Women are nowhere to be seen where men gather in muslim culture. Amazingly it may now be possible that muslim women can sing:

http://www.sputnikmusic.com/news.php?newsid=15456&page=2

….Dr. Yousef al-Qardhawi ruled that Sharia Law does not expressly prohibit singing by women or men. Music is viewed suspiciously in parts of the Islamic world as it is perceived to incite sin and debauchery.

Islamic opinion is divided on the subject,*** with many scholars believing singing is only permitted in prayer and others that only men may sing.***

Oh enough with the bs chants,just kick some muzzie ass

I don’t know which is worse…athiests or Muslims.

And a good time was had by all. I’m sure they all feel really good about themselves; “Take that you nasty muslim/athiest!1!1 Go away or I will taunt you again”.

“Where are all the white wimmen at?”

Imagine God haters against women haters…whose is the biggest?

Hilarious!! They need to be shouted down! Then they will get their knickers in a twist and get aggressive; THEN they will get a good hammering. A few punches from an Aussie rugby player and those bearded c#nts will be mincemeat.

http://www.wavsource.com/snds_2012-04-22_2695155505713847/movies/blazing/white_women.wav

I’m not a fan on militant Atheism, but in this case it was an Atheist convention, and the Islamists deliberately went there to cause trouble. Fortunately it was peaceful and the Atheists just laughed at them.

Any group of people will have a share of nutters, and my neighbours are Muslim, they are peaceful decent people, I’ve never seen a spot of trouble out of them. They just have to accept that we have a fundamental rule of law that comes first, and then personal religious convictions people are welcome to believe in, but not to inflict on other people. Other religions seem to be able to deal with it.

Well, the Global Warming religion still thinks everyone should listen to them, but that’s a different story I guess.

Just throw bacon at them and they’ll go away.

Go out there with a piss Mohammed like they made a piss Jesus and see what happens.

Silly Atheists. Don’t they know we are the Infidels and Muslims are the Heathens? Ha. Should have yelled pigshit instead of bullshit.

LOL

I was going to go to the Atheists Conference but couldn’t get a ticket – they sold out in no time. I’d have loved to have been there so I could have punched one of those muzzie wops right in his long snout and then kicked him up the arse all the way back to Lebanon.

Religion is, without doubt, the greatest curse ever to befall mankind. As Christopher Hitchens rightly pointed out, it poisons everything. The Christians are no better – it’s just that the West had an age of enlightenment that has never happened in the muslim world. But when they ran the West, it was held back scientifically, socially, culturally and in every possible way. The history of Europe from about 500 CE to about 1800 CE stinks from the Church’s torture chambers and burning free-thinkers and “witches”.

If the Christians and the Muslims and the Jews and Hindus had their way, we’d all be living in 1350, believing that the earth was the centre of the Universe, that disease was caused from displeasing god, that there really are angels , giants, saints and flying horses, and everything would be a “mystery of faith” and the font of all wisdom would come from some insane crank, wearing a gaudy dress and a sillier hat, chanting nonsense into thin air around a smoking altar.

I just cannot believe that, in the year 2012 CE, anyone with any sort of education beyond second grade, could believe such arrant rubbish as preached by the pastors, priests, rabbis and mullahs. You really have to be weak in the head, blind, deaf and profoundly stupid to swallow such patent piffle and twaddle. But, as P T Barnum once observed “there’s a sucker born every minute.”

These muslims, and the christian reactionaries who are also on the march, fully intend to drive the whole world back into the dark ages and to impose a theocratic state anywhere they can get away with it. They are much more dangerous to freedom, life and liberty than the communists ever were. If this world goes up in a mushroom cloud, it will be over which gang of lunatics’ bearded sky fairy is the real one.

Mr. Beefstick: It took the mooslums to make me see what a man Jesus Christ was/is. Yes, if you take the religion out of it, Jesus Christ, whether man or myth, is a supreme being. There are those. And they do lead us. And I will follow him, proudly.

Shithead vs. Shithead = the great debate

Can both sides lose?

Shane,

Zip has said dozens of times that he has no problems with run-of-the-mill atheists as long as they aren’t obnoxious. I’m not sure you pass the test

@ Rosie – you prove my point – there’s a sucker born every minute.

@DOTW – you must have read a different bible to one I studied. How can you say, with your bare face hanging out, “One was peaceful and talked of a loving God” !!!! Would that be the same “loving God” who accepted the human sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter? The one whose supposed son instructed his followers to castrate themselves? The God who set bears on a mob of cheeky children and had the bears tear them to death?

You seem like an intelligent person; therefore I am willing to offer you a great deal. I have US$55 million in gold bullion buried in Nigeria. I need to pay some locals to dig it up and ship it to me, but I lost my wallet and can’t access my bank account. If you send me $5000 by untraceable Western Union telegraphic money transfer, I will give you $10 million just as soon as the gold arrives. I also know of another wonderful deal. All you have to do is give one tenth of your income for all your life to my Guru and he promises that you will escape death and live in a paradise with 72 virgins, a new mule, and all you can eat for the rest of eternity. I will eagerly await that telegram from Western Union!

Come on guys I have been on here since the get go. To make things clear I am not a militant atheist. I do not try to impose. As Pat Condell would say. “Peace”….

Some elements in the Muslim world have had positive opinions about Russians and Soviet block technology. For example, Syria has Russian made missiles and technology. Iran supposedly has a border with Russia somewhere. There are plenty of positive opinions in the Muslim world despite the fact the Russians are atheist. Atheism could be instrumental in dealing with Muslims.

Shit, Brutus, I can’t back off on that deal you offered DOTW. Kindly send me your mailing address. $5000.oo forthcoming.

Hussein of the Hyenas

Hyenas are sorta Metrosexual too, from what I understand

Wonder which side the Democrats will favor when this gets to the US……

the muslims…….

or the atheists?

How many atheists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

None. Atheists question whether it’s really light anyway

@ Hickster. I see you’re still a fool and a deadshit.

@ DanlBoone. Gee that joke was hilarious, but don’t give up your day job circumcising the elephants at the zoo just yet. As you said, the wages aren’t that good but the tips are big.

As the faithful will tell you, light bulbs won’t work anyway because there is no electricity mentioned in the bible or the koran – so it can’t possibly exist if it is not mentioned in books that are inerrant and contain all the wisdom anyone would ever need.

Finding the difference between a devout christian or a devout muslim is like trying to find the clean end of a turd.

@Bruxism….

Sir, You think your quarrel matters about if I am dead or alive to you? No. In your eyes I will always remain dead to you. This is no surprise.
——————–
7 Wherefore (as the Holy Ghost saith, To day if ye will hear his voice, 8 Harden not your hearts, as in the provocation, in the day of temptation in the wilderness: 9 When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my works forty years. 10 Wherefore I was grieved with that generation, and said, They do alway err in their heart; and they have not known my ways. 11 So I sware in my wrath, They shall not enter into my rest.) 12 Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God.
Heb 3:7-12 (KJV)

Beefstick: It doesn’t matter whether you take it literally or metaphorically. No one is holding a scimitar to your throat to make you believe anything. Go in peace!

@ BrutusBeefstick:

“no electricity mentioned in the bible:.

Hmm. Really wanna go there?

“He gave them hail for rain, and lightning that flashed through their land.” Ps. 105:32.

There’s plenty more where that came from. Want to hear it?

BTW Brutus,

Religion isn’t Christ, and Christ isn’t Religion. He’s the Son of the Living God.

And you are right about one thing. Religion is a curse of sorts. It’s Man’s way to God, and it isn’t what He wants from us. Ever read Isaiah chapter one?

In fact, the entire plan of Salvation was for God to give Man a law that He knew He couldn’t keep just so that they would find out how pitifully sinful they (we) were, (and still are). And then, out of His Mercy, He gave us a Saviour who died in our place for our sins, fulfilling the Law.

God doesn’t want Religion, He wants your worship. He wants YOU.

Halleluiah, Halleluiah, I’ve been saved! I was walking towards the shearing shed to shear the kangaroos when I had a sudden epiphany. Of Course! When they said “let there be light” they were talking about hitting the switch and sending 240 volts through an incandescent globe! It just took us 5000 years to work out the “hidden meaning”. And, of course, everyone knows that lightning is electricity – even though, back in those days, they thought it was god expressing anger. Old Ben Franklin wasted his time with the kite and the key – he should have just read his bible and it would all have been perfectly clear. Can you please quote from hebrews or the psalms where it says that volts x amps = watts. Maybe that page is missing from my bible?

Yep, I’m convinced! Noah really did come to Australia and collect up seven kangaroos, wombats, koalas and platypus and put them on the ark and really did bring them all that way back from Mount Ararat! Jonah really did get swallowed by a whale and was barfed up three days later; there really were giants; naughty angels really did come down from heaven and mate with human women; muhammad really did fly up to heaven on his horse; after the crucifixion, the dead really did climb out of their graves and run around the streets of Jerusalem; there really is a heaven up in the sky (the astronauts just didn’t look in the right direction); it is perfectly reasonable for a 60 year old man to marry a 5 year old girl; Lot really was in such a deep sleep that he didn’t know his two daughters were sitting on his dick; it is perfectly reasonable to stone cheeky children to death or set bears on them; and I’ll never let any man with damaged balls, or a menstruating woman, come into my temple!

Yep, it’s all true! I can hardly wait to see those 144,000 male virgin jews, clothed in white dresses, flying like a flock of cockatoos up into heaven.

There’s a really ugly old woman lives nearby and I think she may be a witch as one of my wombats died for no apparent reason recently. I think I’ll go and beat her and then burn her alive and, if the Police come to ask why, I’ll just quote the Bible: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. I’m sure they’ll understand!

@ Margie, yes, let’s go there, Can you explain why the bible gets the ratio of pi wrong in two places? From now on I’ll use the biblical ratio and I’m sure that the ends of a circle will meet. Perhaps you can also point out the chapter and verse where it explains the laws of thermodynamics.

