Okay, but how do you justify other religions being unfounded, when they're all based on bible-like "instruction manuals"?

The historicity and coherence of the Bible far outweighs that of any other religious text. No archaeologic discovery has ever disproved anything written in the Bible, only supported it.

That's why.

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/gira.cadouarn/english/history/historical_value/historicity/historicity_gospels.htm

Yeah, but just because Western Civilization has had the money and resources to conduct archaeological studies to support its beliefs, it shouldn't mean that every other religion is unfounded. Some religions aren't based on written proof. Some cultures aren't direct offshoots of ancient Rome.

If there was ever a question which deserved your attention, it seems like this one would be the one. I dare you to investigate it for yourself. Academic excuses can only go so far, if there is a truth out there, the search for it is a noble endevour.

I would suggest reading the Case for Christ by Lee Strobel. I haven't actually read it, but I have it and it is on the list. I have read another book by him and it's pretty good. Strobel was a journalist for the Chicago Tribune who set out to disprove Christianity and in the end became a Christian himself.

If I were to make a list, as I'm apt to sometimes do, ranked by order of rationality of mental existence, it would look like this:

1 - people who have considered the options, desire truth, and find the existence of god or any higher power or "truth", other than the basic physical laws of the universe, completely absurd, and useful only in a historical context in that it used to be the best explanation we had for things, but has since been superceded by better ones.

2 - people who have considered the options, desire truth, and are completely and utterly convinced that there IS a god, that that god is an active part of existence, and whose minds are sent reeling on a regular basis as they try to consider the wonderful nature of this god.

3 - people who have been told, one way or the other, that there is a god or not, but who have never really considered whether what they were told is true or not. Or, having considered it and formed their own opinions, refuse to break out of their initial state, and instead maintain a wishy-washy set of beliefs that are molded arbitrarily from moment to moment so that they fit nicely into their otherwise unguided lives.

I think that groups 1 + 2 combine for about 5% of the population, and group 3 constitutes the rest. I think that your post compares the 2nd (which includes you), to the 3rd (which includes a boatload of people).

Now, I'm not comparing the value of the lives or minds of the people in these groups, or implying that this particular element of what makes a person is a "judge" of what they're worth...but I DO think that most of the past accomplishments of humanity, and of the mind, were accomplished by the first 2 groups, perhaps even more so by the second than the first, if only because of the historical shifting trend which is moving "thinking minds" into the first group at a higher rate than the first.

Obviously, any system which ranks some quality and places the creator of the system into the most highly ranked group (as I would place myself), is somewhat suspect. That being said, I imagine that you made a list, it would look the same as mine, except with groups 1 and 2 reversed. If it were a point based system, I'd probably give group 1 a 99, group 2 a 95, and group 3 a 50. That is, most of the conclusions and methods employed by the two "thinking" groups are equally superior to that of the "accepting" group. The difference between 1+2 being that group 2 is based on what I consider to be a fundamentally wrong, and irrational, belief in something whose existence has no physical evidence, and that is an idea which has only survived historically because of unwillingness to accept what are, in my mind, drastically better explanations for the things going on around us.

The moral of the story, I think, is that neither of us respects that guy who goes to church because he has nothing better to do on a Sunday morning and his wife thinks they "should", for no reason in particular.

I would agree with you roughly as much as you think I would. In fact, in the instance that a god did not exist, I would agree with you almost 100%, as there would certainly still be people that fell into both groups by pseudo-logical consideration of their surroundings. In that case, the people in group 1 would be right, and not only would they be right, but they would be standing on their own two feet, opposed to the concept that they are supported by something else.

However, in the case that there is a God, they still have the concept that they are right, and that they are right by their own power and not by someone elses...only in the case where God exists (in any form whatsoever), they are then prideful and misled. So of course, in that case (which I subjectively believe to be the case), I would rank those who got the answer right above those who pridefully determined that their answer was right when that is not the case.

I will freely admit that the acceptance of God by the second group of people requires an act of personal will (faith as they call it) to reach that conclusion. The System accepted by the first group can supposedly stand on pure individual logic. But since not every step in that logical proof can be determined, and since the presuppositions are too liberal for my taste, I would say that that the people in that category have also taken a step of faith, only without acknowledging it. In this case, I deduct points, as group two at least recognizes that they need to bypass the full logical method to reach their conclusion.

One last point: it is probably pragmatic, given that a leap of faith is required in both instances, to align oneself with the belief system which potentially saves one's soul. There are no benefits for group one, other than a personal satisfation of a release from any external system, and the potential benefits of the second group are infinite.

I'm not saying that one should eschew his determination of reality because of the potential benefits, I'm jsut saying that it's perhaps practical to buy car insurance when one buys a car.

Furthermore, I have long thought that we should get a website together titled, "The Great Debate" if it's not already copyrighted...and then we should get a few keynote speaker with logins to it....and then we should argue about this stuff ad infinitum. Or until I win.

These theories are wonderful, if we're only talking about Judeo-Christianity (and a handful of other similar religions that make up -- drumroll -- WESTERN civilization). But what about the Native Americans who lived here in this country, worshipping the sun and the moon and the mountains & streams, before the white man got here? Was their religion canceled out when a pilgrim handed them copies of the bible?

What about all the different tribes of Africa? Do you think we send missionaries over there to convert everybody to Christianity because they're all atheists? I'm leaning toward not so much.

Bess, I think that there's some sort of anti Western Civilization agenda that you're pushing here, and you're not telling us about it up front. In the interests of full disclosure -- how are the Native Americans compensating you for your efforts here? :)

The diversity of "religious source" or "religious premise" that exists in the world - that is, the fact large groups of different people have arrived at similar systems of supernatural belief, man-and-nature dynamics, concepts of life-after-death, etc. - is interesting, and can be looked at a few ways.

Regardless of the number of, or absence of gods, the way it values life, and whatever other qualities any belief system has, if it's widespread, then it's been successful at "reproducing". In fact, ideas and sets of beliefs within human minds perpetuate themselves in a way that's very similar to genetic lineage and evolution. Ideas that are formed within one mind and never told to anyone else or recorded in any way at all, simply cannot spread. They are like the cell that splits into two child cells, both of whom have mutated so that they are unable to split themselves. By their nature, they (the ideas or the cells), will go no further. On the other hand, beliefs that are widely held - "christianity", "islam", "communism", etc (and I quote these only because they are not the most precisely defined, qualifiable things - but you get my point) - are the cells that not only split themselves successfully generation after generation, but manage to eat and kill other competing cells that are not just like them, so that over time the ratio changes in their favor.

....I have absolutely know I idea where I was going with that or why I thought it was connected to the discussion here, but there it is.

Point being, the different religions thing could be viewed either as evidence that there actually IS one god, and that god has just been "discovered" and personified in a plethora of ways across different cultures - OR - it could be evidence that there is no god, and that human nature lends itself to mass-hallucinations and that sort of thing, and that these groups are all just as wrong about what they think as each other, they just think these wrong thoughts in different ways - OR - that perhaps one of these religions (christianity, in the example here), has managed to get it right, and that there are a few other religions who might fit into the "same god, different visual" category, like Islam, Judaism, etc - and others who are just so completely different from christianity that it's basically impossible that BOTH of them could be right at the same time. In that last case, you'd have different cultures - Whitey "Western civ" McWhite and Chief Sitting Bear (a native american) and Jet Li (a chinaman) - who had all, along the same timeline and without much interaction with or knowledge of each other, come up with completely different scenarios to explain the natural phenomenom they saw, had a few key figures (Moses, Jesus, assorted Buddhas, sun gods, chieftans, medicine men, monks, etc) who have convinced the rest of their group that they have a link to a supreme power, or nature, or whatever - and that somehow, one of them managed to hit the nail on the head (christianity, again, for example), and the rest of them used a similar process but missed the boat on how it all works.

