a famous atheist once challenged a famous religious leader to a debate but would only debate him in a cemetary.. as the 2 men walked into the cemetary the atheist looked at the religious leader and said, i wanted to debate you here because i have no have fear here, the religious leader responded with a question of his own,, do you have any Hope here..
The People's Champ
The People's Champ
SSI, If you want to debate this, in a level headed nature, please email me. A public forum is not the best place to do this.
Again, I'm not looking for some sort of a war, just a discussion.
smartin1234@yahoo.com
Again, I'm not looking for some sort of a war, just a discussion.
smartin1234@yahoo.com
de niro, the bible does not say you should not gamble (nor does it say you should now gamble). it does not mention gambling at all, except that the soldiers gambled for the garments of the crucified Christ. please only speak of things which you are informed.
gringo, i rec'd your email and will respond.
gringo, i rec'd your email and will respond.
I cant believe people still try to tout creationsim. THe bible is completly facile. No one has been able to prove it as a fabrication? Uhhh....what about Charles Darwin? WHat about the simple laws of physics, that say a man cannot die, arise 3 days later, and ascend into heaven?
The cop out for those who preach the bilbe, is that when one of thier precious passages gets torn apart my science, they use faith as a harness and net, to avoid getting to the bottom of things. They do no hold thier beliefs up to standards such as logic and scientific method, yet, if they find even a slight ambiguity in darwinism, they try to questions its validity.
For anyone that wants a good read on this I highly reccomend Kurt Vonnegut's Cats Cradle. It is hilarious, and enlightening. It is a sweet pill served in a bitter shell.
No damn Cat....no damn cradle.
The cop out for those who preach the bilbe, is that when one of thier precious passages gets torn apart my science, they use faith as a harness and net, to avoid getting to the bottom of things. They do no hold thier beliefs up to standards such as logic and scientific method, yet, if they find even a slight ambiguity in darwinism, they try to questions its validity.
For anyone that wants a good read on this I highly reccomend Kurt Vonnegut's Cats Cradle. It is hilarious, and enlightening. It is a sweet pill served in a bitter shell.
No damn Cat....no damn cradle.
Born into this world with two eyes, two ears, two arms, two legs and a wonderful data-crunching computer system in both halves of our brains, we humans develop a perception of space as small infants. We do not have to be told that the world we live in has three dimensions: length, width, and height. It is almost intuitively obvious.
The Greek philosopher Euclid (330-275 B.C.) put this down in a mathematical format we now call plane geometry-which ruled the world for the next 2000 years-almost like a religion! In grade school we all learned that the angles of a triangle must add up to 180 degrees, and that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. A line had one dimension, a square had two, and a cube, three. Beyond that it was, for centuries, thought impossible for more dimensions to exist. Aristotle and Ptolemy added their weight to Euclid by "proving" that any more than three dimensions was "impossible."1
But of course for those who believed in God, there must be a fourth dimension. God would surely live there, thus He could watch everything that was happening in our 3-D world. Medieval art even accommodated this orthodoxy-paintings were flattened and two dimensional so the viewer could (sort of) see the world as God sees it.
Until the middle of the last century there was not much talk of a possible Fourth Dimension. But a sickly, brilliant mathematician-the second of six children born to a poor Lutheran pastor-Bernhard Riemann (1826-1866) blew the world apart when he proved mathematically that more than three dimensions were not only possible but also highly likely. In a brilliant lecture on June 10, 1854 this shy, mentally unstable young man toppled the Euclidean world order once and for all.
The Math of Hyperspace
Riemann had discovered what we now called "field theory," which connects forces in the universe with the geometry of space. The Pythagorean Theorem from the Greeks had shown that in a two-dimensional world where a and b are the short sides of a triangle and c is the hypotenuse, then a2 + b2 = c2. For a cube which had sides a, b, and c, the diagonal, d, inside the cube, crossing from one corner to another was given by a2 + b2 + c2 = d2. Well, it did not stop there, because from purely mathematical considerations Riemann could imagine an N-dimensional cube whose diagonal, z, was simply given by a formula with N terms on the left side, a2 + b2 + c2 + .... = z2. The math was easy, the implications were world-shaking.
