mistermack

I had this idea years ago, and I know I'm not the first. Most of the planet is ocean, and most of the ocean is desert. That's because the nutrients sink to the ocean floor, and the surface water is too pure for algae to grow. So all of the Sun's energy goes nowhere, it just warms the water. There have been trials of seeding the ocean with finely ground iron, or iron ore, not sure which, plus other similar trials, and it did result in a temporary algal bloom, but the effect is soon lost, as the stuff sinks out. My idea is a sunken flat plastic sheet, kept at such a depth that the waves and UV don't damage it, trapping the surface layer of water. To get nutrients, you send down a pipe to the ocean floor, with an agitator on the end. Cloudy silty water is pumped up to the trapped layer, and then nature takes it's course. Algae bloom, plankton eats the algae, and you add small fish to grow to a suitable size for the market. So with a little one-off cost, and a bit of maintenance, you have a steady crop of fish to sell, from what was previously a pretty sterile ocean desert. I think you could probably do it in a more simple form, without the plastic sheeting too, just pumping nutrients to the surface, and catching the resulting fish. There would have to be international agreements, that only those paying for the pumping, could catch fish in the area. In a small way, it would remove CO2 from the environment, and provide food from a previously barren source, so it's win win if it worked.

What we actually have is full of invention, so reasonable and realistic is a bit ambitious. Anyway, if there had been a real Jesus, Paul would have answered their everyday issues with " Jesus said this " or " Jesus did that ". That's what the priests used to throw at us from the pulpit every Sunday. You wouldn't go seven whole Sundays with Jesus getting hardly a mention. If you combine the lack of it in Paul, with the lack of any non-forged mention, in any Roman, Jewish, Christian, or Greek text of the existence on Earth of a living Jesus, till 50 years after his death, it's actually a very powerful argument from silence. It's why the silence in Paul is so telling. It's not just Paul. It's silence from everybody.

I'm sure they'd be thrilled to hear it.

The God of the gaps argument is fine for a discussion. It's correct but it's rubbish. True, where there's a gap, you can always insert God. And closing that gap doesn't disprove God, he's in every gap, and there will always be gaps. The reason that it's rubbish, is that it doesn't tell you anything. Fill a gap with God, and you are no wiser. Everyone has an opinion what it means, but that's all it is. So, there will always be gaps, and there will always be Gods stuffed into them. That's not going to change. And stuffing God into a gap doesn't get you one millimetre closer to verifying his existence. It does nothing either way. You can't say it's not science though, if you can't test a scientific hypothesis. Einstein predicted gravitational waves. It wasn't possible to verify it for a hundred years. That doesn't mean it wasn't science.

Is there such a "kind of guy" ? And if there is, is the similarity genetic? I find that idea highly unlikely.

Of course that's right. But in fact, for most higher animals, the most important part of their environment is their own kind. It's certainly true for us, and for our closest relatives. And the latest evidence is that our ancestors began to separate from those of Chimpanzees and Gorillas in a similar forested environment.

The question of whether there had been a real Jesus was being argued over at the time of the writing of the gospels. It's not a new-fangled idea. This video about the nature of the trinity is well worth listening to from the start, but I've linked to an interesting point at 6:51 .

I was replying to your posts. I don't buy that. Paul's career was one of conversion. The people he wrote to were only recently converted. Jesus had only been dead (allegedly) 25 years. Paul converted about 8 years later. So even PAUL wasn't a seasoned believer, he'd been a believer for only 17 years, and he'd had a miraculous meeting with Jesus. The people you are talking about had obviously been converted more recently still, and just through word of mouth. Bart Ehrman compares them to his mother, who is probably in her seventies or eighties, and been a believer from childhood. That's seasoned. They were definitely not. And neither were the stories they were hearing. It was all brand new back then. Not 2,000 years old. It's all so suspicious, if you shine the slightest critical light on it. Paul goes to Jerusalem. He meets two people, claiming to be the brother and sidekick of Jesus, a living god. And uses NOTHING that they said, but relies on his own visions. He also doesn't record any attempt to meet the parents of the Messiah. Or other siblings. Or get hold of any personal history whatsoever, from eye witnesses. In his place, I would have been RATHER interested in meeting the people who met him, after he rose from the dead. You know what, I would have found that fascinating, and would want a little chat with some of them. That's the sort of thing real people do, in those situations. But if you cast a non-critical eye over the stuff, and just believe what's written, you're pretty easy to mislead. And a lot of misleading has been done. Seven letters from Paul that probably were forged. Forged entries in Josephus's texts, inserting "James the brother of Jesus". Gospels expunged from history because they were too obviously invented. What you are seeing now is what they wanted you to see, not a snapshot of history. I was of the opinion that there probably WAS a real Jesus human at the core of it, till I took a closer look. But everything I'm seeing points the other way. Paul writing "James the brother of Jesus" is the best, but it's weak. I only offered the "house of David" thing as an example of other possibilities, but I personally think that it was simply inserted in later versions, just like it was in Josephus. And the EARLIEST version we have really is a later version, from the third century.

