Phi for All

I agree. In the US, we're being actively conditioned (imo) to see the gov as this big immovable entity that wants to do horrible things to us if we step out of line. It makes us not question things. We accept that national healthcare is too expensive, for instance, despite the fact that we could buy any of the already successful systems for less than what we pay now. The psychology that goes into politics these days, backed up by constant media massaging, has left us with a disconnected view of our government. We've forgotten that we're People, so we're just people.

My father would never "give" anyone something that could obviously harm them. He charged me a penny for a pocketknife once, just so he could claim he didn't "give" it to me. I think there's only one piece of advice you can give an unskilled person who wants to learn to do something dangerous: Find an expert and watch how they do it until the expert thinks you can do it alone. There are many people whose tombstones should read, "How dangerous can this really be?"

I think Jesus was chosen as messiah from at least three possibilities, well after his death. The Jeselsohn Stone seems to point to Simon of Peraea as the foretold messiah. Athronges was also a simple man who rebelled against the prevailing authority, but he had brothers so fulfilling the "virgin birth" prophecy was more difficult with him. Mostly because of the lack of writings about him outside of Christianity, I think Jesus of Nazareth was chosen partly because of his obscurity. If there had been a lot of secular works talking about how amazing this man is, it would have been much more difficult for the bishops at the Council of Nicea to create the religion they wanted. As it was, his obscurity worked in their favor.

! Moderator Note Please stop advertising your book. It's against the rules you agreed to when you joined.

I think when you start asking this question in a democracy, you've made the mistake of assuming they're separate entities. Government should be an extension of the will of the people who put it in place.

Changes the assumption I made that this woman is a human and could interact as such with me.

It changes a fundamental assumption, so I don't see how it couldn't change how I feel.

I'm unable to see the graphic in Chrome.

I was unaware you were able to give life to a planet. I underestimated your omnipotence, possibly. Personally, I think it's disrespectful to the planet and our environment to embellish it with imaginative qualities that actually take away from it's true, reality-based awesomeness. You want it to be a single living entity but it's so much more as the collective habitat for every species known to inhabit this universe. You diminish it with your anthropomorphisms, imo. I don't know you, so I don't feel qualified to comment on things like your ego or what you respect. Fire isn't a thing, it's an event, like a tornado. It's a process that starts with heat and eventually reaches a point where volatile gases from the fuel combust with oxygen from the air, at which point the process is visible as flame. So much more awesome than a thing. I'm not trying to prove you wrong. I'm discussing this subject with you and disagreeing with some of your premises, while trying to correct some of your misconceptions about science. I don't see how there can be a universal wisdom, a wisest action, since what is considered wise is subjective and contextual. Who gets to decide what's wise? I'm not comfortable with it being you, as you've demonstrated some decidedly un-wise judgement thus far in the discussion.

I really don't think you'll get anywhere using the word "clever". It implies coordinated thought and intelligence and trying to show this exists as a trait of "the universe" has never been successfully supported. Everything you've shown as "clever" has mechanisms in reality that are well understood and don't need intelligence behind them. The processes work well because they are the most successful, not because there is someone guiding them. You're thinking too subjectively, like it would be clever of nature to rain on you because you got dirty working in the garden. It's most likely a pleasant coincidence, not a clever universe doing you a clever favor.

Changing your definitions so your arguments look better is dangerous reasoning. How exactly would we control wisdom, even now that you've redefined it? A flame isn't potentially infinite; flame is just the visible portion of a process, a very rigid process that requires very specific materials and conditions. It is without life. Similarly, your attempt to give "life" to inanimate objects like planets is unsupported and fanciful. I think your feet have left the ground and your ideas are becoming less grounded in reality. "Omnipotence is the answer to everything, if it exists, it is the answer; well, it's the closest to an answer we will ever get." Really? I think omnipotence is the most inane concept ever invented. It's pointless to talk about a being that can change the very laws of reality it lives by, or supposedly created. You're into sky fairy territory here, with a magic wand to wave to make any of your explanations work for you. I don't see how anyone can reason this way. OK, you're starting to throw out your signature blanket accusations and generalizations again. I find them very offensive, trying to elevate your own position by unfounded and misleading vividness. You're not supposed to build your own martyry.

