Moontanman

An interesting video on the existence of god and why he always remains beyond our reach....

I forgot to address this, why would you think hydrogen would float above the other gasses in the atmosphere and be stripped off? A planet that big should be able to hold on to hydrogen and it would mix with the other gases just like CO2, O2, N3, mix in the earth's atmosphere.

I'm not sure where you are coming from here. Are you saying that the availability of cannabis should be curtailed or that the availability of alcohol should be curtailed as well or are you talking about hard drugs?

Who knows what evil lurks in the mind of men... The shadow do...

I've never had one take a swing at me but they do get all emotional for sure, especially when you start calling your demon on them

If frogs had wings....

I am curious, I have been in personal communication with Dr. Foot as well, but I'm not sure why you mention him in this context. Is he personally in agreement with Dr. Stephen M. Phillips?

I wish I could say it only happened once, I generally tell them no thank you and shut the door, if they are persistent I tell them I don't believe in fairy tales and shut the door but if they become aggressive, and they do sometimes, it can result in me insisting they get off my property or I'll seek my demon on them...

I don't think we can say there is any Christian evidence that holds more weight than any other religion, no concrete evidence for sure. I have never understood why theists come to a science forum to justify their beliefs. They are like moths drawn to flames. If you want or need to believe then you should, as long as you don't dive into fundamentalism and decide your particular cult is the only way and that everyone else must follow and do your best to change society to favor your world view i will support your right to believe. The sad thing is that most religions, for some reason especially the mono theistic ones, have to convince others to follow their way or the religion dies. The religion often requires you to convince others to believe, and make others conform to your beliefs, this is where I start having problems with it. I also have problem with people who claims their religion deserves some amount of respect that no one else gets. I see no reason to respect anyone's beliefs past not caring what they believe. Or to the extent it makes me have to modify my behavior. If theists could just keep it to themselves and stop bothering me i would be good to go with it. One real world example of this is the billboards that proselytize a particular religion. These billboards are everywhere, in my small town there has to be dozens of them, people knock at your door to tell you the good news, some of them come in cars others come on bicycles but the message is the same, i need to believe their way or i am going to burn in hell and if i don't believe their way i am somehow morally corrupt. But allow one billboard to go up that even suggests that there are people who don't believe and that they are not alone is reason for people to go nuts! They bitch and moan like they are being skinned alive because someone doesn't have belief and wants to show that they are not alone. Such a billboard here makes the news, people are interviewed so they can say how evil it is to have that billboard up for the "kids" to see... How the people who put it up are evil, immoral, criminals... It's simply crazy, even non fundamentalist theists go nuts over that stuff, they want respect for themselves and no one else gets anything but derision...

I see lots of assumptions about cannabis being made here. Some of you seem to think that legalizing it will allow it to be better controlled which is probably true to some extent but then some go on to say the harm can be minimized as though cannabis is killing people and destroying lives everywhere. You are mistaking cannabis with alcohol, just like crime is more connected with drugs being illegal than with their real effects the worst thing about cannabis is getting caught with it. Smoking pot doesn't affect your life in the same ways that alcohol or even cigarettes do. Pot, for the vast majority of people anyway, is not addictive in the same way that things like alcohol, nicotine, crack, or meth is. I've known a great many pot smokers and the worst effect it can have is the government ruining your life if you get caught. You can lose your job, jail time, a criminal record, but smoking pot in of it's self is relatively harmless. I don't want pot to be legalized so those poor unfortunate pot addicts can get help, that attitude is nothing but horse feathers. It's what the government has been telling us forever, pot, in the US, is listed the same as heroin, crack, or meth. Get caught and the government does everything in it's power to destroy you personally. Then they turn around and use that as examples of how pot ruins lives. It's propaganda at it's finest. People should be able to grow their own, limits should be put on people who sell it but but for personal use I see no reason why you can't grow your own the same way you can make your own wine or beer. Pot is not healthy, anyone who thinks it's completely harmless is deep in a river in Egypt but it is demonstrably less harmful than alcohol and not even close to being addictive like nicotine. Ruining peoples lives because they smoke is cruel and serves no purpose. And no smoking pot doesn't make you a loser, it doesn't keep you from working a job or anything else. it certainly doesn't make you a bad worker, alcohol and cigarettes take away far more in worker productivity than cannabis, the old adage that pot makes you stupid and unproductive is nothing but government propaganda...

I don't know dude, The Native Americans believed in a trickster God that enjoyed fooling people, the Norse had such a God as well, Loki, Christianity has the Devil, Most belief systems allow for some sort of supernatural evil or rogue God. I think this is a reasonable question....

I knew there had to be a catch...

I think this is a bit of a stretch, if something impossible happens it would falsify something else that is not possible to test? If a fossil bunny rabbit was found in Cambrian strata evolution would fail big time but I wouldn't try to justify Creationism by asserting that possibility... Yes a miracle would indicate something new was going on, maybe even supernatural, but specifically proving the God of Abraham?