Now that I have been converted to “the truth” I am so happy that I could just shit.

I’ll ask him to explain the laws of thermodynamics, germ theory, the theory of relativity, how many galaxies there are in the universe and why, while he is busy running all those gazilllions of galaxies, stars and planets, he took a personal interest in the end of my cock, what I eat, and all the dirty thoughts I have about Taylor Swift and Jennifer Love-Hewett. Then I’ll ask him that, as he created men in his image, how often does he take a shit.

@ The Infidel,

Yes, I’m aware of that. It’s why I said no more pearls to swine, and then he/she/it proceeded to prove the point.

How sad indeed that he chooses to be as you said, an animal rather than a man.

But still, it is His will that none should perish. May he come to his right mind before he leaves this very short life. And it is always short compared to Eternity.

“The Lord is not slow about His promise as some count slowness, but is forbearing toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” 2 Pe. 3:9.

Thanks for your comment, Infidel.

A cornucopia of knuckleheadness.

Why is it that devout christians, moslems, jews and hindus can never find an answer in their holy and inerrant texts to any quite simple questions? Instead, they always pull down the shutters, turns their backs, and start chanting their inane mantras around their smoking and stinking altars?

Then they always try to hide behind some esoteric nonsense about the “meaning of goodness” or how it is impossible for anyone to live without the “Laws” of Moses or some other mythical being. There’s never a straight answer, never an explanation as to why all the holy books are full of holes, contradictions, physical impossibilities, ancient nonsense about the origins of life and everything else, the most blinding hypocrisy and the blatant lies.

As I said earlier, you really need the mentality and learning of a backward second grader to believe such utter tosh. Of course, they always have that air of superiority, that mocking and knowing smile, always seek to “open” the minds of others whilst theirs is closed tighter than a submarines hatch.

They don’t want to think; don’t want to even consider the possibility that they are wrong; don’t want to admit that they have been fools all their lives and have been conned by the greatest 419 scam ever invented. No, no way – far better to hang on to all those illusions and delusions than ever investigate the causes of the night noises which terrify them so.

Then they go off to the temple, synagogue or mosque and participate in those great examples of the “herd instinct”, of mass hysteria and mass hypnotism, and they feel “part” of something, get to feel “special”, get convinced once again that they really are “chosen”. But they never face the truth, never see beyond the smoke and mirrors, and never stop hoping that the cheque from Nigeria really is in the next mail.

Have you ever noticed, when you ask people about their origins, just how many people claim to be descended from English royalty, a French Count, an African Chief, or some other such rubbish -something that makes them just that little bit better than everyone else? It’s all wish thinking; every little girl wishing they really are a “princess” and every little boy thinking they are really a heroic Prince come to save the world. It’s called “narcissism” and all the religions prey on that weakness in the psyche of the primates called Homo sapiens.

Well I don’t have any delusions. I am a direct descendent of a whole lot of English, Welsh and Irish bastards, thieves and whores – four of whom were kicked out of Britain between 1788 and 1792. I can proudly claim that my grand-mother nine generations ago was hanged for burglary at Ilchester, Somerset England in August 1786. And she was guilty as charged.

The best thing about having such an illustrious heritage is the fact that not one of my ancestors ever believed a word the preachers told them – not one. They all knew it was bullshit and a way for con-artists and frauds to live high on the hog in this life and keep the common man in line. Not for the preachers the reward in heaven – oh no! They’ll have theirs now! I notice with some satisfaction that none of the raving Ayatollahs and Mullahs ever strap on a suicide bomb themselves – just like none of the Popes ever took up a sword in the Crusades.

So if all you benighted idiots want to keep pouring your money into the pockets of the worst frauds, swindlers and scammers, political opportunists and utter lunatics, then I feel desperately sorry for you. There is no afterlife, no such thing as “original sin” or sin at all (there are crimes), no heaven, no hell, and no-one has a soul.

Despite being a life-long atheist I’ve never found it convenient or necessary to murder, rape, rob, enslave, commit genocide, incest, torture or any of the things advocated in the holy testaments – and so openly practiced by the faithful who then have the hide to claim “moral superiority”.

What utter hypocrites are the religious, what dangerous and destructive lunatics they are; what bare-faced liars and pathetic fools. Geeeezus! In the year 2012 CE when everything that puzzled the ancients in the holy books has been explained, there are still these congenital idiots chanting nonsense into empty space and thinking that, by wishing for something completely absurd, it will come true! A dog has more sense and intelligence than that.

But I’m open to a demonstration that faith can move mountains. And just to prove it, I’ll put a $1 coin on a chess board, right in the middle, and all you religious cranks can prove I’m wrong by praying and asking YHWH, jesus and allah and all the saints to move that coin into the next square. If, in 24 hours, that coin has been moved by all your prayers, I’ll become a devout Christian and cut my own balls off with a dull bronze knife – one like Abraham was going to use on Isaac.

Anyone going to take up the challenge?

sorry, phone number is 6948 4012, not 6248 4012 – just a typo

I know some Aussies, they will tell you it is fucked up over there; gangs of muslims on mopeds raping and performing all the other practices of islam. Gun rights down the shitter. “Diversity” at its finest. Islam has taken root and weed-killer is banned.

I don’t care what religion (or lack thereof) you practice or hold dear, as long as it’s not islam or other forms of devil worship.

Awesome Aussies!

Brutus Beefstick says:
April 28, 2012 at 12:11 am
I’ll ask him to explain the laws of thermodynamics, germ theory, the theory of relativity, how many galaxies there are in the universe and why, while he is busy running all those gazilllions of galaxies, stars and planets, he took a personal interest in the end of my cock, what I eat, and all the dirty thoughts I have about Taylor Swift and Jennifer Love-Hewett. Then I’ll ask him that, as he created men in his image, how often does he take a shit.
———-

What a simple mind Brutus has.

Shall we get into a string theory debate? Do strings really exist? Then, how many? 7? 9? 13?

Simpleton. Intolerant. Angry.

Go the beach.

@Brutus Beefstick:

“Perhaps you could also pray for me to grow a bigger dick.”

That would explain your nickname. I’ll just pray for you to become fixated on a bigger, and more important issue if that’s OK. Oh, sorry to use the word “bigger” that was a insensitive of me.

Putting all jokes aside (even little ones), let’s presume you do believe in evolution, and Darwin and all that stuff. You probably would have considered how to go about judging a success criteria for the whole process. I mean Darwin was pretty clear on figuring out how to identify failure, but he was hazy on how to identify success. Kind of lame to say, “it is what it is” because how does that help me predict the future?

I’m willing to draw the line in the sand and say the theists have been pretty successful all round. You find theists everywhere, they have achieved a lot, and there has never yet been a stable society of Atheists to equal that (although bunches of Atheists have been popping up right back to ancient Greece).

To me that can only imply that religion must have something going for it, which doesn’t prove it is “The Ultimate Right Answer” but until you have done better, you don’t have much of a leg to stand on… and that’s kind of where Atheist philosophy has parked itself.

Brutus Fuckstick sez:

“@MG42 send it to me at: Maragle Road, Snowy Mountains NSW 2642 Australia. I’m sure you’ll get your $10M very soon, but I might have to bribe a Nigerian Customs Officer to get an “export licence” so I may need to get some more money from you, just a few grand. But hey, it’s nothing compared to what you’ll get once the gold arrives.”

You’re an arrogant piece of shit but, as I mentioned to another asshole who posted on this site a while back, these online back and forths are meaningless. But then again, if you’re right it’s all meaningless in the end, so whatever you or anyone else has to say ultimately doesn’t matter.

Mr. beefstick –

You must consider yourself some sort of ultimate spokesman for the final battle, pitting those of us who believe in the Christian way of life, imperfect as we are, against you and others who share your depraved non-beliefs, who want to do . . . what? rid the world of all those filthy non-religion religions, according to your non-beliefs, which is the product of all these years of enlightenment, progress, liberal thought processes, and most of all – rationality ??

I once thought like you, (not as radical or hate-filled) but I woke up, and simply accept the morals, traditions, and philosophies of Christianity. There is no more to it than that. What you cannot accept is that it takes an actual personal commitment to Christ, not a mob mentality like islam, which is bent on world domination, need anyone explain that to you ?

And you can ‘quote’ any passages you like, the truth remains. . .you are truly filled with hate, both for yourself and the whole world . . .

Well I don’t know if there is a god, or if there isn’t.

But I do know one thing. A LOT of people who believed in the god described by Christianity gave up their lives fighting to protect the freedoms that we in western civilization should always ponder and cherish. And I also know that many people who didn’t believe likewise gave up their lives fighting for the exact same thing.

Therefore we are joined and our histories and destinies are fortuitously intertwined. Being rude to one another is therefore not helpful and takes our focus off of the unfortunate reality that the next big fight for human freedom is clearly upon us.

Beefstick, I can see that you are educated and that you use your head for thinking about things. But you apparently need to study history a more – especially the history that came after the seventy century whence began islam’s war (jihad) against all things non-islamic.

This might be a good start:

http://islam-watch.org/HistoryOfJihad/index.html

I love when athiests point the accusing finger at “killing in the name of religion.” Meanwhile every athiest-run government has killed far more millions then the entire history of religion.

Are atheists really that uninformed???

I will take anyone’s side over the muzzies.

a humanist… an atheist… and not much of a storyteller either

– –
To all you religious cranks of whatever flavour and wherever you are, I repeat Sarah’s advice to you: Get Fucked!

– — –

Hey, little dick is back, tell us what life is about butt stick. lol

“cloacae?” Who knew it was just another word for asshole?

forgot to add that me thinks that Bruxism panders to Human Trafficking.

I’ll make one last comment as I have tired of being insulted, denigrated and disparaged for my lack of belief in the great alpha-male grey-bearded sky fairy. I have tried to be courteous, gentle and considerate towards the congenital idiots, knuckleheads, ignoramuses and gold-plated fuckwits who have spitefully castigated me in their usual arrogant, sanctimonious and pious way.

