been no diseases had men not sinned. Death and disease was the consequence of our first parents Original Sin. God will not sin, but having made mankind free He permits it and its consequences. This permission was a less serious thing than would have been the deprivation of our freedom.

But as much as God is All-Loving, He is All-Just. And the way we understand this is that this life is not all there is. God permits these sufferings, etc. becasue He knows that there is a future life where He will rectify all inequalities so to speak. Again, in the meantime He draws good out of these miseries and sadnesses, for they teach us not to set our hopes entirely on this world as if there were no other, and help to expiate the sins of mankind. We cannot be entirely happy here, but we can in the next life which is what we were actually made for...our end is God Himself.

As to your beloved cat Banjo....

there is no real completely satisfactory answer... again, you should appeal to the greater good. I'd suggest though to look at Banjo's life and remember the happiness and pleasant times he/she brought to your life...as a way of compensating for the unpleasant and sad ones....in other word's don't concentrate on the bad, painful times, but remember the good ones...

Another thing that we humans too often tend to do is read human attributes into the animal world, interpreting the suffering of animals in terms of our own experiences...animals don't suffer in the way we do for they lack our power of reflex thought.

As to the religious girl that you seem really like...again, you should appeal to the greater good and that's why I suggest that you never say never!

MOMMIE4LIFE POSTS #247

It's not so....we can "prove" that God exists and I commented on evidence of God's existence in posts #137 pg 10; # 196 page 14 and #210 page 14.

As far as stellar evolution and the universe from nothing ie Big Bang...I responded to this in #194, pg. 13.

I'm not doubting that God exists. As a matter of fact I believe that God and science can, and do, co-exist.

Well, "B or not B" is a tautology: it's just a generically true statement that holds for everything, so it's basically useless for logic.  You don't really need a proof for that.  But I think you might be misinterpreting what it means when translating it to English.  "B or not B" only means that either B is true or B is false.  It doesn't mean that "B doesn't need to be true" in the sense you're using it.  If B is true, then B needs to be true.  If B is false, then B needs to be false.  For example, the follwing is a true statement:  "Michael Jordan is tall, or Michael Jordan is not tall."  It's a true statement because he is tall, so the statement as a whole is true.  But it doesn't really mean "Michael Jordan doesn't need to be tall."  It doesn't mean there's a possibility that he might not be tall.  He IS tall.  The statement that he's tall or not tall is just a tautology: it's useless for determining anything about him at all.

I agree; especially converting between pure symbolic logic and the English language.  It's not always intuitive. 

If you assume it to be true, the only logical conclusions you can reach are ones that would start with "Given that we accept that God does not have a beginning...", or, to be more succinct, conclusions that presuppose the Christian beliefs are true.  And so you can't really use them to figure out whether or not the Christian beliefs are true; you're starting out by using a logical framework where they're assumed to be true; any answers you get using logic will be based on that assumption.

The main reason I think this is important is because many people like to say that, by nature, it's impossible to prove that God does or does not exist.  Like I said earlier, if that statement is true, it means that by definition, there can not be any empirical evidence of God, nor can he have any evident properties; it's by definition impossible to KNOW anything at all about him.  You can only guess completely randomly; that's what makes it "faith".  If there was any actual concrete evidence pointing towards one particular version of god, then it wouldn't be true that it's impossible to prove that he exists.

LULA POSTS:

LEAUKI POSTS:

I've explained the Old Covenant Jewish religion (what I call Biblical Judaism) accurately. God's Chruch was, is and always will be an organic, priestly and sacrificial spiritual society, based upon Divine principles. The Holy Bible sustains this. Such was the Jewish Chruch, the Temple when it had a priesthood, the high priest being supreme in authority as is the Pope. The worshipful function of this priesthood was to offer the Mosaic commanded sacrifices, for the glory of God and the spiritual well being of the children of Isreal. Biblical Judaism ended once for all in 70AD. You disagree...one of us has the truth.  

Remnants of Judaism remain the most intensely religious being the Orthodox. They pray for the priesthood to be reinstated, the loss of which marked the Old Testament Judaism. The first requirement of the claimant of the office of the high priest who alone offered the sacrifices, was proof of Aaronic lineage. This was most strictly demanded in the days of Isreal's glory. Moses, speaking with divine authority, says in Numbers 16:40 that "no stranger or any one who is not of the seed of Aaron should come near to offer incense to the Lord, lest he suffer as Core suffered" who paid the penalty of by dieing in fire.

You may be a follower of Judaism today and may have kinship with some of the teachings of the Old Law inspired of God, but you are not a follower of Biblical Judaism as it doesn't exist...there is no Temple , no Altar, no sacrifice, no ephod or terephim, etc. etc. and thus you can't physically keep the Torah.

The entire argument earlier was not based on science, it was based on the idea that the entire world is a Chinese plot to destroy the U.S, and that certain people are telling "the truth" but being drowned out by the world conspiracy.  In that case, it's not at all ad hominem to point out that the people allegedly telling the truth are all known liars and shills of the Republican party.  It's entirely relevant.  This is really the only thing that one can use since no one here is trying to use actual scientific data that they've gathered themselves.  You yourself are just posting a whole bunch of links to things that other people wrote.  You have no way of knowing whether any of these things are true or not, since you don't do your own experiments, and you don't know enough about climatology to really form a valid model of global weather based only on your own observations.  I don't either.  No one in this thread can.  In order to be able to form a valid world model based only on your own personal data, you'd need to be a highly educated climatologist who is doing lots of research and experiments.  You know; like the actual scientists.