As originally conceived, the "fourth dimension" was an additional spatial dimension, and not the fourth dimension now called "time." It was Einstein who stumbled upon Riemann's pioneering work and in 1905 put 3 plus 1 together and realized that material objects not only have length, width, and height, but they also endure in time. The fourth dimension was obviously time!
Newton's physics had imagined an absolute clock somewhere in the universe that kept the time for all bodies large and small, whether at rest or in motion. So strongly embedded were the old views that the average person on the street has not yet grasped the radical nature of Einstein's revolution. But now it is clear that space and time are part of an integrated whole-what we call the "space-time" continuum."
Time as well as space can be bent, shrunk or expanded-as can the other three dimensions of the world we live. But if few ordinary people grasp what Einstein had to tell us, Riemann's revolution has had an even greater, lasting effect on physics.
However, to talk about time as the fourth dimension is to jump over 50 years of fascinating history before 1905, when the obscure little man in the Swiss patent office changed the known world all over again.
Riemann's 1854 lecture was an instant success. The world was not flat and it was not necessarily even limited to three dimensions-there might be four-or even more! God was now crowded up into the higher levels of newly discovered "hyperspace." Riemann had been friends with Wilhelm Weber, who was experimenting with electric sparks, magnets and flowing currents-so Faraday and then Maxwell were ready to apply Riemann's work to what became the very successful model we now call "electromagnetic theory."
James Clerk Maxwell, for instance, showed that moving electric charges constitute what we call current flow and flowing currents produce magnetic fields. Light waves, radio waves, and x-rays all "obey" Maxwell's elegant equations: (Diag. 1)
The first equation says that electric lines of force begin and end on charges (such as electrons). The third equation tells us that there are (apparently) no magnetic monopoles-magnetic lines are closed loops. The second and fourth equations are vector equations actually representing three equations each, and they tell us how electric and magnetic fields are related to one another. Maxwell's four equations are actually eight. However if one adopts the mathematics of Riemann space, all eight equations can be written in the following form, called "tensor notation":
Fµv = ðµAv - ðvAµ
ðµFµv = jv
The second equation says it all! It is this ability of Riemann geometry to simplify physics that is so appealing to scientists who always prefer elegance, beauty, symmetry and simplicity when attempting to explain the physical world. Introducing more dimensions, even though they can not be seen or directly measured, improves our ability to understand how the world works.
Georg Bernhard Riemann took ordinary "flat" geometry and crumpled it up, making spherical space which was positively curved, or saddle-shaped space with negative curvature. All this could now be beautifully described in the new short hand of tensors. Whole systems of simultaneous differential equations involving many dimensions could be written down and manipulated with ease.
Riemann showed that spaces could be multiply connected, as shown below. A small bug living in the flat world of the top sheet of paper could hypothetically encounter a "Riemann slit" in the fabric of his known world and inadvertently cross over into a "parallel" universe.
A strange cast of characters seized upon Riemann's ideas soon after his famous lecture. American psychic Henry Slade achieved notoriety in 1877 when Leipzig physics professor Johann Zollner rushed to the former's defense of magic parlor tricks and ghosts by claiming that what was impossible in our ordinary three-dimensional world was readily possible if a fourth dimension were added. Unfortunately, the ensuing uproar led more to popular turn-of-the-century science fiction, and an impetus for ESP and psychic research which continues to this day-more than to legitimate applications in physics. The greatest applications of Riemann's new geometry to physics had to wait half a century for Einstein and his successors.
"Flatland"
In 1884 the Christian headmaster of the City of London School, Edwin Abbott, wrote a wonderful novel about creatures who lived in an imaginary world called "Flatland."2 It was now immediately easy for ordinary people like you and me to imagine what it would be like living in a two dimensional world-on a flat sheet of paper-with occasional intrusions of "beings" from a higher three-dimensional "hyperspace." Even more fantastic science fiction now unfolded into being overnight and by the turn of the century the common man's perception of his world would never be the same.
