Doom Shepherd

That is impossible... I've tried just to see if I can. Of course it wouldn't work. No Atheist would consider the Bible a primary source, so the argument would be considered invalid and circular to begin with. However, it IS possible for an Atheist to argue with a Christian, using only Bible quotes to support his (the Atheist's) argument. The Atheist in question will have to have strong Cognitive Dissonance Buffers, though. That can be fun, but that's another thread entirely.

The civil war in Sudan has been mainly between the Islamic North and the Christian/Animist South. I very much doubt that the Christian South would be seceding to form an Islamic dictatorship.

"There are not many of them, all things considered: the truly old. Even on this planet, in this age, when people consider a mere hundred years or a thousand, to be an unusual span. There are, for example, less than ten thousand humanoid individuals alive on this planet today who have personal memories of the saber-toothed tiger, the megatherium, the cave bear. There are today less than a thousand who walked the streets of Atlantis. There are less than five hundred living humans who remember the human civilizations that predated the great lizards. There are roughly seventy people walking the earth, human to all appearances (and in a few cases, to all medical tests currently available), who were alive before the earth had begun to congeal from gas and dust. How well do you know your neighbors? Your friends? Your lovers? Walk the streets of any city, and stare carefully at the people who pass you, and wonder and know this: They are there too. The old ones." -- Neil Gaiman, "Sandman: Brief Lives" ^ This is true. "Don't try to out-weird me, three eyes. I get weirder things than you in my breakfast cereal." - Zaphod Beeblebrox, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "God does not play dice with the universe: He plays an ineffable game of His own devising which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players (*i.e., everybody), to being involving in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules and who smiles all the time." --Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchet Mary Ann Cramer: "Is it worth it? Should we just pull back? Forget the whole thing as a bad idea, and take care of our own problems, at home." Sinclair: "No. We have to stay here. And there's a simple reason why. Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes…[and] all of this…all of this…was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars." -- Babylon 5, "Infection" Sebastian: "How do you know the Chosen Ones? "No greater love hath a man than he lay down his life for his brother." Not for millions…not for glory…not for fame. For one person, in the dark, where no one will ever know or see." -- Babylon 5, "Comes the Inquisitioner" G'Kar: "It was the end of the Earth year 2260, and the war had paused, suddenly and unexpectedly. All around us, it was as if the universe were holding its breath…waiting. All of life can be broken down into moments of transition, or moments…of revelation. This had the feeling of both. […] G'Quan wrote, "There is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way. The war we fight is not against powers and principalities, it is against chaos and despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope. The death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender." The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future, or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born…in pain." -- Babylon 5, Z'ha'dum Susan Ivanova: "This is the White Star fleet. Negative on the surrender. We will not stand down." Captain Thomson, Earthforce: "Who is this? Identify yourself!" Ivanova: "Who am I? I am Susan Ivanova. Commander. Daughter of Andrei and Sophie Ivanov. I am the right hand of vengeance, and the boot that is going to kick your sorry ass all the way back to Earth, sweetheart! I am Death Incarnate, and the last living thing that you are ever going to see. God sent me." Captain Sisko: So... I lied. I cheated. I bribed men to cover the crimes of other men. I am an accessory to murder. But the most damning thing of all... I think I can live with it. And if I had to do it all over again - I would. "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - "In the Pale Moonlight"

It will most likely be this: SCP-035 or this: SCP-058 or possibly this: SCP-217 I will probably have a hand in it. My projects, after all.

BTGbullseye pulls it off by the skin of the teeth... which don't have skin, so I don't know what that metaphor is supposed to mean.

The word for that would be "evil." The descriptive phrase for that would be "not a god at all." Though I believe someone once found a compromise position. Check out this quote from "Babylon 5" about the religious beliefs of the Minbari... "We believe that the universe itself is conscious in a way that we can never truly understand. It is engaged in a search for meaning. So it breaks itself apart, investing its own consciousness in every form of life. We are the universe trying to understand itself." Or later in the series, what G'Kar says: "If I take a lamp, and shine it towards the wall, a bright spot will appear on the wall. The lamp is our search for truth, for understanding. Too often we assume that the light on the wall is God. But the light is not the goal of the search. It is the result of the search. The more intense the search, the brighter the light on the wall. The brighter the light on the wall, the greater the sense of revalation upon seeing it. Similarly, someone who does not search, who does not bring a lantern with him, sees nothing. "What we perceive as God, is mearly the by-product of our search for God. It may simply be an appreciation of the light, put and unblemished, not understanding that it comes from us. Sometimes we stand in front of the light and assume we are the centre of the universe - God looks astonishingly like we do. Or we turn to look at our shadow - and assume that all is darkness. If we allow ourselves to get in the way, we defeat the purpose. Which is to use the light of our search to illuminate the wall in all it's beauty and in all its flaws, and in so doing better understand the world around us".

