Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

[Toronthab]

skilly said:

toronthab said:

Actually, we are all the body of Christ. He gave his life for our sins. The church as an entity does not exist without the people.

God knows who is "Christian". I subscribe to Saint Paul's "We have reason to hope."

We are destined to find out though. I sure as hell wouldn't put my name very high on the list of probable invitees. My notions place an entirely appropriate emphasis on forgiveness and mercy.

Nope. But when I say Creationism I am speaking of Biblical creationism. The church/christianity were its biggest defenders.

All I am trying to do in this post , (and its' really boring for me) is to distinguish the following.

"Creationists" believe that the earth was "made" in six days. They are nuts. Intelligent Design theorists are not "Creationists" who are the right true and proper target of the
spaghetti monster crowd. The pasta crowd, like the creationists, also should do significantly better research.

The "church/christianity" were not and are not defenders of creationism as creationism is understood in our culture. Even Saint Peter says in the bible somewhere that a day to god can be like a thousand years. Saint Augustine made the same point 1600 years ago or so.
Biblical fundamentalism is not representative of Christian thought.

I take offense to this comment. Protestants are commonly known in my part of the world as non-Roman Catholics. There are no misguided Roman Catholics?? Most protestant religions were borne out of Roman Catholism. I hope when you use the word protestant in this context you meant non-religions (which to me would be pagan).

OK. I am not sure what you have said here, but creationsism as the belief in a six day creation is generally and almost exclusively a belief held by a relatively small number of protestant biblical literalists. This is the central point of this thread. There are tons of misguided Catholics. Kilotonnes.

This is one THEORY. In science you have postulates, theories, and rules. (I know there are more than that, but for this purpose this is enough). Rules are written in stone for all intents and purposes, theories are not. It is the best guess. The big bang has not been proven, it is a theory

I will include a link to a protestant scientist / thinker who adresses this issue really well in two parts. Big Bang science is extremely well founded and is way the hell beyond a "good guess"

Rules are only written in stone if they are from God. They are otherwise mere conventions subject to moral relativism, the ascendancy of the fashionable.

so how does anyone know what was before it and what wasnt. Philosophers have there educated guess as do religious heads and scientists. People choose to believe who they want.

The cosmoligical arguments for the existence of God are demonstrative. They prove the existence of God. They are not guesswork. They move from self-evident propositions to logically-entailed conclusioons. A sound argument is not guesswork. What is unsound about Hubble's observations, and the more recent evidence for the Big Bang? Are you guessing? Religious heads of my experience rely upon the guidance of the promised holy spirit, not guesswork.

You mean they no longer have a problem because evolutionists can not explain what caused the Big Bang.

This seems another instance of misuse of terms. Almost all of the world's "Christians" are evolutionists. Augustine suggested similar notions to explain life, and the idea was actively considered in Catholic universities before Darwin was born. Darwinism, that particular species of evolutionary theory is actually not defensible from the fossil record. He knew that by the way. Most scientists know what Schaeffer calls the "trade secret" of the science.

God is just a good an answer as pressure build up in a vaccum that exploded in a magnitude with a trillion times Energy releases itself in only two ways. Heat and Noise. The creation of matter is not one of them.

This is exactly why many scientists believe what the evidence leads to...a power above nature a supernatural entity was necessary to create the universe. Science, philosophy and theology are in agreement.

Nobody is defending atheistic materialism. If anything we are asking science to explain more. Questioning science or religion does not show lack of faith or lack of conviction. It shows a quest for knowledge. If the Big Bang is a correct Theory, then a logical question arising is "What was before it" ..... saying nothing is philosphical - a soft science.

The big battle in the halls of academe are in fact predicated upon atheistic materialism. Interesting that you would call philosophy "soft". If so, and I do not in the least accept that it is (In other words I disagree with with your philosophically inaccurate statement) but if that were in fact so then I suppose you will have to revise your ideas of "hard" sciences, as their principles are only defended by philosophical argument.

It is in fact when scientists (like Hawking ) and others are not mindful of their philosophical naivete that a lot of people start believing a lot of nonsense.

Your are right to seek what is logically prior to the BIG Bang. You will only find answers in either metaphysics or religion or both. That's not a guess. That's just the way it is.

Science was prosecuted by the church when they disagreed with the science.

This is simply not true. The medieval church was profoundly involved in the advancement of the science, allowed an extraordinary degree of academic freedom, and was in fact the primary reason why science developped in the West and nowhere else.