If four dimensions are not only possible, but now certain, why not 5 or 10 or 26 dimensions? Indeed, if we jump from Einstein to the present time, that is precisely what has happened in modern physics. All this has taken place because introducing (mathematically) additional dimensions to the physical world "unifies" the laws, forces and fields of physics, and leads (usually) to simpler and more "elegant" ways of looking at the universe in which we live.
Discussion of hyperspace rapidly became very complex after Einstein-we must save that for another article. But let us note several things: It is indeed quite likely that the physical, material world we live in has many more than four dimensions.
Ten is a reasonable number to make our physics simple. Discussion of hyperspace still leaves the issue of where God now lives, since he was long ago excluded from the "fourth" dimension. Unfortunately some modern Christian apologists have implied that God is merely a higher-dimensional being, a cosmic giant who pokes his fingers into our world from time to time, alarming us with visions or miracles which we cannot fully understand. Is God a super being from another dimension?
I don't mean to imply that miracles, visions and UFO intrusions from higher dimensions do not occur! They most certainly occur and I believe they are all real extra-dimensional happenings. The point is: God is not made of matter, He is Spirit and spirit is something fundamentally different from matter.
There is an all-important point to keep in mind in our discussions of modern physics and that is that "God is a Spirit and those who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth." (John 4:24) Spirit is not the same thing as matter!
We can talk endlessly about matter/energy, space and time in the created material world, but that still leaves a higher realm of God and his angels. Who are they and where do they live? What are the unseen worlds they inhabit? Beyond our amazing physical world is yet another realm where different laws apply and where time flows at a different pace.
To talk first of matter and now of spirit is also to go beyond the scope of this short introductory article. Suffice it to say, our knowledge and understanding of the physical world comes through the scientific method, which is based both on observations and on mathematical models that can be tested and verified by measurements and experiments.
The spiritual world is something we know about by personal revelation from our God.3 Most marvelous of all, God has created man to live simultaneously in the material and in the spiritual world. He wants us to be at home in two worlds-he wants us in His training program designed to prepare us for an amazing greater world which is to come.
The opening of doors for us to enter into other worlds was accomplished by the sacrificial work of Jesus Christ on the Cross-we live in a moral universe, and much more than physics is involved in the superhyperspace the Bible calls the "heavens."
"Since we have the same spirit of faith as he had who wrote, 'I believed, and so I spoke,' we too believe, and so we speak, knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence. For it is all for your sake, so that as grace extends to more and more people it may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God. So we do not lose heart. Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, because we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal."
The Greek philosopher Euclid (330-275 B.C.) put this down in a mathematical format we now call plane geometry-which ruled the world for the next 2000 years-almost like a religion! In grade school we all learned that the angles of a triangle must add up to 180 degrees, and that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. A line had one dimension, a square had two, and a cube, three. Beyond that it was, for centuries, thought impossible for more dimensions to exist. Aristotle and Ptolemy added their weight to Euclid by "proving" that any more than three dimensions was "impossible."1
But of course for those who believed in God, there must be a fourth dimension. God would surely live there, thus He could watch everything that was happening in our 3-D world. Medieval art even accommodated this orthodoxy-paintings were flattened and two dimensional so the viewer could (sort of) see the world as God sees it.
Until the middle of the last century there was not much talk of a possible Fourth Dimension. But a sickly, brilliant mathematician-the second of six children born to a poor Lutheran pastor-Bernhard Riemann (1826-1866) blew the world apart when he proved mathematically that more than three dimensions were not only possible but also highly likely. In a brilliant lecture on June 10, 1854 this shy, mentally unstable young man toppled the Euclidean world order once and for all.
