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kermo
Joined: 01 Sep 2004
Location: Eating eggs, with a comb, out of a shoe.
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 Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2006 6:46 am Post subject: |
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[quote="rapier"]
| laogaiguk wrote: |
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| What is your degree in? Have you looked at the world? It is getting better every generation. |
As far as i can see...the 20thc and the consequences of industralisation (brought to us by science) has led to:
*Unprecedented,untold damage to the earths natural processes: mass pollution,widescale habitat destruction: mass slaughter and extinction/near extinction of many species; air pollution and global warming..etc. As the bible commands us to be custodians of the natural world, wrecking and trashing it is a crime, a sin.
*Rapid improvement in weapons capability (thankyou science). Conventional as well as chemical weapons have increased and proliferated, developed in leaps..from swords to nuclear warheads in a short space of time. From villages fighting neighbour hamlets, to whole geographical regions allied against eachother (East v west).
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| Yes, actually it has and is continuing to do so. Fast communication between nations has probably led to signifcantly less miscommunications. Remember the war of 1812? That entire war would have been averted had people been able to communicated quicker. |
I'll take your word for it..but human nature has not changed in any case. Technology has just increased our ability to kill eachother.We still have an instinctive desire to find reasons to eliminate eachother. Wars have increased around the world, not lessened. Science helps us to grow more crops to feed more people more efficiently, (but then why is food not evenly distributed and half the world needlessly starving in grinding poverty?). Science is good but it has never reached its potential to improve life on earth, because human nature has not altered and never will. If the richest nations spent all the money on defense/weapons instead on helping the poor..ok..but it will never happen.
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| The Internet is also helping bring us all together, even people who disagree. |
this is true. It also has led to an increase in child abuse and paedophilia for example as the market has suddenly mushroomed..just for example.
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Hegel believed that history was a progression from unreason to reason, and was one of the first prominent atheist thinkers. I wonder if he would say the same if he could see the world we live in now. People aren't becoming any sweeter or ethical as they become more scientifically aware or technologically literate. There's as much treachery and nastiness as there ever was.
I have to agree with Neil Postman (a brilliant writer whose passing last year was largely unmarked) when he reminds us that we don't ask "What problem does this new technology solve?" and "What new problems will this technology create?"
Rapier, I love this new "agreeing with each other" thing we've hit upon. |
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rapier
Joined: 16 Feb 2003
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| Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2006 7:39 am Post subject: |
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| kermo wrote: |
Rapier, I love this new "agreeing with each other" thing we've hit upon. |
I agree.  |
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kermo
Joined: 01 Sep 2004
Location: Eating eggs, with a comb, out of a shoe.
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| Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2006 7:53 am Post subject: |
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| rapier wrote: |
| kermo wrote: |
Rapier, I love this new "agreeing with each other" thing we've hit upon. |
I agree. |
I love it! |
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Grotto
Joined: 21 Mar 2004
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| Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2006 9:42 am Post subject: |
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| Name calling is really just a cover for insecurity and it is a horrible thing to be a slave too |
Insecurity? Nope. I use name calling to show my utter contempt for your idiocy. You cant debate things logically and have already mentioned how others tell you that you are a nutjob so I dont feel like I am overstepping any boundaries.
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| As far as i can see...the 20thc and the consequences of industralisation (brought to us by science) has led to: |
What about?
Advances in medicine. Extending not only the average lifespan but the quality of life.
Defeating diseases like polio, smallpox...etc.
Exploration and a greater understanding of space, the Mars program, Voyager, the Venus program for example. Some great accomplishments there.
Providing people with clean water to drink, allowing everyone to have electricity in their homes, the ability to communicate with anyone anywhere in the world.
The list goes on and on.
Even with your anology of the creation of weapons of mass destruction. Historically we are at a very rare time of relative peace. Why is that? Because the nation states that have these weapons are fully aware of their capabilities. A hundred years ago 30,000 casualties in battle was an enourmous loss of life often taking days of fighting...people know that now battles last hours, not days and the effeciency of the weapons and the people handling the weapons has reached a point where open warfare is suicide.
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| but human nature has not changed in any case |
Your religioin has had thousands of years to change human nature and has failed. Science has done more to educate, teach, heal and free people than anything any religion has ever done. Real tangible benefits...not that pie in the sky crap that is christianity.
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| Do you think life on earth would be better if everyone obeyed the ten commandments? |
The ten commandments are simply laws. Not the laws of any god or anything but simply common sense laws. Probably the only part of the bible I relatively agree with. Like 8 out of 10.
