I've explained time and again how biblical Judaism and Christianity was revealed by God.

 Would you please explain how Zoroastrianism is revealed by God?

And in saying so you are making an intellectual mistake but thank ALmighty God that making mistakes doesn't necessarily mean an evil disposition! 

As to your first comment....No, we are not free to believe anything we want to believe when it comes to God's laws and His holy religion. When God revealed His law that revelation took away my liberty to do what that law forbids and the same with when He revealed a definite religion, He took away my freedom to belong to any religion I might wish. A person can be free from God and a servant of Satan or be free of Satan and a servant of God. We choose which liberty we will have.

As to the second...this is silly. My comments regarding Judaism stand. I note you haven't refuted anything I've said with any substance. We disagree on Judaism....Remember truth is neither yours nor mine, it is independent of us. We hold things because they are true. They are not true becasue we happen to believe them. Truth is consistent. If you have the truth on this subject and my ideas conflict with yours, then I don't possess the truth.  And if I'm right, you haven't got the truth.

No, you haven't. You have explained that you BELIEVE that they are.

They have a prophet and holy scriptures. Plus the Bible says that king Cyrus, a Zoroastrian, was a righteous king anointed by G-d.

Zoroastrianism is mentioned as a religion of the true G-d in the (Hebrew) Bible. Christianity is not. That's good enough for me.

I am perhaps making an intellectual mistake when I tell you something about Judaism which you didn't know. However, I do consider it useful to speak up when somebody makes up stuff about Judaism and then pretends to know what they are talking about.

I just want everyone here to know that what you say about Judaism is complete nonsense. That's all. It's up to you whether you can justify your own beliefs without misrepresenting other people's.

Your comments might "stand", but they still show a total lack of comprehension of what Judaism is and what the Jewish religion is about. If your own religion requires ignorance of others from you, that's fine.

And I have refuted what you said. You said Judaism stands for X, I, as a follower of Judaism, tell you it does not. There's your primary source.

Faith backed by empirical data.

Oh, wait, was that your agenda I stepped on?

Yes, thanks Protocept00....we've been up, down and all around this topic and more...

I find no problem with "arguing" as long as it's conducted with civility.

Dialogue is good and it should be no surprise that discussions that last this long focus on differences.

Ha, ha, ha....I admit it...I enjoy trying to figure out this stuff! I enjoy defending Christianity and my belief in ALmighty God, the most important stuff (subject) of all!

In my work of apologetics, I use the writings of the early Chruch Doctors and Fathers and my could those people write! There was no such thing as a touchy-feely approach to religion....no moral relativism either. They thought the truth mattered and so do I. There weapons were words...they thought that good things arose from a grasp of truth and evil things from a rejection of truth.

you mean data? or that thing more scientists around the world, everyday, are refuting?

hmmm

General-Ethan153 posts:

While Science and God aren't one and the same as the title of this article asks, there is a definite connection.

Science according to a 10th grade biology book can be defined as knowledge of the world around us and taken a step further the knowledge and study of reality including things which can be perceived beyond this world around us.  It goes on stating that this "Prove it" attitude encourages scientists to investigate phenomena and to develop new explanations and ideas.

Empirical science is knowledge or degrees of near certainty about the behavior of matter (which btw is always law-abiding) and the laws of nature by which the universe operates. Science really can't say anything about asbtract things as good, evil, truth, justice, beauty and love but it can, by deduction, shed light on the existence of an Intelligence Force and Designer at work in the universe...the fantastic complexity and law abiding DNA code impressed upon cells is one that comes to mind.

Empirical science is connected with God since He is the Maker of all matter, including time and space. I say this becasue it is written in Genesis, the first book of the Holy Bible, and God is the principal Author of Genesis and I have faith in the trustworthiness of God as a reliable eye-witness. My faith in God enables me to look at things with something more than a hunch.

MOMMIE4LIFE POSTS #247

It's not so....we can "prove" that God exists and I commented on evidence of God's existence in posts #137 pg 10; # 196 page 14 and #210 page 14.

As far as stellar evolution and the universe from nothing ie Big Bang...I responded to this in #194, pg. 13.