Furst, I figured you'd agree with that on a basic level...a few points though..

I don't like using the "leap of faith" to describe the process you are talking about, only because there's religious connotation to it. I don't know the origin of the word, but I know what you mean by that. I would say that group one is content* with accepting that there is a limited body of physical and scientifically deduced evidence, and from that evidence they've reached the conclusion that it's more likely that there is not a god than that there is. The second group is content* with not being able to prove that there's a god because they either "just know there is one", or are willing to accept historical texts and accounts of one AS evidence. I put a * in both groups because I think there is a subset in each group who is specifically NOT content with the leap-of-faith / just-accepting-it / not-explaining-it business, and tend to drive themselves completely mad over time as they struggle with things they either don't have the tools to measure or don't have the mind to grasp.

And on the "play the odds" part you threw in at the end, I don't think you actually hold that opinion, and I'll explain why. If there is a god who has the capabilities to either read my mind, look into my soul or otherwise "judge" and review my life and beliefs, it seems completely absurd to think that it would be a god who was willing to "save my soul", indefinitely, just because I had checked the right box on the "religion" section of the entrance form, despite my not ACTUALLY believing in anything implied by checking that box. I am totally and completely cool w/ resting my soul (if there are souls, somehow) and my eternal fate (if there's an option for my soul to be sent into one of many eternal fates) to hinge on my having used my (god-given) mental faculties to evaluate what I saw going on around me, and had just come up with the wrong answer. I think I'd be more likely to get in than someone who was raised within a community who all "believed in the right god", had never questioned why they believed this, and as a result, also checked the right box on the form. Basically, in the event there's a god, I imagine it to be the sort of god that would still give you credit on a math test if you had used the right process to arrive at an answer, showed your work, but made one small rounding error at the end and come out a decimal place or two away from where you should have been.

Right on, Matt. In fact, I'd give that close to a "1" on the Post-Collegiate Rand Scale.

Furstie, Carl, and other born-agains where applicable: Have you ever seen The Testaments, a Mormon film? I saw it when I was visiting friends in Salt Lake City, and found it sweet and moving and everything, but I couldn't help but notice that it actually attempts to rewrite history by claiming that Christianity came about simultaneously in the Middle East AND the Americas. I mean, isn't that going a bit far?

Either way, I think that if I had to pick a religion, I'd convert to Mormonism -- just because it's really the most audaciously ambitious one. I mean, some pilgrim named Joseph Smith was hallucinating on moonshine or something, staggered off into the upstate NY woods and uncovered a collection of glowing tablets that spoke to him in god's voice and led him out into the middle of the desert with multiple wives to erect the largest temple in the friggin' universe.

Somehow I'm down with that. The more far-fetched the better. If you're going to have "blind faith", you might as well have it for the most out of control, impossible-to-prove, cooked-up-by-someone-tripping-on-acid set of beliefs.

One last thing:

"Behold the gold, and the silver,
and the silks, and the scarlets,
and the fine-twined linen,
and the precious clothing, and the harlots."
[1 Nephi 13:1]

Any religion that can give me poetry like that is one I'm down with.

A few things, in approximately reverse order:

Bess, I think the mormons are as ridiculous as the next guy, don't you worry. And the worst part about their poetry is that it was originally written in this language. At least hebrew poetry (which is often times quite beautiful, even if the meter and rhyme scheme aren't native to our tongue) was not written in English. Smith just didn't even try on that stuff.

Matt, you bring up one of my favorite instances of possible external evidence for a god, the fact that humanity seems to be subconsciously wired for believing in a divine being. I would say it's like stumbling upon an orchestra playing mozart...if you have no concept of instruments, and if you have no ideas about how sounds interact and harmonize, then when you try to reproduce this music for yourself, you are left with simple drum beat and a humm. The concept is the same, but the manifestation can never equal the real thing. Being that certain groups of people were more directly contacted by God throughout history, they were able to learn the chords and some notes, developing a more musically mature understanding of God.

Bess mentions the polytheists and animists. I would echo the ethnocentric ideas of my european counterparts when I say that those worldviews are evolutionarily (from a thought standpoint) inferior to monothesism. Someone could worship rain, thunder, lightning and wind, but it takes a stronger mind to understand that all of these are features of the same weather event. Polytheists stumble upon the orchestra and come away from it worshipping the flute and the tuba, perhaps understanding that the two interact, but not seeing the harmony of their coexistence. Animists come away from the orchestra with a humm, a dim reminder of what they heard, but nothing like the real thing. I am opposed to the idea that all cultures, all worldviews are created equal. Frankly, some just suck, and I don't care what my anthropology teacher says. Maybe eating people and severing cervixes is your idea of cultural diversity, but I tend to consider it cultural inferiority.

For most of human history, people experienced first hand the idea that "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork." (Psalms 19:1) In more recent times, steps have been taken to claim the creation of the Universe and even of the concept of God for ourselves. Yet the gaps remain. The devil's in the details they say, and God lives in your missing pieces.

As a side note, which is easier to prove, existence or non-existence? Also, which is easier to argue? It seems that existence could be proven with one fell swoop, but I think that to prove existence to one who refuses to acknowledge that possibility is harder than to sow doubt for the believer.

First of all, I would say that humanity is not subconciously wired to believe in a divine being. Rather, I think it's more accurate to say that humanity is hard-wired with the predisposition to find 'sacred' objects or ideas that it can connect with. That may well be animals, a divine being, or a completely separate world outside of the one we exist in. It also seems to me that religion arises from the need for people to explain the existence of suffering.

I agree with you that Animism is a poor example of other religions to be considered. History has shown that the natural evolution of religion follows the belief in many gods with the belief in one god. Hume saw this, as did Gibbons. Both of these men described polytheism as having risen from simple fear and superstition. When one man's hunt went worse than another's, he would seek to explain the chance happpenings that made it so: thus, an explanation of many gods governing many aspects of the world as it exists and the random elements therein. Polytheism is, in this way, easily seen as simply advanced superstition.

Now, while monotheism solves some of the problems that multiple gods poses, it still has it's own downfalls. Max Weber, at the turn of the last century, began a discussion on what he called 'Theodicy,' the problem of having a perfect deity create an imperfect world. Specifically, in his look at suffering, he discussed that Karma is actually the best solution to the idea of suffering.

Karma is the Buddhist belief that we are all trapped in a cycle of rebirth, and that the amount of suffering we go through in this life is a result of our actions and placements in our previous lives. Weber saw that rather than having a god who so loves his people yet still makes them suffer, Karma offers an objective source of suffering.

Interstingly enough, the six levels of existence within the cycle of rebirth include gods (at the top) and devils (at the bottom - literally known as hungry ghosts). This means that Buddhism, while still following some strict religious beliefs, still allows for the gods of other religions within this world of existence.

And Weber was writing this stuff a century ago!

As far as many religious scholars are concerned, Buddhism, or even more generally the belief in reincarnation, is a much more evolved religious structure than monotheism altogether.

Now, that's not to say that monotheism is wrong, I certainly don't believe that. But if you're going to try and argue from a standpoint that it's logically the most advanced religion, think again.

You're just mad because you didn't win either of the last contests. I can see how heuristically you can arrive at the conclusion about enlightenment through buddhism, but Christianity's God-Man Jesus provides a similar mechanism.

God did not create an imperfect world. He created a world in which we the people could choose, through our free will, to make decisions. He also told us what is objectively right and what is wrong, and we chose to do what is wrong in many many instances, separating us from the Creator. This separation was reconciled in the human person of God, Jesus, who usurped our need for blood offerings by becoming one himself. To accept this reconciliation is to break from the cycle of separation from the Holy God.