Gallileo, who gets exhumed and trotted out regularly as some sort of proof statement for commnents like the one above was advancing the theories of Copernicus (who was himself a canon in the church ). Galileo (who claimed to have invented the telescope and of course did not do any such thing) was demanding that the church base its teaching on his arguments.

His opposition was from scientists. He based his "proof" of the earths' motion around the sun on the tides of the ocean. Even you and I know that this is a lunar phenomena.

He wanted to overthrow Ptolemy's work, but offered no proof. He had none.

Only observations in the early 19thy century confirmed Copernicus. The moons he observed through his misappropriated telescope could be adequately accounted for without Copernicus. Galileo incidentally was a devout catholic as was Copernicus, and was good buddy of the pope's. That the issue got out of hand was unfortunate, but the primary instigationj came from Galileo, not the church. Virtually all modern scholarship agrees in this. It will no doubt be continued to be trotted out to defend untrue propositons.

Aquinas held, as a good Catholic that the universe was created ex nihilo (out of nothing).

Aquinas was a philospoher. There are all kinds of philosophers with differing opinions so Aquinas or jake are not the end all and be all of thought. Plato, Aristotle, Mencius, Seneca, Freud, Hume, Marx, Satre, Beauvoir, Skinner, Wilson, Augustine, Nietzche, abd Descartes ideas are just as good as Aquinas or my own .... they are ideas.

Am I to understand (even though ideas are involved) that I should place no value upon what you write because they are only ideas and as true or false as any other ideas?

Is this because there is no connection between the real world and our ideas about it?

Shirley you can't be Sirus.

To be consistent with the Hegelian Idealism or post-modernism, its cousin, one should not realloy say anything, for adressing another implies that they are really there, that they also have real ideas in common that are grounded in experience and that to some degree the intellect is capable of distinguishing sense from nonsense. That's roughly what Aquinas, Aristotle and other philosophical realists thought. I think their ideas are obviously correct in this matter and that philosophers like Hume, Kant, Descartes and others were obviously wrong.

The principle of non-contradiction holds inescapably that when people disagree on the same matter considered in the same respect, they only one can be correct.

Aquinas is his Treatise on Man argued that the body and the soul are two principles related to each other as matter to form. The human soul is the inner principle that makes a potentially human body what it is. He feltthe human soul was immortal whereas Aristotle thought it was a thing. Two ideas.

Aquinas developped a great deal of Aristotle's thought. Oddly, Galileo (see earlier) based upon Ptolemy believed as Aristotle brilliantly taught that orbits had to be perfectly circular.
Development and disagreement do not negate the value of ideas.

Ideas about reality are statements about being. A thing cannot both exist and not exist simultaneously. Rather our ideas measure to a considerable degree how real we are.

[Toronthab]

Sorry about the faulty post

Quote:Actually, we are all the body of Christ. He gave his life for our sins. The church as an entity does not exist without the people.


God knows who is "Christian". I subscribe to Saint Paul's "We have reason to hope."

We are destined to find out though. I sure as hell wouldn't put my name very high on the list of probable invitees. My notions place an entirely appropriate emphasis on forgiveness and mercy.


Quote:Nope. But when I say Creationism I am speaking of Biblical creationism. The church/christianity were its biggest defenders.



All I am trying to do in this post , (and its' really boring for me) is to distinguish the following.

"Creationists" believe that the earth was "made" in six days. They are nuts. Intelligent Design theorists are not "Creationists" who are the right true and proper target of the
spaghetti monster crowd. The pasta crowd, like the creationists, also should do significantly better research.

The "church/christianity" were not and are not defenders of creationism as creationism is understood in our culture. Even Saint Peter says in the bible somewhere that a day to god can be like a thousand years. Saint Augustine made the same point 1600 years ago or so.
Biblical fundamentalism is not representative of Christian thought.


Quote:I take offense to this comment. Protestants are commonly known in my part of the world as non-Roman Catholics. There are no misguided Roman Catholics?? Most protestant religions were borne out of Roman Catholism. I hope when you use the word protestant in this context you meant non-religions (which to me would be pagan).



OK. I am not sure what you have said here, but creationsism as the belief in a six day creation is generally and almost exclusively a belief held by a relatively small number of protestant biblical literalists. This is the central point of this thread. There are tons of misguided Catholics. Kilotonnes.


