Vidiot

the ontological arguement-

1. God is defined as "that which nothing greater can be coneived".
2. Therefore, if god exists, he must be infinite and perfect, because anything less would not be a god (because fo the last statement).
3. Existance is more perfect or "greater" than non-existance.
4. Therefore, the statement "god does not exist" contradicts itself ( since a non-existant god would be less than perfect, and therefore, not actually "god".
5. Therefore, the statement "god exists" is necessarily true.


keep in mind, this does leave room for the idea that OUR creators (not necessarily humans, but the universe) are NOT perfect and could be, for all intensive purposes, some kid's science project. However, that brings up the question of who was the creator of that creator, of that creator ect.... on into infinity. At some level, shouldn't there be someone on top... "the greatest?"

__________________
i want to die with a hard on.

Rector of Desire

Vidiot,

I think I hit on a similar instance of "musn't there be that something" in regards to framing back in that "is there really a god" thread, much like you did here.

However, infinity is infinity, and to assume infinity ever reaches a linear end is to enter into a logical impossibility.

That's why I don't believe in an omnipotent entity that controls all this and is supreme. If everything increases in gradients up an infinite food chain, we can never reach "perfection", "omnipotence", and everything else ascribed to God. Much like moving a ball across the floor half the distance remaining between it and the wall, we will always get closer, but we will never get there.

I do believe in a God, of sorts. I do not believe it is omnipotent, I certainly don't believe it controls our destiny and will smote us for our moral transgressions, nor do I believe it even to be necessarily conscious of it's creationary power. I merely believe that - given the fact we already readily admit that our frame of reference is limited by our inability to manipulate one of the 4 dimensions we readily acknowledge to affect our understanding of the universe - we aren't capable of seeing the bigger picture around us; in other words, we're stuck in a picture frame seen in a photo of a man holding a picture frame that holds a photo of a man holding a picture frame that holds a photo of a man holding a picture frame...

Furthermore, to manipulate the 4th dimension would open up a whole new can of worms that would undermine our understanding of mortality as we know it. I can't claim to understand what would be in that can of worms, other than it would undermine everything we know about average age and life expectancy, because our system of indexing the time elapsed in these estimates would cease to exist.

We can't rightfully claim to understand what is beyond this, precisely because we're stuck in this. But the discoveries of physics are proving that there are frames of reference all around us, affecting us, that we aren't able to view - our frame is subordinate to theirs. Therefore, to die is to be removed from this reference frame. To assume death is anything more than that is unnecessarily pessimistic, in my books.

RoD

__________________
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God." - President George Herbert Walker Bush

"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the bac

redarmyraven1

I dont know

I doubt its something we will ever know.

peon1313

First off, I definately believe in God, I know God and I think this argument may be the big one in this area for me, but, to play the devil's advocate, who says existence is preferable to non existence? This was brought up by another student in an old philosophy class and we never really reached consensus. It may be the the only proofs for the existence of God lay in personal experiene. If you think about it, our entire universe is only real in each of our own personal experience. What i mean to say is, I'm not sure that I can prove to you that ANYTHING is real. That's what's funny about illusion. Maybe the things that we CANNOT prove to our senses are the ONLY things that are real. The Mystery...We're confronted with it daily, we can't escape it. We can distract ourselves but ultimately we confront it.
jc

__________________
The Universe itself can be called a myth, since bodies and material objects are apparent in it, while souls and intellects are concealed. -- Sallustius

choketoke

what makes you guys even start to think theres some greater being.... our entire existance is just a fluke of evolution....if one thing was different we wouldn't be here... i would start to belive theres a god if our earth was created then there was humans... but therewas soooo many millions of years b4 that...we were fukin animals man....i just don't believe it...

__________________
drugs made me crazy

Rector of Desire

Choketoke,

I don't believe in a greater being either (although I do believe in some greater unifying, quite possible unsentient force). But let me ask you this: how are your assumptions any more supportable than theirs? You claim it's all a fluke; they claim it was all created by God's hand. How do we know either way? It's all conjecture.

Additionally, this statement:

[quote]Originally posted by choketoke:
<strong>if one thing was different we wouldn't be here</strong><hr></blockquote>

Could equally be taken to represent the side you're arguing against, couldn't it?

Just trying to spark a debate. I'd be interested in your thoughts on what I've said.

