Eise

Yes and no

(Historical) Sources? When did Solomon live? When Jesus? What happened in the time between? Yes. And from a poor, rural country, that was oppressed by the Romans. He did not work and live in the high society of Jerusalem. Illiteracy was wide spread, even in Rome itself. The worse in their conquested countries. You compare modern times with antiquity? If I want to read fantasy, I prefer Tolkien. If I want to read about history, I read historians. But if you prefer to keep your head in the sand, be my guest. Why should I fear? In the end, it did not occur the time for what is predicted (should have been somewhere between 33 - 100 CE). And your thread is closed... It is funny: you are on a science forum here, but when it comes to the bible you refuse to look at what historical science has to say about the bible. Instead you argue with arguments from within the bible, stating that it is consistent and true. Which of the 2 birth stories is true? Matthew or Luke? Luke was shown wrong about the census. You did not react on that at all. Obviously you see the problem.

And virtual all New Testament scholars are convinced that: - Peter could not write, so surely not Greek - the gospel of Luke was not written by Luke 'the physician' - the gospel of John and Revelation were not written by the apostle John (but very probable were written by the same person) You see, the bible itself has a history, and a lot that historians agree on, does not agree with your naive believe in the bible as factual truth. E.g. Was Jesus just born in Bethlehem because Joseph and Maria lived there (Matthew); or was he born there because they had to travel to Bethlehem because of the Roman census (Luke). All historians agree that such a census never took place. And Luke makes even false propositions about the time that that supposed census should have taken place (Herod the great and Quirinius did not reign at the same time, as Luke suggests).

Sigh... I pick one too: So God's kingdom would happen in at most one generation. So what is true? Don't we know when the Kingdom of God will come, or do we not know it precisely? Jesus estimated it would happen in at most one generation. But it still did not happen... How many generations have passed since? About 60? (Taking a generation to be about 30 years). No, John the baptist, Jesus and Paul all expected the apocalypse in a lifetime. They differed however on the question how to prepare for it: Jesus proclaimed to keep to the Jewish law; for Paul the only thing really needed was to accept Jesus as saviour. What you do is preaching, not arguing.

Doesn't suffice as an answer. I suggest you have a look e.g. at this Christian site: www.jesuswordsonly.com, especially this page. In short: Jesus said you have to live according to the Jewish law, i.e. prepare by being morally good, doing good works and loving God and each other. Paul, on the other hand, said that people should accept Jesus as saviour, that's all. For gentiles (non-Jews) it is not necessary to keep to the Jewish laws. He saw Jesus resurrection as the first sign, that the apocalypse actually had begun. So the Catholic Church (and I assume most protestant churches too. Or are the protestant boys circumcised? Or don't protestants eat pork?) are not Christians, but Paulians. It is not the religion that Jesus taught, but Paul. Paul's religion is a religion about Jesus, not the religion of Jesus. I don't. Jesus said it would happen during his lifetime, or at least shortly after (as did John the Baptist). Also Paul assumed it would happen pretty soon, and he hat to quieten some churches where people were worried that some of their companions had died before God's Kingdom was established. Obviously God's Kingdom did not come in nearly 2000 years, so we can safely put this prediction aside. The only thing I do is trying to get at peace with life as it is, including its suffering and eventually my personal death. But I do not do this because I want to be rewarded in some fantasised afterlife. (And of course you know that Jesus meant the coming of God's Kingdom was on earth, not some afterlife).

Hey! Coffeesippin should answer this! In the end, he knows the bible is the truth, so he should know this.

As DrP noticed, you did not answer my question: so here is it again. How should one prepare for the coming of God's kingdom: - according to Jesus - according Paul If you evade to answer the question again, we all know that your believe in the bible is a lie.

The apocalypse. And I want the answer from coffeesippin. He claims the bible is consistent, the true word of God. I'll wait for his answer.

-1 for evading and irrationality. Tell us what you found: how do you prepare for the youngest day? The way that Jesus said, or the way Paul said? Who of the two is right, and why? Or don't you prepare at all, even that Jesus and Paul both mention the youngest day several times?