Kharma is all well and good, but if you don't remember your existence from one life to the next, what is the point? I am interested in how this statement will be attacked, but isn't the proof in the pudding with Kharma? I don't remember being alive previously...if I were moving toward some greater good, I could never tell if I'm closer, since I don't remember the past...so each time I start over naked, as though there were no past...how can I ever get closer if I start completely naked...how is my new start any different than my first start...if there is no difference, what's the damn point?

Plus, I think we could state with reasonable scientific assurances that if I were to come back as a slug, I wouldn't actually 'learn' my lesson, as slugs likely aren't capable of grasping metaphysics.

In the order that they occured to me-

The subconscious wiring thing w/ the orchestras and whatnot... I do not believe (and I encourage biologists here to correct me) that there is any one specific part of the nervous system that is "wired", per se, to accept the notion of a divine being. I DO believe that, evolutionarily, organisms whose information processing hardware was formed in such a way that it interpretted the environment through the senses, came up with some concept of what was going on that fit well within it's memory of past goings-on, and instructed it's body to act accordingly to respond to whatever stimuli it was dealing with would have a higher tendency to survive. To simplify that, if you've got two gerbils and one of their brains is wired to jump off every cliff it sees and the other's brain is wired to run away from cliffs, over time you're going to have more of the cliff-runners than the cliff-jumpers. Likewise, in humans, and tons of other primates and mammals in general, I'm sure, we've developed this ability to an incredibly advanced state. Not only can we interpret our immediate physical surroundings and compare them to what we've seen before and work from there, but we can actually run simulations in our mind to guess what MIGHT happen or why something might be the way it is, based only on partial knowledge of the subject. So, to hit on another point here, early polytheists and other pagan groups were acting in a very logical and sensible way when they came up with the idea that their was a sun god or a moon god or a rain god and that these gods controlled their crops, the hunt, their wives pregnancies, etc. These conclusions were based on the best available information at the time, they were just completely wrong.

So in that sense, I completely agree with you about some belief systems being "better" than others. It's not that it's better because The West (TM) thought of it, or because it's newer, it's better because, based on information that's been objectively collected, we've been able to explain pretty much everything that they had been using these gods to explain. Like the weather. On a side note though, choosing one culture or ethnicity or religion or whatever over another requires a very strict set of rules about what exactly you're judging. To just "x is better than y" is basically useless, because I don't know what it's better AT. To say "assuming we are seeking an objective truth, monotheism is MORE right than polytheism", while hard to prove, is at least saying something about how you should compare them. I only say this because some cultures that are "inferior" to ours in terms of things like availability of medicine, schooling, productive capacity, etc - are arguably better than ours at "raising families", co-existing with nature, etc. It just becomes a big subjective mess and there's no real way to sort out whose actually "better" without first establishing what your ultimate goal is. Judging cultures on their ability to put a human on the moon would yield different results than judging cultures on their ability to make good rice. I think...

The whats-harder-to-prove business -- logically, the person trying to show -something- has to provide evidence for that something. You can't prove nothing...it's the default state. The way I look at it, at one point in history, believing that there was one god who had done x,y,z for us made sense. It was the most reasonable thing we had. If you took all the evidence, that's actually what you came up with. Since then, that's changed. If you take all the objective evidence, you end up with evolution as a means of population, sex as the means of creating pregnancies, gravity as the force that holds this entire mess of rock and fluids together and keeps us from hurtling off into space, etc. So, monotheism, in my mind, is not thinking fourth dimensionally. It's stuck at that point in time where that was the best we could come up with, and is now attempting to compile evidence to support what it insists is the truth, instead of allowing the gathered evidence to dictate what the truth is.

As an aside, I'm about 100 pages away from finishing a book (A brief history of everything, by Bill Bryson) that attempts to catalog, in a somewhat popularized way, the history of scientific discovery and "how we know what we know". It's informative, and sometimes entertaining. Scientists have some of the most bizzare lives you can imagine. Anyway, there's a quote somewhere in there, talking about Darwinism, that's something like "Before 1860, you had no choice but to believe in god. It was the best thing we had - since then, if you still believe in god, you don't understand Darwinism". It was in a chapter that covered intelligent design, and discussed the people who couldn't figure out how things like eyeballs could have evolved, since they're so complex and couldn't possibly have formed at once but would be useless in smaller pieces. (The solution to that, by the way, is that they ARE useful in small pieces, just not pieces of modern eyeballs. Any light-receptor would be a huge reproductive/competitive advantage for an individual, and would certainly lead into an arms race that created more and more efficient eyes...)

On buddhism/karma/advancement -- I don't think that buddhism is more "advanced" that christianity/judaism/islam - but that it's more or less equally advanced, just along a different pathway. Let's say buddhits are apes and christians are dolphins. Both are pretty damn smart, but neither of them would be any good in the environment of the other. The base premises are different, the solutions and actions that follow are both advanced.

And finally, to conclude my morning volume of thought, on the objective-right-and-wrong thing... here's the spot where it's really really useful for people to have a god or some other guiding influence. Because honestly, without one, why is anything better or worse, moral or immoral, and so on, than anything else? Well, I've always been keen on consistency, and since I'm taking the no-god position, I've got to take the no-objective-right-wrong position. To explain that, I'm just going to say that everything is a big jumble of atoms, and they're interacting with eachother, so there is no right or wrong, there's just things and the way they are. You could view that as a zen moment, or a big cop out, or both. And then you'll say "so Matt, you can go around killing and raping and it's not wrong!?" - and I'd say "no, it's not 'wrong', in any fundamental, universal sense - but in as much as I'm particular manifestation of these atoms that are interacting with eachother, and in that they've arranged themselves into proteins and cell walls and genetic code that forms me, and in that this particular collection of stuff has evolved in such a way that it's behaviors tend to reward preserving it's own life, passing on its genetic code and so on, it would be to my advantage not to go around killing and raping people, because for one, it might get me killed or raped in return, killing someone else with similar genetics as mine (basically all of you), would knock my genes down in the gene pool as well, raping someone has a whole slew of non-positive side effects, and so on and so on".

So, again, to the extent that you could agree on what a particular individual, societal, species, or other collective GOAL or PURPOSE was, you could come up with logical ideas that could be viewed as "right" or "wrong" within the context of meeting that particular goal.

On the slug thing - if slugs are god's creatures (are they or aren't they!??), and they have souls, I think you COULD come back as a slug and know your past. Or are you implying that the abilities of an individuals souls hinge on the hardware of the individual, and that since you've got a more developed neural network than the slug, you're capable of supporting a more knowledgeable soul??

If there were a generational memory across reincarnations, I'd want to go for the record of lives. I'd try to become a fruit fly or something like that OVER and OVER again, and just reel off the generations. Fly into windows, spider webs, etc. That would be hot.

Side note - karma systems fail to account for population growth, I think.

Thank you, Andy. You are this web site's new hero.

Bess, I determine who is and who isn't this website's hero.

That being said, Andy is the official super-hero of this site (feel free to specify your super power...getting peed upon like a commie is definitely one of them), because he once sent me potato chips from the Pacific Northwest.

Matt, so long as the total number of living organisms on earth stays constant, the kharma system can work. Assuming that humans are the highest form of existence, the increase in humans must indicate that the world-kharma system is increasing with time, ie Kharma is not a conserved quality like say energy. There are less tropical forests now than before, as many species of plants and animals have transcended their previous existences and become starving children in Bombay. Mass extinctions cause a problem though don't they? It's impossible for actual world events to be reconciled with the destruction of souls due to behavior.

I can't answer every point, as the amount of wordage per reply is increasing exponentially.

But sometime later I'll try to get to a couple of them.

I'm envisioning some sort of other-worldly "soul queue", in which we could deposit the souls of beings whose current physical vessels had been destroyed either by natural occurences, sudden catastrophe, or otherwise. The soul could spend time in this queue until an appropriate physical body could be found (while observing the world's conservation of energy laws to do this), and then allocated appropriately.