RoD

__________________
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God." - President George Herbert Walker Bush

"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the bac

kiWikkid

i agree with RoD, that the very fact of our existance within this randomness, can be used as an arguement for there being a creator. with our knowledge of quantam physics, the universe as we know it would have to be designed(fine tuned) for it to sustain life. i know next to nothing about quantam physics other than its mathematical equations do not describe actual existence - they only predict the potential for existence, (reminds me of spirituality) but to date experiments have confirmed every theory.

__________________
__________________

THE BLUNCH BLACK OF BLOTRE BLAME

ZenSkin

[quote]Originally posted by choketoke:
<strong>....if one thing was different we wouldn't be here... </strong><hr></blockquote>

This is known as the neo-teleological argument for the existence of a creator. That is that our existence isn't a fluke because it is soooo unlikely.

Then, I tend to think of us as a cosmic mistake.

__________________
Honk if you don't exist

ZenSkin

[quote]Originally posted by Vidiot:
<strong>the ontological arguement-

...
At some level, shouldn't there be someone on top... "the greatest?"</strong><hr></blockquote>

St. Anselm's argument. DesCartes even fell for this one. It is not the strongest argument since it requires several unprovable assumptions to lead to an unprovable conclusion. Thomas Aquinas had a stronger argument (IMO). See the teleological and cosmological arguments in Summa Theologica <a href="http://www.ccel.org/a/aquinas/summa/home.html" target="_blank">http ://www.ccel.org/a/aquinas/summa/home.html</a>

Immanuel Kant had a counter argument for the ontological view. So did Anselm's contemporary Gaunilon :

First: If by "God" we do mean "that than greater which can not be conceived," then the concept is meaningless for us. We can not understand, in any meaningful way, what exactly is meant by such words. The reality behind the term is completely transcendent to the human knower;

Second: Even if we grant that the concept of God as "that than greater which can not be conceived" exists in the understanding, there is no reason to believe that the concept necessitates the extra-mental reality of God. After all, I can imagine the most perfect island, glorious in every detail, but there is nothing about my understanding of the island that forces us to admit the island exists.

Interestingly Kurt Gödel, a close friend of Einstein and among the most important mathematical logicians ever, revived the ontological argument in the 20th century as an example of modal logic. I can't even pretend to begin to understand modal logic ... getting your head around Gödel's Incompleteness theorems requires at least a year of study of mathematical logic at the graduate level ... it is not for the light-hearted.

Anyhoo -- people have been kicking this stuff around for a few centuries. And at the end of the day it is a matter of faith. What is interesting is that the desire to prove the existence or non-existence of a supreme being is uniquely Western. I suspect it started with Plato and his argument for the perfect circle. But it is all mind chatter. Interesting, but just talk. Faith lies in the mind of the faithful. The desire to prove belief is one of the aspects of the European "Age of Reason" that sort of got away from itself. Now you have people who despise science for tearing down their totems so they have invented "creation science." A true oxymoron -- an attempt to marry two things utterly unrelated. First century Judeo-Christian mythology and 19th century empiricism.

But that's the problem with talking about God. You are relying on a mythology that is almost totally irrelevant in the 21st century. The virgin birth, the flood, the ascension into heaven, the 7 days of creation, 7 plagues, 40 days in the desert, Moses' 40 years in the desert, the sons of Abraham etc etc were never meant to be taken literally. These all had a psychological impact in the Near East 2 millinea ago. These stories had a resonance with the people of that time because they spoke in forms that were meaningful to those people in that time. Jews enslaved by the Pharoah or in Mesopotamia meant something to Jews in the Roman Empire ... it means nothing now unless it is read as mythology. The Passion and Resurrection had an immediate appeal to people who were aware of Greek mythology in the 1st century, but all those connections are lost now. The "New Testament" never talks about Orpheus -- but that is exactly the Near East template for Christ. People at the time know that ... now it is totally irrelevant to our world view. We are not an agrarian nation under the control of the Roman Empire. We do not see ourselves as the only true people (those who do are called lunatic racists). Our current world view is shaped by television and the newspapers. We all know that the universe was not created in 7 days. We've seen images of people on the moon. We can't find any evidence for Heaven or a soul. We are living in an empirical/consumer age and our new gods are the gods of celebrity and wealth. We have failed miserably to integrate our world view with these ancient mystical ideas. Talking to a modern American about the Christ/Orpheus connection is like talking to an Eskimo about palm trees.