The article I cited claims that Neanderthals MUST be less than 4000 years old because they're typically found in caves rather than in the sediment left over from the Great Flood. A blatant Begging the Question fallacy, automatically assuming that the Great Flood actually happened. Further, they attempt to refute the studies done based on assuming that any discrepancies in the way the segments were judged went to the scientific majority, which they claim "... the DNA segment could have gone either way—essentially meaning that it is all human DNA anyway". This is an extremely sloppy and ill-founded conclusion, but is consistent with creationist efforts to ignore the mountains of evidence for evolution. They simply claim it's wrong, using this type of rigor-free approach.

Created wise as in born wise? Evidence suggests this isn't the case. Wisdom is not a trait children are known for. Consider the common phrase, "Wise beyond his years", in reference to a younger person showing the wisdom of a much older person. It would seem that age is a basic factor of wisdom. Created wise as in poofed into existence by the unlimited abilities of a deity? If you use omnipotence, you can claim anything is true. I don't think it's wise to use omnipotence as an explanation for anything. Wisdom, at least in the sense you're using it here, needs to be separate from intelligence if you want to distinguish it as a special trait. And I would also suggest that wisdom is a situational and subjective assessment. If you make one wise decision, does that mean you're a wise person? I would suggest that having stolen things doesn't necessarily make you a thief except in the strictest sense, and similarly it's not right to call a person wise when it's their actions that can individually be wise or not.

I'm not a fan of putting humans outside of nature. Why is it when we use our intelligence, something that was naturally selected just like wings or claws or fins, some people consider this "artificial"?

Chemical reactions are truly fascinating and can be mind-boggling, but there's no reason to suspect anything supernatural at work here. Part of my basic definition of wisdom is "a heightened perspective on experienced reality". How can wisdom be available before anything has been experienced? Wisdom needs time to grow, doesn't it? At least for us it does, and that's really the only experience I can draw from.

Here are two articles from the Institute for Creation Research: DNA Proof That Neanderthals Are Just Humans (and descendants of the 8 people left after the Great Flood). Speedy Glaciers Trample Multiple Ice-Age Theories. Let's absolutely consider these ideas, supposedly backed up by PhDs and solid science, something creationists simultaneously claim to both hate and love. It's very easy for creationists to argue that their claims are "rejected out of hand", making it seem like scientists won't even listen to them. But so many of their claims start with flawed concepts, like evolution = abiogenesis. When an argument starts out wrong, why should anyone listen to the rest of it? Fix the flaws before going further. Another bit of hypocrisy is that creationists often claim science is too rigid in their grip on evolution, when in fact science can simply point to the preponderance of evidence that supports evolution. Creationists don't have that, and so ironically form the rigid opinion that evolution is wrong, and do so without any evidence at all.

The third option is pretty loosey-goosey to me. "Pretty much", "at one time" and "10,000 years or so" are vague and give a great deal of leeway, whereas the first two options are much more rigid. If I believed in a god but didn't want to be pinned down by my answer, I'd opt for #3. I'm not saying there isn't a large faction that prefers their god story to science, just that I don't think there are THAT many people in the US who are what I would call creationists.

Not sure how this relates to the OP, but I would say the English sheep are NOT being bred to be good mothers, but perhaps their breeders are looking for other traits, like superior wool and meat that make the extra work at birth worth the trouble. Which do you think is more clever, the English way or the NZ way? Remember that you're placing an emotional attachment to the NZ methodology because it seems more "natural", but if the English way makes more beautiful wool and mutton that melts in your mouth, isn't that more clever?