Not quite. Wikipedia says : "The Soviet Union lost around 27 million people during the war,[329] including 8.7 million military and 19 million civilian deaths.[330] A quarter of the people in the Soviet Union were wounded or killed.[331] " We had it pretty cushy in the West.

If you can, I think it's probably coincidence. The reason you see orange, is because the light receptors in your eyes give a certain signal. It probably happens that a mix of red and yellow light cause the same signal to be sent as when orange light of just one wavelength hit's the retina. I suppose you might be able to get mathematical with the dimensions of the cones. Or maybe it's possible that the mixing is done in the brain, when red and yellow signals come in. It would take some research to find out how it happens.

The Jews were unfortunately the minor victims of the Nazis. There was also the little matter of twenty million Russians, among others. Funny that Russia gets a totally different reaction, when it took over the Crimea. Even though they were merely transferring title back to where it belonged, and not moving in six million aliens, as has happened to Palestine. Double standards, double standards. Is anti-russiatism a word ?

If you have a bladed paddle, you have to get it at the right angle to get the expected pull, whereas the curragh oar can be used at any angle, and you get the same amount of drag. When you watch the varsity boat race, they have trouble in rough water on the back stroke with the blades catching the waves. That's just on the River Thames, so it might be worse at sea with much bigger waves. That's my theory anyway. I always thought those oars looked odd, but maybe they just work better that way. Edit : Maybe those paddles last longer too. They are less fragile than a blade, so would probably survive hitting rocks, and being tossed around on shore. They would have a rough life around the Atlantic shores being used for fishing.

Wikipedia says, in the Page on Paul the Apostle : "Paul described Jesus as having been promised by God beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures; being the true messiah and the Son of God; having biological lineage from David ("according to the flesh");[Rom. 1:3]" Same argument has been put already in this thread. I provided the link myself of Bart Ehrman giving that argument. All I can say is it's a ridiculous contrived claim, and doesn't correspond to reality, as I argued earlier. I don't accept that he had no reason to mention the life of Jesus. Jesus is the very centre of the religion. Him dying and being born again is the very essence of the difference between the Jesus cult and the rest of the Jewish religion. Paul says he met James and Peter roughly in the year 38 or thereabouts. They would still have had every detail of the last years of his life fresh in their minds, including his supposed death and resurrection. And Paul would obviously have been hungry for every last scrap of information. So Paul should have had first hand, eye witness accounts available to repeat to his followers. And yet he can write seven long letters and mention none of it. Except what he received in his "visions" of Jesus. You say I'm ignoring your argument. I'm just saying it's a ludicrous claim. It just wouldn't happen in real life. There's no way to prove it either way. But as I pointed out earlier in the thread, Paul's own words, about the nature of rising from the dead, contradict the gospel version, of the empty tomb and the missing body. Paul stresses that resurrection is of a spiritual body, not physical. How can he say all that, if he's had the full story of the body being missing, the tomb being open, and people seeing the resurrected Jesus in the flesh? All of this dramatic stuff is supposed to have happened as recently to him as the gulf war is to us. And yet you're claiming that Paul could write seven long letters, and not touch on any of it. Nothing's impossible, I'm just giving my opinion that it's vanishingly improbable, and the real reason he doesn't mention it, is because it never happened.

The Sun gives out light in all the visible wavelengths. Our eyes see the combination of all that as very nearly white. When that light combination falls on a red object, most of the light is absorbed, and what bounces back is the red wavelengths, so that's what we see. Same goes for green, brown, blue etc. You are seeing what didn't get absorbed, but was reflected. Light that gets absorbed, and re-emitted is called fluorescence. It's not what you see from everyday objects, that's usually reflected light.