This is why Nietzsche wrote that God is dead. Contemporary Europeans, he argued, were stuck acting out hollow rituals in which they did not believe -- certainly not the way first century christians believed. Nietzsche understood that we need to find a new mode of being -- we need to create a belief system that is relevant to our current experience. If we don't we will fall into nihilism.

Isn't it fairly obvious that orthodoxy is a vulgar attempt to protect oneself from nihilism?

Honestly ... asking me to believe in the Biblical accounts is like asking me to believe in the Easter Bunny except that the Easter Bunny has more cultural relevance.

And if you do not mean the Biblical account of God what do you mean? Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians and Muslims are the full accounting (I think) of monotheists on the planet (the fact that they all hate each other is not lost on the skeptic). It is not like we have another mythological set of references with which we can discuss an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent creator deity.

I believe that any meaningful discussion about a creator must not anthropomorphize that creator. We can speak of the natural order of things based on observation and we can point at what may or may not be behind the order and chaos of the cosmos but to assume the world is consciously directed always lands us in the trap of "us versus them." Why does one person survive cancer but another die? Why does one premature baby make it but another doesn't? Either the consciousness behind the natural order is immensely cruel or suffering is the basic state of existence and we are wasting our time asking "why?"

The latter choice is exactly the first premise of Buddhism, incidentally. And Buddhism, for all its flaws, is a religion and ethical system with no god. But Buddhism has no cultural relevance to Westerners either.

At least not yet.


It's too bad I have nothing to say on this subject ...

__________________
Honk if you don't exist

duderonomy

[quote]Originally posted by Vidiot:
<strong>the ontological arguement-

1. God is defined as "that which nothing greater can be coneived".
2. Therefore, if god exists, he must be infinite and perfect, because anything less would not be a god (because fo the last statement).
3. Existance is more perfect or "greater" than non-existance.
4. Therefore, the statement "god does not exist" contradicts itself ( since a non-existant god would be less than perfect, and therefore, not actually "god".
5. Therefore, the statement "god exists" is necessarily true.


</strong><hr></blockquote>


don't think I've ever heard a sillier argument. You create a definition, then devise a series of illogical circular arguments to support a 'because I said so' proposition.

What if 'god' is perfectly absent, and a greater example of non-existence is nowhere to be found?

What if god's only power is his coincidental residence in the imagination of so many misled people.

The greatest trick god ever pulled was in making people believe he existed, to paraphrase Verbal Kint.

__________________
I can see your house from up here

duderonomy

[quote]Originally posted by ZenSkin:
<strong>

I believe that any meaningful discussion about a creator must not anthropomorphize that creator. We can speak of the natural order of things based on observation and we can point at what may or may not be behind the order and chaos of the cosmos but to assume the world is consciously directed always lands us in the trap of "us versus them." Why does one person survive cancer but another die? Why does one premature baby make it but another doesn't? Either the consciousness behind the natural order is immensely cruel or suffering is the basic state of existence and we are wasting our time asking "why?"

The latter choice is exactly the first premise of Buddhism, incidentally. And Buddhism, for all its flaws, is a religion and ethical system with no god. But Buddhism has no cultural relevance to Westerners either.

At least not yet.


It's too bad I have nothing to say on this subject ...

</strong><hr></blockquote>


therein lies the truth amigo...

__________________
I can see your house from up here

Vidiot

[quote]Originally posted by Rector of Desire:
<strong>Vidiot,

I think I hit on a similar instance of "musn't there be that something" in regards to framing back in that "is there really a god" thread, much like you did here.

However, infinity is infinity, and to assume infinity ever reaches a linear end is to enter into a logical impossibility.

That's why I don't believe in an omnipotent entity that controls all this and is supreme. If everything increases in gradients up an infinite food chain, we can never reach "perfection", "omnipotence", and everything else ascribed to God. Much like moving a ball across the floor half the distance remaining between it and the wall, we will always get closer, but we will never get there.