Quote:This is one THEORY. In science you have postulates, theories, and rules. (I know there are more than that, but for this purpose this is enough). Rules are written in stone for all intents and purposes, theories are not. It is the best guess. The big bang has not been proven, it is a theory



I will include a link to a protestant scientist / thinker who adresses this issue really well in two parts. Big Bang science is extremely well founded and is way the hell beyond a "good guess"

Rules are only written in stone if they are from God. They are otherwise mere conventions subject to moral relativism, the ascendancy of the fashionable.


Quote:so how does anyone know what was before it and what wasnt. Philosophers have there educated guess as do religious heads and scientists. People choose to believe who they want.



The cosmoligical arguments for the existence of God are demonstrative. They prove the existence of God. They are not guesswork. They move from self-evident propositions to logically-entailed conclusioons. A sound argument is not guesswork. What is unsound about Hubble's observations, and the more recent evidence for the Big Bang? Are you guessing? Religious heads of my experience rely upon the guidance of the promised holy spirit, not guesswork.



Quote:You mean they no longer have a problem because evolutionists can not explain what caused the Big Bang.



This seems another instance of misuse of terms. Almost all of the world's "Christians" are evolutionists. Augustine suggested similar notions to explain life, and the idea was actively considered in Catholic universities before Darwin was born. Darwinism, that particular species of evolutionary theory is actually not defensible from the fossil record. He knew that by the way. Most scientists know what Schaeffer calls the "trade secret" of the science.



Quote:God is just a good an answer as pressure build up in a vaccum that exploded in a magnitude with a trillion times Energy releases itself in only two ways. Heat and Noise. The creation of matter is not one of them.





This is exactly why many scientists believe what the evidence leads to...a power above nature a supernatural entity was necessary to create the universe. Science, philosophy and theology are in agreement.


Quote:Nobody is defending atheistic materialism. If anything we are asking science to explain more. Questioning science or religion does not show lack of faith or lack of conviction. It shows a quest for knowledge. If the Big Bang is a correct Theory, then a logical question arising is "What was before it" ..... saying nothing is philosphical - a soft science.



The big battle in the halls of academe are in fact predicated upon atheistic materialism. Interesting that you would call philosophy "soft". If so, and I do not in the least accept that it is (In other words I disagree with with your philosophically inaccurate statement) but if that were in fact so then I suppose you will have to revise your ideas of "hard" sciences, as their principles are only defended by philosophical argument.

It is in fact when scientists (like Hawking ) and others are not mindful of their philosophical naivete that a lot of people start believing a lot of nonsense.

Your are right to seek what is logically prior to the BIG Bang. You will only find answers in either metaphysics or religion or both. That's not a guess. That's just the way it is.




Quote:Science was prosecuted by the church when they disagreed with the science.



This is simply not true. The medieval church was profoundly involved in the advancement of the science, allowed an extraordinary degree of academic freedom, and was in fact the primary reason why science developped in the West and nowhere else.

Gallileo, who gets exhumed and trotted out regularly as some sort of proof statement for commnents like the one above was advancing the theories of Copernicus (who was himself a canon in the church ). Galileo (who claimed to have invented the telescope and of course did not do any such thing) was demanding that the church base its teaching on his arguments.

His opposition was from scientists. He based his "proof" of the earths' motion around the sun on the tides of the ocean. Even you and I know that this is a lunar phenomena.

He wanted to overthrow Ptolemy's work, but offered no proof. He had none.

Only observations in the early 19thy century confirmed Copernicus. The moons he observed through his misappropriated telescope could be adequately accounted for without Copernicus. Galileo incidentally was a devout catholic as was Copernicus, and was good buddy of the pope's. That the issue got out of hand was unfortunate, but the primary instigationj came from Galileo, not the church. Virtually all modern scholarship agrees in this. It will no doubt be continued to be trotted out to defend untrue propositons.





Quote:Aquinas held, as a good Catholic that the universe was created ex nihilo (out of nothing).





Quote:Aquinas was a philospoher. There are all kinds of philosophers with differing opinions so Aquinas or jake are not the end all and be all of thought. Plato, Aristotle, Mencius, Seneca, Freud, Hume, Marx, Satre, Beauvoir, Skinner, Wilson, Augustine, Nietzche, abd Descartes ideas are just as good as Aquinas or my own .... they are ideas.



Am I to understand (even though ideas are involved) that I should place no value upon what you write because they are only ideas and as true or false as any other ideas?

Is this because there is no connection between the real world and our ideas about it?

Shirley you can't be Sirus.