Even though my feelings have been deeply hurt by all these humourless and dour religious bastards who have attacked me like ravenous hyenas, I am resilient and will recover to continue my life-long crusade against ignorance and superstition wherever I find it.

Having said that, I have often considered the problem of whose side I will take in the coming Third World War between Anglo-European secular democracy and the blackest, bleakest and most terrifying “geopoliticultural legal fascism” ever dreamt up in the perverted mind of the filthiest of Arabs i.e. ISLAM.

Make no mistake, when they are strong enough and confident enough, they mean to enslave the entire world and drive us all back into the donkey-powered 8th Century. As they have done before, they will burn all the books (including electronic ones like computers and the internet) and will replace all those wonderful institutions like the Royal Society and its myriad offspring in every advanced country of the world with Islamic madrassas. If they have their way, a darkness of ignorance, superstition, and totalitarianism will cover the lands and the oceans. Everything will be banned from a dinner party amongst friends to music, movies, and every social or scientific advance of the last 1200 years.

They have completely brain-washed upwards of one billion people and filled them with hate for the west, anyone with a white skin, and all technology more sophisticated than a hand-operated olive press and a camel-drawn cart.

When push comes to shove and the crunch comes, and I have no alternative, then I’ll “Stand up, stand up, as a soldier of the Cross”. Fundamentalist Christianity is a disgraceful perversion of everything that is fine and good in a natural life, but it is not without the possibility of redemption – as every thinking person for the last 1000 years has seen that it sows the seeds of its own destruction.

Perhaps salvation will come from two quarters that seem not to have been mentioned in this erudite and articulate discussion: western women and the power-house countries of East Asia. I wonder just how many American, British, French, German, Australasian or Scandinavian women will accept being forced into the burqua and bedroom as Islamic sex object and baby factories. I also wonder how the (mostly) godless Chinese, Japanese and Koreans will respond to a mob of stinking Arabs, Pakistanis, Bengalis, Persians, Indonesians and Afghans telling them to go back to the rice paddies and tear down their glittering temples to secular Capitalism.

All these greasy Arab wops stirring up all these problems know that, one day, the oil will run out, and so will the western money, and then they’ll be back in the goat-skin tent in the desert eating dates and camel milk. They have not developed a single industry, a single technology; any way to earn a living after the oil runs out. The Imams, Mullahs, and Ayatollahs figure they can grab the whole world and get safely in the saddle before that happens – but they have to act soon or the chance will pass and never come again.

A good indicator of just how backward are the priest-ridden Islamic countries is given by GDP. Australia, with a population of 22 million, has a greater GDP than the combined total of Pakistan, Indonesia, Iran and Saudi Arabia – with a combined population of about 500 million. Hardly anyone in Australia goes to church anymore – but in those muslim countries, they pray five times a day and it has done them no good at all.

I do fear for the future of the world now that the muslims are clearly on the march and clearly dedicated to the destruction of the secular west and now have nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. But just as frightening is the resurgence of Christian, Jewish and Hindu fundamentalism that are equally determined to obliterate the earth.

The day may well come when the last of the faithful is sitting on top of a hill, glowing in the dark, clasping his holy book and saying, “I was right! My Sky-fairy was the True One, because we won the last war and all the infidel, and everyone else, are now dead and there’s not one stone standing upon another. Halleluiah, halleluiah!”

Brutus,
your chess piece model is a very religious construct.
But, it’s not a game. Is it.

Is the piece on the chess board you?

Are you placing out a sheepskin in the morning dew to see if God will play a game of real life chess with you?

ouijia [sp?] board thingy.. whichever.. but juxtaposed from a bitter, rather than humble and sincere spirit?

regardless, it’s a religious thing.

Good ol’ Danl, still blowing smoke.

Circumlocution, smoke and mirrors, fog and mist, and presumptions that couldn’t be more wrong.

I have been Captain of my own Ship all my life and have never needed ancient camp-fire myths to guide me on the path of righteousness. I am not adrift and my “soul” sure aint crushed.

I am 61, have plenty of money, retired at 55, have children and grand-children I’m very close to, and own a nice big chunk of land on which the Herefords grow fat, all surrounded by a pristine wilderness full of the most astounding things in evolutionary history. I have climbed to the top of Mount Garland and I have seen the promised land , and I own it – something Moses never did.

Your God must like secular atheists because I have led a very lucky life – and still do. I have never had a sick day in my life, never known poverty or want, and never, for one moment, thought that I was born with “original sin” or that I was faulty and worthless and needed to beg forgiveness from a piece of wood or a lump of plaster – and I have never given a cent to a priest or a pastor.

I spent nearly a decade in Universities studying Liberal Arts and then Science/Engineering where I was occasionally bothered by roving gangs of evangelicals. I have travelled the world and seen many things. The truth is, I know more about everything than any of the ancient Semites, Greeks and Romans who wrote the holy books as they clearly had no understanding of any of the true secrets of reality – and feared everything they didn’t understand. It is clear from the bible that they had not mastered even 5th grade mathematics; let alone any understanding of structural engineering – as the story of Noah and the Ark so obviously demonstrates. And yet I’ve met fools who claim it is true and read about even bigger fools searching the mountains of Turkish Armenia for the wreck.

I once drew up a structural plan for the Ark as described in the bible. Using the known tensile and compressive strengths of the structural timbers of the middle-east and their masses and twist coefficients, and the well-known ratios of displacement buoyancies, it is quite clear that: 1. the structure would collapse under its own weight during construction and; 2. it simply wouldn’t float and would swamp instantly and; 3. there is no amount of timber section, however configured, rigid enough to span the distances.

How anyone can still believe such utter tosh, when the truth is readily available, just astounds me. It just beggars belief.

oh..sorry, I was talking about his new book
The Grand Design

“In the Beginning..” [sic], would appear to point to the beginning of time ~14 bil years ago.

yeah, it was kinda garbled, I looked at it later.. I should try and do one thing at a time. sure would be nice to have an editing function.

the reason you might care what Hawking has to say, is that he formulates your argument. You don’t establish anything coherent of your own.

And, I have no idea what bathing the tip of your penis in goat’s milk has to do with your delusion of Free Will..

that seems to be something you’ll have to answer for yourself

But, I do know that when Judaizers were troubling the Gentile converts with male circumcision, Paul wished that they would just go the whole way with the flint knife, and castrate themselves.

That’s pretty much how I see it when someone tries to oppress me with some absurd legalistic wrenching of the bible.

The people I’m referring to though, have at least a functional understanding of the bible. Their religious constructs are sophisticated.. like Hawking.

On one [quantum?] level, Hawking is a broken piece on a chess board.

The Bible is very clear on all the things I mentioned. If you are a devout Christian and believe, like Sarah Palin, that the book is literal and inerrant (as do many in the Assembly of God and the other fundamentalist sects and cults), then you should cut off your foreskin (OT), castrate yourself (NT), cook your kid in something other than its own mother’s milk (OT) and instantly kill anyone you find working on Sunday!

All your pseudo-intellectualism and foggy sententiousness will not alter the facts that that is what it says, that is what they believe (or should). If that’s all crap, then the lot is crap. Stop trying to cloak what is written with esoteric and recondite smoke. It is there, clear and simple, for all to read and even the biggest fool to understand.

Hawking doesn’t formulate my argument or anything of the sort. I couldn’t care less about his latest theories – it makes no difference to the fact that this very day Muslim religious fanatics launched a kamikaze attack in Nigeria.

Brutus, your irony, wait, there, better

your irony burns like white hot phosphorous.

You make an appeal to the world’s science. And then in the most absurd manner, reject it. Hawking’s theories represent the world’s material cosmological models.

It’s fine if that means nothing to you; it means nothing to my poodle either. But where do hope to find any sort of reference for your ideas whatever in the heck they are.. you haven’t said.

Or are saying something like the origin of the universe has no bearing on whatever it is you’re trying to say?

You claim to know something about the world you live in, but what is that? Some surrealist wisting for a utopian Australia?

The globalist- left is about to eat your lunch, and you don’t even know it. Your would-be pristine environment is fungible land use to sustained planning schema from the UN.

We have more households in HOA covenants than the population of Australia.

You try and juxtapose God to disprove Him against your straw constructs, a circular argument.

The origins of the universe are completely irrelevant. Nobody knows how the universe got here, at least not yet, but to say that, because the origins are not known, then it must be a god who looks like a man who did it, is just stupidity. Why not say it was the Easter bunny or a giant rooster wearing a spotted bow-tie, Doc Martin boots and Rayban shades?

Yours is the argument of “the gaps”. Find a gap in human knowledge and claim that it proves god did it. It’s absurd. It’s like those idiot creationist and intelligent design advocates who say no-one has ever found the fossil of a giraffe with a short or medium length neck – and that therefore proves “design”. What ignorant fools! “Ah” the say “Evolution is only a theory and the fact that there are still apes and monkeys disproves evolution!”

Do you think those scumbags who flew the planes into the WTC, or cut off that English Doctor’s head just a few days ago, gave any thought at all to the origins of the universe? Do you think the Westboro Baptist Church debates string theory and Hawking’s ideas about multi-verses while protesting at funerals?

It is completely irrelevant to my concern that benighted and bigoted religious zealots really do intend to enslave me, or kill me if I refuse to submit to their nonsense. That’s what matters – not recondite theories in astrophysics. The mad muslims of this world have thrown a rock into the pool and the splash and ripples have lifted the Christian, Jewish and Hindu fundamentalist out of the bottom mud. They have caused a hard-line reaction – and it just keeps getting worse!

As Sam Harris observed, there really are people in the USA in prominent positions who really do believe that a nuclear war will be a good thing – because Armageddon will mean the rapture and the second coming of christ! To think that an utter lunatic like Sarah Palin came within a near miss of having her finger on the launch button has to terrify anyone with a brain. She doesn’t understand anything about nuclear weapons and would have had no qualms about pressing the button.