That being said, I'd implement the soul queue storage with some sort of tree structure. A bag would require too much iteration to find the next soul to send out, a linked list would constantly be re- and un- linking itself to maintain data integrity after a soul had left, but a b-tree could be built which would keep a balance of souls stored, and have an obvious mechanism to find the next appropriate soul. I might write pseudo-code to do this, because I'm a ridiculous person.

I say just a straight up FIFO chain.

What if you're deluged with souls that deserve "good" bodies, but have an absence of acceptable new bodies to use for these souls?

In a FIFO system, your entire collection of souls needs to sit and wait for the souls who got there first to be placed in the correct bodies before any of them can, regardless of availability.

It's like a "one-in, one-out" line at a bar. Regardless of if you just need to pop in real quick to see if your friend is there, you need to wait on the line like everyone else. Perhaps a FIFO system that had a separate "VIP" line for souls with higher precedence for body selection...

A few things here.

Andy, well said my friend. Buddhism, if anything is one of the most open and "forgiving" religions I've encountered--I think about Jack Kerouac's assertion that he was both Catholic and Buddhist, because his Catholic belief in God helped him to follow the paths of good living in Buddhism. He wasn't necessarily a GOOD Buddhist, but that's neither here nor there. But Jesus, Son of God or not, was an excellent Buddhist, and I'll always respect him and his teachings in that respect. He was a stand-up fella.

And about Karma--consciously, you don't remember your past life. But somewhere in your soul, YOU DO. Deep down. One of the major purposes of Buddhism is to recover this knowledge, bring it from the subconscious to the conscious, and atone for it. About population growth: I believe (but I may be, and probably am wrong) that according to Buddhism/Hinduism new souls do in fact get created, that we're not constantly dipping from the same pot, so to speak. So that while old souls are being raised to Nirvana, these ones are just starting out on their long journey.

Secondly, we're discussing in my mythology class about the many direct connections between happenings in the Pentateuch/Old Testament and happenings in myths and religions of the surrounding region, such as those of the Hittites, Sumerians, Assyrians, Akkadians, and Babylonians; groups far older than Judaism, and FAR older than Christianity. It becomes clear, looking at these connections, that when Judaism began to form, they took many of the myths that surrounded them and made only one simple change: many gods to one god. Just as the Greeks appropriated the same myths and created their myth structure, only keeping the polytheism.

The best example is the Universal Flood. All Middle Eastern traditions have this myth: the gods/God get pissed at humanity for their impiousness and all-around filth, and decide to wipe them out, saving only one man or one couple, pious to the end, to repopulate the species. In Judeo/Christian myth this is Noah; in Sumerian it's Zisudra; in Akkadian it's Atrahasis; in Greek it's Deucalion and Pyrrha. And looking into the past to find a founder, like Abraham and Israel, is the same as the Greeks looking back and tracing their heritage to Hellen and his three sons, fathers of the three Greek tribes. And just as the Greeks called themselves Hellenes so they retroactively decided to name their founder Hellen, so did the Israelites name their founder Israel, and the Semites Shem.

How do you account for all of this? The New Testament is a completely different question, one I don't know how to get in to.

Lastly! I'm of the firm belief that God (or whatever you want to call it) doesn't really care how we worship, whether it's through Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, the multitude of Native American religions, or Greek goat sacrifices, just as long as people keep him/it with them, in their hearts, and remember, and do good things in the world. And conversely, I bet he gets royally angry when people call him down on any or both sides of a fight.

All of this is giving me a serious headache. (I'm a girl, you know, and therefore possess an inferior brain, according to the ethics on which this web site is based.)

Matt, you need to write a friggin' book, STAT. Not just on this, but on pretty much anything -- using the god-as-a-partial-credit-giving-math-teacher metaphor widely.

Furstie, you talk the talk, but you've got to stop slipping in ancient biblical gobbledygook like "prideful" and "false idolatry" and shite. You've got me all captivated and almost convinced, and then, BAM! "Behold thou holy spiritus sanctus begat blah blah blah...." and I'm alienated. (By "me" here, I mean "the reader" in general.)

You're pretty much saying that the better/truer religion is necessarily the one practiced by the majority. You claim that since SO MANY PEOPLE believe in Christianity, it must be the real deal. But really what it comes down to is drama potential, especially in recent years. More people are willing to accept all of the biblical fables because they're wonderful stories involving these dynamic characters, as opposed to believing in some boring "polytheistic/animistic" story about how the sun god flies across the horizon in his chariot each morning to light the sky. To relate to religion, we need real people as examples. We need the possibility of Mary Magdalene being Christ's love interest. That's what excites us. That's what sells. The fact that any of it is/isn't true is superfluous.

And that's why Buddhism isn't as popular as it should be. It doesn't promise anything fancy. It doesn't allow you -- like in catholicism -- to feel the rush of committing crimes left and right as long as you go for weekly confession to be forgiven. Buddhism is a little too much for us at this stage of the game in society. It doesn't have the romance, the thrill we require. It doesn't fabricate as elaborately as we'd like it to, if at all. It doesn't have a catchy enough pitch line. It's not trying to be anything other than what it is.

Jack, how might I explain the flood thing? What if there actually was a flood...wouldn't that explain that everyone had a myth related to it?

Bess, what did I almost convince you of? I don't even remember what I was talking about, and I can't recall ever seeing a chink in that magnificent armor of yours.

It is, however, very hard for Christians to remove the instruction manual and still try to describe how the treehouse works. 90% of practicing Christians would not even attempt to remove the Bible from their arguments, but I realize that if you don't accept it as a useful premise, then I'm just begging the question by calling to it.

If I thought for a second that I could convince you of the historicity and inerrancy of the Bible, then it would be worthwhile for me to try that...if I could do that, then you'd be railroaded into believing everything that it said. I have convinced myself of that fact, but it took much more research than I could possibly convey on here, and you wouldn't take my word for it anyway. So, for me, I'm just trying to describe the treehouse since I've already built one of my own, but since you don't believe in the instructions, I'm being forced into uncertain and shaky philosophical ground, against those who are casting doubt into an area of thought where doubt is natural for anyone to have. Is it easier to raise doubts than alleviate them? In any aspect of life...

I don't pretend that I have the best logically consistent system. Without faith, one of those biblical concepts, none of it works. Sure, it's as internally consistent as any system out there (if it is true, it would have to be), but to convince someone through logical arguments without requiring from them an act of belief to bridge the gap is impossible.

I can't say that I ever implied that it's correct because more people believe it. If I had to estimate, I would say that there are precious few people in my category (category 2 as Matt ranked it earlier), and the "believers" in category 3 are societal fencesitters. They believe some things, but conform their views to what others think. If there is a true system, why should it conform to external opinions and changes? Believe it or not, outside of church and Bible study, I am a minority in every single situation that I find myself in. It's always a challenge to find someone who is infinitely resigned to a concept of faith. It's like closing your eyes and letting yourself fall, believing that you will be caught. Does the majority do that?

My problem with that whole historicity thing is that it's a load of garbage. There are so many Islamic documents that still have yet to be translated out of ancient Arabic that absolutely anyone who wants a Masters in religion need just learn the language and translate the document for instant thesis fodder. It's not like you can say these documents are any less authentic than the bible or it's sources.

All the Sutras, the Jakartas, the Dharma of the historical Buddha have ancient sources in text as well as the thousands upon thousands of ancient temples, statues, and otherwise sacred sites throughout Asia that contain inscryptions concerning the various forms of meditation and enlightenment. Again, these are no less verifiable than those sources of the Bible.

So to base your argument on the 'authenticity' of the Bible is absurd, you just can't argue that one religion is stronger than any other based on the historicity of the documents.

The only way you can argue the 'authenticity' of any religious document is by considering the source of the document. And I mean the physical author. Obviously, no one from any of these religions claims that any form of higher power PHYSICALLY wrote, inscribed, or carved these words - it's always a messenger. Therefore, no religion can ever claim correctness based on the source because in every case it's a dead human.