The Math of Hyperspace
Riemann had discovered what we now called "field theory," which connects forces in the universe with the geometry of space. The Pythagorean Theorem from the Greeks had shown that in a two-dimensional world where a and b are the short sides of a triangle and c is the hypotenuse, then a2 + b2 = c2. For a cube which had sides a, b, and c, the diagonal, d, inside the cube, crossing from one corner to another was given by a2 + b2 + c2 = d2. Well, it did not stop there, because from purely mathematical considerations Riemann could imagine an N-dimensional cube whose diagonal, z, was simply given by a formula with N terms on the left side, a2 + b2 + c2 + .... = z2. The math was easy, the implications were world-shaking.
As originally conceived, the "fourth dimension" was an additional spatial dimension, and not the fourth dimension now called "time." It was Einstein who stumbled upon Riemann's pioneering work and in 1905 put 3 plus 1 together and realized that material objects not only have length, width, and height, but they also endure in time. The fourth dimension was obviously time!
Newton's physics had imagined an absolute clock somewhere in the universe that kept the time for all bodies large and small, whether at rest or in motion. So strongly embedded were the old views that the average person on the street has not yet grasped the radical nature of Einstein's revolution. But now it is clear that space and time are part of an integrated whole-what we call the "space-time" continuum."
Time as well as space can be bent, shrunk or expanded-as can the other three dimensions of the world we live. But if few ordinary people grasp what Einstein had to tell us, Riemann's revolution has had an even greater, lasting effect on physics.
However, to talk about time as the fourth dimension is to jump over 50 years of fascinating history before 1905, when the obscure little man in the Swiss patent office changed the known world all over again.
Riemann's 1854 lecture was an instant success. The world was not flat and it was not necessarily even limited to three dimensions-there might be four-or even more! God was now crowded up into the higher levels of newly discovered "hyperspace." Riemann had been friends with Wilhelm Weber, who was experimenting with electric sparks, magnets and flowing currents-so Faraday and then Maxwell were ready to apply Riemann's work to what became the very successful model we now call "electromagnetic theory."
James Clerk Maxwell, for instance, showed that moving electric charges constitute what we call current flow and flowing currents produce magnetic fields. Light waves, radio waves, and x-rays all "obey" Maxwell's elegant equations: (Diag. 1)
The first equation says that electric lines of force begin and end on charges (such as electrons). The third equation tells us that there are (apparently) no magnetic monopoles-magnetic lines are closed loops. The second and fourth equations are vector equations actually representing three equations each, and they tell us how electric and magnetic fields are related to one another. Maxwell's four equations are actually eight. However if one adopts the mathematics of Riemann space, all eight equations can be written in the following form, called "tensor notation":
Fµv = ðµAv - ðvAµ
ðµFµv = jv
The second equation says it all! It is this ability of Riemann geometry to simplify physics that is so appealing to scientists who always prefer elegance, beauty, symmetry and simplicity when attempting to explain the physical world. Introducing more dimensions, even though they can not be seen or directly measured, improves our ability to understand how the world works.
Georg Bernhard Riemann took ordinary "flat" geometry and crumpled it up, making spherical space which was positively curved, or saddle-shaped space with negative curvature. All this could now be beautifully described in the new short hand of tensors. Whole systems of simultaneous differential equations involving many dimensions could be written down and manipulated with ease.
Riemann showed that spaces could be multiply connected, as shown below. A small bug living in the flat world of the top sheet of paper could hypothetically encounter a "Riemann slit" in the fabric of his known world and inadvertently cross over into a "parallel" universe.
A strange cast of characters seized upon Riemann's ideas soon after his famous lecture. American psychic Henry Slade achieved notoriety in 1877 when Leipzig physics professor Johann Zollner rushed to the former's defense of magic parlor tricks and ghosts by claiming that what was impossible in our ordinary three-dimensional world was readily possible if a fourth dimension were added. Unfortunately, the ensuing uproar led more to popular turn-of-the-century science fiction, and an impetus for ESP and psychic research which continues to this day-more than to legitimate applications in physics. The greatest applications of Riemann's new geometry to physics had to wait half a century for Einstein and his successors.