I do believe in a God, of sorts. I do not believe it is omnipotent, I certainly don't believe it controls our destiny and will smote us for our moral transgressions, nor do I believe it even to be necessarily conscious of it's creationary power. I merely believe that - given the fact we already readily admit that our frame of reference is limited by our inability to manipulate one of the 4 dimensions we readily acknowledge to affect our understanding of the universe - we aren't capable of seeing the bigger picture around us; in other words, we're stuck in a picture frame seen in a photo of a man holding a picture frame that holds a photo of a man holding a picture frame that holds a photo of a man holding a picture frame...

Furthermore, to manipulate the 4th dimension would open up a whole new can of worms that would undermine our understanding of mortality as we know it. I can't claim to understand what would be in that can of worms, other than it would undermine everything we know about average age and life expectancy, because our system of indexing the time elapsed in these estimates would cease to exist.

We can't rightfully claim to understand what is beyond this, precisely because we're stuck in this. But the discoveries of physics are proving that there are frames of reference all around us, affecting us, that we aren't able to view - our frame is subordinate to theirs. Therefore, to die is to be removed from this reference frame. To assume death is anything more than that is unnecessarily pessimistic, in my books.

RoD</strong><hr></blockquote>

OK, KEEP IN MIND PEOPLE!!!!! THIS IS A LOGICAL ATTEPT TO PROVE THE EXISTANCE OF GOD. THIS NOT AT ALL BASED ON EXPIRIENCE, FAITH, ECT.

Second,, THIS IS NOT BY ME! It was written by anslem, and when he wrote it, he didn't really intend the ontological argument to be some sort of absolute proof of the existence of God (or even of a Most Perfect Thing); that it's not so much a proof as an expression of how things look once you get acquainted with the reality of God, or something like that

Third, RoD: Your first statment is the fatal flaw in the ontological arguement...i was kinda hoping you'd all figure that out through debate, but you got it right off the bat. As for the ball rolling across the floor..and the impossiblitiy of it going anywhere is called zeno's paradox.... my perceptions of god (or at least my intellegent guesses) are for another thread i think, but i definatly agree with alot of what you said. It's pretty well accepted that humans have a really really limited perception of true reality.... if we were to sudenly see existance in an entirely new way i think i goes without saying that the entire world of philosphy (including morality) would be in for some major revision.

[quote]Originally posted by kiWikkid:
<strong>i agree with RoD, that the very fact of our existance within this randomness, can be used as an arguement for there being a creator. with our knowledge of quantam physics, the universe as we know it would have to be designed(fine tuned) for it to sustain life. i know next to nothing about quantam physics other than its mathematical equations do not describe actual existence - they only predict the potential for existence, (reminds me of spirituality) but to date experiments have confirmed every theory.</strong><hr></blockquote>

yep, quantum physics is HEAVY shit... it appears on the subatomic level that the world is nothing but chaos... completely random...which bring into question the idea that the entire univers could be completely 100% a random chance. perhapse there is no purpose to speak of.. just random chance...


Also, think about this....god is supposedly the most perfect being... that doesn't necessarily mean OUR CREATORS have all the traits of gods... its possible that ideas like evolution and the intellegent design theory can happen at the exact same time...

__________________
i want to die with a hard on.

Vidiot

[quote]Originally posted by ZenSkin:
<strong>

St. Anselm's argument. DesCartes even fell for this one. It is not the strongest argument since it requires several unprovable assumptions to lead to an unprovable conclusion. Thomas Aquinas had a stronger argument (IMO). See the teleological and cosmological arguments in Summa Theologica <a href="http://www.ccel.org/a/aquinas/summa/home.html" target="_blank">http ://www.ccel.org/a/aquinas/summa/home.html</a>

Immanuel Kant had a counter argument for the ontological view. So did Anselm's contemporary Gaunilon :

First: If by "God" we do mean "that than greater which can not be conceived," then the concept is meaningless for us. We can not understand, in any meaningful way, what exactly is meant by such words. The reality behind the term is completely transcendent to the human knower;

Second: Even if we grant that the concept of God as "that than greater which can not be conceived" exists in the understanding, there is no reason to believe that the concept necessitates the extra-mental reality of God. After all, I can imagine the most perfect island, glorious in every detail, but there is nothing about my understanding of the island that forces us to admit the island exists.

