flog

Nate recommended I look into the Transcendental Argument for the existence of god. It is his opinion that it is the strongest argument for the existence of god. So, I'm reading the wikipedia article, and, of course, must excrete my thoughts on the matter here.

Interestingly, these points are quite similar to statements Nate has made:
"One aspect of the TAG regards moral absolutes. The argument asserts that an omnibenevolent God provides the basis for attributing right and wrong to any thought or action. In creation God equips humanity to act as moral beings, and in self-revelation God demonstrates how people should act, and commands them to do so. People then have an absolute standard of morality by which to condemn evil thoughts and actions (or to commend good ones).

The argument furthers states that moral relativists, by contrast, cannot condemn theft, rape or genocide (nor commend generosity, marriage, or the preservation of life) without relying on the assumption of absolute morality. No moral assertions, it is argued, can be explained by the relativist's own worldview; they are instead derived from unconsciously "borrowed capital" from Christianity, proving the truth of the Christian worldview."

and they are patently absurd.

God is the basis for attributing right and wrong: Christians who take god himself to be the standard of what is good have no way a priori to know what is good (or evil) and therefore commend (or condemn) such acts. They can only know after the fact what was good, and then only if it was recorded as being an act of god in the Bible. The rebuttals I offered to Nate were Abraham and Isaac, the "Conquest" of the Promised Land, and the suffering of Job. These stories from the Bible teach us quite clearly that there are contexts wherein it is good and right to murder one's child (or at least attempt to murder), to commit genocide, and to disregard (or even aid in the exacerbation of) human suffering. If the voice in his head says its god and tells the Christian to drown his children in the bathtub, the Christian has no yard stick by which to judge this command if god himself is the standard of what is good. He must have faith, obey, and find out after the fact if the voice was really god or not.

Borrowed capital: The puddle also marvels at how perfectly it fits into its depression. There is no surprise that generic human morality (which shares remarkable similarities to the morality of other social animals) should be consonant with the less despicable aspects of Christianity. It is Christianity that is borrowing from general human nature - I assert. For the sake of argument, it is equally plausible that Christianity is borrowing from some general inborn moral sense that evolved from our primate ancestors as it is that moral relativism is borrowing from Christianity.

I've been slowly friending all the Krises on Facebook (or attempting to friend them). I thought it's possible I might come across a couple distant cousins who would have family tree information of their own that could assist me in filling out my own genealogical data.

Anyway, I got a message from one Krise in Illinois that I send a Friend Request to last night. She was so sorry to see I was an atheist she had to send a smarmy message but not sorry enough to confirm friendship.

--

Somebody Krise
Friend Requested
Today at 11:25am
Report Message
beowulf,
I am a Christian and am so sorry to see that you are an atheist. What if you are wrong? Eternity is a long time. God Bless you. If you ever need Christ in your life, he will still be there.

beowulf Krise
Today at 11:49am
Why that's a silly argument for why I should believe in god. It is basically a re-hash of an argument called "Pascal's Wager", and the problem with Pascal's Wager is that it incorrectly assumes there are only two options: Christianity or atheism. In fact, the chances that you may have picked the wrong god are immense considering the number of gods that have ever been postulated (Hinduism alone has millions). Anyway, I know all of this will fall on deaf ears. No hard feelings.

I just hope that should I ever come to need Christ in my life he's more willing to friend me than you were.

Thanks,
beowulf

Constant database corruption? Really? How is it that I'm always missing out on these constant problems people have with MS products? I've been using VSS for 6 years and have never lost source code to database corruption. I have never had corruption that couldn't be fixed by my nightly run of ANALYZE, either.

Maybe VSS breaks down with more than 3 concurrent users or maybe these donkeys don't run ANALYZE frequently enough. Heretofore, I've had no problems at all with Visual Source Safe.

Apparently, Passover started Wednesday. While googling for archaeological evidence of the Exodus I came across this quote here:

"But one element is missing from these inscriptions: There are no dead Assyrians! That is consistent with the ancient "historical" style -- negative events, failures and flaws are not depicted at all. When a nation suffers an embarrassing defeat, they usually whitewash the mistakes and destroy the evidence.

This idea has significant ramifications for archeology and the Exodus. The last thing the ancient Egyptians wanted to record is the embarrassment of being completely destroyed by the God of a puny slave nation. Would the Egyptians ever want to preserve details of the destruction of fields, flocks, and first borns -- plus the death of Pharaoh and the entire Egyptian army at the Red Sea?

In other words, we wouldn't expect to find prominent attention to Moses' humiliation of Pharaoh -- even if it occurred. "

I nearly laughed out loud. Yes, this is the reasonable conclusion to draw from the total lack of corroboration for the plagues of Egypt or the Exodus: the Egyptians were embarrassed that they got pwned by YHWH.

