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I say the bible is stupid and full of sh*t.

Discuss.

I think there's a lot of value in there.

Unfortunately, that's more dangerous than if it were completely bigoted, hypocritical, contradictory and all the rest. People tend to agree with people they tend to agree with, if you follow.

http://www.virtualdebris.co.uk/miscella ... ebible.php

It just seems like I have to be so full of bitterness and spite towards so much in the world and it's always religion at the root of it all.

On the one hand I should just let it go, not give a sh*t, and let the fools carry on treating everyone else like crap and only fight back when the infringe on my rights.

On the other, I feel a need to fight it anyway despite my impotence in the matter.

Ever really NEED someone so much that you really come to understand the term, "better half," as in someone whom you're just not sane without?

I wish I had taken a few Philosophy courses, but anyway, I wrote a long piece, Id like some comments, unlike how I got no reply for my Soundwave piece under "not for religious people who cant take a joke" (MAD TV T3 parody)


Fact: People in the land will "always" corrupt scripture, or things regarded as scripture, or at least whole heartedly promote dastardly corrupt interpretations of scripture.

Now here is one painfully obvious corrupted argument:

Something that is forbidden now, will be totally allowed in Heaven, without stressing that in Heaven it might be altered enough to regard the two forms as essentially different things.

Examples:
1) You cant have promiscuous sex here, but in Heaven you will be allowed that.

2) Some type of food was made forbidden only for a segment of folk, perhaps forever, that they might be punished.

What leaps out from this is that people might find true bliss, true joy in these things (promiscuous sex, "forbidden" food), even though they are forbidden, that, reason would actually say that harm does not come from these things, that, they are indistinguishable from blessings. But people would believe that God would be looking over people who go against his commands, like the tribe with the banned food, that, God would alter "all" laws of nature simply to smite this particular tribe by making them suffer for indefinately taking that food.


I have done some faith based "paradigm articulation", love those two words and I wish I could call myself a professional at that. I have read only a very little of the Quran and I have already exrapolated. I did find a few things that really put me at a loss for argueing how they were based on obvious reasoning, or lets say, I was at a loss for seeing how they might be interpreted "nicely", I simply had to put them aside for the time being. This launches us into a postulate.


1) At face value, in this world, there exists no bombastic and blatent source of indisputable light.

God's style/plan is not to make the truth, His existance, the happenings of events and the purposes for those events, blatantly apparent. It shall never never be that some "holy" thing would unconditionally and whole heartedly convert all sorts of disbelievers to His path. All things suggest to me that God is not a magician, he does not alter "all" laws of nature ad hoc. Of course it seems much more fitting that a noble person who might have led a special life of righteousness, would become deservant of experiancing miracles. This extends to companions of prophets, and say the people whom God blessed with wisdom over the prevelant blindness (Galileo anyone). Their prior lives might have earned them what they found.


Some years back, when I had seen almost nothing of the Quran, I thought that it would be something like that "holy" thing, in the sense that it didnt matter how the person might have lived, one read of high concentration would bring true belief. But no, its not something bombastic and blatently filled with indisputible light (though I believe that any true believer would find it to be some subtle indisputable light). For one thing, that would contradict the existance of evil, evil people are supposed to find very good support for their beliefs, living in this life. Regarding the corrupt argument above, and the things from the Quran I wanted to put aside, I had one at hand while I was writing this article, but I found a resoning just then, Im glad. Now regarding the month of fasting (Ramadan) it says:

[2:187] Permitted for you is sexual intercourse with your wives during the nights of fasting. They are the keepers of your secrets, and you are the keepers of their secrets. GOD knew that you used to betray your souls, and He has redeemed you, and has pardoned you. Henceforth, you may have intercourse with them, seeking what GOD has permitted for you. [...]

Now I was following this commentry:
Like all duties in Submission, fasting was decreed through Abraham (22:78). Prior to revelation of the Quran, sexual intercourse was prohibited throughout the fasting period. This rule is modified in 2:187 to allow intercourse during
the nights of Ramadan.