Well, "B or not B" is a tautology: it's just a generically true statement that holds for everything, so it's basically useless for logic.  You don't really need a proof for that.  But I think you might be misinterpreting what it means when translating it to English.  "B or not B" only means that either B is true or B is false.  It doesn't mean that "B doesn't need to be true" in the sense you're using it.  If B is true, then B needs to be true.  If B is false, then B needs to be false.  For example, the follwing is a true statement:  "Michael Jordan is tall, or Michael Jordan is not tall."  It's a true statement because he is tall, so the statement as a whole is true.  But it doesn't really mean "Michael Jordan doesn't need to be tall."  It doesn't mean there's a possibility that he might not be tall.  He IS tall.  The statement that he's tall or not tall is just a tautology: it's useless for determining anything about him at all.

I agree; especially converting between pure symbolic logic and the English language.  It's not always intuitive. 

If you assume it to be true, the only logical conclusions you can reach are ones that would start with "Given that we accept that God does not have a beginning...", or, to be more succinct, conclusions that presuppose the Christian beliefs are true.  And so you can't really use them to figure out whether or not the Christian beliefs are true; you're starting out by using a logical framework where they're assumed to be true; any answers you get using logic will be based on that assumption.

The main reason I think this is important is because many people like to say that, by nature, it's impossible to prove that God does or does not exist.  Like I said earlier, if that statement is true, it means that by definition, there can not be any empirical evidence of God, nor can he have any evident properties; it's by definition impossible to KNOW anything at all about him.  You can only guess completely randomly; that's what makes it "faith".  If there was any actual concrete evidence pointing towards one particular version of god, then it wouldn't be true that it's impossible to prove that he exists.

The entire argument earlier was not based on science, it was based on the idea that the entire world is a Chinese plot to destroy the U.S, and that certain people are telling "the truth" but being drowned out by the world conspiracy.  In that case, it's not at all ad hominem to point out that the people allegedly telling the truth are all known liars and shills of the Republican party.  It's entirely relevant.  This is really the only thing that one can use since no one here is trying to use actual scientific data that they've gathered themselves.  You yourself are just posting a whole bunch of links to things that other people wrote.  You have no way of knowing whether any of these things are true or not, since you don't do your own experiments, and you don't know enough about climatology to really form a valid model of global weather based only on your own observations.  I don't either.  No one in this thread can.  In order to be able to form a valid world model based only on your own personal data, you'd need to be a highly educated climatologist who is doing lots of research and experiments.  You know; like the actual scientists.

That's kind of my whole point.  Posting links to things other people wrote is not "science", and you can't take it as such, because those people might be lying, and you have no way of knowing whether or not it's true.  For people who are completely removed from the actual study of climatology (the vast majority of Americans), it's 95% a matter of deciding who to trust.  Either, you trust the scientists or you trust the Republicans.  Both sides have their own websites, and they both have conflicting "science".  Only one side can be telling the truth.

You posted a lot of links.  Before I get to that, let me restate what I was saying:  Every legitimate --> SCIENTIFIC BODY <-- agrees on anthropogenic global warming.  --> INDIVIDUAL SCIENTISTS MAY DISAGREE <-- but they are in the vast minority.  So you've posted a bunch of links to individual reports.  This doesn't change the fact that every scientific organization has released groupwide statements agreeing with it.  I'm not denying individual scientists disagree.  There are two main points I'm making:

1) Every national and international scientific organization in the world agrees.  Here's the statement by the Joint Science Academies: http://www.nationalacademies.org/includes/climatechangestatement.pdf

Here's a great list, with an introduction that I think is very important to read, in order to understand the importance of peer review and credibility: http://logicalscience.com/consensus/consensusD1.htm

Here's wikipedia's list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change   (And I know you were probably told that wikipedia's a liberal conspiracy too, but please just check the sources at the bottom of the page to verify the data first.)

2) The scientists who disagree are a small minority, and many are Republican shills.

SourceWatch is a great place to find info on sources, to let you judge their credibility.  Here's some info on the Heartland Institute, which has been quoted repeatedly in this thread: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Heartland_Institute

Some good info on all the PR think tanks that Republicans spun up as Kyoto was approaching: http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/1997Q4/warming.html

A good article about why you shouldn't trust "surveys" of articles that say that there are large numbers of people disagreeing: http://local-warming.blogspot.com/2007/08/do-12-scientists-endorse-global-warming.html  -the imporant thing is that just because an article about warming doesn't specifically say "We believe in anthropogenic global warming" doesn't mean it's taking a noncomittal stance.  Like he says, biology articles almost never say "We believe in evolution", nor do they attempt to "prove" evolution anymore, the people writing the article take the consensus as well-proven and are writing about some other specific thing.