Mormons aren't just rediculous because they believe mecca is the middle of a salt flat. Their absurdity to us is for the same reason that holds true for the Nation of Islam: Elijah Muhammed is just about as credible a 'Prophet' as Mr Smith.

But these documents are just as historically accurate as anything else! No one can disprove that W.D. Fard really was living in the Detroit area in the early 1930s. And what's better is that we can prove Mr. Muhammed DID write that stuff.

As for shaky philisophical ground. I don't think anyone need back up their reasoning for BELIEVING in something. Faith is one of the greatest things that we as humans have, it saves us from our fears and often from falling into total emotional decay. Whether this be faith in scientific truth, divine truth, or the human heart, it's totally and utterly true.

Just don't tell me that your Bible is more authentic than anyone elses.

When I speak of the historicity of the Bible, I speak of it as accurately describing events as they happened. For instance, I would say that the life of Christ is historical and that the Bible records the history accurately. In order to make this claim, I compare the books of the Bible to external sources, and find harmony. Some external sources might claim that the whole story is bunk, but they still recognize that the story described was contemporaneous to the time described.

The Bible does have historical value. Jack spoke of the Hittites; their existence was not known until an attempt to debunk the Bible found them. The Bible can be shown to accurately describe history.

Most people haven't read the Bible, but if they did, they'd be surprised to find the amount of space devoted to cataloguing historical events. By confirming these events, one can gain confidence in the value of the Bible as a book which is attempting to record history. So, when we see historically verifiable events intermixed with accounts of miracles and other otherwise historically unverifiable occurrences, perhaps the accuracy of the historical portions lends credence to the miraclous portions.

That is what I mean by historicity.

The Book of Mormon is not historically verifiable because it speaks of events, places and people groups who did not exist. While the origins of the book are well known (some dude wrote it), the historical claims are fallacious. In that sense, yes, the Bible is more authentic.

Furstie, the bulk of all FICTION is "contemporaneous to the time described." So why would someone write something they're trying to pass off as FACT without casually slipping in mentions of events that everybody agrees really happened simultaneously?

I just read a novel that takes place in Rhinebeck, NY, present day. The setting is very real (the "rural" factor a BIT dramatized), though the characters are quite made-up. There's even this big snowstorm (in October, no less) that supposedly knocks out the area's power for, like, a WEEK, and nobody has electricity or can go anywhere, etc.

Did such a snowstorm ever hit Rhinebeck, NY in the mid-90s? I'm leaning toward not so much. But that's only because I'm from around that area, and it's only depicted as being in the middle of nowhere by former city-dwellers, which the author is. Throw in a couple "historic" references to the Poughkeepsie Galleria legitimately being closed-down, and it's easy to buy that there may have been a huge snowstorm in the Hudson Valley one October that wiped everything out for days. Even easier to buy if you're not from those parts. Does that mean we should let the storm go down in history as having happened?

Anyway, my point is that it's so, so easy to combine fact with fiction, and pass it off as either.

Incidentally, if anyone wants to check out the aforementioned book, it's Scott Spencer's "A Ship Made of Paper". Quality read.

Listen, I'm not saying the historical value of the Bible is invalid. What I am saying is that you can't assert that the miraculous accounts of the christian Bible are any more or less authentic based on the fact that it contains verifiable historical events.

Perhaps I should clarify my examples.

The stories of the historical Buddha, the Jakartas, and the Sutras of later Bodhisattvas, contain historical truths in the same way the Bible does. There are many stories/thoughts/meditations, written by ancient Buddhist monks, that are accurately dated. A healthy amount of Buddhist history and tradition has been passed down via temples and inscriptions on statues that can be easily dated and referrenced against the known history of the time as catalogued elsewhere.

For a matter of years, the 'inventor/discoveror' of Zen Buddhism receeded to a cave for meditation. This is accurately documented, it is known when and where he lived. The miraculous occurence happened when a young monk arrived, seeking to be taught. The master refused until eventually the young monk ripped his arm off to show his devotion and willingness for self-sacrifice. This is a miraculous occurence intertwined with accurate history.

The Nation of Islam, as a more recent example, outlines the visitation by Allah in the form of W.D. Fard. There is documented proof that this man existed in Detroit for a period of about three years, outside of this time-frame, there is nothing. This exactly corresponds to the story as told through the writings of the prophet Elijah Muhammed. Writings which show mixed accounts of true history and miraculous occurences upon which the Doctorines of the Nation are built.

I will go further to state that anything you can say to debunk the precise accuracy of the HISTORICAL events as told in these different cases, I can say to you in reference to the Bible. In both cases, however, this does not speak to the 'truth' of the miraculous occurences contained therein.

Furthermore, I find it hard to swallow any assertation that says one person's interpretation of FAITH is wrong based upon what that person puts his or her faith IN. For someone who seems to have such a distaste for communism, Eric, I'd think you'd be more open to true religious autonomy.

I will warn you that you are on a very slippery slope Bess.

You seem to be implying an intentional work of fiction. Someone wanted to create a new idea, make a new religion, change their rigid customs, or somesuch, and so they based a story around an existing person (namely Jesus) as their mechanism for accomplishing it...

So that sounds reasonable enough. But consider that only 1 of the 12 disciples (people who knew and followed Jesus, people whose historicity and death accounts are recorded in secular records) died of old age. Now, if you made up a work of fiction about Rhinebeck, would you not renounce your work of fiction even when faced with a death by crucifixion, UPSIDE DOWN?

The earliest Christians, people who knew Jesus and who knows His followers died bloody deaths. Do you really think they didn't actually believe the events? I make up stories sometimes. But if you put a gun to my family's and my head and said, "say that there was never a Golden Egg" I would tell them the truth. Why die for something which you don't believe to be true?

Jack, I'm going to assume you're a buddhism expert - do they make an attempt to justify the physical existence of the soul? Or is this just seen as something that "is", not to be questioned? If they do claim it's an actual physical - or energy, or whatever - in what container does it exist? How does it travel from host to host? What means does it use to transmit itself from host to host? where does it store the information about it's past lives? Not attacking here, just curious as to how they explain what seems like an obvious pitfall of the "soul/karma" idea...

Also, I find the idea that anyone could have a notion of how god (if there were one) would feel, think, or react to anything at all, to be completely absurd as well. There are two options here. Either you (like Jack) think that god does not care how you name him, so long as you mind him and "keep him in your heart" -- OR -- you're a bit more fundamentalist and believe that no other way EXCEPT your particular way of naming, conjuring and discussing how your god thinks/creates/imagines is correct. I claim that whichever side of this you take, you are simply coming up with a way of working which is most pleasant and comforting to you, based on no evidence at all. The only position I'd accept from a god-believer on this would be to say "no, I have no idea whatsoever on how god thinks, whether it's even 'thinking' as I know it, how time passes for god, how he feels about us doing things in his name, etc". I mean, if you're going to hold one irrational belief (that there's a god), at least don't claim to be an expert on what his views on things are.

Bess, if you give me a topic, or even a general area of inquiry, and a few months time, I'll send you a manuscript suitable for publishing. I ask only that it be published under a pseudonym - as there are certain people who would stand to benefit from my untimely demise, and placing myself into the public eye through authorship of a best-selling book might be just what they need to find me.