To be consistent with the Hegelian Idealism or post-modernism, its cousin, one should not realloy say anything, for adressing another implies that they are really there, that they also have real ideas in common that are grounded in experience and that to some degree the intellect is capable of distinguishing sense from nonsense. That's roughly what Aquinas, Aristotle and other philosophical realists thought. I think their ideas are obviously correct in this matter and that philosophers like Hume, Kant, Descartes and others were obviously wrong.

The principle of non-contradiction holds inescapably that when people disagree on the same matter considered in the same respect, they only one can be correct.



Quote:Aquinas is his Treatise on Man argued that the body and the soul are two principles related to each other as matter to form. The human soul is the inner principle that makes a potentially human body what it is. He feltthe human soul was immortal whereas Aristotle thought it was a thing. Two ideas.





Aquinas developped a great deal of Aristotle's thought. Oddly, Galileo (see earlier) based upon Ptolemy believed as Aristotle brilliantly taught that orbits had to be perfectly circular.
Development and disagreement do not negate the value of ideas.

Ideas about reality are statements about being. A thing cannot both exist and not exist simultaneously. Rather our ideas measure to a considerable degree how real we are.

[habsaddict2]

Great discussion guys!

And to think that some people think that this is a hockey site..... .................

[Toronthab]

habsaddict2 said:

Great discussion guys!

And to think that some people think that this is a hockey site..... .................

Just trying to adress the ever pertinent questions suchas:

1. Can people who don't like hockey be natural in the Aristotelian sense?

2. Can hockey players be minor gods?

3. Do LeafLovers have human souls? Ti Domi?

4. Is a Leaf Nation a self-defeating notion or will the Habs do it for them again and again and again.....?


This has just been a preseason warmup for the biggies.

[franko]

A Short History of Progress [Ronald Wright]

[Vinna]

I believe that J.W's coming to my door are a pain in the arse.

I believe thast everyone has the right to chose their own belief system.

I believe I have never seen god.

I believe that for an Almighty Being, he is awfully bad at balancing his bank book. After all, please give is the catholic church slogan.

I believe that sex with one you love is better than sex with one you don't.

I believe that alcohol taken in moderation can be theraputic.

I believe that somkeday soon we will be able to buy pot at the corner store and we will have to buy tobacco on a street corner.

I believe in happiness can be found in the absurd.

I believe I will partake in some alcoholic therapy.

[Toronthab]

franko said:

A Short History of Progress [Ronald Wright]

Just noticed your post and listened to the CBC interview. Pretty interesting and his take on fundamentalists' naive and unscientific beliefs vis a vis evolution and the idea that God will wave a magic wand and just fix things we don't attend to is also reasonable.

They are a pretty easy target, but I gather we all come in for a well deserved wake-up call for our patterns of mindless consumption and mindless short term busy-ness.

It make me think of Blaise Pascal's observations on why we are so ensnared by busy-ness and an endless search for diversion. Methinks his diagnosis was brilliant.

[Habs_fan_in_LA]

vinna said:

I believe that J.W's coming to my door are a pain in the arse.

I believe thast everyone has the right to chose their own belief system.

I believe I have never seen god.

I believe that for an Almighty Being, he is awfully bad at balancing his bank book. After all, please give is the catholic church slogan.

I believe that sex with one you love is better than sex with one you don't.

I believe that alcohol taken in moderation can be theraputic.

I believe that somkeday soon we will be able to buy pot at the corner store and we will have to buy tobacco on a street corner.

I believe in happiness can be found in the absurd.

I believe I will partake in some alcoholic therapy.

Young attractive JW's are in the minority.
Me neither.
I sometimes feel like Job too.
But is sex with one you love better than sex with two you don't?
Alcohol in moderation is greater than the small sip you get in church.
They should both be in stores.
True, I'm happy.
Cheers.

[Toronthab]

habsfaninla said:

vinna said:

I believe that J.W's coming to my door are a pain in the arse.

I believe thast everyone has the right to chose their own belief system.

I believe I have never seen god.

I believe that for an Almighty Being, he is awfully bad at balancing his bank book. After all, please give is the catholic church slogan.

I believe that sex with one you love is better than sex with one you don't.

I believe that alcohol taken in moderation can be theraputic.

I believe that somkeday soon we will be able to buy pot at the corner store and we will have to buy tobacco on a street corner.

I believe in happiness can be found in the absurd.

I believe I will partake in some alcoholic therapy.

Young attractive JW's are in the minority.
Me neither.
I sometimes feel like Job too.
But is sex with one you love better than sex with two you don't?
Alcohol in moderation is greater than the small sip you get in church.
They should both be in stores.
True, I'm happy.
Cheers.

Heh heh.