I can imagine why. c is the velocity of light, light is an electromagnetic phenomenon, so everything should be electromagnetic. The correct way to see it however, is that c is the maximum velocity that is possible in the universe. It is so to speak the 'speed limit of causality'. And only particles (or waves, or... anything) that have no restmass travel at this speed. So c is more universal than just the velocity of light.

Well, that is easy. This posting is written by Paul too. This is proof! Really? (See bold passage) (Bold and Italics by me). Of which day? About 50 CE? Or 250 CE? See passages in italic above. The books of the bible are written by people, the bible was composed by people, it was falsified by people, people made errors copying, and therefore is full with errors, biases, falsifications, inconsistencies etc etc. E.g can you tell me. - What should we do in the face of the youngest day according to Jesus? - What should we do in the face of the youngest day according to Paul? Who is right, and why?

It seems 80% of the scholars agree that Timothy (yes, both) is not written by Paul. So where does your certainty come from?

(Bold by me). I'll give it a try... I will repeat arguments already given, but maybe it helps to see the different causes of redshift all together in comparison. Strange already said that in the case of light there are more possible causes of redshift. So I have no idea why there should be only one cause for redshift. (There is of course just one cause for cosmological redshift.) Doppler effect when source and observer are moving away from each other light 'climbing' out of a gravity field expanding space The first one should be the simplest to understand: when moving away from the source, the succession of e.g. wave peaks slows down for the observer. This means that for the observer he measures less peaks per second, so the frequency is lower than the frequency at the source. Logically then also the wavelength becomes longer. Compare when you sit in a train and you pass a railway crossing with sound signals. First, when nearing the crossing, you hear a higher pitch, and when you have passed the crossing, the pitch lowers. There is of course an important difference between the Doppler effect for sound and for light: for sound there is a medium, for light there isn't. So the formulas differ. A typical case for the second cause of redshift is a (heavy) star. Say we look at the spectral lines of hydrogen that glows at the surface of the star. When we, from a far distance, measure the frequencies of these spectral lines, they are redshifted. A simple explanation would be: the light loses energy when climbing out of the gravity field of the star. But be careful! When we look at the light of a distant source, passing a strong gravity field, the following will happen: 'falling' into the gravitational field, the light will be blueshifted, because it gains energy. However, when climbing out of the gravitational field, it loses exactly the same amount of energy again, so gets redshifted exactly the same amount as it was blueshifted before. So as an endresult, we will see the frequency of the light of the remote source exactly the same as if the gravitational field was not there at all. Only when the observer is in the gravitational field it will see a difference in frequency: but it will be blueshifted. From this it already follows that gravitational fields that light passes on its way, make no difference in frequency. (It can change the path of the light, that is gravitational lensing.) The third case is due solely to the expansion of space itself. As space is stretching, the light 'stretches' with it, and the wavelength of the light becomes longer, and so its frequency lower. I think you really should read the article Strange linked too.

This was jfoldbar's question. So I would expect only people who believe in a soul to react... Which might not too many on these fora. Of course I can throw in a bon mot (that does not actually fit to jfoldbar's descriptions): "of course the soul exists: and it is made up of many tiny robots" But that was an Italian journalist's description of Dennett's philosophy of consciousness... Ah, found it:

I suggest this youtube video for a much better analogy. Still an analogy, but you get a better feeling for the fact that gravity is the curving of spacetime, not space. The rubbersheet analogy depicts only curving of space, and so is inherently faulty.

Without the context what you are talking about, such an equation says nothing. The correct context is that an object is moving. Written as 'DISTANCE=VELOCITY x TIME' it says how far (DISTANCE) an objects has traveled, depending on its VELOCITY and the TIME we are considering. If the VELOCITY is 0, then it will travel no distance at all. Written as you do (TIME=DISTANCE/VELOCITY) the equation says how long an object with a certain VELOCITY has traveled, given the DISTANCE it traveled. But when the VELOCITY is 0, it will have traveled 0, so you get 0/0, which is undefined. Any answer will do: take 10 seconds: according to your first equation, we get: DISTANCE = 0 m/s x 10 s = 0. So 10 m/s does it. But 100 does it too. Any value for TIME will do. Which makes perfectly sense. When an object is not moving, it will travel no distance at all, it does not matter how long you wait. That's all.

It is the maximum I can hope for when I write a posting between two different database maintenance tasks...