The USA has more nuclear bombs than anyone else – I’ve forgotten just how much overkill – but the muslims only need one to explode over Tel Aviv or under Chicago or Denver, or London or Paris, and we can all kiss our arses goodbye. Living where I do, I may well survive the next war – at least the immediate blasts – and may even survive the radiation – but I’ll soon be living in a cave, wearing skins, and hunting the last of the kangaroos with a spear.

So philosophical arguments about the origins of the universe, the nature of ethics, whether you can step into the same river twice or whether Jesus can make a rock so heavy not even he can lift – is all so far removed from the main concern as to be totally meaningless.

The main concern is that the Saudi funded madrassas and islamic terrorist organisations are effectively brainwashing half a billion children into believing nothing but what is in the koran and that dying, particularly for Allah, is the greatest thing that can happen to you.

Unfortunately, in the USA, Britain, Western Europe and even here in Australia, the holy cranks are imitating the madrassas and constructing “faith based” schools everywhere – to indoctrinate and brainwash the next generation with all the best and most effective methods ever dreamed up by the CIA, KGB and MI6. And it’s working!

I know there is no god just as I know there are no fairies in my garden and no easter bunny and no great rainbow serpent. It’s all myth but it has a powerful and profound effect on homo sapiens with weak minds and a genetic bent to irrationality, wishful thinking and superstition. It works in exactly the same way as the Nigerian 419 money scam (which actually started in the 1920s and was the called the “Spanish Prisoner” scam).

The promise of an idyllic after life, where you can cheat death, and live in peace and prosperity forever, where there are no diseases, no illnesses, no worries and no want for all eternity and all your loved ones come back to life … well it just sounds so good doesn’t it? And all you have to do to get there is to die in the service of christ or allah or shiva or yhwh – preferably by killing all the unbelievers who actually work for a devil who wants to wreck everything for everybody. The only way to heaven is to ski there on the rivers of blood of god’s enemies. BUT NONE OF IT IS TRUE – IT’S ALL MYTH!

Do you ever read anything other than this site? Do you follow what’s going on in Europe and East Asia, the sub-continent, Africa or Latin America? This religious cancer is metastasising all over the world; everyday there’s another call to jihad, another fatwa issued, and the click and crunch as the devout christians, jews and hindus lock and load.

Do you really want to die because Islam was offended by Americans or Britons eating bacon? Do you want to be vaporised because some arab arsehole read one ancient book and decided that you are an infidel and, therefore, must die? That’s what it is coming down to.

All these distraction about what some old English cripple, in a wheelchair with a computer-generated voice, thinks started time and everything else is completely unknown to the Jihadist who want to cut your throat or fly a plane into your workplace. They don’t care and neither should you.

What you should think about is how these ignorant and dangerous fools of all “faiths” can be beaten before it is too late. Don’t show them any respect and never let them deviate from what it actually says in the testaments, the hadith, the suras, the bagavad gita and the talmud and torah.

Nearly all of true human knowledge, (about 99%) has been revealed in the last 350 years and most of that in the last 100. All sciences are still in their infancy – so can you imagine what strides will be made in the next 350 years? Hawking’s ideas are not the end of anything, but the start. There’s a long, long way to go.

But there is a very real chance that everything will go up in a mushroom cloud or be washed away in black rain – all because of a vicious argument over mythical nonsense about Noah’s Ark or whether a virgin can give birth or whether Muhammad really owned a flying horse. It just beggars belief!

Brutus Beefstick says:

The origins of the universe are completely irrelevant.

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therefore, you are irrelevant by your own decree. A perfectly circular concept.. and drawn free hand too.

so in your Godless world, the creature, ignorant of his own circumstance, renders the very environment that allows him to live, and the a priori matter which begs, what is this? Who am I? Why am I?

Are questions “Irrelevant” to you.. meh

This appears to be the weight of your incoherent and convoluted would-be argument, loosely so-called.

I know there is no god just as I know there are no fairies in my garden and no easter bunny and no great rainbow serpent

I certainly won’t accuse you making a cogent comment.

The issue of free-will appears to be a challenge you, that you can’t/won’t respond to.

I don’t like Hawking, but I respect him. You don’t seem to actually have any idea to support your yet to be revealed thesis.

Your comment:

All these distraction about what some old English cripple, in a wheelchair with a computer-generated voice, thinks started time and everything else is completely unknown to the Jihadist who want to cut your throat or fly a plane into your workplace. They don’t care and neither should you

It seems like you’re going out of your way to display some sort of ignorance. You can do better than that.

Danl – you truly are a fool and an arrogant one at that. Do you really think your half-baked pseduo-intellectualism impresses anyone? You can barely write a cogent sentence, make no sense at all, and constantly disappear into your own smoke rings of irrelevance.

It is apparent to me that your education is sorely lacking. You have no analytical ability at all, cannot grasp a clearly expressed point of view, and cannot make a point that isn’t convoluted garbage suspended from an irrelevancy.

“The origins of the universe are completely irrelevant.

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therefore, you are irrelevant by your own decree. A perfectly circular concept.. and drawn free hand too.”

Now I will type this really slowly so that even a congenital idiot like you can understand. This was never a discussion about the “origins of the universe” and thus that very compex topic is completely irrelevant to any discussion of the very real dangers posed by well armed, well funded, theocractical fascists determined to impose the worst sort of totalitarianism on the whole world. I’ll ask you again, do you think the Jihadist who want to cut your throat or fly a plane into your workplace give any critical thought, at all, to the origins of the universe or Hawking’s theories?

You make no sense at all, you can not see anything clearly, and you are a bigot.

Brutus, the reason this conversation is stillborn, is your inability to communicate any thing beyond a tedious foolish anti-religion rant.

You haven’t said anything beyond, in affect: religion epithet..

you got no science, you got no philosophy.. ya got nothin

you spin the hell out of your own squirrel cage, and invariably come up with nothing.. so epithet is your only recourse

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man absolutely contradict himself quite so thoroughly as yourself.

You said:

The origins of the universe are completely irrelevant. Nobody knows how the universe got here, at least not yet, but to say that, because the origins are not known, then it must be a god who looks like a man who did it, is just stupidity

just beatin the living hell outta that straw man.. dead horse.. whichever your paradigm.

But the sheer irony, is that you posit a God–Whom you deny–to prove your would-be thesis–no God.. ridiculous.

That’s.. well, what can I say.. you’re the one that insists on blowing his own foot off.. hell, I was trying to talk you out of it.

Atheists can be some of the most seething religionists. Very difficult to communicate with you on any level; because you are unwilling. Maybe you just don’t trust your own worldview enough chill out to a reasonable conversation.

or

maybe I’ve mis-perceived you. Perhaps you are unreasonable.

And yeah, to answer your earlier disingenuous comment, God does like secular atheists..

well, let me walk that back a bit: He Loves secular atheists. I doubt that He “likes” you, hell, you don’t even like yourself, do you?

I’m not asking you to examine Hawking. For crying out loud, I thought we were talking like grown men. Choose your scientist, I don’t care. I was referring to science itself, moreso than Hawking singularly.. pun noted.

I’m glad there’s a screen between your spit and my eye.

You should apologize to the professor for getting all pissy just because he’s a better chess player than yourself.

Tell Gilligan hello.

Ginger is a fine girl, it’s a wonder she ever cared about you.

Someone must move the piece on the chessboard.

A piece with no meaning, no purpose, is a paradox unto itself.

woh!
interesting thing. I’m just reading about Daschle, and Edwards and two other Congressional members on record at different ceremonies surrounding Sept 11.2001, Isaiah 9:10

The bricks have fallen down, but we will rebuild with dressed stone; the fig trees have been felled, but we will replace them with cedars.

what’s interesting is that, contextually, that reference is Israel bowing her defiant neck against the preceding judgement that they were responding to.

It expresses a proud instead of repentant National spirit before the Lord. A person needs to read the text in order to know that very fundamental context.

These guys are pretty bright, personally I perceive Daschle as nothing less than cunning, but that’s just me, and neither here nor there.

My point is, it’s doubtful any of these officials pronouncing Scripture in official gov ceremonies re: 9-11, even knew this.

I didn’t. It’s a fairly obscure thing, in that, Israel was always getting herself into these kinds of binds. We’re supposed to learn from that.. but of course, we don’t.

But it’s absolutely fascinating. This is what happens when a counterfeit, or deceived Christianity is represented in gov.

Brutus, you don’t know it, but most of the Christian church wants gov separated from this, a religiously neutral gov.

We want some political parity.. but we expect the shaft from the world. It’s not our priority. We are about Christ, not so much about the world’s systems or religions.

I resent gov officiating with biblical textual referent wrenched from text on a much deeper level you do. I would much rather they say nothing. There are goofs everywhere, but we are not politicos.

We are simply passionate people like everyone else. You couldn’t know it, but a significant population of thinking people, softly underspoken, do not participate in the process because it is simply too incorrigible and corrupt.

Many of us don’t actually see the world getting any better. We’re in too deep. We have the ability to not destroy ourselves, but not the will.

These guys and their pronouncement of one of Israel’s rebellious behaviors onto the US, is a significant matter to those of us who trust on the fidelity of Christ alone.

It’s a fascinating thing. It shouldn’t be weighted any more, or any less, than many in a consistent pattern of types and shadows of Israel’s prophets manifested in the world over the centuries, altho it seems to picking up momentum.. but that’s the danger of reading into the text instead mining out what is in text.

Sincere study of prophecy should be approached with an humble heart. It is powerful, and magnifies matters in the world to a person’s mind.

An anchor for a Christian is this general structural arrangement of scripture:

Prophecy to Israel, Grace to the Church. That simple overview is a reliably anchored context consistent to the whole bible.

It entreats rather than revises the text. It keeps the very important historical and grammatical context unmolested. Provides an incredibly wealthy window for study.

If employed, that would have pre-empted these sophists from pronouncing Israel’s [this was a past situation] judgements on the US in the supposed voice of Christianity

there’s a lot more to this. Cahn_link

but again, no more or less weight than many [many] types and shadows of Israel’s prophecy fulfilled/fulfilling in the world over the past two millennia.