On the popularity-of-beliefs-as-marketing-tools thing - I agree with you, to a point. I think that while in some cases the "sexy commercial" quality of a belief system can be used to attract followers (ie, scientology, jews-for-jesus, crazy-subway-guys, etc) - it's more common that certain religions just get a lockdown on "mind markets", if you will. Christianity might have the best salesman and sales tools ever, but they simply won't penetrate the chinese "market", because the opportunity won't come up. Certainly, TV, the internet, and other things affect this...but then we get back to our free speech discussion, and who wants that. So the point is that for one, I agree with you that looking at numbers in a particular belief system is a lousy way to evaluate that belief system. I don't think anyone suggested that, but if they did, just look at the whole earth-is-flat thing. That being said, I think the relative numbers of people in different belief systems is based more directly on people's limited exposure to other systems, amount of time spent questioning their own, and access to conflicting evidence than it is on everyone taking some time out to evaluate their options and choose what they think is best. I'd like some numbers on that, if anyone has them. Percentage of people from culturally diverse and educated societies who "switch teams" religiously verse those from culturally isolated or conservative cultures who do. I'd also like to see it built out onto a US map, if you've got the time.

Furst, good point on the flood thing. The timing of the last large glacial melting actually meshes pretty well with the emergence of intelligent homo sapiens, so there might be something to having "Water that wiped out life" as a common "earliest memory" of different, geographically separate cultures.

Andy, you said "As for shaky philisophical ground. I don't think anyone need back up their reasoning for BELIEVING in something. Faith is one of the greatest things that we as humans have, it saves us from our fears and often from falling into total emotional decay. Whether this be faith in scientific truth, divine truth, or the human heart, it's totally and utterly true."

Usually, I would discuss the difference between believing something and having "faith" in something (again, I don't like using that term, but there's not a better one for what you mean), but that point about the total emotional decay is interesting. There's definitely a case to be made that people who belief in something larger than themselves, a purpose in life, a goal to existence, etc are more successful/productive that your average nihilist. In that sense, faith is probably an evolutionary selector, in that beings who tend to display it are more likely to spread around than beings who sit around in drunken stupors believing in nothing. That's one of the pitfalls of having that ability, I guess. Most animals can bounce along with no more objective than getting a meal, staying warm, and having kids all the time. Humans have the capacity to ask WHY, and, when driven to an all-consuming emotional breakdown into insanity, this capability would actually be selected against because everyone who could do it would be bashing their head with rocks all day long because they couldn't make heads or tails of the world. I think this is another great reason why god and religion were excellent tools, historically, to keep us from going mad. It's also why lots of scientists have gone completely mad trying to look past these things. I don't know if that's a genetic trait at all, but it's certainly related to chemistry and hormones and emotion, so at some level it must be.

Furst, we can say that the book of Mormon is fallacious because since it was written, we have VERY extensive archives of news reporting and other accounts of day to day life that simply rule it out. Unfortunately, we can't do the same for the bible. I'm positive that I haven't investigated this as thoroughly as you, but you must admit that it's hard to verify -thousands- of years of history and events when we haven't really had the ability to permanently archive things in more than a few places except since the guttenberg press or thereabouts.

Bess, that snowstorm is real. I remember it only because of my paper route. There are dragons, too. They're in Cornwall.

Andy, again with the communism! I swear, between your collectivist/socialist agenda and Bess' working for the Native Americans, I'm surprised anything gets done here at all...

My point about the flood has been misinterpreted. Whether a flood did or did not really happen is not my issue here. Although, if a massive-scale flood did indeed happen at some point in prehistory, I find it incredibly tough to believe it happened on such a scale that only one family survived out of surely many millions. But I digress. What I was really on about was how you can claim that Judeo/Christianity and only Judeo/Christianity has a correct interpretation of the myth, when it has been clearly identified as a simple derivation on a far earlier myth. Forget the Hittites; the Sumerian culture, a culture established in history by us with no preconceieved notions of debunking the Bible, had this myth written down in at least 3000 B.C. You can actually read the tablet. It's been dated. Its words are sitting in front of me right now. Did the Sumerians, despite being first in line, somehow get it wrong? And this is but one example of many.

The Bible itself (I'm talking Old Testament now) has been established by scholars to be essentially a collection, narrowed down and homogenized, of the many versions of Hebrew myths and laws that were floating around for so many years. They've found Hebrew texts of these myths in their various forms that predate the Bible. These aren't debunkers; just because they find faults doesn't mean it's their express purpose in life, to bring down Christianity. What I'm asking with all of this is: how can you call the Bible the Word of God when so much of it comes from sources outside and predating Judaism and Christianity?

I don't pretend to understand what God is thinking. I don't know if I even believe in God. What I meant in my last post is that the basic premise of every religion in the world is that if you pay attention to God, acknowledge him as a force for good in your life, good things will happen to you either in this life, in some other life, or in death. So to me it makes no sense to nitpick over how God is manifested in one person's mind versus another person's mind. As the Big Lebowski would say, "but that's just like my opinion, man."

I'm no expert in Buddhism, but I believe the concept of the soul is basically the same in Buddhism as in Christianity. In Christian terms the soul is a vessel, too, right? It carries information about the person, it helps in decision-making, it's what connects you to God. The Buddhist soul does the same things, it just has a bigger memory card. There's no explanation for this as far as I know--it just is. Also like the Christian soul the Buddhist soul, paradoxically, has a physicality that isn't physical at all.

I find this stuff very intriguing. I consider myself a spiritual person with faith in many things, but as far as religions go there isn't really one that suits me, so I've set myself to explore and question all that I can.

Matt and Jack -

The Buddhist soul is a wholly different thing from what Western society is used to thinking of it as. Instead of a soul at all, in fact, Buddhists belive in the Five Skandhas, or five forms of being. Each person's 'conciousness' is made up of different combinations of these Skandhas, and every time a person is reborn, these Skandhas form in different ways according to the person's Karma.

In this way, people are not reborn in the sense that their souls simply move on to a new body - it's rather a 'repositioning' of conciousness as dictated by these five forms of being.

Karma meanwhile, is sort of a universal thing. See, the Five Skandhas make up everything: that means the form that the universe takes, as well as the form that conciousness takes. These Skandhas are structured in a certain way, and transgressions (and I mean that in much the same way as sin) misalign our portion of these Skandhas from the universal structure. This is how, without a deity, transgressions are recorded.

Enlightenment is the final step in which a person's Skandhas are 'alligned' with the rest of the universe.

Buddhism is a complex thing, and I don't even understand a lot of it, but that's the best way I know to explain it.

I'm hereby naming Andy & Jack the official Mulder & Scully of this web site.

Jack - I think that the line, as delivered by the Dude, is actually "Yeah, well that's just your opinion, man". He says it to Jesus at the bowling alley after Jesus threatens them and says he's not scared of Walter's gun.

(people who have not seen this movie are now totally and hopelessly confused)

Andy - can I describe the buddhist "soul" (collection of skandhas) as a set of tumblers in a door lock? When they key of enlightenment passes through the door lock containing my skandhas, if they are such that they fit that key, the door will open and I will see...something? Or is that just another good example of someone coming up with a physical metaphor for something that can't really be viewed physically?

On a side note, I am no good at opening the door to my new apartment. I swear it's my key, but Seamus and Dowdell can open it fine, and me and saint simply can't. The only thing I can think of is that this is a clear indicator that growing up in close proximity to a catholic church somehow limits your ability to operate door locks down the road...

...Ok fine. I'd already alientated people who haven't seen The Big Lebowski, I just wanted to alienate people who aren't familiar with the geography of Goshen, NY or who these people I'm talking about are.

First premise:
Jesus is historically verifiable. The acts of the apostles are historically verifiable. The deaths of the apostles for Jesus' sake are historically verifiable. The apostles fully believed, and wrote it down, that Jesus was God incarnate, that He died for sins and that He rose from the dead on the 3rd day.

So, feel free to pick at that, but I take as first premise that Jesus was a supernatural being.

Second premise:
The same documents, produced by the apostles within starting 10 years after Jesus' death and extending to ~80 years after his death, state Jesus' belief in the tenets of the old testament. So a supernatural being "believed" in the history and law of the Old Testament.

Third premise:
Modern archeology typically confirms events of the Old Testament. Criticisms against it have been disproven and time after time the book exonerates itself. People groups emerge, cities appear, battles are documents, and the Bible continues to get it right. The book is historically viable as far as we can prove it.