Well, God is in all things, so God creating the universe could easily appear to an outside viewer as the universe creating itself... Or vice-versa.

Some people are pretending Elenin is Nibiru because... well, they're just so stupid that they can't tell a tiny comet from a GIANT planet. Brown Dwarfs mass much more than Jupiter, and they are always around Jupiter's size or larger as well. There is NO WAY for a person to honestly mistake a comet for a brown dwarf... unless they are among the stupidest people alive. Therefore the people making an Elenin-Nibiru connection are either dishonest, or really, REALLY dumb. As for Nibiru... as I've discussed on another thread, it is completely physically impossible for Nibiru to exist the way that the people who "believe" in it describe it, in the same solar system that WE, with our nice neat inner solar system with planets in nearly circular orbits, live in. Can't happen. If I high-mass brown dwarf were careening through the inner solar system every few thousands of years, it would have made millions of trips in the 5.4 billion years our solar system has existed, and at some point its gravity would have pulled the inner solar system planets out of their nice orbits into a crazy bunch of elongated ellipses. That's how gravity works. tl;dr - things have mass, so Nibiru is fake. The people who believe in it are lemmings, and should all self-terminate.

The Senator does not set university policy. He does not have super powers. He has no ability to enforce his words. If he tells the officers not to arrest someone, but to do so is their job, they're not supposed to do what he says. A Senator can not give orders, to police or to military. He's not in anyone's chain of command. Yes, bad things happened. I'm not denying that. And I'm sure if you were a racist, (NOT SAYING YOU ARE! I'M SURE YOU ARE NOT!!!) you could compile a very similar video - from TV news clips alone - showing black people breaking the law and mistreating white people, and use it to try to support an argument that black people are corrupt and bad, and should be held accountable. (And you could do the same thing with white people, gay people, people who drink, people who smoke pot, people who practice recreational philosophy, or any other community you'd care to attack) This is exactly the reason for the saying, among responsible researchers, that "The plural of 'anecdote' is NOT 'data.'" It's exactly like someone being scared of flying after you show them a video of a bunch of planes crashing. Yes, some planes crash, but the percentage is SO astoundingly SMALL compared to the numbers of planes that land SAFELY every hour of every day, that worrying about it is pointless... despite the fact that it IS important to take every reasonable measure possible to insure that planes do NOT fall out of the sky, compiling a vide of the planes that DO is NO help whatsoever. You don't provide any real data supporting the argument that the incidents you have compiled are in any way statistically significant or indicative of a systemic problem. (The real data is almost certain to imply the opposite, but I'll assume you don't know that.) You may have good intentions... but you're using bad science. (Emotionally-based arguments rarely work on people like me. Maybe I'm supposed to feel bad for 'those poor people,' but I can't. So I don't. Trying to get me to is like arguing with an Atheist while using only Bible quotes to support your side.)

Yo dawg, they heard you like forum games, so they put a forum game forum in your forum so you can game in the forum!

I'll explain it to you immediately after you explain how God got there. Because the truth is, whatever explanation works for God will work for the universe. (Except for the fact that current mathematical theory - which I will admit is wayyy beyond me, and I'm not going to drag a theoretical physicist in here to explain it to laypeople - suggests that thanks to how incredibly WEIRD the universe gets on the quantum scale, it may just be possible for the universe to have created itself. Wiki m-theory if you have to.)

1. Very smart. 2. Callous indifference. 3. Glasses. 4. Beard. 5. Has problems with authority figures. 6. Has used the phrase "I am a monkey God!" 7. Can accurately fire weapons despite having little training in their use. 8. Kind of lazy, or at least finds the laziest way to accomplish tasks. 9. Doesn't really pay attention, has no idea what's going on much of the time. 10. Constantly irritated by the stupidity of others. 11. Often frustrated by substandard equipment/facilities. It's obvious... Ross is portraying Gordon Freeman as if he were ME.

It's not so much knowing everything, as it is knowing how to apply Set logic. A thing can be inside the set of "things that exist" (and hence, inside existence), or it can be outside that set, wherein dwell all the things that do not exist. And so...