Just with that I felt weak, its like that food taboo, it felt horrible, I had to resort to this explanation, kinda ad hoc too:

old times -----> different genetic structure
much much time passed --------> new genetic structure + people would be at an overall loss if they abstained from sex the entire month

Now this had a potential of producing shockwaves in my paradigms if they became more than ad hoc. Isnt that terrible, then they would assert things like "space bridge... completed" or "destruction to all trespassers". I just read another commentry, that the Quran said to follow the practices continuing from Abraham that had not been distorted. The others that had been distored, it "corrected" (not modified!) and spoke in detail about their performance. So its much much better that I believe that God never made such a drastic change like that in his commands. Infact, I take for now, "GOD knew that you used to betray your souls" to mean that the people had wronged themselves by allowing men to lay down the commands, in this case, that God commands the greater abstination of the entire month.

Anyway, this is an example, that the Quran is such that some people might read it and laugh malicous laughs owing to their malicous interpretations, say that the people demanded a change of God's commands from God and it was granted. The "laughers" Im thinking of accept God's existance as hypocrites and wish to bring "severe" dissonance to those with faith, or assume it for the sake of argument to hurt good people.

That suddenly reminds me, another corruptedness is that where people promote interpretations that God as being bashful: if He said what He really wanted form people, in this case, that they abstain the whole month, it would fall on deaf ears, therefore He declared a weaker law. Relativism is a pain, how painful is it to think that people would then completly believe this bashfulness theory.


Well, now that I have said that knowledge about God is relative, I also have a postulate about where truth lies and can be found (subtlety). Would people like a piece on that?

Well, the other day I had a thought...

This may offend anyone who is deeply religious, or even half-heartedly, I dont know... erm, dont read if you are going to flame me, this is just a thought I had the other day -






I will tell you there were two places I could send you to for eternity - one with endless bliss and one where you would be forever tortured. No matter how many terrible things you have done, how cruel you were, how many lives you ruined - if you suck up to me and kiss my a**, I will let you go to heaven. No matter how kindly and generously you lived, always helping others, with never a malicious act - if you do not suck up to me, I will send you straight to hell.

If I said that, wouldnt you call me an egocentric ***hole?

I know I would...

Originally posted by Sir Auros
Ever really NEED someone so much that you really come to understand the term, "better half," as in someone whom you're just not sane without?

Maybe. I'm familiar with separation as a genuine physical pain. I'm pretty self-reliant when I feel I have to be, though.

Originally posted by Axe
Well, now that I have said that knowledge about God is relative, I also have a postulate about where truth lies and can be found (subtlety). Would people like a piece on that?

Not particularly. I have very little interest in the dogmatic minutia of stories; the literary and historical framings are of more direct use in debunking... understand the realities and contexts of religious writings and we're closer to what possessed people to write them. Social control figures quite highly in the list of reasons.

Whatever I believe, it lacks shopping lists.

Originally posted by ThePeacemkr2
if you suck up to me and kiss my a**, I will let you go to heaven. No matter how kindly and generously you lived, always helping others, with never a malicious act - if you do not suck up to me, I will send you straight to hell.

Sums up my feelings about Methodists with precision.

Honestly, Christians who can bring themselves to believe in a god with the above credentials are amongst the most hate-filled individuals I know.

Originally posted by Denyer
Honestly, Christians who can bring themselves to believe in a god with the above credentials are amongst the most hate-filled individuals I know.

I don't know about anyone else, but I sure don't need Christianity, or the beliefs thereof, to fill me with hate

I'm guessing that you—like the majority of people I know who aren't religiously-minded about judgement—don't try to pass it off as love, though...

Is it really that obvious?

Damn...

Originally posted by Sir Auros
I say the bible, quran, and talmud are stupid and full of sh*t.

Discuss.

Gotta be fair man.

Originally posted by Sir Auros
I say the bible is stupid and full of sh*t.