That's kind of my whole point.  Posting links to things other people wrote is not "science", and you can't take it as such, because those people might be lying, and you have no way of knowing whether or not it's true.  For people who are completely removed from the actual study of climatology (the vast majority of Americans), it's 95% a matter of deciding who to trust.  Either, you trust the scientists or you trust the Republicans.  Both sides have their own websites, and they both have conflicting "science".  Only one side can be telling the truth.

You posted a lot of links.  Before I get to that, let me restate what I was saying:  Every legitimate --> SCIENTIFIC BODY <-- agrees on anthropogenic global warming.  --> INDIVIDUAL SCIENTISTS MAY DISAGREE <-- but they are in the vast minority.  So you've posted a bunch of links to individual reports.  This doesn't change the fact that every scientific organization has released groupwide statements agreeing with it.  I'm not denying individual scientists disagree.  There are two main points I'm making:

1) Every national and international scientific organization in the world agrees.  Here's the statement by the Joint Science Academies: http://www.nationalacademies.org/includes/climatechangestatement.pdf

Here's a great list, with an introduction that I think is very important to read, in order to understand the importance of peer review and credibility: http://logicalscience.com/consensus/consensusD1.htm

Here's wikipedia's list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change   (And I know you were probably told that wikipedia's a liberal conspiracy too, but please just check the sources at the bottom of the page to verify the data first.)

2) The scientists who disagree are a small minority, and many are Republican shills.

SourceWatch is a great place to find info on sources, to let you judge their credibility.  Here's some info on the Heartland Institute, which has been quoted repeatedly in this thread: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Heartland_Institute

Some good info on all the PR think tanks that Republicans spun up as Kyoto was approaching: http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/1997Q4/warming.html

A good article about why you shouldn't trust "surveys" of articles that say that there are large numbers of people disagreeing: http://local-warming.blogspot.com/2007/08/do-12-scientists-endorse-global-warming.html  -the imporant thing is that just because an article about warming doesn't specifically say "We believe in anthropogenic global warming" doesn't mean it's taking a noncomittal stance.  Like he says, biology articles almost never say "We believe in evolution", nor do they attempt to "prove" evolution anymore, the people writing the article take the consensus as well-proven and are writing about some other specific thing.

Ok... I don't have the patience to go through each of your links in depth one by one, so I'll try to give a brief summary.  First, almost all of the sites require you to pay in order to read the actual article, and I'm not going to do that; I don't think you did either, as you just quote the abstract.  So I'm going to have to work just off of that, which isn't very useful.  But:

The first - actually does disagree.  Good work.

The second - Doesn't seem to disagree.  Just because they're talking about glacial changes being related to the oceans doesn't mean they're denying pollution.  They say it's "associated" with the rise in carbon emissions - I don't think this means they're saying it's the sole cause of it.  If they were denying global warming theory, I think they'd be more up front with it in the abstract.

The third - Is a synopsis of research from a scientist in the 1950's.  There are some tenuous attempts to link it to more current research, but most of it is from the 50's, before global warming research really began in earnest.

The fourth - Does seem to disagree.  The overwhelming majority still believe that the solar cycle isn't enough to cause this much change.  If you're interested, the IPCC actually did do a whole lot of investigation into solar cycle theories, but they came to a consensus that it's not enough to cause this drastic a change.  A graph: http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/fig12-7.htm

The fifth - was written in 1990.  That was before the massive upswing.  If you look at the graph above, she's right; it does match pretty closely up to 1990.  It's after that that it goes way up.

The sixth - I think the key is that in the abstract they say "we cannot say if this effect is local, regional, or global".

The seventh - I think the key is that in the abstract they say "at this time they are not statistically significant".

The eighth - was written in 1961.  Before global warming happened.

The ninth - First, written in 1997, so a little early.  Second, is interesting because it disagrees with your earlier articles about solar radiance.  Also doesn't really mention anthropogenic warming or disagree, probably because there wasn't much study on it in '97.

The tenth and eleventh - Yeah, peer review IS important (wah wah).  Spencer's an interesting guy - did you know he believes in the literal interpretation of Adam and Eve?  And that he denies evolution, and thinks humans lived with dinosaurs?  And that he's a working member of the Heartland Institute and the George C Marshall institute, two Republican think tanks with mission statements to discredit science that might harm the interests of American corporations or the Republican party?

The twelfth - Doesn't sound like denial of global warming to me.  It's about sea levels rising, not so much about temperature and warming.  There's more to global warming than just sea levels.

The thirteenth - Doesn't deny global warming.  Just about sea levels.

The fourteenth - Doesn't deny it.  Weird because you even highlighted the part where he talks about anthropogenic warming.  He's not saying it doesn't exist; he's saying that it does exist, but it doesn't necessarily effect the rate of tropical hurricanes.

Wooooo that was more typing than I really wanted to do.  I think I'm done with this argument.