Shrunk wrote:First time I've seen AA used as evidence against evolution. Not quite following the argument here, Wil.....

He's amazed that I'm an atheist in AA I think. There are a whole lot of us actually.

The other issue is 'spirituality' and atheists. Lots of surprises for xtians. Hell, some of us atheists have even stopped eating our children on moral grounds.

SpeedOfSound wrote:The other issue is 'spirituality' and atheists. Lots of surprises for xtians. Hell, some of us atheists have even stopped eating our children on moral grounds.

Splitter!

I stopped eating them because they taste bad. The taste like PlayStation!

SpeedOfSound wrote:I stopped eating them because they taste bad. The taste like PlayStation!

You tried to eat your PlayStation ?

No! It's the kids. They use to taste like sugar and spice and puppy dog tails but now they reek of silicon.

Soak for 24 hours changing the water twice before cooking.

Shrunk wrote:

… Discussion of interpretation of parables omitted…

Shrunk wrote:
So you think that Jesus was literally talking only about a situation in which a person asks you to walk a mile with him. And that, in that situation, you are required to walk two miles. Like, if he asks you to accompany him to his house, which happens to be a mile away, once he gets home you must continue to walk another mile, and then stop. But if his house is only a half mile away, or two miles, you can just stop when he gets to his home.

Why would Jesus give such a strange instruction? I guess you don't care, you just have to follow it, 'cuz God says so. So do you follow it? How do you know the exact distance a person has asked you to walk? Do you use a GPS?

I don’t know if all of this is tongue in cheek (probably), but I’ll bite and respond.

As I understand it, the context of what Jesus was saying had to do with a practice that the occupying Roman soldiers exercised. Namely, if they got tired of carrying their pack, they could draft a local citizen to do it for them, up to a mile. Is that your understanding of the context?

It requires some type of context like that to make any sense at all, at least, to me. In this context, it is clear that the Roman soldier decided when the mile was up, so that your objection makes little sense. How? Who knows? They walked for 20 minutes? They walked for what seemed like a mile? They used road markers? They guy with the sword decides. At that point, Jesus suggests volunteering to go another mile, thus killing (or convicting) your enemy with kindness. That’s how I see it, anyway. Another example of loving one’s enemies.

Where is your evidence for all this crap?

Wilberforce1860 wrote:

Shrunk wrote:

… Discussion of interpretation of parables omitted…

Shrunk wrote:
So you think that Jesus was literally talking only about a situation in which a person asks you to walk a mile with him. And that, in that situation, you are required to walk two miles. Like, if he asks you to accompany him to his house, which happens to be a mile away, once he gets home you must continue to walk another mile, and then stop. But if his house is only a half mile away, or two miles, you can just stop when he gets to his home.

Why would Jesus give such a strange instruction? I guess you don't care, you just have to follow it, 'cuz God says so. So do you follow it? How do you know the exact distance a person has asked you to walk? Do you use a GPS?

I don’t know if all of this is tongue in cheek (probably), but I’ll bite and respond.

As I understand it, the context of what Jesus was saying had to do with a practice that the occupying Roman soldiers exercised. Namely, if they got tired of carrying their pack, they could draft a local citizen to do it for them, up to a mile. Is that your understanding of the context?

It requires some type of context like that to make any sense at all, at least, to me. In this context, it is clear that the Roman soldier decided when the mile was up, so that your objection makes little sense. How? Who knows? They walked for 20 minutes? They walked for what seemed like a mile? They used road markers? They guy with the sword decides. At that point, Jesus suggests volunteering to go another mile, thus killing (or convicting) your enemy with kindness. That’s how I see it, anyway. Another example of loving one’s enemies.

That's not what it says. It says nothing about Roman soldiers or loving one's enemies or anything. It only talks about how one should respond when someone asks you to walk a mile.

If you're going to interpret scripture literally, you have to do it consistently. Otherwise, you're not interpreting it literally, except sometimes.

SpeedOfSound wrote:...an atheist in AA... There are a whole lot of us actually.

Largely because of the lack of alternatives, I'd suggest.