I agree.

Originally posted by ThePeacemkr2

I will tell you there were two places I could send you to for eternity - one with endless bliss and one where you would be forever tortured. No matter how many terrible things you have done, how cruel you were, how many lives you ruined - if you suck up to me and kiss my a**, I will let you go to heaven. No matter how kindly and generously you lived, always helping others, with never a malicious act - if you do not suck up to me, I will send you straight to hell.

If I said that, wouldnt you call me an egocentric ***hole?

I know I would...

I got an opportunity to write out my subtlety paradigm + some other stuff. Well here we go:


Hmm, what Id like to focus on is this superficiality that people that I find to be ignorant and hypocritical are obsessed about. I think it is pretty common to have superficiality people like these, and its horrible that they think the statements form people with religious authority are like proofs comming from Mathmeticians, as long as they are at most unnoticiably in conflict with recently accepted statements and longer standing beliefs of course. A more horrible thing is that some of these folk dont even care to articulate for themselves the process of inspiration that might have gone on with prophets and others who helped forward messages from God.


Yes, these are the people, for whom I feel, that their innermost belief is likely to be that God is furiously watching over his creation. They would believe that He doesnt have direct control over His creation, but His creation is destined to conform to his commandments, wheter or not they suffer tremendously in the process of this conformation. They think that God is distant from His creation, and also knows not its truest needs, he simply gives them puspose, like a man and his computer lets say. Its like the man is running his computer in a hot weather (earth), 120 F lets say. The man has plans to take the components of the computer that perform good or bad based on his assessment, in their given time in this room, to either a cooler room indefinately (Heaven) or to an even hotter room indefinately (Hell).


Now the people, i.e. the components, think that anything in this life that might seem good, in any form whatsoever at any level, would be bad in reality if it had the "marking" of being prohibited by God. There is a huge flaw in their schema by thinking this, but they truely believe that it would be as if each component in the computer might find to the deepest level of soberness a way of living fit for it, and yet it might produce an undesired effect in the computer according to the man.

So at the end of the day their belief is, even though it would never come onto their mouths: "Oh man, we will try to form your computer even though we truly despise what your specifications demand of us."



Now I would like to articulate what I find is a better paradigm, and here we are also delving to see how God might be seen as far from arrogant. Bear with me the postulating that follows from here. The Lord is closer to his creation than one could imagine. Anything that happens, happens according to his will. He is fully cognizant of even the subltlest of subleties.

Whether or not evolution occured:
1) Its good that we see imperfections among us, God wants to be subtle, if everyone saw humans or anything at all to be perfect at face value, that would be bombastic, like God simply forcing us to bow down to Him.

2) Animals and humans are so similar, its hard to see where they are disalike structurally. But subtle differences mean everything. We see that subtle differences surface with such tremendous consequences, God is in complete control of subtlety.


God wants us to focus on the weather, that is another place where subltley is at work, whilst we know not: we cannot predict drastic weather changes over long periods of time. For humans, the factor of not being cognizant of subtlety can mean seeing nature to be screwed, for example Mercury's orbit not conforming well at all to Newtonian mechanics, or seeing more reason to believe in God's control over nature; the development of relativity, which also gave meaning to the subtle discrepancy in Mercury's orbit by explaining it.


Using the intensity of the weather example, I want to point to the benefit it brings to analyzing miracles. I believe that God does not jam "all" the laws of nature into a coner, in order that He may bring up special miracle ones, when he wants to bring about a miracle, he simply works in subltety. In the prophets you have a shining example. God put in these people just that little something extra with which these people, at least the message they delivered, arose over the bombastic prevelence of corruption during their times.



