Well, it does explain the 7 day week (it's about the only thing that does).Originally Posted by Mutatis-Mutandi
Well, it does explain the 7 day week (it's about the only thing that does).
Les Miserables,
Volume 1, Fifth Book, Chapter 3
Remember this, my friends: there are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators.
Agreed, it does come across as a fictional story with an underlying issue of morality of some sort.YesNo;1134557I've wondered about that as well, but I've always seen this as a story with perhaps some moral underlying it rather than what actually happened.
That is something I never knew... it would be good to find out how they worked the actual time it took to 'bigbang' ...it is after all an exact time and by the second.If I understand the big bang correctly, the universe was created in 10^(-43) seconds. Of course it took many years after that to get itself settled into place enough to support life.
it may never try
but when it does it sigh
it is just that
good
it fly
Cacian, you are scaring me to life. You are making too many good points and asking too many good questions and within genuine context.
cafolini !!!!I am sorry I really do not mean to scare you...haha.
Have said something wr------o----ight?
it may never try
but when it does it sigh
it is just that
good
it fly
Literarily interesting. It makes for a better story than "He created the world in a minute."
Well, I'm making a huge assumption here, but I assume that we had a seven day week before Genesis was written/conceived. So, I'll also assume that the story was written around that template. It is not unusual for Christianity to integrate already established traditions into their religion.
Well, maybe the "event" was first conceived "in the beginning"...
Do we have any document which establishes the first use of the 7 day week?
Moses recorded the Genesis account about 1500 BC.
Les Miserables,
Volume 1, Fifth Book, Chapter 3
Remember this, my friends: there are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators.
Six days is for us pea brains to understand (sarcasm). What I mean is, God could have created everything in any time He choose. But He choose to do this in six days so we may understand the spiritual meaning behind it. You know, on the seventh day He rested.
shad·ow ing
Yes but the fence is often pointy and painful. Furthermore, you are far too unstable unless you cling on to something - you are at the mercy of everything around you if you don't want to break your neck. No one can be firm on a fence.
But in all seriousness - I am not wholly opposed to people seeing both sides of an issue - this is a good practice - but when you try to reconcile two irreconcilable events in order to avoid any conflict, this is just silly.
I wrote a poem on a leaf and it blew away...
I see what you did there.
I am no expert on calendars but there is one thought - used in Ancient Babylon - that the seven day week is based on a lunar cycle. The moon enters a new phase every seven days. And in Ancient Babylon, the seventh day of the week was observed as a holy day. This seems to be separate from the Ancient Jewish tradition taken from Genesis. I do not know enough to say which came first.
I wrote a poem on a leaf and it blew away...
I wondered about how they got it down to 10^(-43) of a second which is almost instantaneous and then it occurred to me that that is about how long a quantum of time lasts and apparently the physical theory can explain what happened after that first quantum of time.
The actual measurement to the big bang is 13.73 billion years plus or minus 1% and that was established by measuring the cosmic background radiation by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe: http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/ I'm amazed that it can be resolved to such precision and I don't understand how that was done, but wish I did.
My blog: https://frankhubeny.blog/
My $0.02:
I tend to think of the issue over the labels of agnostic and atheist usually refer to one's level of certainty/uncertainty and one's claim about that certainty. "Agnostic" literally means "without higher knowledge." The original word was coined to present the idea that we can't know if there is a higher power out there (and, even if there is, we can't know anything about it). The word has come to be used to define people who "aren't sure" whether there's a higher power or whether they believe in one. Atheist really just means a lack of belief (someone is "without theism"), so all agnostics are atheists "in a sense" because they don't "believe" in a higher power (sometimes they're not sure whether they should believe or not). But there are also the atheists that aren't agnostics in the sense that they claim to be pretty sure (if not completely sure) there is no God or other higher power. So one claiming they're agnostic is a way to get around them having to claim that there is no God/supernatural/higher power, etc.
Personally, I claim to be an agnostic atheist. I don't believe in any gods or any supernatural, but I do not claim to know for sure they don't exist. There's always an immense unknown out there, and it is possible (although remote, in my mind) that something somewhat matching the various ideas of any god or supernatural could be out there in the places we just don't understand yet. But considering the fact that every time we come to understand something new it turns out to be perfectly natural (even the things that were previously thought inexplicable and were therefor caused by God/gods) I think there's a good reason for rejecting the notion of the existence of gods or supernatural. But can I claim with certainty there are none? No. But do I believe in any? No. Hence: agnostic atheist.
It's not contradictory AT ALL. Lacking a belief is not the same as believing in its opposite. There is a whole realm of probability between the poles of true/false, 0/1, black/white. In fact, Bayesian reasoning (based on probability theory) has come to dominate a lot of scientific and rational discourse, which makes sense considering that the current most befuddling mysteries of the universe (quantum mechanics, the uncaused nature of virtual particles, etc.) seem to be based on concepts of probability rather than direct cause-and-effect. So when I say God's existence is improbable (meaning I put the chance of his existence somewhere between 0% and 100%, but closer to 0%), I can claim, simultaneously, that I don't have a believe in God (atheist), but that I am not absolutely sure one doesn't exist (agnostic). As I said above, I think one reason many feel more comfortable with the agnostic label is precisely because they think that to be an atheist one has to believe God doesn't exist, which is just wrong. I can not believe God exists without believing God doesn't exists; that's the nature of probability! It would be like me saying that that I can not believe there is a plant growing beside my house, but I don't have to believe that there isn't one growing there. It's possible one sprouted overnight when I wasn't looking, and that possibility means I can't be sure enough to believe there isn't one there.