Fourth premise:
A supernatural being believed in something historically viable and correct when it is possible to verify it. He believed this 2000 years closer to the actual events, in a pre-diaspora Israel where documents existed which modern scholars would drool over. As a result, there is extra credence given to the historically unverifiable (due to the assinine or individual nature of the stories) accounts.

Come to your own conclusion given those premises, or rewrite them for yourself.

Of the flood, I would then argue that there is an oral tradition...I could say that the Hebrews didn't write on stone tablets (they wrote on less permanent parchment)...I could say that the existence of an earlier account DESCRIBING THE SAME THING does not take away from the Bible story...I could say that names in different languages do not always translate the same in english (Jesus, after all, could also be translated as Joshua)...I could say a lot of things, and we could go on for days.

Does it occur to anyone else that a conclusion will not be reached?

There there, Furstie, nothing wrong with accepting defeat and slinking away with your tail between your legs. ;-)

Now let's discuss the fact that Jesus was actually a woman. (Actually, Matt, that's what you can write a book about!)

I'm just pointing out that one of the 19 of you will always have an argument to give me, and I will always have some response to give back. Frankly, I have a little bit of a caged dog syndrome going on here; it's coming from all sides. Even my biblically intolerant mother is getting on the act.

Whats more fun is that I could probably argue your side as effectively as most. I know most of your angles already, you're all pretty deterministic...that Buddhism as an evolved religion argument was new to me though, so that makes it worthwhile anyway. Plus Matt is always fun to argue with, as he typically sounds slightly less like the "always on the defensive because of my hidden belief in yet rejection of God" atheists that are most prevalent.

We know your angle, too, Furstie, and could argue from it likewise. I don't know about all y'all, but I've just been playing devil's advocate (no pun intended!)

Anyway, please check out this topic-related soundbyte: www.citywriters.com/annefrank.mp3. C'est tres, tres amusant.

You should see me at Bible study with the devil's advocating...I regurgitate half your everyones arguments and supplement it with scripture sometimes. It's fun, but there are always answers to it.

By the way, I read your Ayn Rand thing on Boland's page. Do you think she was happy with her life? Objective perhaps, for whatever that's worth, but at what cost?

Right...there will be no conclusion, or consensus. Nor should we expect one. No one has ever come up with a totally sound and untouchable proof for either side of the debate here, and even though I think I'm right, I don't think I've got such a proooooooooof.

I agree on that atheists thing. It's become "popular" to, at a minimum, say something like "Well, I think there's -something-, but I don't like the way any churches describe what it is, so I'm just 'spiritual'". Now, I'm not knocking that position at all - it's a perfectly legitimate belief - it's just that if that's your belief than you're never really arguing FOR anything, only telling other people why they're wrong.

A lot of people are also very uncomfortable with holding a set of beliefs where either their actual selves, their culture, humanity, animals, the earth, etc. are not at least /special/ or /valuable/ in SOME way. That's also reasonable to feel, since, since you are coming up with your belief system, it's natural that you accord yourself, in some sense, a position near the center of it.

On the other hand, my completely objective view basically holds that the only truth you need is that everything is energy - and some of it shows up as mass, and everything else is an extension of that. Morality, Love, Trust and Faith are nothing beyond electro-chemical reactions between your nerves.

Incidentally, I've got to rank the best ideas ever, in terms of understanding what's really going on here, as follows:
1- Darwin + friends coming up w/ evolution
2- Einstein coming up w/ the general theory of relativity basically just by thinking about it for a while
3- Newton / Leibniz for the laws of motion, calculus, etc.
4- The assorted historical contributors to general math, geometry, the idea of zero, etc

Let's not get into a debate over the definition of happiness, thanks. But yes, I believe that Ayn Rand was immeasurably, almost unrestrainably happy in life. But I'd say she also suffered from an equal amount of immeasurable, almost unrestrainable sadness/despair. Nowadays we call this "bipolar" or "manic", but in my opinion that's how life SHOULD be, and for many, IS. Is anything in between even worth feeling? A general singy-songy sense of vague contentment mixed with the occasional bad hair day just isn't for everyone, especially if you're a super-brilliant literary genius/philosopher.

well it looks like my last comment didn't get posted. so here it is again.

jankowski,
have you ever read "Darwin on Trial"?

Eric - You're right, there's never a conclusion to this argument.

Matt - I was just twisting the original Dude quote to make it fit in there...further alienation on our parts.

Eric and Matt - I'm not an atheist. I don't think it's a fair or appropriate term for me. I'm just still working on it--religion, that is. I was raised in a household with two parents, both Presbyterians, who were totally turned off to the idea of religion by their over-zealous parents. So I had no belief system to be a part of automatically. These days, my general feeling is that their is a God. But calling it God is problematic for me, because giving it that title anthropomorphizes it, makes it into a being, whereas I think of it more in a Buddhist sort of way--an energy, a "universal soul" perhaps, that we're connected to. Sounds hokey, yes, but it's really not very different than the Christian God, just more formless, more passive. It's hard to explain. It may sound like wishy-washy cop-out pop-religion to you, but it's not. It's hard defining your beliefs from square one. I devote serious thought to it often, and I watch it play out in daily life.

And since I am arguing for something, which is my own personal belief system, I'm not simply talking others down. Faith is great. I don't question anyone's faith in God, only their faith in religion. I understand for some people those things are one and the same, but for me they aren't, and that's where I'm coming from. Eric, it seems like you're a thoughtful guy and that you've given time to questioning your religion, and it's made your devotion stronger. I respect that. I'm just pushing more questions your way, which in the end, is a pretty fruitless task for both of us, as you said. But I still feel I have to do it.

Kinda funny, this whole thing, since I don't know any of you 'cept Andy...

Carl, I've never read that book. My quick research shows that it's a critique of Darwinism based on lack of fossil evidence, the intelligent design business, etc.

Is there a particular point from the book you were going to throw at me - or are you just suggesting I read it?

Well, this is on the verge of getting mushy, as everyone makes nice with everyone else.

Jack, I know a bunch of people you probably know, from my time in Flagstaff...There was Andy, Lindsey, Peter, Mark, Andrew and some other kid. All of them seemed like good folk, and I doubt Andy tramps about with anyone that isn't a clean cut conservative like himself.
If you never stop honestly searching for truth (if you area really "mulder" as my unofficial title dispenser Bess would say...as Andy is obviously scully) and you don't find the same truth that I have, then that's more power to you. It is my belief that someone with an open heart will arrive upon the same conclusions I have, just because if you search for truth, sometimes you actually find it.

Carl/Matt (Jankowski):
Matt posted something a long time ago...about monkey and typewriters creating a single line of Shakespeare. Do you still have that, Matt?

I read it and it made me seriously doubt the standard theory of evolution. There just aren't enough transitionary fossils. I was wondering if you had read it and what you thought of it, because I have no idea how darwinists/evolutionists have responded to it and I wanted to hear the other side of the story.

The fossil issue has a few parts. First, is that it's very hard for something to become a fossil. It has a lot to do with the manner of death of whatever you want to fossilize, the area it died in, and whether there was enough volcanic ash or other preserving chemistry around it to preserve it, and that it was lucky enough to, despite having been shifted around by continental shifting and general land movement, to stay in one piece -- and then be discovered. I read something that it could be expected that, with current expected rates of what fossilizes, if all the people alive on earth right now were to die in one singular, extraordinary catastrophe, we could expect maybe 100 or so of us to be fossilized AT ALL, and of those, an exploring group of aliens or future humans would be lucky to find or two. Now, those are obviously partially made up numbers - but the reasoning as to why it's hard to fossilize something is sound.

That's not really an answer to your question - but it's a problem that archaeology, biology and zooology all have to deal with, and as a result it affects studying darwinism/evolution.