"Flatland"
In 1884 the Christian headmaster of the City of London School, Edwin Abbott, wrote a wonderful novel about creatures who lived in an imaginary world called "Flatland."2 It was now immediately easy for ordinary people like you and me to imagine what it would be like living in a two dimensional world-on a flat sheet of paper-with occasional intrusions of "beings" from a higher three-dimensional "hyperspace." Even more fantastic science fiction now unfolded into being overnight and by the turn of the century the common man's perception of his world would never be the same.
If four dimensions are not only possible, but now certain, why not 5 or 10 or 26 dimensions? Indeed, if we jump from Einstein to the present time, that is precisely what has happened in modern physics. All this has taken place because introducing (mathematically) additional dimensions to the physical world "unifies" the laws, forces and fields of physics, and leads (usually) to simpler and more "elegant" ways of looking at the universe in which we live.
Discussion of hyperspace rapidly became very complex after Einstein-we must save that for another article. But let us note several things: It is indeed quite likely that the physical, material world we live in has many more than four dimensions.
Ten is a reasonable number to make our physics simple. Discussion of hyperspace still leaves the issue of where God now lives, since he was long ago excluded from the "fourth" dimension. Unfortunately some modern Christian apologists have implied that God is merely a higher-dimensional being, a cosmic giant who pokes his fingers into our world from time to time, alarming us with visions or miracles which we cannot fully understand. Is God a super being from another dimension?
I don't mean to imply that miracles, visions and UFO intrusions from higher dimensions do not occur! They most certainly occur and I believe they are all real extra-dimensional happenings. The point is: God is not made of matter, He is Spirit and spirit is something fundamentally different from matter.
There is an all-important point to keep in mind in our discussions of modern physics and that is that "God is a Spirit and those who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth." (John 4:24) Spirit is not the same thing as matter!
We can talk endlessly about matter/energy, space and time in the created material world, but that still leaves a higher realm of God and his angels. Who are they and where do they live? What are the unseen worlds they inhabit? Beyond our amazing physical world is yet another realm where different laws apply and where time flows at a different pace.
To talk first of matter and now of spirit is also to go beyond the scope of this short introductory article. Suffice it to say, our knowledge and understanding of the physical world comes through the scientific method, which is based both on observations and on mathematical models that can be tested and verified by measurements and experiments.
The spiritual world is something we know about by personal revelation from our God.3 Most marvelous of all, God has created man to live simultaneously in the material and in the spiritual world. He wants us to be at home in two worlds-he wants us in His training program designed to prepare us for an amazing greater world which is to come.
The opening of doors for us to enter into other worlds was accomplished by the sacrificial work of Jesus Christ on the Cross-we live in a moral universe, and much more than physics is involved in the superhyperspace the Bible calls the "heavens."
"Since we have the same spirit of faith as he had who wrote, 'I believed, and so I spoke,' we too believe, and so we speak, knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence. For it is all for your sake, so that as grace extends to more and more people it may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God. So we do not lose heart. Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, because we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal."
Blue edwards,
What are you saying. That one should beleive in god just in case?
A perfect example of the mind control that organized religion has on the population.
Geez....dont let independent thought get in the way.
Besides BLue, even if there is some kind of infallable, higher power, that doesnt mean you were right. Christianity s one of many religions and is perhaps the most facile of them all.
Again, why let independent thought get in they way. Ignorance is bliss.
What are you saying. That one should beleive in god just in case?
A perfect example of the mind control that organized religion has on the population.
Geez....dont let independent thought get in the way.
Besides BLue, even if there is some kind of infallable, higher power, that doesnt mean you were right. Christianity s one of many religions and is perhaps the most facile of them all.
Again, why let independent thought get in they way. Ignorance is bliss.
my point is not that "you should believe in God just in case". my point simply is that both of us cannot right. one of us is wrong.
if biblical christianity is true, there are severe consequences for people who do not believe. if the bible is a fairly tale, then i have believed a lie. one thing's for sure...we will both find out some day.
certainly, everyone is free to believe whatever they want about God and the bible. we all have free will - no one controls our mind or will. however, it is my take that with a question as big as "is there a God" or "is the bible really true", it makes sense to do your homework so whatever conclusion you come to, at least its an educated one.
and, ignorance is bliss only if you're not held accountable.
if biblical christianity is true, there are severe consequences for people who do not believe. if the bible is a fairly tale, then i have believed a lie. one thing's for sure...we will both find out some day.
certainly, everyone is free to believe whatever they want about God and the bible. we all have free will - no one controls our mind or will. however, it is my take that with a question as big as "is there a God" or "is the bible really true", it makes sense to do your homework so whatever conclusion you come to, at least its an educated one.
and, ignorance is bliss only if you're not held accountable.