Personally I think that Shakespeare was a far better writer than any of the ancients who wrote the holy books – that were actually just setting down in print the popular oral camp-fire stories. The bible is a plagiarised collection of older stories from the Babylonian “Epic of Gilgamesh” through the Greco-Roman pagan mythology such as the worship of Mithra and Dionysus. Nothing in it cannot be pre-dated and attributed elsewhere. Everything in the bible; from the virgin birth, the miracles, the crucifixion, betrayal of Judas to Noah’s flood and Lot all occur in earlier pagan myths – they’ve just evolved a bit like in the game of Chinese Whispers.

Insofar as “prophecy” is concerned, for Israel or anywhere else, there is nothing but broad generalisations that anyone could make. The Book of Revelations reveals nothing at all.

In am a life-long atheist; there has never been a moment when I even considered that any of it could be true – even though I was brought up in the Catholic tradition (having a mother of Irish descent) and can still remember most of the Latin Mass. But I have read the bible a number of times, an English translation of the Koran, and once took a course on the Hindu tradition – as well as a bit of dabbling in Buddhism. These religions are all different and yet, all the same. At their core, they all offer a way to escape death and to enjoy an eternity in paradise with all one’s loved ones. They all have fixations on sex and all promote various approaches to sado-masochistic sexual repression and severe asceticism and self-denial. Essentially they are all death cults fixated on ignorant and perverted notions about human sexuality.

Personally I couldn’t care less if someone wants to sit in a cave or atop a pole and whip and starve themselves for having “impure thoughts” – but when they come out of those caves, or down from that pole, and start making pronouncements that everyone else in the world should believe in their psychotic delusions – on pain of torture and death – then they become a real worry. And that is exactly what is happening.

As I have taken the time to listen to priests and preachers, and have read the “inerrant texts” of the world’s main religions (or tried to), perhaps you should take the time to read some of the works of the opponents of militant religion. I’ll suggest a few titles for a beginner:

Dan Barker: “Godless”
Richard Dawkins: “The God Delusion”
Daniel Dennet: “Breaking the Spell”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: “Infidel”
Christopher Hitchens: “God is not Great” and “The Missionary Position”
Sam Harris: “The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation”
Victor Stenger: “The New Atheism”

If you can get hold of it, there’s also a documentary by Marjoe Gortner made in 1972 that exposes just what a complete fraud are the pentecostal/evangelical preachers and bible thumpers. You may recall that Marjoe became an ordained Minister in 1948 at the age of 4 – and performed many “miracles” that were seen by many.

Work your way through all that (it won’t take much longer than reading the bible) and see if you’re still a sucker at the end of it.

Just one last comment, don’t assume that my interest in religion is in anyway indicative of my restless soul seeking “the truth” or a “meaning in life” – it’s been nothing like that. It is a purely academic interest in a common phenomenon which seems completely inexplicable to me – just like the behaviour of the common Magpie that will spread its wings and lie down on a nest of bull-ants and allow them to crawl all over it. No-one knows for sure why they do it; perhaps the ants clean parasites from their feathers, but no-one really knows. I have seen it myself a number of times. The birds lie there motionless and look like they are dead, with nasty and stinging ants crawling all over them, then they jump up, shake their feathers and fly away. Why they do it, how they figured it out, nobody knows … must be a mystery of faith! I’ll consult my bible to see what Jesus had to say about it.
I have always wondered why it is that the USA has produced so many utterly crazy religious cults. There have been the Millerites, Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses, Shakers, Mennonites, Amish, Adventists, Christian Science, Scientology, Heaven’s Gate, the Branch Davidian, Exclusive Brethren and Plymouth Brethren, Westboro Baptists, and the loopiest of the lot, The People Temple. You’ve even got back that raging lunatic, Mel Gibson, and his even more psychotic father, with their own version of charismatic Catholicism. And that’s not even to delve deeply into the activities of the Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church where the all smoke marijuana as part of the ritual or – my favourite – The Church of Elvis Presley in Los Angeles. As the common expression has it, “Only in America”!

I have never read in any religious text any discussion of “free will”. The Koran tells you that you can choose not to believe – then instructs the faithful to kill you. The Bible also says you can chose – but then paints a lurid picture of the hell that awaits you if you so choose. Both books advocate theocratic totalitarianism.

No-one ever needed a God, or Jesus or Muhammad, to act ethically and morally – as the ancient Greek philosophers demonstrate.

Getting bogged down in esoteric discussions of deep philosophical issues – which do not appear in any depth in the actual texts – is a neat way to side-step what the texts actually say. I am regularly visited by a mother-daughter team of Jehovah Witnesses who always try the same thing i.e. getting right away from the actual texts. It’s a bit like surfing the net – you start in one place, follow a link to something else and, a few hours later, are so removed from the starting point that that there seems no connection at all.

With the JHs it is very difficult to keep them on track as they always want to go off on a tangent. They are very good at selecting a sentence here and a phrase there from both testaments to “support” some particular idea and never want to answer direct questions i.e.

Q1. Did God really make the universe in 6 days?
A1. A “day” could mean just a period of time that stretched over millions of years. (But it doesn’t say that. They’ve “interpreted” the inerrant word);
Q2. Was there a Garden of Eden populated only by Adam and Eve?
A2. Adam and Eve could just be metaphors for “man and woman” (another “interpretation”)
Q3. Was Jonah really swallowed by a whale?
A3. This is really a metaphor for….
Q3. Was Jesus really born of a virgin? And, if so, why is it that neither Mark nor John nor St Paul mentions this astonishing fact?
A4. Ummm, aaah, probably because Matthew had already mentioned it.
Q5. Were there really giants who were the progeny of human women and Angels?
A5. The Lord saw that things had gone a bit awry so he destroyed the world and started again.
Q6. If God knows everything and can never be wrong, how come he made such a mess of things that he had to destroy everything and start again?
A6. Well, they had “free will” and chose not to … so God killed them all!

You get the picture. All the obvious myths, contradictions and general absurdities need to be “interpreted” or some assumption is made so as to square the circle.

There is nothing you can’t justify with a biblical (or koranic) quote – from slavery to genocide to the suppression of women to infanticide.

My view is that if I can go through the bible and find a demonstrable fiction or absurdity on every page, then the whole thing is nothing but ancient myth. It is no more true (and no more poetic) than the Aboriginal belief in the Rainbow serpent, the Dreamtime, and the spirits that reside in all animate and inanimate objects – a belief shared by the Shinto.

Questions about the origins of the universe are completely irrelevant to the truth or otherwise of the holy books. I don’t know how the universe came into being – and neither does anyone else. But on the basis of probability, I’d say the chances that it was created by a God who also came down to earth to speak to an ancient Semitic goat-herd through a burning bush is so infinitesimally small as to be zero for all intents and purposes.

Religions, all religions, derive from the fact that people just cannot accept that we evolved from earlier primates and just aren’t “special”; they cannot accept the certainty of death and thus invent a whole collection of myths about spirits and an afterlife; then they connect a random human event with a natural coincidence and believe that they caused it – like “rain dances” and sacrifices for a good harvest. These things invariably lead to the creation of a priestly class who then sit around and concern themselves with the “mysteries” and thus invent an entire dogma. It is easy to see how it happens. The Cargo cults in PNG and the Melanesian islands with the “God” John Frum are just one example of how quickly an utterly false theocracy can develop.

It’s all bullshit. Whether there is “free will” or not is neither here nor there. Solving the question won’t make the slightest bit of difference to next summer’s harvest. But, if you get your jollies by torturing your own mind about the insoluble, well so be it. It is completely futile – like the Catholic Cardinals who all flew to Rome and went into conclave to work out a new edict on what happens to the souls of unbaptized babies who are unfortunate enough to die: do they go to hell; do they go to heaven; or do they go to limbo. If you think this is a laughable and complete and utter waste of time and resources, well it is beaten by an earlier theological argument about the colour of angel’s wings and how many of them could dance on the head of a pin. And the people who debated these utter absurdities were grown men who wield real temporal power in much of the world today.

The greatest mystery to me is how anyone can believe such deranged nonsense in the first place. The greatest worry I have is that these demonstrable religious cranks really do run a number of countries and already have nuclear, biological and chemical weapons – and really do believe what they say they believe – and are quite prepared to use those weapons and see such use as the “ultimate good”. How can it be; how can it be!?!?!?!?!

You get the picture.

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the picture I get is that you are biblically illiterate. You don’t appear to display any real understanding of the religions you cite either, as far as I can tell.

Conflating Christianity with Islam and assorted cults is just plain silly.

“My view is that if I can go through the bible and find a demonstrable fiction or absurdity on every page, then the whole thing is nothing but ancient myth. It is no more true (and no more poetic) than the Aboriginal belief in the Rainbow serpent, the Dreamtime, and the spirits that reside in all animate and inanimate objects – a belief shared by the Shinto.”

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personally, I find that perspective absurd. But, I find your freedom to hold that opinion–regardless of it’s weighty ignorance–exquisite.

“Religions, all religions, derive from the fact that people just cannot accept that we evolved from earlier primates…”

yeah, ancient cultures were assaulted with false science like evolution and global warming.

Arguing against religion with religion–evolution. That’s ridiculous.

In large, Protestantism does the same thing as Roman
Catholicism, but we cough up our sleeve and point a bony accusatory finger with it.

We are not priests following in Israel’s order of Melchizedek, Aaron and Levi, looking forward to the advent of Israel’s Messiah–which is doctrinally, what most Christian teaching, Roman or Protestant succumbs to.

We are ambassadors of the Risen Christ, Israel’s King in exhile.
We no longer no Him after the flesh. He is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. But, He is risen.

In His humility, He was born to the promised, Israel. He was a rabbi, born under the Law. He came only to the House of Israel.
He took the Law, with it’s codes and ordinances which condemn us to His cross.