The first video is an interesting piece of propaganda. I didn't have time to watch all of it, but I noticed that what I did see consisted mainly of short, contextless bits of film coupled with the creator's own interpretation of what was going on. It is a compilation tape, mostly undated, so we can't know how long a time span it covers. Some of those clips look OLD. I also note the the video's poster has a tendency to post a lot of "New World Order" and "End Times" videos... the hallmark of a paranoid nutball. As for the "Don't Tase Me" guy... he went there HOPING that something like that would happen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Florida_Taser_incident

Worked all right for Slovakia and the Czech Republic, too. Although I worry about the day the US may divide into the Holy Fundie Christian Psychotic Empire, and Hippiestan. (Although I figure I could invade Hippiestan and conquer it in about a week... silly pacifists.)

Right outside of existence... Who needs to exist when you're God? Well, GOD would need to exist. And for a thing to exist, it needs, at the very least, somewhere and something to be. Otherwise it doesn't exist. You can't exist outside of existing. Unless you don't exist. But if you don't exist, you can't do things like, oh, create the universe. Before you can DO, you have to BE.

Well, I'm going to see the movie, and I expect I'll enjoy it, but it's not the end-all, be-all, to me that it is to some people. On the other hand... Emma Watson... totally private holosuite material. This summer I've seen Thor, GL, and TF3. What I'm really waiting for is Captain America. Which reminds me... I don't care WHAT politically correct name they give it in these butthurt countries that don't matter, the name of the character and the name of the movie is CAPTAIN F*CKING AMERICA!!!!

Meh, all we need to do is cause two branes to collide, then we can make baby universes. *Theological riddle* IF God was the first being to make something from nothing... where was He standing when He did it?

Areen't they just? especially sconsidering that their original middsion lifetime was set at 30 days... now Opportunity is closing in on 3000 days. I wish my car could outlive its design lifetime by that much, with NO maintenance... Or better yet... me...

The problem is we have a "jury by your peers" system, and some of our peers are freaking idiots. I served on this jury once, one lady on it dozed through most of the trial. During deliberations she said two things that almost made me strangle her: "I never read books, newspapers, or listen to the radio or television." (She was PROUD of this!!!) and "I don't think I could ever send anyone to jail, no matter what" (Then you were supposed to say that DURING JURY SELECTION, you stupid ****!) Any surprise that she was the sole hold-out against conviction?* *Of course, when they polled the jury at the end, she wasn't paying attention and said "guilty." Stupid, STUPID cow. Dude..... What the fuck... *Anyways, if that sort of thing happens here we have appeals courts where the mistreated person can call for if he can present evidence there was a bad jury or any other tyupe of corrupted verdict. We have that in case of a bad CONVICTION, but there's really no recourse for the people, in the event of a bad ACQUITTAL. In fact, we have specific rules against that sort of thing, like the "double jeopardy" law. (I may not have been clear. The guy we were trying was guilty, but this one woman hung the jury - so there had to be a retrial. We actually convicted him on all but the one charge on which we were hung. But he WAS guilty of that, too. We proved that in the jury chambers... while this lady obstinately stared out the window and ignored the rest of us. We rendered the verdicts, which was the official result... she only said "guilty" when they polled the jury as a formality, after the trial was over.

That is correct. There has been, and continues to be, debate over whether or not the structures found were life. The meteorite is ALH-84001. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Hills_84001 There has, however, so far been no (zero) (none) (not a single speck of) life found on Mars or anywhere other than Earth.

I know a little Spanish because I didn't have a choice. If I were to learn another language at this late date, it would probably be Scots Gaelic. Or Klingon.

I am #18? This is what comes from working too much, being old, and usually only posting when I have something to say.

-rep for those 5 words. Reading comprehension? Never heard of it? Too bad. If you had bothered to read the full post or even look at the bill objectively, you'd see that endangering video game content is not the intention of this bill, but is due to its wording, the bill in and of itself is a good idea, but it needs to be more precise in wording, for it is intended to apply to illegal streaming of copyrighted content like movies and TV shows, not video games, and so I proposed revising the bill, but you didn't read that, you only read up to those 5 words and instantly decided to make a judgement call. A stupidly worded, exploitable law is worse than no law.

The problem is we have a "jury by your peers" system, and some of our peers are freaking idiots. I served on this jury once, one lady on it dozed through most of the trial. During deliberations she said two things that almost made me strangle her: "I never read books, newspapers, or listen to the radio or television." (She was PROUD of this!!!) and "I don't think I could ever send anyone to jail, no matter what" (Then you were supposed to say that DURING JURY SELECTION, you stupid ****!) Any surprise that she was the sole hold-out against conviction?* *Of course, when they polled the jury at the end, she wasn't paying attention and said "guilty." Stupid, STUPID cow.