601. Polygamist Leader Convicted in Utah

Comment #73943 by BAEOZ on September 26, 2007 at 5:39 pm

Russell, off topic question, but since you mentioned teaching philosophy; Does Deakin Uni have a good philosophy faculty? I've been thinking of changing to philosophy or doing some non-core philosophy subjects as I've been bitten by the philosophy bug over the last 6 months. The student guide mentions that Deakin specializes in Asian, psycho-analysis and western philosophy. I'm not sure why Freud et al are considered part of the basics of philosophy. I'd have thought more psychology (which is what I'm studying now.) Does Monash do the same (I think you teach at Monash?)
Thanks.

602. There Go The Dinosaurs

Comment #73774 by BAEOZ on September 26, 2007 at 6:13 am

Thou art wise oh Dr.

603. There Go The Dinosaurs

Comment #73770 by BAEOZ on September 26, 2007 at 5:59 am

Don't listen to Goatboy2012, he's a double agent. He sold Jack up the river to get some brownie points with the heavenly host. Jack wouldn't be doomed to eternal bliss if Goatboy2012 held fast with Satan.

604. Teacher: I was fired, said Bible isn't literal

Comment #73765 by BAEOZ on September 26, 2007 at 5:38 am

Well said Northern Bright. Though I'm confident WeeFlea's logic filter will exclude your points from consideration.

605. Why are we Muslims so self-destructive?

Comment #73705 by BAEOZ on September 25, 2007 at 11:23 pm

Richard, there's no need to stop posting. At least I don't see it. As far as I can tell you're a cantankerous bugger, but who isn't? I hardly see that as a crime. I'm a loud mouth dullard, that never stopped me commenting nor has it stopped WeeFlea for that matter. And yes, the good Dr.'s post are invaluable. Though he was better as a tit-avian.
Adieu seignieur de la France.

606. Teacher: I was fired, said Bible isn't literal

Comment #73704 by BAEOZ on September 25, 2007 at 11:18 pm

The WeeFlea:

Because you believe something based on your presuppostions which are themselves unproveable. In the fundamentalist version of your faith you refuse to listen to any other point of view.

607. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #73695 by BAEOZ on September 25, 2007 at 9:54 pm

CHeard, I have to disagree. It's well known that that an eclipse is the moon god gettin' funky with the sun god. Yahweh has nothing to do with it, he doesn't get funky with other gods since Baal two timed him with some middle eastern pantry god.

Biblical studies is more relative than sociology it would seem to my untrained eyes.

And was that the same Yahweh, super warrior in judges 1:19?

"And the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron."

Just kidding. I was told by one believer that this meant god had stopped being "with" Judah (lovers tiff I believe). That's why they lost. Not that God got sprayed with a can of whoop-arse by the iron charriot guys. But you can pick any meaning you like out of scripture it would seem.

[EDIT] Forgive my pueril god mocking CHeard. Your answers have been illuminating and do you credit.
Revcort, please notice my god mocking, it'll make your paranoia and need to feel persecuted justified somehow....

608. There Go The Dinosaurs

Comment #73673 by BAEOZ on September 25, 2007 at 7:44 pm

Notice that the Jews who are betraying Jebus are big nosed, evil looking stereotypes. But Jebus doesn't look that way at all??? And Jebus is god, and god didn't die, so he sacrificed nothing...la la la...
And it's funny about the oxygen comments and water locked up in the sky, where is it now?
Sorry, I'm being silly. Please ignore this post. :)

609. Why are we Muslims so self-destructive?

Comment #73671 by BAEOZ on September 25, 2007 at 7:33 pm

Wow an atheist schism over psuedonyms. We are catty!

For the sake of disclosure:
Brian Andrew English Australia (OZ).

610. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #73655 by BAEOZ on September 25, 2007 at 6:26 pm

Goldy, I guess it's like Fatima, when the sun plunged to the earth. No one noticed this, except a bunch of marian worshipers who'd been staring at the sun for hours. I find the idea that staring at the sun for hours is considered reasonable and in no way attributable to the consequent "visions" which of course are equally unrelated with the expectations of said visions weird. A bit odd to say the least.
I guess the same goes for a superstitious git sitting in the desert without food for 40 days, and then sees a devil! Couldn't be an hallucination bought on by malnutrition, dehydration, lonleyness and expectation now could it?

611. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #73643 by BAEOZ on September 25, 2007 at 5:04 pm

Revcort:

The reason I say that you may well be in danger is because you are not only believing these things yourself, but you are giving these guys exactly what they want- something that will neither save them nor give them sleepless nights.