Well that's postulating for God being subtle rather then bombastic, but other postulating naturally follows. The definition of good becomes doing what God wants. God knows 100% exactly what is truly good. But we must also look into the innermost belief development of people. A man may have very seldom got the words like "True God" to his mouth with reverence, and have hated the religous authority close to him, but, whenever he did true good, with his heart filled with truely good intentions, he automatically obeyed the Lord exactly. If his doing of good, is plentiful, does it follow that he disobeyed the Lord? And of course, anybody, who commited true evil, with his heart filled with truely evil intentions, he disobeyed the Lord.


If we just add this one last touch, a theory, and what can I say, I couldnt help but come to this conclusion: Every person has a part of consciousness that is in complete touch with the Lord. That part never comminicate back too much of revealing material to the rest of consciousness, or else it would kinda be over, the person would believe totally in the Lord. So at the end of the day, the belief of the good guy would lie at least in this part of conciousness, if it does lie only there, it would be something like, "Oh Lord help me and the rest of me see further, and more vividly, the good in that which you command, as you have done so in the past."


Hmm, comments? That "in touch" conciousness part is intriguing, an angel for evey peson is another concept.

Originally posted by Axe
God wants us to focus on the weather

That's a collosal extrapolation from the fact that there are simply too many variables. Just because we don't understand something, eg. situations which can only be approximated through chaos theory =/= divine power at work.

Humans have a lot of limitations, but that isn't proof of guided creation.

Originally posted by Axe
That part never comminicate back too much of revealing material to the rest of consciousness, or else it would kinda be over, the person would believe totally in the Lord.

Complete cop-out, if you ask me. I think it's an all-or-nothing deal with 'communicating back'...

http://www.virtualdebris.co.uk/notebook/p2s2.php

^^^ That was my fictional take on something similar.

[quote]Originally posted by Denyer
That's a collosal extrapolation from the fact that there are simply too many variables.


Oh gosh! When you said "too many variables" I realized Ive been "scientific model" blinded for a long time on the matter of "mathematically modelling" weather. I simply thought that Quantum uncertainty (undeterminancy) principles were responsible for us not being able to make better predictions, but the matter is that its a science in its own right, and even if determinancy exists, I suppose we havent researched this science to that level at all. Aint it odd, the uncertainty principle has such a grip on our minds, and we cant even find analytic probabalistic wavefunctions for atoms beyond hydrogen. Maybe Physics has grown too fast for mathematics over the past several centuries, we need more usfull math ammunition. No wait, Newton was one who brought more physics and math. We need a new philosophy then, these waves and particles are too old.

[quote]Originally posted by Denyer
Just because we don't understand something, eg. situations which can only be approximated through chaos theory =/= divine power at work.


I just wanted to bring to light that even though we have our sciences that place highly probabalistic bounds on what should result from given initial situations, there's room for happenings outside the laboratory that we would consider to be miracles. Therefore, one is allowed to see the same, every day essence of nature, bring about a calamity, or inspiration in a man as part of God's "exact" will.


[quote]Originally posted by Denyer
Complete cop-out, if you ask me. I think it's an all-or-nothing deal with 'communicating back'...


Hmm, yeah. I guess I have to face it. Right now it seems to me that the only way a man could have complete belief in God inwardly would be if he were being antihypocritical, Thundercraker turning into an Autobot comes to mind.

Science is nothing but a language attempting to describe things.

Not being able to describe something doesn't make it a miracle.

Take life, for instance. We can harvest seeds, grow them later at will with the application of nutrients and water, and we don't regard this as anything out of the ordinary.

The notion that mammalian reproduction follows an analogous set of 'rules', on the other hand, fills us with dread. Suddenly we feel as if we might have to be nice to those other animals we kill with abandon!

Well, no. Some people react against this by regarding human life as 'sacred' above all the rest, and some just acknowledge that we treat anything we haven't formed personal emotional attachments to with more than a little apathy. We aren't about to give up bacon, or virtually ignoring problems in the Third World, but we aren't going to lie about it, either.

Those who entertain perverted end times images and justify nuclear war/terrorism as the Lord's work are the real enemy.

Originally posted by Denyer
Science is nothing but a language attempting to describe things.