I want "Home Aquarium Expert" under my avatar

Can God really be suspended?

She is immersed in a religious culture, like all of us, this has a profound influence on children, i thought Santa Claus was real until i was 4 or 5, i remember watching the moon expecting to see his sleigh pass in front if it Christmas eve night and listening in rapture as the radio described jets flying along side Santa and NORAD supposedly giving reports of his progress. I also question the mom as an atheist, i hear this crap all the time from theists who are trying to prove their religion. It's quite common to assert "I used to be an atheist but now I see the light" a great many Religious apologists do this even though it's quite easy to show most of them are bald faced liars. Kirk Cameron is a huge example of this as is Ray Comfort, it's a common theme among these fundamentalists. Of course I can't prove that but accepting her mom's word on this is just naive... Also there is the possibility that the little girl influenced her mom instead of the other way around. A 4 yo is quite easy to influence and no doubt she was influenced by adults around here for reasons we cannot know, the main thing is that her visions of heaven are no different than what we are all taught in church, no revelations have come from this, her pictures of Jesus look just like every other picture of Jesus I have ever seen and he looks western not middle eastern. While i won't call the child a liar, i can see the same influences in her work that everyone else has seen...

I would be amazed if they did not...

I have to say i use my avatar everywhere i go on the net that allows an avatar, when I change it i change it everyplace, my current avatar is a poke of humor at myself. On another forum I can choose my own title under the avatar and It says "Hello Low IQ'ers" if anyone is familiar with this particular avatar you know that is what Bullwinkle always said when he opened up his "Mr. Know it All" segment and he never got anything right... He is the quintessential idiot and totally unaware of his lack of knowledge...

Guys, while I really don't have a dog in this particular subset of this hunt aren't both of you just making an appeal to authority? I genuinely don't understand what this has to do with the question of is there a god... christian or not... The little girl has inspiration from god or she has an intense imagination that she uses to interpret the stuff she is told by the people around her? Nothing she paints is outside the realm of her experiences, she paints the things she has heard about from other people, her talent is very impressive for sure, but she is not the only child prodigy to have existed. Would anyone be willing to say if she grew up in China the images wouldn't have been of her ancestors and images associated with ancestor worship? Or if she was Hindu the images wouldn't have been of Vishnu and the details of that religion? Of if she had been raised atheist her visions wouldn't have been of the natural world? I honestly don't see it as indicative of anything other than this little girl being very talented, other children are talented as well in this and in other areas some equate their talents or inspiration with god others do not. To say it is evidence of god is more wishful thinking than proof of anything but talent.... IMHO

Since what we now call waste is actually a potential source of immense energy and that fact that new reactor designs can use this waste to produce energy and at the same time reduce both it's volume and half life to more manageable numbers by a couple orders of magnitude at least it would seem to be very short sighted to dump this "waste" someplace where we cannot access it at some point in the future...

Let me make sure I have this straight, God, the almighty creator of the universe, and everything in it, The God that knows all and sees all, the God who created all life not to mention the magnificent world we live on. The God who brought not only the planet we live on into existence but all matter and the forces of nature, the God who knows everyone's thoughts and actions, who is aware of the fall of every tiny bird to the most important human who ever lived. This God cannot communicate with us clearly enough so that his word is exact and understandable? So we have to interpret his words to understand then and since nearly everyone interprets God's words differently to the point that people kill each other over who is interpreting his words correctly? That's lame as hell guys... Then of course there are all those other Gods... Who are apparently just as lame as the Christian God... All the hundreds of Gods, all the tremendous volume of writings from all those Gods but none of them is clear enough not to require interpretations of those Gods writings as well.... It's more likely they are all wrong and the logical stance is there are no gods...

Are you seriously suggesting that interpretation equals evidence, that is called apologetics, it has noting to do with evidence of anything except the desire to twist scripture to fit reality when it really doesn't. It might hake a difference to Christians since their religion is indeed based in these things and the truth of their holy book depends on these things being true. But I have to agree that the idea of Mary being a virgin is debatable, the original meaning that was implied was closer to young girl than actually being a virgin. Although at the time not being a virgin on your wedding night was punishable by death. This is not true if the woman was a widow but in this case i don't think anyone is trying to say Mary was a widow. You are seriously mistaken on this, in the US something like 60% of just Christians believe in the inerrant word of the bible. They are often called creationists, there are also Islamic fundamentalists and Jewish fundamentalists as well, they all believe that Genesis is absolutely true word for word. There are also a great many Hindu, Sikh, Zoroastrian, creationists as well but the myths surrounding them are different and serve a different god or pantheon of gods.

It's not possible, mammals cannot reproduce naturally using parthenogenesis. (it's magic... you know... never believe it's not so... ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis As indicated above it can be done by artificial means but it doesn't result in viable embryos.

Back in those days, the claim couldn't really be checked up on, she was already with child, her husband to be loved her so much he believed anything she said. So he justified it by believing her claims, I doubt anyone examined her to make "sure" she had an intact hymen. That is probably the easiest thing to fake in the world...