As an extremely addictive personality, having repudiated several addictions (and working on those that remain), I'd have welcomed something like the 12 steps if I could, even for the sake of argument, accept magic. That's what's required for this to work (I tried AA, but I couldn't silence the voice screaming 'what are you fucking morons banging on about? [rant]..............................................................[/rant]').

It's taken a long time for me to shed some of my many addictions, and I'm under no illusion that, in every case, I'm anything but still an addict, but can state categorically that the only role played by a higher power in any of it was my rejection of the role of a higher power in the course of my life.

I control these things. I control them mostly imperfectly, and with increasing skill as I learn to deal with shit, but no imaginary entity has any bearing on my shedding of my addictions, either for the sake of argument or otherwise.

The 12 steps are fucking bollocks, regardless of whom they may have worked for.

Is it perhaps worth noting how vestigial Wilberforce1860's contributions have become to this thread?

I was about to ask when we're going to start engaging in dialogue on 'Cretinists Read This'.

Guessing that we have nothing more than trolling, and that this isn't going to happen.

Be under no illusions, people. Wilberforce is trolling here, regardless of his demeanour. His trolling is exactly the same class of trolling as rainbow, but without remotely the intelligence. Under no circumstance other than trolling could valid rebuttals be dismissed as OT, or objections directly rooted in the context of the thread be considered beyond its scope.

Wilberforce is here only to preach his banal bollocks, and he's particularly shit at it, which is why he comes across as benign. There's nothing benign about this toxic shit, and his bollocks should be fucked up the arse, as is our penchant.

Alternatively, formal debate to reduce the bombardment to a manageable flow (like he could manage the forum cat, let alone any forum member). Wilberfarce versus anybody. I'd be more than happy to take him to pieces, if nobody else fancies it.

To feed or not to feed?

hackenslash wrote:
The 12 steps are fucking bollocks, regardless of whom they may have worked for.

The Higher Power aspect of the 12 steps makes sense from a psychological perspective: it facilitates the creation of a subroutine of sorts in an addict's mind, with that subroutine being ascribed the label of "God" and assigned executive powers with respect to the addiction. I suppose it's a kind of like a deliberately engineered form of Dissociative Identity Disorder.

That said, it's still not going to be very effective for people who don't take the idea of a Higher Power seriously, or people who don't like the prospect of trading addiction for a contrived form of psychosis. One would think that Buddhism would provide a (more) suitable addiction recovery framework for such people, given it's emphasis on mindfulness and non-attachment.

Except that Buddhism is also bollocks.

Buddhism's certainly got issues, but imo it has a lot more to offer in terms of dealing with addictions and compulsions etc. than the Abrahamic faiths. I have read about psychology movements in Western countries which take the mindfulness aspects of Buddhism without taking on any of the magical aspects (cherry picking admittedly, but if you're not interested in being Buddhist anyway then so what?). Such an approach would probably have good synergy with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

It's been a while since I bothered with this thread, and life has been pretty eventful whilst I've been away. Among the more, shall we say, interesting occurrences in my life has been my first heart attack, about which I've said much elsewhere that is superfluous and irrelevant to bring to this thread. However, it's been refreshing to discover that the usual canards and blind assertions have been subject to the discoursive minigun in my absence, it's always a pleasure to see one's efforts at education rewarded in such practical terms. Whilst other participants therein may regard noting their own valiant efforts in this vein as briefly welcome, before turning their attention to yet more targets, soft though most of these will invariably be, the principal reason I've returned to this thread, is to post a little observation based upon time spent musing the more considered thoughts of Carl Sagan. The astute will already be thinking that the observation in question is anything but little, but such observers, jumping the gun as they are, won't spoil what is to follow.

Sagan, in one of those masterful moments of contemplation, alighted upon the idea that was framed neatly and eloquently in the following quote:

Carl Sagan wrote:In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed"? Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way."

I thought it would be a good exercise to visualise this, in a manner not that different from his own Pale Blue Dot, in order to expose the absurdity of certain mythologically inspired assertions. The method I choose, is to contrast the size of the universe derived from careful examination of scientific data, with the size of the universe arising from those mythologically inspired assertions, a contrast that will shortly be seen to be pretty damning of those assertions.

