How can we get rid of our sinfulness?
- Thread starter sanctus
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but i guess for me that is the real question. how can we really know it is fantasy or not. i mean, it might be toyou, but what youmight believe might be fantasy to someone else, know what i mean?
but what about ghosts and things like that, do you believe in that? im wondering cos i am trying to figure out where ghosts exist in the spiritual realm, especially for christians.
Neither do I. There's no good evidence there's any such thing, no properly investigated case of ghosts appearing has ever survived routine skeptical scrutiny, and people who claim to be able to talk to the dead, like Sylvia Brown, John Edward, and James van Praaghe, are easily shown to be frauds by people who understand how they do it. It's an old stage magician's trick called cold reading.
Nope, I'd probably laugh. Then I'd tell him he looked pretty good for a 2000 year old. Then I'd explain that I was kidding and tell him that in all likelihood no such critter ever existed. Then I'd probably offer to buy him a beer and explore the whole issue.
Did they? Any real evidence of this? Or is it just more sayso?
A contradiction? In the holEy bible? You're kidding of course, ar bith?
Why would I? It'd be behavior that would be entirely out-of-character for me to do anyone else any harm. You have forgotten that my stand is that man created all this nonsense, so it's not beyond me to think that Yahweh, Yeshua, and Casper the holy spook are completely at odds with each other. No-one can prove me wrong. As far as that goes, no-one can prove that this critter with the multiple personality disorder didn't dance around in ladies scivvies and wear pumps like Edgar Hoover. get it? I don't believe the whole thing from beginning to end. As far as I'm concerned, this whole conversation is almost all hypothetical. All 80+ pages of it.
I'd rather cast fishing line.
More politics. Ah, the ease with which the faithful can produce diaphanous and nebulous vaguenesses is really cool. There are no snakes in Ireland because Ireland doesn't have any snakes.
Balls. One could say the same thing about all those Santa Claus characters. Saying that 90% of the planet thinks so, so it must be true is crap. Besides that it's not even debating very well. It's a fallacious argument: more specifically it is argument of appeal to authority. http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html
Yet there are the stories in your own favored book. Go figger.
WOW!!! Someone who actually speaks for a god. Arrogance has no bounds. Hmmmmmmmm. Isn't that taking the lord thy god's name in vain? Purporting to speak for him?
I have my answers in my head, so you're correct.
Hug's fine. A gab at the pub is better.
Evidence. The process is that one forms the hypothesis, then tests the hypothesis and if the evidence agrees with the hypothesis, it becomes theory. If the evidence (assuming there is any) contradicts the hypothesis, the hypothesis is most likely fantasy. If ALL evidence shows exactly the hypothesis, it is considered fact. The hypothesis here is that a god exists. There is no qualifiable evidence for the hypothesis.
No such things. There is ball lightening, static electricity, "phosphor clouds", etc. http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20020209/bob8.asp
Humans haven't discovered everything that there is to discover, so there are a lot of hypotheses out there being researched, but the probability of spectres is minimal. This isn't really an area of interest for me so you might find someone who can elaborate.
Speaking of products of the imagination, scientists have actually discovered elves and sprites.
http://sky-fire.tv/index.cgi/spritesbluejetselves.html
Yeah. One of the better spook debunkers is a Canadian: James "the amazing" Randi . Cool, huh?
Teasing you, Tal. You said a few posts ago, "For me, it's not even in the catagorie of "I believe", I just just know, now that might sound arrogant to some, but it is the truth, it is instinct." So I said, uhoh, there's the I know just because thing again. lol
Perhaps not, but in truth, faith, God, or any of these matters is not necessarily something that can be put on a table and examined. I wish that it could, but obviously it cannot. It is down to the phrase you dislike, either you believe or you don't. If you believe, obviously proof is all around you, but not proof that can be scientifically examined. Bottom line really is, if the person is stable, and their faith in God manifests good behaviour and moral choices, there is little harm in Christian faith. When faith manifests itself into self-righteousness and arrogance, great harm can be caused, especially to others.
For better or worse, one of the elements to fundamentalists of any stripe that I find disquieting is people presuming to judge based on what they THINK God is telling them, as if He whispers only in their ears. The stories I could share about the damage these types of faith systems cause the individual are many.
There is just something that is so annoying about fundamentalists, especially when they're rapping on your door in tag-teams of two. Does no good telling them you already go to Church either, because they second they hear you're Catholic they start their "wh+re of Babylon-pope is the anti-christ" rhetoric.
Why they even bother knocking on Catholic doors is a mystery to me. You'd think the "Mary in the bathtub" in the front garden would be a clue that you're probably NOT going to win the people inside the house over to your sect.