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| Has science enabled mankind to live together peacefully? sustainably on the earth? Changed our human nature from selfish, destructive predator? no..nor can it. The advent of modern science has been followed by more wars and mass death then ever before in history. |
Has religion enabled mankind to live together peacefully? Sustain the earth? Changed human nature? No...nor can it. The advent of organised religion has been followed by more wars and mass death than science has ever done. Read your history books Rapier. Religion is one of the major driving forces behind war in the last several thousand years.
We must invade them!
Why?
Because they worship false gods!
Oh...okay then.
Open your eyes and take a long look around. The middle east has been in turmoil for thousands of years. Why? Because each has their own secularian beliefs and believe that any acts they commit here on earth they will be rewarded for in heaven.
Sound familiar? Sounds an awful lot like christianity all over again..... |
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Bee Positive
Joined: 27 Oct 2005
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| Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2006 9:52 am Post subject: |
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| Satori wrote: |
| fiveeagles wrote: |
Only God can produce love. Love is the trademark of all of his disciples.
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That`s completely and utterly incorrect. Billions of people all over the globe give and recieve tons of yummy huggy deep affectionate love every day, and they are not christian. The sheer bigotry, the arrogance, the pride, and the ignorance of your post is quite beathtaking. Unless you`re playing dumb on purpose for some kind of special effect, Im truly worried for you. You have the mental and emotional age of a 9 year old.
Actually, Im beginning to think that maybe I DO believe in Satan, and his current incarnation is Five Eagles... |
Oh boy, I'm getting to disagree with Satori on absolutely everything. Call me the anti-Satori and you will have just about summed up my views on everything.
Love requires that there be first one and then two. A lover and a beloved. A beloved loving the lover in return. A circularity.
Outside of nature, moving from physicality into the realm of the ideal, we can easily find, in agreement with Plotinus, that there is a ONE which is perpetually and indeed extra-temporally spinning itself outward and in so doing self-effusively generating a second One, the God who is generated by God, the Second Person of the Trinity in Christian thought, the Intelligence in Plotinian thought. God propagates himself firstly as God: perfection generates perfection above and before and beyond all else.
And between God and God there can only be perfect love. God in love with God. Pefect love.
Out of which flows a third something, Plotinus's Spirit of the World, Christianity's Holy Spirit, the third person of the Hindu trinity, what have you. It cannot, would not, should not, will not, and wasn't ever otherwise. God in love with perfect and potentially autonomous, self-sufficient God overflows the very bounds of God in the very act of creating those bounds. Oneness contracts, expands, and explodes into something entirely but not essentially new. The One, becoming Two, generates Three. (Veni Sancte Spiritus!)
One plus one yields two, and when combined with the original one yields three. God is mathematical in nature. Just think one and two and then three and you're much closer to understanding what God is all about, I propose, than you ever were in Sunday school.
Love is God. God is love. Down here on earth, we imitate the divine love in various degrees of perfection and imperfection.
Three plus two yields five, meanwhile, and five plus three yields eight. See where this is going? That's right: THE FIBONACCI SERIES. It describes a great deal of terrestrial biology. It's one of the great mathematical keys to understanding physical reality, and it has its origins logically in the One and its effusions into numerality. The one becomes many. Two interact to generate a third, beyond which the numers propagate. This is mathematics, and this is also love.
God is glorious and great and Good and One. He becomes one and two, and then three. He embraces all of us on the Cross, hooked to the divine oneness at one end, and no less to the infinite numberlessness of all the rest of it, and us, at the other.
God bleeds and dies, and like a ham actor exceeds the bounds of propriety in an outsized attempt to prove his greatness. We should respond appropriately, by acknowledging his goodness to us, and attempting, in however small a way, to return his love. We can do this, within the bounds of logic, by loving each other, since in loving who and what God loves, we achieve, or at least attempt to achieve, what he himself does.
Love is thus the essential relationship. Prior to love, to be sure, there is simply THE ONE, but this is a singularity too radical and severe for us to face. Its unmediated presence would destroy. We approach God by degrees, through the appropriate channels. We approach God through love. Thus God, for us, is love. And love, in a very real sense, is God.
In his unitary sovereignty, God, had he chosen to do so, could have stood alone in utter self-perfection. Instead, for reasons which will perhaps ever remain obscure to us, he contracts and expands himself endlessly so as to generate a world which is by his will self-willing. Willing our way back to God means returning to a primal happiness.
It's so very simple. In whatever way that you can, get back to oneness. But don't neglect the possibility--indeed, the PROBABILITY--of finding oneness in plurality. The kingdom of God, as Jesus says, is within you. By deduction, it is also within your fellow human being.
BEE+ |
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Grotto
Joined: 21 Mar 2004
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| Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2006 10:47 am Post subject: |
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| Love requires that there be first one and then two. A lover and a beloved. A beloved loving the lover in return. A circularity. |
I love camping...does camping love me?
Another typical BAC moronic reply.