612. Teacher: I was fired, said Bible isn't literal

Comment #73386 by BAEOZ on September 24, 2007 at 11:21 pm

WeeFlea, haven't seen you posting for a little while. I see you've not learned that lack of faith isn't a faith. But that's ok. Logic can be hard to grasp. Especially for one who would seem to gain a living by ignoring such things.

WeeFlea's mantra: "If I accuse others of being dogmatic like myself, it must be true!"

Just keep projecting.....

613. The Saudi connection that belittles Britain

Comment #73365 by BAEOZ on September 24, 2007 at 9:57 pm

The west seems to want to kill itself in the name of tolerance. Relativism sucks.

614. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #73319 by BAEOZ on September 24, 2007 at 5:35 pm

CHeard:

Even if the limits are self-imposed, a limited omnipotence isn't "omni" any more.

615. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #73031 by BAEOZ on September 23, 2007 at 9:46 pm

Never mind that the word "Jews" is terribly anachronistic in the context.

616. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #73021 by BAEOZ on September 23, 2007 at 8:51 pm

Thanks for your well thought out replies CHeard. I won't bother revisiting my questions as it seems to me that you believe because it fills some emotional needs. That's cool.

P.S. Do you believe Moses existed and a few hundred thousand Jews wandered the Sinai for 40 years without leaving a trace by the way? ;-)

As for physics and the resurrection. Well, as I understand it, god or someone outside the system brought back the corpse. Now this violates the 1st law of thermodynamics, not to mention rationality....But if you believe in a god and angels and resurrection a little thing like violating the laws of nature won't get in the way I guess.

617. Religion advances despite science (and thanks to Dawkins)

Comment #72968 by BAEOZ on September 23, 2007 at 4:36 pm

I have a theory that believers think that if they repeat a lie often enough, those who never read books will assume that the lie is a correct representation of that book and feel comfortable holding their beliefs.
I've seen it on religious blogs. An article will be posted that misrepresents The God Delusion and Richard Dawkins. Religious types, who don't want to think about their faith accept the blog article as being representative of Richard and TGD and presto! Problem solved, Dawkins is evil and divisive, doesn't get faith and faith is still good.

618. Monkeys show sense of justice

Comment #72742 by BAEOZ on September 22, 2007 at 3:04 pm

Poor Plato. He thought Justice was everybody doing their own thing to the best of their ability and not doing other peoples stuff. It turns out he was wrong and it was really all about grapes in favor of cucumber.
Let this be a lesson to you kiddies, rationality is good, but without empirical data it's just thought games.....

619. Poll: Are Dawkins and Hitchens good for humanism?

Comment #72740 by BAEOZ on September 22, 2007 at 3:00 pm

I haven't made a difference! Take that Richard Morgan.

620. The Science Of Collective Decision-making

Comment #72737 by BAEOZ on September 22, 2007 at 2:58 pm

In the end, 4 out of 7 judges think she is young and 4 out of 7 think that she is trilingual, but only two of the judges think she is both. How should the committee proceed?

621. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #72736 by BAEOZ on September 22, 2007 at 2:54 pm

While we're on the subject of weak jokes. Do angels get beaten up by demons for being effeminate wusses? I'd prefer to be a demon; they always seem to look like some corrupted version of the Pan, the god of masculinity. Probably an early Christian thing to discredit Pagan gods.

622. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #72581 by BAEOZ on September 21, 2007 at 7:16 pm

CHeard. Thank you for that last post. It seemed quite honest and that's a refreshing change. Especially the not feeling good about holding irrational beliefs. You're not a trinitarian and favor arianism. Poor old Arius got the wrong end of Constantine's choice of church.

They knew that the author of Isaiah 56 baldly sought to overturn or countermand the author of Deuteronomy 23. And note that Deuteronomy 23 is presented as divine speech in the immediate literary context—but that didn't stop the author of Isaiah 56 from trying to counter it with his own version of divine speech!

623. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #72552 by BAEOZ on September 21, 2007 at 3:24 pm

Dr. Benway:

Having been around the block more than twice, I'm not terribly impressed by any of this "humbly before the Lord" wank.

624. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #72549 by BAEOZ on September 21, 2007 at 3:06 pm

revcort:

His holiness makes Him unlike any other and His purposes and ways are impossible to map out completely.

625. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #72548 by BAEOZ on September 21, 2007 at 2:59 pm

Hi CHeard, if I could pick your brain.
What do you base your Christianity on? Do you believe Jesus rose from being dead, although he never died if you believe the logically incoherent trinity, along with many others and sundry earthquakes and curtain tearing? This means you put the fallible bible ahead of physics and everything we've observed. And it was never recorded by the Romans, Jews nor anybody else. I mean dead people walking the street, earthquake. The people of that time might have noticed, but they didn't.
Jesus is claimed by many to be an innovator. But his message of loving your enemy, turning the other cheek, etc predate him by many centuries. You can find them in Plato's Phaido, and apparently the OT, etc.
Finally, what words in the NT are Jesus'? Did he say he'd return in the lifetime of his followers? Did he say to abandon your family and possessions and follow him? I ask this because Jesus is suppossed to be pro-family. Anyway, I can list many more Biblical revelations that didn't work out or a demonstrably false.
In short, why do you believe?
Thanks.

626. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #72374 by BAEOZ on September 20, 2007 at 9:59 pm

Teratornis, that's entirely too logical for revcort to understand. :)

627. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #72312 by BAEOZ on September 20, 2007 at 5:59 pm

Revcort:

I would take that a step further and say that I have yet to run into anyone on this site who has a genuine understanding of who God is.

628. Why Christians should take Richard Dawkins seriously

Comment #72155 by BAEOZ on September 20, 2007 at 12:44 pm

Metaphysical wankery. The God of the Bible is untenable, so say the theologians, so we define god as undefineable. The average church going punter or fundy defines just as Richard Dawkins demolished. What a waste of an article.

629. Against the grain: There are questions that science cannot answer

Comment #72145 by BAEOZ on September 20, 2007 at 12:34 pm

Dr. Benway:

Try discovering a few scientific facts that people might find cheerful and uplifting. You'll get more dinner invitations, I'm sure.

Evidence Please!

630. Against the grain: There are questions that science cannot answer

Comment #71905 by BAEOZ on September 19, 2007 at 11:44 pm

What a bunch of lies and incomprehensible inanity! Let the skewering begin.....
Dawkin's isn't proposing an ideology. Just what does this women think Evolution by Natural Selection is?

Dawkins dramatises natural selection by the use of the word selfish. He says that natural selection means nature red in tooth and claw, but that's not true. Natural selection means using something that others are not, like photosynthesis or a new food source, and we must not forget that co-operation is often terribly important for survival.

631. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #71897 by BAEOZ on September 19, 2007 at 10:35 pm

I believe Quetz can tell us his plan behind the Tuatara. That's if he deigns to tell us. Apparently he's divine (in a non attractive fashion. And we can't really see him, as we are so beneath him and yadda yadda.) Phillip78 seems quite smitten (in a disciple kind of way.) He likes his followers to drink tea or some such. Anyway, maybe he'll let us in on his plan....

632. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #71890 by BAEOZ on September 19, 2007 at 9:39 pm

Goldy, I just looked up the tuatara on the web. Very interesting creature. I'd heard of the parietal eye before, but I didn't realise it was a real, if degenerate, eye. Thought it was just some fake eye to bother the birdies or something.

633. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #71888 by BAEOZ on September 19, 2007 at 8:58 pm

It was the giant eagle that hunted the moa, it got fat and grew big (lamarkian evolution?) by first hunting the mamals. And the terrestial flesh eating parrots finished them off.

634. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #71886 by BAEOZ on September 19, 2007 at 8:54 pm

Brush tail possums are doing fine in their new home too I believe as are some species of Wallaby that I think are on the bring back here. Sad.
What's the parrot that walks around and eats flesh called? I'm sure god, in his benevolence, decided that this parrot didn't need to fly and didn't need to eat flesh. Had nothing to do with lack of predators and change in evironmental conditions over eons that might have lead to certain traits being selected naturally. Heaven forbid.

635. Taking exception to Jake

Comment #71881 by BAEOZ on September 19, 2007 at 8:47 pm

OK. Who killed Pharyngula. Where's the nefarious creationist who unplugged PZ's server?

636. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #71880 by BAEOZ on September 19, 2007 at 8:44 pm

Goldy lay off the platypus and echidna. It's perfectly normal for a mammal to lay eggs. Show him a tatuara(spelling?) or Kaka or something you got over that side of the puddle.

637. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #71818 by BAEOZ on September 19, 2007 at 5:59 pm

Revcort:

and I can foresee that these lines of mutating creatures carried forward by natural selection will never be seen because they don't exist

638. A Response to Jonathan Haidt

Comment #71816 by BAEOZ on September 19, 2007 at 5:53 pm

Steve99, I just read Victor Stenger's book "God: The failed hypothesis" and his contention was that the find tuning of the universe, for the most part, was just the units of measurment but the few forces that seemed fine tuned are just the outcome of forces separating from a singularity into a system such as our universe (I think, am struggling to explain it well). Anyway, the forces couldn't have been any other way. Not because the were preordained. Of course a theist could posit that god set it in motion then stayed out of it, but that's a deist god, not the bibilical god.
Apologies if I explained it poorly.

639. A Response to Jonathan Haidt

Comment #71808 by BAEOZ on September 19, 2007 at 5:41 pm

Danielos, you've agreed there is no objective evidence of god. So how do you justify belief in god? I have objective evidence of my existence. You can say I don't have objective evidence of anything else, but then I just take the most reasonable and probable explanation. That what I see exists. That there's no reason to doubt that the computer I'm using and the people in the office in the next room and the car driving past outside and everything else in the universe are false or some thought in some unknown god's mind. It explains everything nicely to say they exist as they are and are caused natural explanations. To say that they don't or that god created it doesn't explain anything any better and introduces lots of unecessary complexities. You need to provide evidence, not metaphysical word play, that can't be attributed to a natural process. The god you described before is meaningless because he has no measurable effect.

640. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #71787 by BAEOZ on September 19, 2007 at 4:37 pm

Hey Revcort, have you accepted homosexuality as natural yet? Or are you being dishonest and ignoring the evidence because your faith tells you to?

641. Faith schools should not be tax-funded, and here's why

Comment #71786 by BAEOZ on September 19, 2007 at 4:32 pm

"Not only do we agree with this holocaust of teenage girls, we think these women are dying for a good reason. And furthermore, we think they're dying for such a good reason that we're prepared to halt this charity's activities even on behalf of vulnerable men, just to make a point."

642. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #71497 by BAEOZ on September 18, 2007 at 11:46 pm

Biz:

If you knew only that Leprechauns were little men in green suits with pots of gold, you could not expect to reasonably argue against their existence. It is entirely possible that at some time in Ireland's history, there was class of wealthy midgets who wore green suits and kept their riches in large cauldrons.

If you knew but a smidgeon of basic theology you would know that part of what defines "God" as "God" is his self-existent nature.

643. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #71488 by BAEOZ on September 18, 2007 at 10:00 pm

Goldy it appears those letter writers didn't read Richard Dawkins' letter. The bit pertaining to the courtiers reply would've been enough. It's already been covered.

644. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #71479 by BAEOZ on September 18, 2007 at 9:17 pm

Here's a nice summary of Christianity:
http://www.extian.org/home.htm

645. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #71473 by BAEOZ on September 18, 2007 at 8:54 pm

Night. It's day here, so I'll stay awake.
Try counting homosexual sheep if you can't get to sleep easily. They are some of the gayest animals I've seen. Rams just love to mount other Rams. Was quite an eyeopener when I was a youngster growing up in the country. :) Thus homosexuality is natural and love by god. Why else would creatures that don't reason do it?

Maybe that's why Christians despise homosexuality. The lamb of god was givin' and takin' some Ram lovin'. Maybe the Ram's didn't understand that no means no.

646. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #71469 by BAEOZ on September 18, 2007 at 8:42 pm

Revcort:

Homosexuality is obviously sinful- it is a crime against nature itself, wouldn't you agree? Do you know of any homosexual animals?

647. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #71461 by BAEOZ on September 18, 2007 at 8:27 pm

Revcort I asked for some sources that Jesus existed and you gave me sources that the cult of Jesus existed. I know this already, it's known as christianity.
As for your word play. You truly must be god if you know the meaning of a greek translation that was written by people who weren't present when the words were supposedly spoken. I can't see how you can honestly accept that Jesus didn't lie, granting for sake of argument that he existed and was divine.

648. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #71454 by BAEOZ on September 18, 2007 at 7:59 pm

revcort:

As a matter of fact, I'd say there is more evidence of the existence of Jesus Christ than there is of my existence or yours.

649. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #71451 by BAEOZ on September 18, 2007 at 7:57 pm

Funny, the catholic church has tried to destroy many books. It has a list of forbidden books. But who tried to destroy the bible.
Any thoughts on my gospel quotes about Jesus saying he'd return within a generation?

650. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #71447 by BAEOZ on September 18, 2007 at 7:47 pm

I'd love to run a marathon, but would need to sheed probably 30ks. It seems marathon runners have to look like they've been starving or they can't enter.....
Anyway, way off topic.