Interestingly Kurt Gödel, a close friend of Einstein and among the most important mathematical logicians ever, revived the ontological argument in the 20th century as an example of modal logic. I can't even pretend to begin to understand modal logic ... getting your head around Gödel's Incompleteness theorems requires at least a year of study of mathematical logic at the graduate level ... it is not for the light-hearted.

Anyhoo -- people have been kicking this stuff around for a few centuries. And at the end of the day it is a matter of faith. What is interesting is that the desire to prove the existence or non-existence of a supreme being is uniquely Western. I suspect it started with Plato and his argument for the perfect circle. But it is all mind chatter. Interesting, but just talk. Faith lies in the mind of the faithful. The desire to prove belief is one of the aspects of the European "Age of Reason" that sort of got away from itself. Now you have people who despise science for tearing down their totems so they have invented "creation science." A true oxymoron -- an attempt to marry two things utterly unrelated. First century Judeo-Christian mythology and 19th century empiricism.

But that's the problem with talking about God. You are relying on a mythology that is almost totally irrelevant in the 21st century. The virgin birth, the flood, the ascension into heaven, the 7 days of creation, 7 plagues, 40 days in the desert, Moses' 40 years in the desert, the sons of Abraham etc etc were never meant to be taken literally. These all had a psychological impact in the Near East 2 millinea ago. These stories had a resonance with the people of that time because they spoke in forms that were meaningful to those people in that time. Jews enslaved by the Pharoah or in Mesopotamia meant something to Jews in the Roman Empire ... it means nothing now unless it is read as mythology. The Passion and Resurrection had an immediate appeal to people who were aware of Greek mythology in the 1st century, but all those connections are lost now. The "New Testament" never talks about Orpheus -- but that is exactly the Near East template for Christ. People at the time know that ... now it is totally irrelevant to our world view. We are not an agrarian nation under the control of the Roman Empire. We do not see ourselves as the only true people (those who do are called lunatic racists). Our current world view is shaped by television and the newspapers. We all know that the universe was not created in 7 days. We've seen images of people on the moon. We can't find any evidence for Heaven or a soul. We are living in an empirical/consumer age and our new gods are the gods of celebrity and wealth. We have failed miserably to integrate our world view with these ancient mystical ideas. Talking to a modern American about the Christ/Orpheus connection is like talking to an Eskimo about palm trees.

This is why Nietzsche wrote that God is dead. Contemporary Europeans, he argued, were stuck acting out hollow rituals in which they did not believe -- certainly not the way first century christians believed. Nietzsche understood that we need to find a new mode of being -- we need to create a belief system that is relevant to our current experience. If we don't we will fall into nihilism.

Isn't it fairly obvious that orthodoxy is a vulgar attempt to protect oneself from nihilism?

Honestly ... asking me to believe in the Biblical accounts is like asking me to believe in the Easter Bunny except that the Easter Bunny has more cultural relevance.

And if you do not mean the Biblical account of God what do you mean? Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians and Muslims are the full accounting (I think) of monotheists on the planet (the fact that they all hate each other is not lost on the skeptic). It is not like we have another mythological set of references with which we can discuss an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent creator deity.

I believe that any meaningful discussion about a creator must not anthropomorphize that creator. We can speak of the natural order of things based on observation and we can point at what may or may not be behind the order and chaos of the cosmos but to assume the world is consciously directed always lands us in the trap of "us versus them." Why does one person survive cancer but another die? Why does one premature baby make it but another doesn't? Either the consciousness behind the natural order is immensely cruel or suffering is the basic state of existence and we are wasting our time asking "why?"

The latter choice is exactly the first premise of Buddhism, incidentally. And Buddhism, for all its flaws, is a religion and ethical system with no god. But Buddhism has no cultural relevance to Westerners either.

At least not yet.


It's too bad I have nothing to say on this subject ...

</strong><hr></blockquote>

you certainly do know your philosophy sir! from what i know, Kant attacked the idea that existance is not necessarily more perfect than non-existance... his argument "imagine a rose, imagine a rose with red petals and dew drops... now imagine that rose is real ...does existance change the the nature of an object? Kant argued that it didn't. He was wrong, of course... Look, is it better (or 'more perfect') to have an imaginary 100 dollar bill or a real 100 dollar bill. Most people would say a real one is better for obvious reasons....

your observations about talking about god are right on... although i'm really not a big fan of existentialism or nietzsche...i dunno, i guess i'm just not angsty enough to get into it...

buddhism is pretty damn interesting ideas... ideas that make a ton of sense in some cases...but as you said, things like lack of material possesions doesn't go over well in the western world today. its gaining popuplarity...we will see where it goes...