Do you two ever think through the crap you post? Ever take an objective look at it and realise just how offensive your stupidity and evil is?
If there is a hell...its full of born again christians as they are the most evil of all. |
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laogaiguk
Joined: 06 Dec 2005
Location: somewhere in Korea
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| Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2006 1:24 pm Post subject: |
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[quote="rapier"]
| laogaiguk wrote: |
| Quote: |
| What is your degree in? Have you looked at the world? It is getting better every generation. |
As far as i can see...the 20thc and the consequences of industralisation (brought to us by science) has led to:
*Unprecedented,untold damage to the earths natural processes: mass pollution,widescale habitat destruction: mass slaughter and extinction/near extinction of many species; air pollution and global warming..etc. As the bible commands us to be custodians of the natural world, wrecking and trashing it is a crime, a sin.
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You think without science this wouldn't have happened. Hell, with the Pope's take on contraception, the world would probably have many more people who are cutting down every forest cause we don't have any other fuel, slaughtering tons of animals for food cause we don't have any way to feed them as we do now. Even salting is science. Yes, science has curtailed a lot more that without.
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*Rapid improvement in weapons capability (thankyou science). Conventional as well as chemical weapons have increased and proliferated, developed in leaps..from swords to nuclear warheads in a short space of time. From villages fighting neighbour hamlets, to whole geographical regions allied against eachother (East v west).
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Tell you what, when that asteroid comes hurtling towards us, it will probably be science and not some miracle of God that saves us.
Also, we have gone from villages fighting eachother to millions of people being united. Imagine if I said 1000 years ago all of Europe would be pretty close to a major union. They would have laughed.
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| Yes, actually it has and is continuing to do so. Fast communication between nations has probably led to signifcantly less miscommunications. Remember the war of 1812? That entire war would have been averted had people been able to communicated quicker. |
I'll take your word for it..but human nature has not changed in any case. Technology has just increased our ability to kill eachother.We still have an instinctive desire to find reasons to eliminate eachother. Wars have increased around the world, not lessened. Science helps us to grow more crops to feed more people more efficiently, (but then why is food not evenly distributed and half the world needlessly starving in grinding poverty?). Science is good but it has never reached its potential to improve life on earth, because human nature has not altered and never will. If the richest nations spent all the money on defense/weapons instead on helping the poor..ok..but it will never happen. |
Please show me any kind of proof wars have increased. Fast communicatation has increased, not wars. Most of the bad stuff people think is not because of more wars or more natural disasters, it's because we are really only starting to record and report most of it. Many countries give to poor countries, not near as much as they should, but more than they did in the past. While we need to do much, much more, also don't forget the age old wisdom "You can give a starving man a fish and feed him for a day, or show him how to fish and feed him for life." Schools are being built all over the world. They just developed a $100 laptop that is cranked for electricity to give to poor areas like in Nepal. That is what technology is doing.
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| The Internet is also helping bring us all together, even people who disagree. |
this is true. It also has led to an increase in child abuse and paedophilia for example as the market has suddenly mushroomed..just for example.
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Technology has significantly decreased child molestation. Technology can be seen as current psychology and sociology too. Significantly less parents beat their children, and forensic science is helping in treating many cases. The internet also gives children a way to find help anonymously, as most are too scared to go to a teacher or such. By the way, do you know how many children have been saved because a website was tracked down and they were able to actually raid the place. You couldn't do that before.
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| Could you please show how your mighty organized religion has done any of these thing for us (and it's had a good chance to for awhile now)? |
Do you think life on earth would be better if everyone obeyed the ten commandments? of course..it hasn't happened, because doing the wrong thing is deemed more fun by homo sapiens.
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this isn't an answer, it's a cop out.
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Ultimately..I have zero faith in humans and human nature. We aren't going to make, simple as that. If you are christian you would say humans are fallen into evil/deception that they are unwilling to escape from. If you are a scientist, you would say that we are badly programmed /evolved, and that the characteristics we depended on as cavemen will ensure our demise in the modern age. We can't help ourselves! |
No, I wouldn't say we badly evolved. Like I said earlier, we don't know why we have consiences yet, but we do and I can say we have fallen into a "evil" too. Always black and white with you guys.
Kermo and Rapier, either you guys are both extremely negative or refuse to see the world from anything but that crap the humans suck that has been beat into your heads. If you don't like humans or technology, go into the forest and live by yourselves. You guys are the problem with society. You refuse to see the good. I don't hang around negative people as we all know they just bring other people down. |
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kermo
Joined: 01 Sep 2004
Location: Eating eggs, with a comb, out of a shoe.
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| Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2006 2:25 pm Post subject: |
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I don't like being called extremely negative. I'm not a Luddite, and when I read the news, my heart leaps just like anyone else's when another breakthrough in medicine occurs. I get excited about the newest species of reclusive lemur or what-have-you.