Israel was broken off in part, and for a while, from Christ her Messiah, because of her unbelief, and so that we, who remained without God and without hope in the world, could be grafted into her eternal promises from God.

But, “Behold, all of Israel shall be saved..”[sic]Ro 11.

Brutus, you cannot grasp the breathtaking beauty and unparalleled majesty of the worlds most known and most ancient autographs.

You don’t even treat it with a simple secular intellectual honesty. It intimidates you in that sense. It’s a fear.

Augustine’s paradox was that the deeper-meaning is the prima facie of the warrant; “All of Israel will be saved” means just that.

The Jews were in diaspora in Augustine’s time. The text [Ro 11] speaks directly to a national ethnic Israel.

Tell me, when Jesus absolved the woman taken in adultery and told her to, “Go, and sin no more.” Did she? Did he say anything to the woman’s husband, who must have been terribly hurt and aggrieved? …

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your ill informed pre-suppositions overlayed on the text is a skewering. Forcing whatever is your distorted demand on those texts renders your comment incoherent.

But I applaud your freedom of speech in the matter, and celebrate your plumbing victory. I don’t care much for plumbing. My only gratification with plumbing is in it’s conquest. I much prefer to bend nails and butcher wood on any given day.

I suppose the classics have their place. I will undoubtedly recall Hemingway’s Old Man & Sea all my life. But then again, I was very impressionable at 12, and frankly Chaucer was over my head. When I looked briefly at Chaucer as an adult, I wasn’t moved.

The Greek philosophers are challenging, but just like Paul told them at the Athenian Acropolis in the 1st C, In all things, they were too religious [sic]

Plato’s two part man still maligns Christianity with it’s dis-connect to God..

Shakespeare is just too fruity for me.. but taste is often a facade for some asinine mental masturbation to begin with anyhow, no?

here’s a bit of trivia:

Athens was crammed with altars, images and statues dedicated to the gods. Some historians said it was easier to find a god than a man in Athens.

Statistically, that might have been true. The population of the city at the time was about 10,000, but some scholars estimate that there might have been as many as 30,000 statues of gods erected there.

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it is that same religious/intellectual [as well as Eastern mysticism] currency that much of Western secular thought derives from.

It’s interesting the Paul engaged the Aeropagus, [the Judicial entity at the Acropolis]

among their idols they sanctioned one for “the unknown god” [just in case they had, by hubris, ignored.]

Similarly, the atheist sanctions, by hubris, a fundamental and overarching place for his no-God

“If you are talking about Cicero, Livy, Plutarch, Suetonius, Thucydides, Homer et al, I am well aware of their “majesty” – though I wouldn’t say it was unparalleled. I think Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Bronte sisters, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, Dostoyevsky and Sholokhov (amongst many others) certainly have “majesty”. I’d say that , so far as writing History is concerned, Bullock, Conquest, Beevor, and Sebag-Montefiore [...]“</blockquote
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naw, those are cheap tricks compared to what I'm talking about.
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“People have always invented Gods for everything they feared or couldn’t understand”

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white-hot phosphorous burning irony. That’s what the very thinkers you make an appeal to were doing in Greece.

In all things, they were too religious [sic] And, regardless of your vociferous denial, no-God is the a priori doctrine of your philosophy..

I appreciate your ornamentalism.. it’s approaching a virtuoso level, but you don’t really innovate, you improvise well, I think anyhow..

that’s my subtext, but I can see why the ‘ill- informed pre-sup’ thing could read as ad hominem

7 questions re: Angels.. yeah, I’ll defer on that one.. as a matter of fact, I’ll only answer questions about the bible and Christianity that I find a subjectively compelling reason to respond to.

I’m too often unsure where you are serious and where you are just ranting a mock (that sounds a lot like running amok) .

For one thing, nobody has the first idea what an angel is; but that doesn’t stop the world from worshipping them.

But yeah, Lucifer is a created being like all. Evidently, he is of [or was] of an high ranking amongst angels. Biblically speaking, there are greater and lesser angels just like man, beast and heavenly bodies.

But I sure feel like providence interceded by way of His messengers on more than one occasion. I flipped my truck 360 a few years ago.. barely scratched me..

I got more of those..

But no we don’t have personal guardian angels™ there is a tension there. And frankly, I don’t know the first thing about angels, I don’t want to know any more than already I do know, and I don’t understand what I do know.

wait..the delightfully graceful messenger of the Lord to me, my wife, is pretty close. She’s probably saved me from serious physical trauma and/or mortality on one or two occasions.
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Why is it that the three conflicting sets of “The Ten Commandments” (exodus 20; Exodus 34 and Deuteronomy 5) fail to say:
Thou shalt not commit incest;
Thou shalt not rape;
Thou shalt not keep slaves;
Thou shalt not torture people or animals;
Did God regard these things as OK?

When God said, “Honour thy father and thy mother, as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee; that thy days may be prolonged, and that it may go well with thee, in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.”

Does/did this “Commandment” apply to Svetlana Stalin or the children of Ted Bundy, or of Heinrich Himmler?

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I don’t understand the question.

But you’ve caught my interest about seething the kid..
I dunno. Maybe I’ll look into it. Jewish Christian sources are usually the wealthiest insights for these kinds of questions.

I’ll see, maybe.. right now I’ve a tostada crying out to me from across the food desert.

Thanks Fr Sully. Spoken like a true Catholic. Are you the same Fr Sully who used to be involved with the Sea Scouts and was known as the “Rear Admiral”?

@Danl – If you think Shakespeare’s tragedies were “cheap tricks” then your perceptions of the world are sorely lacking. There are no greater “parables” and insights into human nature than the stories of Macbeth, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Othello, Henry V, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet etc. The novels of Thomas Hardy are far more credible and far more insightful than anything in the holy books. Amongst his many works, my personal favourite is “Jude the Obscure”, closely followed by “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” and then maybe “The Mayor of Casterbridge”.

“I don’t know the first thing about angels…” perhaps you should read the Gospels as Angels play a very important role in the story. Was not Mary visited by an Angel who told her that she would bear God’s son? After that it gets a bit confusing – like exactly how many Angels were at the tomb, kindly donated by Joseph of Arimathea, when the women went to anoint the body of Christ. But then, it is not at all clear from the four Gospels what then happened, or who the women were. Quite a bit of confusion in a story that was “divinely inspired”, hey?

What did Jesus do for those three days between the crucifixion and the resurrection? Did he really go to hell and baptise all those who had lived and died before he had come to earth to save them? Or did he really go to Missouri and have the Angel Moroni inscribe the Book of Mormon which Joseph Smith, a convicted fraud, later found and then read to scribes from behind a curtain? Perhaps it was the latter and that is why he has now chosen the Mormon Bishop, Mitt Romney, as the likely next President of the “One Country Under God”!

It surely must be the “end days” now; nothing more certain! Such a pity the Adventists, Millerites and Jehovah’s Witnesses have all predicted the end of the world over the past 180 years – and all experienced the “great disappointment”. The whole Christian world expected the second coming in the year 1000 and there were plenty in England and Europe who thought the end had indeed come in the year 1350. There are no shortages of fools who predict that the world will end on 27 May or 21 December 2012; but then there were plenty of fools who thought everything would collapse when the calendar clicked over from 1999 to 2000 – but not a single plane fell out of the sky and Jesus did not ride triumphantly across the sky.

“I don’t understand the question.” Should the children of Stalin, Himmler and Ted Bundy honour their father as required by the Ten Commandments?

Flipping your truck and surviving is the result of poor driving, that it happened in the first place, and good luck that you walked away uninjured. Good luck is just a random event that favours the sinners in the same measure as the pious. For example, I have a friend I’ve known for over 40 years who is a dope-smoking old bum who has never done a good deed in his life. But he went to the Tuross Heads Golf Club one night and just happened to press the “play button” on a poker machine at the very moment that a random number generator in a computer selected the very machine he was playing – and he won $10,000. It had nothing to do with angels, kismet, fate, providence or anything else – like you, he was just “lucky”.

“That’s what the very thinkers you make an appeal to were doing in Greece.” – at least half of them were Roman and Plutarch, who was Greek, lived in Rome and did all his writing there.

Quite obviously there were atheists in the ancient world as well – otherwise the Bible wouldn’t labour the point about them being “fools” so much e.g psalm 14.

There isn’t a shred of evidence for any God; just garbled old myths that are contradictory, illogical, irrational and based entirely on ignorance backed up with threats. I think Christopher Hitchens summed it up well when he said, “That which can be asserted without evidence can be refuted without evidence”. Religion is the greatest scam ever invented – which provides its endless stream of purveyors with luxury in this life and the means to acquire the greatest of all drugs i.e. power over others.

Religion is the greatest scam ever invented – which provides its endless stream of purveyors with luxury in this life and the means to acquire the greatest of all drugs i.e. power over others.

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agreed. When Christianity is reduced to religious expression–a parody of itself, a retrograde presents to the world, and to a Christian as well for that matter.

Atheism is a religion also. It presents a retrograde to world, regardless.

“I don’t drink these days, but I’m good with that.. already drank more than any three stout Australians. But, I’d buy you a beer. I’m not an asshole.. I just play one in real life sometimes.”

If you are ever in the Snowy Mountains I’ll take you up on it and you can buy me quite a few beers in the Pub I used to own. I have given up the grog, relatively speaking, since I retired and no longer regularly down 20-30 “standard drinks” a day. When I owned the Pub it was nothing for me to drink 10 pints of beer a day plus 2-3 bottles of wine and finish the night off with half a bottle of Bundaberg Rum. Now I content myself with a six-pack of VB and a glass or two of red wine.

I do find it amazing that, in this day and age, not only do people still practice these absurd superstitions but do so militantly and never cease demanding special treatment and respect for their superstitions, myths and invisible playmates.

When anyone with a brain, and I’ve still got one despite my many years of copious drinking, can readily research the greatest or latest thinking in physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, astronomy, astrophysics et al and still believe in these obvious myths is just beyond my comprehension. That fact truly is a mystery of faith.