Another fun quote from further down the page:

"Interestingly, the Torah is unique among all ancient national literature in that it portrays its people in both victory and defeat. The Jews -- and sometimes their leaders -- are shown as rebels, complainers, idol-builders, and yes, descended from slaves. "

This is laughably absurd. The same aggrandizing exaggeration the author attributes to the Syrians and Egyptians appears throughout the Bible, as well. At the time that that the conquest of the Promised Land supposedly occurred Jericho had no city walls and most of the cities mentioned either did not exist or were small villages. There is also no evidence supporting the expansive range of the unified kingdom of David and Solomon.

I received an invitation to this Facebook cause and can't help scoffing just a little bit.

I appreciate that the union of vulnerable motorcyclists and clueless asshats contains a number of tragic stories of death and dismemberment, but I have a hard time seeing how it is incumbent upon other drivers to give motorcyclists special attention. I didn't put a gun to their heads and say "hey, you, motorcyclist. get on your bike and ride". This attitude of entitlement from me while you engage in risky behavior rubs me the wrong way.

How about this: everyone who drives should be more careful and pay attention to pedestrians and other drivers regardless of vehicle type.

Some turd posted a rambling apology for Intelligent Design to Amazon's "Science Community" and our (new) friend John D replied.

"John D says:
Ok BM,

Does it work for all systems? I have three systems that I would like to see you apply your rigorous scientific method to determine their status as designed or naturally occuring. All are very, very simple.

1) The wheel, invented by humankind for locomotion, describable by a simple mathematical model, the circle x^2 + y^2 = r^2. It was not used in the design of any lifeform of which I am aware, nor was the human design copied from any such preexisting lifeform.

2) The hydrogen atom, the simplest atom, describable by a bit more complicated mathematical model, the 2-body Schroedinger equation of an electron and a proton, a second order elliptical partial differential equation in space, first order in time, with an electrostatic interaction potential that varies as the reciprocal of square of the distance between those two bodies.

Please describe in detail how the various steps are applied and the differing results applied to each system above show one to be designed and the other natural. Thanks.

3) You find a twig stripped of it's leaves. Was it stripped by a chimpanzee (or even a Masai hunter) to be used as a tool to extract termites from a mound too hard to dig into but too narrow to place a finger (or a fat tongue unlike an anteater's)? Or was it stripped by a hive of insects for food? The first was "designed" as a tool, the second eaten for food, but BOTH were used for survival. Finally, was it a squirrel who jumped from one tree to another stripping and breaking a twig in the randomly occuring attempt? Please apply the scientific method of ID to the twig ALONE to determine which it is, designed or naturally occuring. Thanks.

How and by whom (or by what committee) was the English language, or pick any other language you wish for that matter, consciously and "intelligently designed?" Please explain.

Finally, I am just curious, do you consider yourself a YEC or an OEC? Do you accept the literalism of Genesis? From what you state, apparently not, which is fine, no problem. However, the "intelligent design" of DNA was never mentioned in the Bible as the means by which humankind was created. So, you believe in the "word of a man" (William Dembski, Michael Behe et al) over the "word of God"? The Bible in Genesis states that God formed man from clay/earth and breathed life into his nostrils, no? Wouldn't that imply that our lifeform should be based on silicon rather than carbon, since clays and inorganic soils are phyllosilicates with silicon, oxygen, aluminum, magnesium, iron, sodium and potassium forming their microstructures, unlike ALL other animals and plants which use carbon based microstructures? Certainly, if THAT difference had been discovered by analysis of human elemental makeup and molecular biology, it would have been a clear substantiation of Genesis, no?

It is well known that at least the building blocks of proteins, amino acids can be formed from random events, a la the Miller-Urey type experiments as well as many being found in meteorites. Are you saying that God could "figure out" how to get atoms to naturally "cooperate" to form amino acids, but not to form higher level hierarchies without DIRECT intervention or that he didn't want to allow enough time for it to happen NATURALLY because God was in some sort of "hurry" to create life and/or humankind? Was God incapable of designing a universe in which it COULD happen naturally and where many such hierarchies DO occur naturally? What other hierarchies are too complex to be naturally occuring, hives of bees, human societies?

You talk about evolutionists and THEIR god Nature and their prophet Darwin. But what do YOU put YOUR FAITH in? YOUR Trinitarian god of Behe, Dembski and Minnick and their only begotten creation, ID. Are YOU emotionally tied to ID?

If ID is science as you claim, it CAN be falsified. What happens to your beliefs if it IS falsified? "