__________________
i want to die with a hard on.

Vidiot

[quote]Originally posted by duderonomy:
<strong>


don't think I've ever heard a sillier argument. You create a definition, then devise a series of illogical circular arguments to support a 'because I said so' proposition.

What if 'god' is perfectly absent, and a greater example of non-existence is nowhere to be found?

What if god's only power is his coincidental residence in the imagination of so many misled people.

The greatest trick god ever pulled was in making people believe he existed, to paraphrase Verbal Kint.</strong><hr></blockquote>

dude, read the above posts before you post... you will understand the ontological argument a little bit better.

__________________
i want to die with a hard on.

ZenSkin

[quote]Originally posted by Vidiot:
<strong>

you certainly do know your philosophy sir!

</strong><hr></blockquote>
The power of Google

[quote]<strong>your observations about talking about god are right on... although i'm really not a big fan of existentialism or nietzsche...i dunno, i guess i'm just not angsty enough to get into it...
</strong><hr></blockquote>

I am a stickler for putting things in their historical and cultural place. Existentialism included. Nietzche's comments were more relevant to 19th century Europe than to modern America -- America is the most religious country (in terms of sheer numbers) after India. I find it painful to see people trying to glue together science and religion. To my mind they have all missed the point.

[quote]<strong>buddhism is pretty damn interesting ideas... ideas that make a ton of sense in some cases...but as you said, things like lack of material possesions doesn't go over well in the western world today. its gaining popuplarity...we will see where it goes...</strong><hr></blockquote>

If an American talked like the Dalai Lama talked (Richard Gere?) I wouldn't trust him. But Buddhism is the ultimate chameleon religion. It has adopted itself to the prevailing culture wherever it has gone -- Japanese Zen and Sri Lankan Theraveda are barely the same religion. Each is so shaped by the culture that there are very very few obvious similarities. Shaved heads, statues of the Buddha and meditation ... that's about it. But they are branches of the same philosophy. More to the point the are branches that grew independantly with no one around to say "You are doing it wrong -- get in the iron maiden you heretic." Buddhism ultimate authority is the individual practitioner. Which is why it will never ever work in the West. Westeners love liberty and personal freedom. Buddhism has flourished where conformity isn't even an idea -- it is just how things are.

Now that Japan and Sri Lanka are becoming consumer "plantations" (Japan being a clear victim of its own consumer fever) Buddhism is is getting tossed aside. People want their Coke and MTV. What do they care about some 2500 year old philosophy when there is Budweiser and Marlboros to be had.

__________________
Honk if you don't exist

duderonomy

[quote]Originally posted by Vidiot:
<strong>

dude, read the above posts before you post... you will understand the ontological argument a little bit better.</strong><hr></blockquote>

No, I think I understand it quite fine, pal. I have been down this road several times. My only point is the absurdity of legitimizing something by labelling it. In it's purest form the argument is still initially flawed, relying on itself for substantiation. You might as well try and tell someone to understand the bermuda triangle better.

As per Kant, is imagining validity as perfect as the existance of validity?

__________________
I can see your house from up here

The Rev

God does not exist. I know, He told me so.



The Rev

__________________

Sans & a half

The fact that we exist and that the universe has not been around forever kind of hints at a creator. The thing is if there is a creator what created the creator? If there isn't a creator what the hell created us?

__________________
Life's a trip, make it a vacation. -Sans-

Rector of Desire

[quote]Originally posted by Sans & a half:
<strong> </strong><hr></blockquote>

That's an interesting response. I think we should all get angry at God. You know, smote the smoter.

Give the bastard a taste of his own medicine.



RoD

__________________
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God." - President George Herbert Walker Bush

"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the bac

Hedons

Read on for the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God (Yeah right! but it always makes me laugh)

-Hedons


Excerpt from "The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams...

BABEL FISH

The Babel fish, is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe.

It feeds on brainwave energy not from its carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them.

The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.

The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

The argument goes something like this:

"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"But," says Man, "The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.

"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best- selling book "Well That About Wraps It Up For God."

Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

__________________
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