This may be true but I think you encounter a polarizing effect; some may rethink their position while the rest become even further convinced of the belief. When I think of creationism, I think very specifically about the young-Earth types who believe the Bible is without flaw, but can't seem to adequately explain the most obvious discrepancies. I also think about creationists like Tom Willis who misquoted archaeologist Donald Johansen out of context about Lucy's knee (that particular bit of deviousness is still being repeated almost 70 years later by many creationists who ironically and hypocritically use it to claim scientists are liars). The attempts to discredit evolution and geology and most other sciences also pale beside the claim of Bible inerrancy. Reality says the Bible claims that Ahaziah was 42 years old when he became king, and it also claims he was 22 years old when he became king. This alone shows that numbers aren't to be trusted in a society that kept poor and inconsistent records, yet YEC believers use those numbers to determine the date their god made the universe, and then proceed to ignore the rest of reality that tells us all the Earth is much, much older. This isn't a belief system, it's a willful deception that's being perpetrated every day.

At the least, it doesn't imply that there is automatically something behind the curtain pulling strings. Agreed. Just be careful about assigning meaningfulness to these systems. They work out well but isn't that mostly because we work WITH them, adapt to them? When we find something poorly designed, like a horizontal spinal column on a primate that walks exclusively vertically, we don't think it's so elegant. But the value of those rocks is subjective. You love the smoothness, but a fish looking to rub off some old scales on it would prefer rougher edges. If I want a doorstop, the last thing I need is a rounded rock that will roll away from the door. IOW, all rocks are elegantly useful for something. I think you're cherry-picking that which seems engineered well and ignoring those parts that aren't. Just because we can, with our high-intelligence, appreciate when something fits a need perfectly, it doesn't mean it was designed that way and it doesn't mean there was a designer.

Technically, they would have cleared the land before building the longhouse. It might also be difficult to build on top of fake grass. I would at least cut out the section on which my longhouse was built. Also, fake grass looks a lot like a lawn, which they wouldn't have had back then. Cloth or paint representing indigenous grassland from the US east coast might be better to work with.

Beauty is, again, a very subjective quality, and may be unique to humans. Aside from the selective traits of appearance used for mating, what other animal cares if something is beautiful or not? I think it's the height of human folly to claim it's clever of the ocean to wear away rocks so they can be beautiful. Imagining some clever designer putting all these clever things on Earth just for us humans to revel in Its cleverness actually disgusts me, and demeans the immense awesomeness that the natural world actually offers to anyone who can see it for what it is. Clever is the wrong word. This universe is elegantly sophisticated, far from perfect, and completely awe-inspiring. No designer necessary.

This really reminds me of Douglas Adams' puddle and how it thinks the world fits it so well. It's not cleverness that causes rain to fill an indentation in the ground. The problem with "cleverness" is that it can be assigned to dumb processes that seem extraordinary. It seems "clever" that certain birds will put their eggs in other birds nests and thus avoid the expensive child-rearing process, but that's most likely because we have no equivalent process as humans. We consider it "clever" but it's just a practice selected for as successful. "Clever" may not be the right word here. It begs the question that something clever is orchestrating all the things we think of as "clever". Processes can be extremely well-adapted without being engineered.

The folks who listen to creationism get drawn in by appealing misinformation, and they end up equating this untenable stance with their whole belief system. That's when it becomes an argument from emotion, and too often a stance like that become more rigid the more facts and evidence you produce. We argue against a very specific set of misinformation and suddenly they think we're telling them their belief in God is stupid.

There's your problem, you're seeing things that aren't there. My claim, at least, was that ridicule works best against arguments that are arrived at intellectually rather than emotionally. I don't claim it's the best tool to use, I don't claim it works against all such arguments and I have no idea what an intellectual is, since all people are capable of both emotional and intellectual reasoning. Creationism isn't like a nationality or a profession or a hair color. It's a distortion of facts, a premeditated intellectual dishonesty that has stooped to some devious and distinctly un-Christian methods to misrepresent science and claim Bible inerrancy. I think anyone who has only listened to the creationist argument might stand a chance of removing their ignorance, but for those who have heard the science and still claim to be creationists, still use the same BS arguments and refuted evidence, and still tell outright lies about science, those kinds of creationists are a pox on society. Fanatics with ears they've plugged with their own opposable thumbs.