Ok... I don't have the patience to go through each of your links in depth one by one, so I'll try to give a brief summary.  First, almost all of the sites require you to pay in order to read the actual article, and I'm not going to do that; I don't think you did either, as you just quote the abstract.  So I'm going to have to work just off of that, which isn't very useful.  But:

The first - actually does disagree.  Good work.

The second - Doesn't seem to disagree.  Just because they're talking about glacial changes being related to the oceans doesn't mean they're denying pollution.  They say it's "associated" with the rise in carbon emissions - I don't think this means they're saying it's the sole cause of it.  If they were denying global warming theory, I think they'd be more up front with it in the abstract.

The third - Is a synopsis of research from a scientist in the 1950's.  There are some tenuous attempts to link it to more current research, but most of it is from the 50's, before global warming research really began in earnest.

The fourth - Does seem to disagree.  The overwhelming majority still believe that the solar cycle isn't enough to cause this much change.  If you're interested, the IPCC actually did do a whole lot of investigation into solar cycle theories, but they came to a consensus that it's not enough to cause this drastic a change.  A graph: http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/fig12-7.htm

The fifth - was written in 1990.  That was before the massive upswing.  If you look at the graph above, she's right; it does match pretty closely up to 1990.  It's after that that it goes way up.

The sixth - I think the key is that in the abstract they say "we cannot say if this effect is local, regional, or global".

The seventh - I think the key is that in the abstract they say "at this time they are not statistically significant".

The eighth - was written in 1961.  Before global warming happened.

The ninth - First, written in 1997, so a little early.  Second, is interesting because it disagrees with your earlier articles about solar radiance.  Also doesn't really mention anthropogenic warming or disagree, probably because there wasn't much study on it in '97.

The tenth and eleventh - Yeah, peer review IS important (wah wah).  Spencer's an interesting guy - did you know he believes in the literal interpretation of Adam and Eve?  And that he denies evolution, and thinks humans lived with dinosaurs?  And that he's a working member of the Heartland Institute and the George C Marshall institute, two Republican think tanks with mission statements to discredit science that might harm the interests of American corporations or the Republican party?

The twelfth - Doesn't sound like denial of global warming to me.  It's about sea levels rising, not so much about temperature and warming.  There's more to global warming than just sea levels.

The thirteenth - Doesn't deny global warming.  Just about sea levels.

The fourteenth - Doesn't deny it.  Weird because you even highlighted the part where he talks about anthropogenic warming.  He's not saying it doesn't exist; he's saying that it does exist, but it doesn't necessarily effect the rate of tropical hurricanes.

Wooooo that was more typing than I really wanted to do.  I think I'm done with this argument.

GENERAL_ETHEN POSTS:

Not that it's important, but I'm a dudette!

What do you mean "shut up"? Isn't discussion what this forum is all about?

People are free not to read my comments!

As far as people having a choice as to their religious freedom...that's a half-truth. But once they discover that God has revealed a definite religion, then they are obliged to accept it and no other.

On the other hand, every one is born with a conscience and sense of moral obligation and right and wrong written on our heart. People are entitled to follow their own conscience even though their ideas might be mistaken...even in conscience they are obliged to live according to what they honestly deem to be right and good.

No, you haven't. In fact it is obvious that you know very little about it.

For one thing, you never even knew of the Samaritan Torah, the tribe of Dan's version of the Tanakh, and the Karaites, all of whom are representatives of non-Rabbinic Judaism.

Plus you never understood the relationship of Rabbinic Judaism to the times when the Temple still stood. Heck, you didn't even know that the priest caste still exists.

You are simply not a good source when it comes to Judaism.

Whoever is interested in Judaism should ask a Jew, not you. It's that simple.

And whoever believes that the Judaism before Jesus was somehow totally different from any of today's variants of Judaism ignores the tribal history of Judaism, the schism between Samaria and Judaea, and thousands of years of history.