The notion of God's and the supernatural's unprovability is a thoroughly modern concept. The Bible itself offers stories of experiments that proved the existence of God. See HERE. I'll quote the relevant part:Even more ironically, the roots of the word "faith" is not "belief without evidence or facts," but "belief upon the consistency of events." That's why we say a lover/spouse is "faithful" if they don't sleep with someone else, because they're being "consistent" in their actions. But the kind of "faith being belief without the consistency of evidence" that's now promoted by many Christians exist as a way to handwave contradictory evidence. It's what happens when beliefs become untethered from anticipated sense experience or, in the famous metaphor of Alfred Korzybski, the map stops matching the territory.The idea that religion is a separate magisterium which cannot be proven or disproven is a Big Lie - a lie which is repeated over and over again, so that people will say it without thinking; yet which is, on critical examination, simply false. It is a wild distortion of how religion happened historically, of how all scriptures present their beliefs, of what children are told to persuade them, and of what the majority of religious people on Earth still believe.
Absolutely. As I once wrote in a short aphoristic poem:
Lying on the fence all day
Hurts my back, it smarts!
But it’s worth it knowing which yard to roll in
When the fire starts.
Last edited by MorpheusSandman; 04-30-2012 at 06:56 AM.
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being." --Carl Gustav Jung
"To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due." --Neil Gaiman; The Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists
"I'm on my way, from misery to happiness today. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh" --The Proclaimers
Interesting the fact that you tend to think that supernatural and the notion of a higher being go hand in hand. I never thought about it that way.
I could say that the beliefs in ghoasts can also be described as unexplicable and can be labelled as supernatural.
I for one label not myself nor burden my ideas with anything to do or not to do with religion. I am me just in case one day I happen I turn around and decide I want to become something else. For this very reason I opt out from labelling myself with anything.
it may never try
but when it does it sigh
it is just that
good
it fly
Well, in the case of higher beings and the supernatural you're dealing with things that can't be sensed with any kind of regularity by people unbiased towards believing in them, so both have people claiming they exist and evoking very specious methods and evidence to support their claims. So I really don't see a difference between them, especially since higher beings are usually considered to reside and work in the realm of the supernatural.
You don't have to make any labels permanent, and there's nothing wrong with saying that right now you have a certain level of belief or disbelief in higher beings and the supernatural or whatnot. You're always free to change your mind later (and many atheists and theists and agnostics have).
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being." --Carl Gustav Jung
"To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due." --Neil Gaiman; The Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists
"I'm on my way, from misery to happiness today. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh" --The Proclaimers
What I find most exasperating about this forum is that one can leave for an extended period of time and return to find the exact same persons having the exact same conversation filled with the exact same errors.
First, the notion of atheism as a sort of vague a-theism, meaning roughly without belief in God, really only gained mainstream cultural currency in the 1970s when George Smith wrote Atheism: The Case Against God. The book was a fairly bad one written by a layman for the layman and was riddled with errors as bald and egregious as trying to argue that Jesus was actually a violent man who "brought the sword", which was really just an awful misinterpretation even according to most atheists. The reason for this moderation, which was really just an attempt to co-opt the position of agnosticism, owed to that traditional notions of atheism had proved logically untenable. Of course, this moderation introduced, as another poster pointed out, an entirely new set of difficulties such as that atheists were not, in fact, positing that there was no God. One then began to wonder what all the fuss had been about.
The truth is that the so-called a-theists were really just engaged in the worst sort of legalism and semantic wriggling in attempt to reform their opinion so that they didn't have to defend it. Of course, a distinction between agnosticism and atheism was still necessary, as words generally perform the function of distinguishing between differences, and there were still serious intellectual differences between agnosticism and atheism. For instance, we still need, today, a word to distinguish between the person who just doesn't know and is willing to concede that this or that particular God could very well exist and another person who thinks it's all BS.
The question the atheists were trying to avoid was "Why is atheism correct or more likely true?" The answer, of course, could only be reasonably stated in the form of a rational argument, and historically atheists have failed in this task. Now someone is likely to reiterate Dawkins's canard about "proving a negative" or to try to revivify the now failed verification principle or some empirical evidentiary obligations, but the problem is more basic than that. I assume everyone understands the difference between an argument or reasonable justification and "proof". Any position one has, whether on golf or God, ought to have some reasonable justification ending in a positive affirmation of one's position. Or said another way: there ought to be some reason that one believes what one believes. So if one believes there is no God, then one ought to have some reason for doing so, and the reason ought to logically conclude with "thus there is no God."
The retreat into a-theism is the worst sort of intellectual dishonesty. It is an attempt to escape the intellectual burden for a belief that is probably unjustified, which is not to say that God necessarily exists, but rather there are no reasons he can't. Everyone involved in the actual discussion on this topic understands this. It's generally only the average person who has swallowed the New Atheist propaganda whole that thinks a-theism is reasonable.
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