Nice post Railbird.
The bit that I find awsome is that time stops if you travel at the speed of light.
How the heck did they figure that out??
Its been proved since the original calculation was made, with 2 atomic clocks, one was on a Jet plane, the other not.
When they were compared afterwards, They were out of sych by the correct amount, the one from the jet trip being slower.
I still believe in God btw.
The bit that I find awsome is that time stops if you travel at the speed of light.
How the heck did they figure that out??
Its been proved since the original calculation was made, with 2 atomic clocks, one was on a Jet plane, the other not.
When they were compared afterwards, They were out of sych by the correct amount, the one from the jet trip being slower.
I still believe in God btw.
Religion exsists for a few clear reasons.
1. In primitive times, to explain the inexplicable. A ball of fire passes across the sky warming us each day, it's a sun god.
2. It creates social order, a system of morals and values.
3. It's creates a mechanism for dealing with our inherent fear of death.
4. It's a business and a power for the person in charge of the religion.
1. In primitive times, to explain the inexplicable. A ball of fire passes across the sky warming us each day, it's a sun god.
2. It creates social order, a system of morals and values.
3. It's creates a mechanism for dealing with our inherent fear of death.
4. It's a business and a power for the person in charge of the religion.
biblical christianity did not create social order...it turned the world upside down. the first followers of Jesus were not people of power, they were fisherman who went to their deaths for what they believed. they died for proclaiming Christ and his resurrection.
i am not denying that the "religion" we see today is corrupt. people now and throughout the ages have done unspeakable things in the name of God. but, the first post in this thread does not ask about religion, it asks about the bible.
two different things.
and, one has to wonder...did we create God out of a need and/or desire to worship something bigger than us? or did God create us with this need/desire? how one answers this question will drive the way he thinks on just about every issue related to religion, God, the bible, etc.
i am not denying that the "religion" we see today is corrupt. people now and throughout the ages have done unspeakable things in the name of God. but, the first post in this thread does not ask about religion, it asks about the bible.
two different things.
and, one has to wonder...did we create God out of a need and/or desire to worship something bigger than us? or did God create us with this need/desire? how one answers this question will drive the way he thinks on just about every issue related to religion, God, the bible, etc.
Blue, but there is a loop whole with the catholic church. That is, no matter what one does in his life, he/she can ask for forgiveness on their deathbed by a priest. It is said, if they are truly sorry for their sins (who wouldn't be with the chance of spending eternity in hell) they will be forgiven.
Gringo, we believe as long as there is breath --- there is Hope.. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.. He invites everyone to sit at the Masters Table.. He also says that his Spirit will not always strive with man,, and who is to say that we will have a chance at death bed repentence.. Thank You Blue and Railbird, this is not an easy stand to take in an open forum but we who believe must always stand for Christ..
The People's Champ
The People's Champ
Blue Edwards,
I understand and repect your point.
I refered to religion in more generalized terms because IMO considering that Christianity makes up only a little more than 30% of the religious world (33% based on 98 World Almanac) it's a more a logical approach when discussing such issues. I realize that I didn't address the direct question of how much of the bible is factual.
My point was that IMO, it's easy to see the factors that motivated mankind to invent religions.
I understand and repect your point.
I refered to religion in more generalized terms because IMO considering that Christianity makes up only a little more than 30% of the religious world (33% based on 98 World Almanac) it's a more a logical approach when discussing such issues. I realize that I didn't address the direct question of how much of the bible is factual.
My point was that IMO, it's easy to see the factors that motivated mankind to invent religions.