Then tell me where it contradicts the dictionary: (notice the 'or'). If you have a naturalistic worldview, couldn't be this ultimate reality just what I said? Well, at least Einstein would agree with me... Is that word salad too?

I am afraid it is a battle of words again. Do you see (see3) the differences between these three meanings of 'religious': Religious1: Believing in (some) God (personal God: theist; creator God how retracted himself after the creation (big bang?): deist; divinity of everything that exits: pantheist) Religious2: Following a religious institution, its dogmas, its rituals etc Religious3: Coping with your existence as individual in a far greater world In this sense even a 'religious atheist' is not a contradiction. Everybody has his/her way to live their lives. One can try to get completely at peace with the world as it is: its joys and drawbacks, its gains and losses, with birth and death, with our smallness in a giant universe. But of course many people choose for religiosity1 or 2. Or one does not even think about it, blind out all these problems and just live avoiding pain and strive for happiness without bothering about the big questions. In that case you are a non-religious atheist. So what do you think? Where do you stand? And how would you call yourself?

I feel the real Scotsman fallacy coming... Who defines who is Christian? You? Or do Christians define themselves as Christian? Sorry, But I hate these kind of sweeping statements where you state what others should believe according the labels you use. Fascinating. The article is amongst others about Christians who accept evolution. Another one. If you had written 'most' I would have given you the benefit of the doubt, but you wrote 'all'. I know several people who also take Jesus' miracles symbolically. Yes, probably. Surely evolution made us prone to religious ideas. But religious ideas of individuals are mainly socially learned. So they may arise in the brain, but not necessarily caused by it.

Yes. Nailed on the head. Did you read the Wikipedia link StringJunky provided? Oh, well you did: A 'religious nonbeliever' is a pretty good description of what I mean. Really? Explain.

My answer to this: if the awe you feel for the universe contributes to a deeply felt, meaningful life to you, brings you to being at peace with life and death, including your ethics, then it is religious. Otherwise it is just another joyful experience. From what I've read from Einstein, he was religious in the first sense. So definitively not a word thing. In 'God does not play dice' Einstein was just using 'God' as metaphor for nature. He could have said 'Every event has a perfectly defined cause'. Which is not as poetic.

If one just uses it as a metaphor, no. If one is serious, i.e.when he really think that nature and God are literally the same, then yes. If Einstein was very serious in his believe in the God of Spinoza, then this is not correct. The God of Spinoza has infinite attributes, but we only know two: the physical world and the mind. These are two different ways of looking at a 'part of God', e.g. a human. So 'the Universe', being all that is physical, is only one attribute of God, there are many more.

coffeesippin, you should really distinguish between citations where 'God' is just a metaphor for nature, and where people really express their religious position. Einstein: "the word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses." "I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly"

I followed the discussion a little, but did not participate because of 2 reasons: - one very practical: I am not very versed in the philosophy of language, and going into 'deep thought mode' when my daily business already needs that capacity also, it becomes a little bit too much. I simple do not have the time - the discussion about these topics have shown (inductive reasoning?) that they become emotional very soon. Which maybe funny for people who both, in different ways, believe to be rational. I have not very much hope to alleviate the tension a bit, but at least I can give it a try. Reg clearly stated a few times that he does not question the results of science. What is discussed here, as far as I can see, is the self-understanding of science, not science itself. And that is a philosophical discussion, not a scientific one. But of course, one has to know what the daily praxis of science is. If one wants to reflect on 'how science works', or the even more philosophical question 'why science works' one needs to know when scientists accept new theories, why other theories are rejected, why and how scientists err, etc etc. Until now, I did not see that Reg is principally wrong in his philosophical musings. What I see is a lot of misunderstandings. I am still not quite clear what Zosimus' position is: when he says that 'science is wrong' and scientific theories do not play an important role in the development of technology, I think he is clearly wrong. Just to conclude from that it happens that (technical useful) discoveries are made without any theory does not question the relationship between praxis and theory completely (e.g superconductivity was completely unexpected, and the theory came much later). I just want to add that the problems of the relationship between language and reality are notoriously difficult, and a simple 'we know that science works' is not very clarifying in trying to understand how it is possible that science works.