The standard assertion arising from the somewhat florid view of creationists, is that the universe is only 6,000 years old, an assertion arising from a frankly silly exercise conducted by a bishop who, but for that calculation, would almost certainly have remained very much historically anonymous. On the basis of this, we can compare the creationist view of the universe, to the view of the universe provided by scientific data, as follows: let that 6,000 light year radius, of the creationist vision of the universe, be contained within a single pixel in an image. Such a pixel, if square, will therefore represent an area 12,000 light years square. Already, we have a problem for the creationist assertion, centred upon the fact that the Milky Way galaxy alone has been measured as being 120,000 light years across. So, merely comparing the creationist view to the Milky Way, results in their vision of the universe occupying just one pixel in a 10×10 pixel grid, each pixel measuring 12,000 light, years, looking something like this when magnified by a factor of 10;



The Local Group of galaxies, of which the Milky Way is a member, spans some 10 million light years. Using the same scale, the Local Group thus covers a grid 833 pixels square. Which means that the creationist view of the universe consists of one tiny dot in the middle of this image:



The Virgo Supercluster, of which the Local Group is a member, spans some 110 million light years. Which means, that on the same scale, I would have to place my one-pixel dot inside a grid 9,166 pixels square. At this point, PhotoShop starts to complain even on my laptop, which is usually sufficiently lavishly equipped in terms of memory and disc space to handle a large image, though in the past, I've usually not pushed it past about 3,000 pixels square. The resulting image, for those who want to take the risk of crashing their computers viewing it, is given below:



Note that at the usual resolution the board displays the image, the single white pixel on the blue background isn't even visible, but it's there, I assure you. Head toward the centre of the image, and zoom in, you'll eventually see it.

Now we move on to the entire observable universe. Now because we have to factor in to the determination of the radius of the observable universe, the metrical expansion of spacetime, courtesy of a certain Mr A. Einstein and his work, the naive figure of 13.6 billion light years is actually wrong - the correct figure is closer to 44 billion light years. To represent this, I would have to order PhotoShop to provide me with a canvas comprising, wait for it, nearly 3.7 million pixels square. The memory requirements for this, I am informed, would require me to hook my laptop to a dozen of the world's largest supercomputers in order to achieve this task, so you'll forgive me if I don't provide the next image in the sequence in the same format. However, to put this into perspective, my laptop display is 1,600×900 pixels, and the 1,600 pixel width occupies, according to my tape measure, no less than 38.1 cm. This means that the resulting image, if I were to produce it for real, would occupy 2,291 screen widths of my laptop, or, a little over 87 metres in width. So the creationist view of the universe, is equivalent to putting a one-pixel dot (approximately 0.2 millimetres square) on a computer canvas the size of the Old Trafford football pitch (for the record, the requisite stadium has a capacity of over 75,000 people). This is the sort of scale difference we are talking about. Just to ram this home, here is an aerial view of that stadium:



Comparing the creationist view of the universe to the scientific view of the universe, is akin to putting a 0.2 mm dot in the middle of that pitch. All that creationists have, to support such a restricted view of the universe, is the scribblings of pre-scientific nomads written 3,000 years ago, whilst those of us who paid attention in science classes, accepting the full majesty of the actual universe as seen through telescopes, have entire Himalayan mountain ranges of empirical data. There is no contest. To see the universe in the paltry manner that creationists see it, not only requires a wholesale rejection of reality, but a view of their god as a limited, parochial entity. Their god is the god of that 0.2 millimetre dot, whilst our science encompasses the entire Old Trafford pitch. The comparison is woeful for creationists and their mythology-based, assertion-laden, data-free doctrine.

Oh, and Hackenslash, if you're reading this thread, I chose Old Trafford specifically for you.

hackenslash wrote:.....

The 12 steps are fucking bollocks, regardless of whom they may have worked for.

and apparently not only is it's success rate low (5-10%) it may also cause damage to the other 90%

http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2015/01/a-success-rate-between-5-and-10-percent/

(binge drinker)

Quick question regarding YEC. We have artifacts from humans that are verified to be over 6000 years old. Why is there still a discussion on the topic of YEC? That's really all the proof you need.