On the positive side of things, the rejection of all such nonsense is on the rise in every advanced country, even the USA. I think New Zealand is the world’s most godless Western country, closely followed by Australia and the Scandinavian countries. They are even having trouble getting a quorum in places like Italy and France while in Great Britain the Church of England is well and truly in its death throes. Even in Eire, the Catholic Church is in rapid decline as a result of the O’Brien (?) report on the excesses of the Church, child abuse, sexual deviance of the clergy, and the cruel mistreatment of orphans entrusted to their care and the virtual slavery of “fallen women” thrown into hell-holes like the Magdalene Laundries.

But the faithful, spurred by the stridency of Islam, are fighting back and they do have the money and the organisation to get special privileges and to impose their divisive nonsense.

The one thing all major religions have in common, from the myriad Christian sects to the equally myriad Islamic and Hindu sects and Judaism is their sick, twisted and ignorant approach to human sexuality. One only needs to read the old testament and the bizarre (and utterly ignorant) edicts about menstruation and female sexuality, the emphasis on virginity, the dread of sexual desire which could only be the worst of “sins”, the death penalty for homosexuality, the punishment metered out for “spilling your seed on the ground” and all the other febrile nonsense.

You know, back in the early and mid-1960s, when I was in my teens my poor old Mum would force me to attend the Catholic Church every weekend – Mass on Sunday and “Confession” on Saturday – and what an interminable bore it all was. Anyway, I soon worked out that the thing of greatest interest to the Priests hearing my confession was my sexual activities and impure thoughts. So I used to tell these priests the most lurid details of my sexual encounters, whether real or total fiction. I’d let them drag it out of me and I’d tell them how I’d gone to the movies and sat with some cute surfer girl with long blonde hair, sapphire blue eyes, and a deep tan. How I’d put my arm around her and put my other hand on her leg and slowly moved it up the inside of her thigh. “Yes, go on, go on.” the Priests would whisper with fevered excitement. “Well Father,” I’d say, “she started to moan deep in her throat and opened her legs so that I could my hand right up and that’s when I discovered that she wasn’t wearing knickers.”
“Go on, go on” he’d say, “What happened then?” So I’d relate how I got the hardest stiff I’d ever had and how she gave me a head job or some such thing and how much I regretted falling into temptation. Ha, ha, ha – I’d laugh about it for hours.

I have never had the slightest regard for all these absurd ideas about sexual repression and have always regarded the whole business as a completely natural phenomenon. Maybe that’s why I have seven children from four different women – and I’ve only had gonorrhoea once! Back in the early 70s I made myself something of a goal in life to shag at least one woman from every ethnic group and nationality. I didn’t achieve that goal but I did screw my way from Perth on the Indian Ocean to NYC on the Atlantic and claimed a pair of souvenir knickers from nearly every European ethnic group.

It is a great disappointment to me that now, at nearly 61, the factor of age, a bit of obesity, and medications have robbed me of most of my virility. I don’t really miss it; I chalked up a pretty good score and it was the age of “sexual liberation”. I look back on those days with great nostalgia and have many great memories – like the two Jewish girls I had a ménage-a-trois with in New York City in the January of 1977; or the gorgeous Welsh Belinda I picked up in the Mountaineer Hotel in Queenstown NZ in December 1975; and that cute little girl I seduced in Rosebud South Carolina; the Korean Nurse; the Greek Mia; and Lilly Fachetti from Milan amongst many others. It was a helluva lot better life than the dickheads who spent their time praying and worrying about their “impurity”. Fuck that idiocy; I spread my seed whenever and wherever I could. I can, with some pride, admit to having made love to three different women with 24 hours and I was 51 at the time! Back in 1970, when I was 18, I had this really cute girlfriend who was 16 and I shagged her 21 times between Friday night and Monday morning. I wish I could still do it.

I do feel sorry for all the religious cranks who would look upon such behaviour as the worst sort of sin – and flagellate themselves and pray and beg God to take away their envy of me. If they hadn’t been cursed with religious nonsense, maybe they’d be as well balanced and enlightened as am I. Despite what the religious books tell you, there is nothing “unclean” about women and they do like sex – and I’ve certainly met some who liked it even more than me.

Anyway, with my last wine order I received a free gift of four dozen bottles of International beers so I’ll enjoy a few of those and reflect on how lucky my life has been and how lucky I am to have been born when I was in the lucky country.

the unbridled lust common to a young man, and all the concomitant romance of being the hero of legend in one’s own mind..

is kind of a rarefied stale air and maudlin dusty parody to an old fart.. no?

or are you the only man with those kinds of things in his heart?

so yeah, basically One God up so to speak from Greece’s unknown god with Whom Paul challenged their pantheon

and also the True God above Egypt’s gods. [and above the world's and a man's religious/sensual idols]

I’d venture to say that the common 1st C Corinthian knew the bawdy sensualism of living a life of unbridled lust with more acuity than you and I put together.

The Diana worshippers [Temple prostitutes made a religious art form of it, including booze and dope.]
..granted, I thought we’d invented ‘it too.

I did a few pages of research last year on ancient Egypt’s religious constructs, it’s relationship to the Eastern mysticisms, [Hindu, Buddhism] and common iconography between the two.

It’s interesting stuff from a secular perspective, fascinating from a Christian view.

Actually, I kinda said that backwards. My paper’s locus was oriented to an Hindu exposition [11C bronze Shiva] with Egypt historically and contextually juxtaposed.

Some of the same iconography, like the Lotus blossom for one example, follows Egypt to India.

this is the sculpture of my old buddy Raj.. Nataraja The Cosmic Dancer

“[...]is with me now and was with me when I had that minor orgy in NYC all those years ago. Do you accept those premises?

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no. He is not with you now or ever. But, I do believe that there have been occasions past and perhaps future, that He was near you.. but you are like me, you are a free moral agent. You can say yes or no–in a thing, like your Stalin, Himmler Bundy and kids honoring thing.

Because the real point [beside some one-upsmanship with me] is force you own moral demands on your own false dilemma

it’s false, because it needn’t be an absolutely a yes-no answer. The whole counsel of the bible on that matter is what speaks to it from a Christian perspective.

Biblical Christianity isn’t constrained in the Law of Moses. That’s why when your try to layover the demands of the Law on a Christian, it’s a distorted perception on your part.

And, I expected you to posit the Stalin progeny and so on.. but, it’s just so much silliness on your part isn’t it. It’s your obstinate straw man, you knock hell out of him.. I find him deaf and dumb.
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The Catholic Church and nearly all the other mainstream “faiths” (i.e. Church of England) accept that evolution is true – only a fool could deny the mountain of evidence from the fossil record, archaeology, anthropology and biology – [...]

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count me amongst the fools that see only creation in your your sources

evolution is a religious notion.. it comports best with your camp.

Atheism is a religion, even the SCOTUS knows that.
Your moral false dilemma is your plaything.. you play with with him however you see fit according to whichever moral parameters that you imagine.

Given that we are all programmed to pursue the survival of the species, [...]

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that programming didn’t come from your meaningless, purposeless cosmos.

The finely tuned programming of the universe continues to make a very compelling argument for thermal inflation Big-Bang though.

It also tends to falsify your atheism in the process. Ham and the young earthers are confused by their own errant hermeneutics.

The big bang fits very well with the bible.. thus Hawking’s life long endeavor with infinite number of universes… but I guess he just decided to put a pretty bow on it and publish anyhow..

and you talk about predictability..
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“[...] the Abrahamic Religions’ endless edicts, laws and instructions to supress one’s sexuality

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I really don’t know what you’re talking about here.. and I’m not at all convinced that you do either.

Islam and some cults would present some repression to sexuality.. but otherwise, Who Let The Ducks Out?!

And, that dead horse is tired Hoss.

Yes God is omniscient; you’re on your own w the lotto, you were on your own in NYC, and neither is He “with” you now
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2. You are a “creationist”.There must be something desperately wrong with the USA education system [...]

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true on both counts
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6.”Islam and some cults would present some repression to sexuality” You have just won the Gold Medal for idiotic and appeasing understatement! I presume you include Christianity amongs the “some cults”

is it your peter that still concerns you? Get over it. This is a glaring example of straw on your part. I’m pretty sure He’s more interested in your heart than your pecker.. just my thoughts on it.

Islam perseverates sex, represses, perverts.. but otherwise, that’s mostly a snl church lady cartoon in your head that you’re trying to sell as reality.. if not, give soem example of what you’re talking about..

attempting to mount some moral argument to falsify God is the height of folly on the part of atheists… and it’s often wrapped in an elitist, condescending, bacchanalian rhetoric.. just like it always was.. dead horse, that one

4. “that programming didn’t come from your meaningless, purposeless cosmos” –

Yes it did. So there is a meaning to the cosmos, is there? Like what? What is the great meaning, the great purpose?

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your purposeless universe, against mathematically insurmountable odds derives messenger rDNa in order to make only one Brutus, and like every other human, is an absolutely unique specimen of the species, … I suppose a meaningless gesture on the part of the cosmos..

does cosmos have a sense of humor? .. droll humor.

or wait, maybe you deny any uniqueness in yourself.. and perhaps you are right in that. Perhaps your will is nothing more than a purposeless moral challenge.. it certainly isn’t free.

I think that whatever freedom you know, beyond that which the state allows, is an arbitrary moral arena of your own construction.

I’m not calling you a straw man. I’m calling out some of your arguments as straw.

Your person, I’m calling an unique individual, like all other people. A uniqueness that has both it’s origin, identity and purpose in God–not a purposeless cosmos.

Even the very Laws of physics require an origin..
no-God is a religious doctrine.