I mentioned the "house of David" thing only in regard to the Messiah prophecies. What you can get from it, is that fitting in with the prophesies was considered important enough to be stressed many times in the gospels. The prophesies are originally from the old testament, so they have more than one source of evidence. Paul's conversion is supposed to have happened around the year 33/35 mark. And he's supposed to have gone to Jerusalem and stayed with Peter three years after that. That puts it about 38. He's writing epistles from about 53 so it's 15 years plus, after he met Peter. That is recent, in Biblical terms. Recent enough for an educated man to still have it fresh in his mind, and to still have the writings he made about what he learned in Jerusalem. If you read his epistles, he relies ENTIRELY on what god supposedly revealed to him in visions. He completely excludes anything and everything he heard in Jerusalem. This is from his page in Wikpedia : "Paul asserted that he received the Gospel not from man, but directly by "the revelation of Jesus Christ".[Gal 1:11–16] He claimed almost total independence from the Jerusalem community[4]:316–20 (possibly in the Cenacle), " If he did meet with Peter and James, it seems like he wasn't much impressed with what he heard, and avoided using it almost completely. Maybe because he didn't like the way new stories were being told, over the top of old ones. I find it highly suspicious that no written record of Jesus's supposed life emerges till the gospel of Mark, around the year 68. You can bet your life that loads of it was written, but it's been removed from the record. Paul talks about "the gospel" in his epistles, so it was out there. The chances are, it was such a hotch potch that they got together and ditched all of the interim stuff, and tried to give out an official version in Mark. If you had access to the earlier stuff, it would probably be possible to say more definitively whether there really was a real Jesus. It tells a lot that the Vatican got hold of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and sat on them for over four decades, with the result that nobody will ever know if there was stuff in them to either confirm or refute the stories. It shows that there is a real fear of the truth coming out.

You can try to muddy the water all you like. I've made it clear what I object to, and why. And it's the compulsory belief in some great woo woo man in the sky, without any evidence. Dig up some real evidence, and I'll happily change my mind. Who am I to tell people what to do? Nobody. I'm allowed to write my opinions in an online forum though. I'm just arguing for freedom of thought. If you're in favour of enforced thought through indoctrination, that's sad, but you have the right to say so, just like me.

I think they would soon object, if you suggested that they keep those bits, and stop indoctrinating the kids with the god bit. You seem to be arguing for the sake of it. Who seriously equates teaching of religion with teaching of morals? It's comparing mountains to sand castles.

I can't believe that you can't see any difference. It's a very contrived stance. Would Christians or Muslims equate their religions with morality, ethics, and etiquette? Of course not. They profess it as a profound belief about the nature of existence, and "who" they owe their existence to. I'm not opposed to religion, if people choose to believe freely. I think I've made it clear that it's the compulsion, through indoctrination, that I'm arguing against.

I don't think so. If I criticise the teaching of religion, it doesn't follow that I'm saying all teaching is bad. I don't see how you could make that jump. I'm singling out religion, because it's wrong to teach a flimsy belief as a fact, just because that's what your parents did to you. There's nothing wrong with teaching kids known facts about religion. I just think it's wrong to force unreasoning faith down their throats.

So Russia is fine to keep the Crimea then? And it's enclaves in Georgia and Ukraine? That's going to be popular in the US. Up jump the old double standards again. Why should they stop there? Cut Ukraine in half. There's a lot of Russians living there. There's a big difference between historical migrations and this one, and that is that now, we're supposed to know better. The days of empire, and treating foreign nations like shit were supposed to be over. I can just imagine what the US would do, if six million muslims tried to set up a home for muslims in Colorado. Different standards would be very quickly rolled out.

So you presumably think the Nazis should keep their spoils of war? Nice. Strangely enough, the Jews would disagree with you on that one.

I'm against indoctrination. I'm in favour of people deciding for themselves. That's the maximum freedom available, so yes, you could say I'm in favour of forcing people to make their own choice. That's nit picking though. It's the absolute minimum of compulsion. There is nothing lower available.

It's like a virus. Some get it worse than others. I know several people who don't really believe, and just "go with the flow" but they still indoctrinate their kids. Or agree to them being indoctrinated. And of course, going with the flow usually coincides with a mild level of indoctrination. The stronger the indoctrination, the stronger the beliefs. On average. That's why the Muzzies get their kids reciting the Koran over and over and learning it by heart. It works, and sticks for life.

I took your word legitimate to mean morally legitimate. You didn't say legal. As far as legality goes, it's money that talks. Morals have nothing to do with it.

The proof is out there in their billions. Kids of muslims grow up muslim. Kids of Christians grow up Christian. What better proof is there than that?