Not being able to describe something doesn't make it a miracle.

Well, I can see two paradigms, taken somewhat in their generality, adoptable by people. People might extrapolate from their experiance and from their understanding of their environment, the belief, that what's really out there is either no unbreakable laws of nature whatsoever, or utterly unbreakable ones desribing all of nature, among other extrapolations perhaps.

The paradigms:


1) Order is an illusion, the reality is randomness:

Science simply helps humans see and manipulate their surroundings better. Science is an evolutionary process, it can never describe everything, and no absolute laws exist. Since no statement regarding the limits of influencing reality can be utterly true, every source of randomness, which perhaps includes the human consciuosness, "can" work towards bringing any possible change to reality, perhaps even eleminating all of the sources of randomness, inclduing itself, leaving a reality that woud be....... is very hard to imagine for me he he.


2) There is utter order, and utter destiny in our universe:
(caution, thicker than my usual stuff)

Our universe, which is either a boxed segment of reality, or reality in totality, exists along with a sealed fate. Now there is no demand of neccessity here that it came into existance at a particular time and has to cease to exist at another, it may have existed for time = -infinity through +infinity. Let us take the case of it being boxed, and I should say it has a begining and an end with regards to time, but I refrain as I do not know what transfinitness might have to say on the matter. Then it is possible to have entities outside the box, the only entities that truely have free will in all of reality, but we will come back to these identies later below.


We see that since we have defined our universe to be perfectly determined, any thing that plays any sort of role in that universe will have that role completely determined before hand for the entire span of existance of the universe. We cant have anything randomly comming along from the outside to put its hand in the box and influence it, that would mean it was completely inside the box as long as it influenced it. Therefore, we view the box as not being able to recieve anything whatsoever form the outside, we view it as self contained system.


Now we turn to the entities. We need to view our boxed universe as a four dimensional object that exists for an instant and perhaps over the span of an iota in the complete picture of reality. If we assume a single entity, then by this whirlwind creation and collapse I refer to the product of a single coherent instant of will: "Be!". Therefore, before any new will to alter anything about he boxed universe might have emerged, the universe had already collapsed.

If we take mutiple entities then by the same instaniousness, the will of one or more of those entities might have resulted in the whirlwind event of creation through collapse of the boxed universe.



I tried to be general with the paradigms. Would anyone like to add an extrapolation or a paradigm, or something more general or specific with regards to these two?

Number 1 can give purpose to life I suppose, but I cant see how purpose could be derived from the unboxed case of 2, i.e. nothing outside the box, or from a story that all sources may have died in 1.

You forgot the Torah, whatever that one is for (preferably as an alternative to toilet roll).

I agree with Auros. I'm very sorry, but there is a lot of **** commited in the name of religion. War, genocide, and plenty more besides. The Bible has two stances on everything. One of the ten commandments is 'thou shalt not kill', and yet the same book says 'an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth'. Convoluted? Certainly.

Besides, every religion argues over being right. Thats what starts wars (in the exception of stupid people *coughBushcough*). I just want God to show up at the end of the world and say 'You've all got it ****ing wrong' before the nameless void consumes everything.

I think there's a weakness in this 'instant' concept. Infinity also mathematically is singular, but conceptually can include its own end.

It also depends on what you mean by 'order'... something we would regard as ordered is perfectly possible within a localised area, regardless of whether infinity is the case. It is a perception, though.

Science can never describe everything, because it can't be everything. Past a certain point, description becomes what is being described.

Since the human conciousness is the sum of its organs and impulses, of course it changes reality. What the extent of this ability is, on the other hand...

Originally posted by Wolfang
I'm very sorry, but there is a lot of **** commited in the name of religion. War, genocide, and plenty more besides.

No doubt.

On the other hand, there's also been a lot of evil done by people who didn't believe that there's a God they're accountable to. (e.g. Stalin)

You better not switch off that little thing called "conscience" and "common sense" in the name of any religion or ideology.