Look at from my perspective for a moment; you argue that reality [space-time] arrives purposely– a random chaos evolving upwardly against the dark energy/ dark matter in an entropic universe..

in that very universe, you arrive contrary to the very math that models the known universe: Big-Bang

and argue from that position for purpose in moral arenas of your own design

yours presents a much greater demand for willingness to believe

than in a loving personal, almighty God. He condescended to save me. He became me–so to speak, that is He became flesh–to save me personally and it was me He saved, from me.. I was still a young man-26- but sex, drugs and rock&roll can really ya bring down, if it doesn’t kill ya outright.

The best cosmological models to date [~14.6B yo universe] are seamless to the creation account.

Brutus, I can’t look into God, so to speak, any more than I can look into the sun. But, I do have a certain agency in the matter. I can put on some shades and kinda look into the sun.

I can willfully shade the presumption [pride]–so as to be teachable. Arguments like, if there were a God, He would… such and such.. are incoherent.

“Even the very Laws of physics require an origin..” Then so too does God. If God can arise out of nothing, then why can’t the cosmos? To posit that everything requires a creator is to posit that God also requires a creator – and so on ad infinitum.

I am not sure what you mean by “worship”? Do you mean chanting around a smoking altar dressed in gaudy robes? Or do you mean kneeling by your bed each night with your hands clasped and mumbling various incantations? If so, I don’t know of any atheist who does these things. Belief in the fact of evolution is no more a religion than belief in the fact that 2 + 2 = 4. I would agree that Marxism, Environmentalism and certain aspects of feminism have much in common with “religion”.

Yes, everyone is unique (except identical twins/triplets who may then grow to differ for environmental reasons). The uniqueness is a factor of base DNA pairs of which there are 5 x 10^8 in each human cell and the fact that, if one only goes back to the time of Augustus i.e. 2000 years and assumes 4 generations per century, then each person has 2 x 10^80 direct ancestors and you can multiply that by 3 x 10^8 for the particular DNA you inherited from your father. I get the feeling that you are not very skilled with very large numbers and probability.

For example, there are 7 billion people one earth. Every one of us could have a whole solar system named after us, just in our own Milky Way Galaxy, and we’d still have more than 190,000,000,000 solar systems un-named. Indeed, we could name whole galaxies after every human who ever had a name and still be short by at least 100,000,000,000 names – and that’s only in the “observable” cosmos. What lies beyond that … who knows.

Even though the chances of life arising on a rocky and watery planet are vanishingly small (winning lotto five times in a row with the same numbers is more probable) it has certainly happened at least once – and even the most conservative estimates predicts that it has happened at least 40,000 times in the Milky Way alone. That is not to say that the “life” elsewhere in the galaxy is more complex than here – but it could be. Mammals and thus homo sapiens were lucky that there was the “great extinction” about 65 million years ago i.e. the K-T Extinction resulting from an asteroid impact – the crater of which is in the sea off the Yucatan Peninsula. Had that not happened, the Dinosaurs would still be top of the food chain and not us. Given the immensity of the visible cosmos, even at the most vanishingly small probability, the number of planets on which life has arisen, quite spontaneously, runs into many powers of 10.

Life is nothing more than an electro-chemical reaction between elements – mostly carbon, hydrogen, Nitrogen and oxygen – all of which are in the “light” elements of the first 10 places on the periodic table. All life, from the most microscopic bacterium to blue whales, contains these elements. Because of the unique valency of carbon, the number of permutations of carbon chains, and thus amino acids and proteins, is infinite. Incidentally, self-replicating “life” has been “created” in a petrie dish from inanimate elements, while amino acids are regularly found in meteorites.

But you would have me believe that amongst this almost unimaginable complexity and vastness, a Sky God chose to come to this little blue planet, take on the appearance of a burning bush, and talk to a semi-literate Semite and instruct him to cut off the end of his penis and burn the kidney fat of the sacrificial calf and lamb so that he could enjoy the aroma as it wafted up into the sky?

Not only that, but this same Sky God later artificially inseminated an illiterate and, presumably, innumerate young woman whose son then roamed around a very small part of the Eastern Mediterranean, as did many other fakirs at the time (and still do) fulfilling “prophecy” and instructing “faithful” men to castrate themselves and demanding that anyone who did not believe him should be brought before him and killed on the spot (Luke 19:27).

All this stuff has to be seen in the context of the time. The telling of allegorical stories and legends about great heroes was very popular; literacy was something of a new phenomenon and was being turned into an art form and a powerful tool of propaganda; people really believed that the civilisation of the Roman Empire was the pinnacle of human achievement but contained many flaws and was widely hated by many vanquished nations – who, as a result, generated many “saviours”. The old stories were re-worked, re-told, massaged here and there, and then sold as prophetic truth.

The strength of Christianity, Islam and Judaism (from which the other two were derived) lies in the “simplicity” of only having one God to take up your time (and money) and, in the case of Christianity and Islam, the fact that anyone could join by simply saying “I believe”. This made you a member of “the Club” and bestowed upon the convert a “group identity” and many other benefits important to gregarious animals – you could meet new people, meet girls and boys not of your own traditional social circle, travel the known world and be welcomed into the homes of your co-religionists etc.

The spread of religions invariably led to the dissemination of genes and thus improved, in many ways, the human gene pool. All mammals seek out partners who are genetically equal, or preferably superior, to themselves. One need only look at the countries of the “New Worlds” to see just how far the missionaries spread their genes. Even today in Australia, better than 70% of the Aboriginal people choose to marry non-aborigines – because there is an innate drive to improve the genetic robustness of their off-spring. There is a very good argument to be made that the missionizing zeal of Christianity and, to a lesser extent, Islam accelerated the evolution of the homo sapiens primates.

But religions are closed systems that can expand to a point where they reach, if you like, terminal velocity. That was reached in the 8th Century with Islam and the final codification of the Koran. Since then it has been static and a counter-evolutionary belief – because the book itself claims to be the final word on everything and can only be read in Arabic. Christianity reached its limit of worth (terminal velocity) in the 19th Century but then “evolved” to some extent to adapt to a changing world – but that change has actually undermined its own authority. The (mostly) Catholic teaching Orders of Monks and Nuns (later copied by the Protestants and secularists) spread literacy and numeracy amongst the lower classes of Europe and the Empires and this education of the masses led inexorably to doubt and then to the “free thinkers”, rationalists, and eventually atheists like myself and many millions of others.

Despite the many good things that Christianity initiated, it has served its purpose and no longer has anything to offer. Indeed, like Islam, the militant Christians are trying to drag the world back to the glory days of the 17th Century and trying desperately to block scientific research on every front that may have implications for their entrenched weltanschauung. Islam wants to take the world back to the 8th Century – where most of the Islamic world still lives e.g. the Ayatollahs Iran, the Taliban, the Wahhabi’s in Saudi Arabia, the fanatics in Pakistan and Indonesia.

Perhaps the greatest absurdity is the banning of stem cell research in many states of the USA because of “religious” objections and arguments about the exact time that a “soul” is created. That really is right up there with debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin for utter idiocy. Thankfully, the rest of the Western world is not constrained by such nonsensical constructs.

Do you not find it ironic that the very same people who want to ban stem-cell research have no qualms at all about investing huge sums to make even better drones, smart-bombs and thermo-nuclear weapons? Is there something wrong here? Stem cell research looks at blastocysts at the 150 cell stage – which is much smaller than the full-stop at the end of this sentence. Indeed, a fly’s brain has many millions of times more cells than those blastocysts – and yet there are those, clutching their book of ancient myths (which, by the way, make no mention of any of this) who are intent on ending perhaps the most promising research in all history – research that could well end many of the worst diseases and, at least in theory, prolong a useful human life into centuries rather than decades – because they have this mad idea that there is something called a “soul”.

The problem with the religious is that they do not want to be challenged. They like living in a hermetically sealed universe full of saints and sinners, angels and demons, and their own insular societies. They like the simplicity of finding an answer to everything, no matter how ridiculous, in a single book. And they desperately fear the unknown.

If that was all there was to it, I wouldn’t care about the religious at all. But they are not happy with living an 8th or 17th Century life themselves – they want to impose it on everyone else! As the Islamist have shown, they are quite prepared to kill the infidel whenever and wherever they find them. There is no shortage of equally insane cranks in Christendom, and Hindustan, who would have no qualms about pressing the launch buttons and obliterating the earth – because they are so brain-washed, so insane, that they really do believe that to do this would be the greatest good.

Are you prepared to die for Christ? Do you really believe in an afterlife? Are you happy to see your wife and children vaporised because of a dispute between theologians dating back to the infancy of civilisation? Do you really believe that this immense and unimaginably vast cosmos was created by a Sky God who has the time, and interest, to telepathically talk personally to you? Do you really believe that he is up there, noting down all my sins, so that he can punish me for the rest of eternity after I am dead?

It is just inconceivable to me how anyone with any sort of education can believe such arrant nonsense, such utter piffle, such patent bullshit – and yet have the superlative arrogance to claim, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, that it is true and, not only that, but want to use the power of the state and death threats, to impose it on me!

Are you prepared to die for Christ?

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no. Are you prepared to die without Him?
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Do you really believe that he is up there, noting down all my sins, so that he can punish me for the rest of eternity after I am dead?

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no. He does not know you. But, He has finished with your and my sin both. He does in fact love you as much as He loves me.. that’s only attributable to His own goodness [glory].

but it’s that’s uneasiness about the judgement of you that indicates the fear of death. That’s global. Deny it adamantly; that will prove my point.

Christ propitiated the wrath for, and received the judgement for my sin, leaving me with only one appointment with death.. because I’m willing to believe Him in that.

it’s your own will that binds you.

but no, He’s not noting and holding your sins to judgement.. you are..

As the Islamist have shown, they are quite prepared to kill the infidel whenever and wherever they find them.

There is no shortage of equally insane cranks in **Christendom, and Hindustan, who would have no qualms about pressing the launch buttons and obliterating the earth – because they are so brain-washed, so insane, that they really do believe that to do this would be the greatest good

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**who? where? what are you talking about?

I’m sorry to interrupt a moment.

p.s. How does Bruxism manage to think brains were made? Why would anything of matter randomly “choose” to become a brain?