I'm just questioning whether science is The Answer the way some people seem to say. New technology can give with one hand and take with the other; convenience gives way to obesity, medical research inspires new weapons, economical progress puts new stress on the forests, skies and oceans. I'm not prepared to say that on balance technology always solves more problems than it creates.
Call me a skeptic if you will, but when you read "Technopoly" or "The End of Education" by Neil Postman, or "No Logo" by Naomi Klein, you might see my point of view.
Science has to work hand in hand with ethics, and technology must be used with wisdom for it to bring real benefit to mankind. |
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Grotto
Joined: 21 Mar 2004
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| Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2006 2:36 pm Post subject: |
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Science has to work hand in hand with ethics, and technology must be used with wisdom for it to bring real benefit to mankind.
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Its just too bad that religioun doesnt follow those same guidelines |
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laogaiguk
Joined: 06 Dec 2005
Location: somewhere in Korea
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| Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2006 2:46 pm Post subject: |
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| Grotto wrote: |
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Science has to work hand in hand with ethics, and technology must be used with wisdom for it to bring real benefit to mankind.
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Its just too bad that religioun doesnt follow those same guidelines |
On another note, why don't you let science try without religious interference for a millenium, then we can evaluate which did better and go from there. Monothesic (sp?) organized religion has had about 1900 years, science has really only had about 200. That's not fair |
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kermo
Joined: 01 Sep 2004
Location: Eating eggs, with a comb, out of a shoe.
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| Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2006 3:03 pm Post subject: |
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| laogaiguk wrote: |
On another note, why don't you let science try without religious interference for a millenia, then we can evaluate which did better and go from there. Monothesic (sp?) organized religion has had about 1900 years, science has really only had about 200. That's not fair |
I'm not pitting one against another, but sure, for the sake of argument, let the record show that I'm now allowing civilization to proceed with the benefit of scientific enlightenment, sans God. There you go guys.
Cloning for all!
(booooooooo!)
Very well, cloning for none!
(booooooooo!)
Cloning for some, miniature American flags for others!
(yaaaaaay!) |
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Demophobe
Joined: 17 May 2004
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| Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2006 5:18 pm Post subject: |
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| Grotto wrote: |
Its just too bad that religioun doesnt follow those same guidelines |
You know something Grotto? You are actually doing Christianity a service with all of your replies. You are accounted for and necessary. Thanks for keeping to the plan! |
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Grotto
Joined: 21 Mar 2004
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| Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2006 6:38 pm Post subject: |
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Gosh Demophobe! Is that sarcasm? I always wondered what sarcasm was...thanks for setting me straight  |
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Moldy Rutabaga
Joined: 01 Jul 2003
Location: Ansan, Korea
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| Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2006 7:43 pm Post subject: |
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I will chime in again with a brief comment.. I think that expecting either science or Christianity to make the world a paradise is probably blaming the tool, not the craftsman. The practise of science, which is to research and investigate, doesn't in itself lead to things being better or worse, but only to better knowledge; the applications have turned out to be both beneficial and harmful. We live longer and better, but we are also in danger of annihilating ourselves because of science.
In the same way, Christianity has the potential to make us better people by cultivating loving relationships between us and other people and our creator. But the church is also a tool used by man, and it has a pretty good track record over 2000 years, but it has also been used for depraved and deeply harmful purposes. But blaming either a spiritual mind or an investigative mind-- or saying you can't be both-- probably isn't useful.
>Imagine if I said 1000 years ago all of Europe would be pretty close to a major union. They would have laughed.
At the time, they were under the Holy Roman Empire. There were plenty of wars then. I don't see the connection? More political union=less war.
>Please show me any kind of proof wars have increased.
As to the actual number of wars, no one knows. But military historians estimate that more people died in the twentieth century because of war than in the previous nineteen combined. The deadliness of wars and the weaponry used has certainly exponentially increased. Proof is hardly needed on that.
Ken:> |
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Grotto
Joined: 21 Mar 2004
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| Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2006 10:01 pm Post subject: |
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>Please show me any kind of proof wars have increased.
As to the actual number of wars, no one knows. But military historians estimate that more people died in the twentieth century because of war than in the previous nineteen combined. The deadliness of wars and the weaponry used has certainly exponentially increased. Proof is hardly needed on that. |
True enough...but it is only through the advances of science that the populations grew to the point where the amount of people dying became a factor.
Better food preservation, medical care, refridgeration, vaccinations....take a look at the population explosion in the last 100 years.
Wars prior to the 19'th century were fought without accurate firearms, decent medical care and armies could only be as large as the amount of food they could carry or raise as they travelled. Now armies are only limited by the amount of money the government decides to throw at them. |
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