As to the actual problem of their not being enough transitory states of animals with the fossils that we DO have, assuming we've recovered an adequate sample of fossils to be able to make that observation, there are a few reasons why these fossils wouldn't exist. For one, since the mutations that create speciation are necesarily related to reproductive fitness, it's unlikely that you'd find a lot of animals with -failed- mutation efforts, simply because they would only be around for a short amount of time, and therefore wouldn't show up much, if at all, in the fossil record.

That still leaves the issue of watching the progression of mutations that WERE successful, and did make it into one species or other. A somewhat relevant example (I'm not making this up, I read it somewhere) would be the Israelites walking across the desert. They went 200 miles in 40 years. That's only 24 yards per day. 1 yard per hour. 3 yards per hour if we allow them a sleep schedule. Now, no one believes this is how they moved. They took 40 years, so clearly there were some stop overs, town formations, random wanderings, etc mixed in there. In fact, on a day to day view, they were probably moving around in what seemed like a completely nonsensical way. Only w/ the macroscopic view can you see the true progress that was made. The parallel there, is that you wouldn't expect to find evidence of israelis at EVERY point in this journey. You'd expect to find evidence at the more or less stable stopping points that they lived at for years at a time, and very little evidence in the comparatively quick travel times in between.

You basically need to allow for slow, macro-view mutation, with periods of rapid arms races in between.

The monkeys-typewriters thing just basically says - "given enough time, an infinitely large group of monkeys banging away randomly on an infinite set of typewriters would eventually produce the complete works of shakespeare". Or a similar form to that effect. This applies to assorted scientific ideas that require very specific circumstances to enable a theory to work. Like the whole "forming basic, reproducing, life-bound structures from a 'chemical soup'". Given enough time, and the right circumstances, it's bound to happen. And once it does, it takes off from there.

The difficulty in fossilization was brought up in the book, but I am still not nearly convinced. For one, the example with the Israelites is completely different. We know, through experimental observation, that things cannot teleport (excluding quantum tunneling effects). We can use this evidence to deduce that the Israelites did not warp from camp to camp. We, however, do NOT have evidence (ok fine, maybe one or two debatable fossils) that life forms have evolved to fill in those many gaps between the fossil record. We therefor cannot logically say they evolved into each other.
Your monkey-typewriter idea is very double edged here. Given enough time and enough species shouldn't there be enough fossils to seamlessly trace the evolution of at least ONE species for a few million years?
But, the monkey-typewrite idea really is not a very good explanation at all. First, the life time of the universe is not infinite. If you put a billion monkies at type writers and let them pound away I am quite sure that the universe will end long before they can come up with an act of Shakespeare, or the Pachelbel Canon. This idea is how unbreakable code is made. It is so heavily encrypted that the universe would end long before any comptuer could come close to breaking it.
Here is a quote from Fred Hoyle Phd, a mathematician and astronomer.

"…Life cannot have had a random beginning… The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in 10 to the 40,000th, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup."

Matt, I believe the point of the link that you had was that it was not possible. I think they replaced monkeys with every atom in the universe and got each of them typing one keystroke a second for 13 billions years, and then they found that there was some minute chance that even the first sentence of Romeo and Juliet would be created.

Do you have any concept where that link is?

My Monkeys

Editor's Note:
The original link length exceeded the allocated space for the recent comments section. So I htmlized it.

It might have been this - http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,58790,00.html - but I can't find it in a quick search of the archives.

The thing about that monkey thing - is that it's not meant to be taken literally. Clearly, we could not support infinite monkeys. We'd run out of bananas. The gist of the idea is that, in things where time is not really an issue (like sitting around waiting for something to form), you only need to show that, given enough chances for it to have happened, and the right materials for it to have happened, over a LOOOOOOONG period of time, it would happen.

On the tracing a species business -- I'll concede that there is NOT a fossil-by-fossil record of the exact progress of one particular species. At the same time, the best dating techniques are only accurate to within about 100,000 years or so, which, on a geological/evolutionary scale, is a mere blip on the radar. In fact, something that happened in that short of time would be viewed as essentially instantaneous from a geological standpoint. Look at your arm. Consider the start of time to be your shoulder. Smash your fingernail into your desk, or run a nail file across it (for your own safety) -- you've just destroyed the entirety of human existence, and then some.

The unbreakable code thing - that only applies to a brute force attack. Usually, codes of exceeding difficulty to brute force are broken by more intelligent methods, like finding flaws in the algorithm, or compromising the key generator, or what have you. That's not relevant at all here, I'm just an encryption geek.

The enzyme/life/random thing - the principles of natural selection and evolution through mutation ccan also be applied to non-organic life. Like diamonds, for example. Diamonds replicate themselves by making exact copies (well, by bonding to foreign chemicals in such a way that more of the total mass can be looked at as being "diamond". They have a certain rate of mutation (flaws in diamonds), and continue to pass their traits (the exact chemical bond alignment theyre in) on to their "young". It's just that all of this happens on such a mind-numbingly slow speed that it's nearly impossible to imagine. Same thing with river mud actually. Muds that are more prone to binding to other muds will form local "mud populations" on the bottoms of riverbeds, and, over time, turn non-mud things into part of the larger mud structure, through low level chemistry. Now, no one would claim that muds or diamonds were intelligent life - but the mechanisms for establishing and spreading their populations is similar - just very much prolonged compared to what's an already very slow process amongst intelligent life.

I don't see how diamonds or mud are good examples of natural selection.

Can the structure of a diamond affect how often it passes on its traits? I don't see a mechanism here. If I have two different diamonds in the same environment will produce "young" faster?

that should read "If I have two different diamonds in the same environment, will one produce "young" faster?"

Matt, it's true that few things become fossils. But you see, there are fossils, they exist. So obviously you get fossils despite the statistical improbability...so the fact that that aren't transititionary fossils isn't described particularly well by your thought.

Feel free to use the word "puncuated" in your answer.

Furthermore, I think that animals are much more likely to be fossilized than humans. When was the last time you even saw a tar pit, let alone thought about jumping in. Humans aren't typically in the same situations that fossilized animals were in...because we're smarter.

The missing fossil thing was just a note, not really supporting my point. If anything, it hurts the evolution theory (as you've both pointed out), because there's less evidence than we'd like to have to confirm our ideas. There are probably an absurd number of species who have never been fossilized at all, simply because they didn't exist in an environment that would lead to that. And yes, people have this knack for envisioning scenarios where they'd die - and staying away from them. Except those people who live near volcanoes...I never understood those people.

The punctuated equilibrium people...I was getting towards that w/ the 100,000 years thing and then forgot about it.

You've got the "gradualists" - who actually would believe that the Israelies walked at a more or less constant rate for 40 years. The "punctuationists", who would believe that they packed up and moved 5 miles, stayed there for 3 years, did it again, etc. - and the "saltationists", who would believe that the israelis woke up one morning and BAM, found themselves 5 miles from where they were yesterday, all at once.

What about shrimp??? - http://www.godhatesshrimp.com/

Eric, correct me if I'm wrong, but..

These shrimp people have shown they have never actually *read* the Bible. If they they did they would know that there have been a few different aggreements between man and God (covenants) and differing rules to go along with them. The last one involved Jesus (it's just about as fair an agreement as you could ask for) which means the laws God told the anicent Israelites to live by have changed. This is why, when Jesus is asked what is the greatest commandment he says,

'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.'This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

Not that Jesus ignores the question and gives two commandments, not one. If the law had not changed with Jesus do you not think that He would at least list the 10 Commandments?

God no longer cares what we eat (Paul says so in Romans 14) but God still DOES care about homosexuality, (once again, Paul says so Romans 1).

The Old Testament Law still exists, Jesus just said that we were being legalistic about it...dietary laws and hygene laws were clarified by Jesus, and you're right, Peter and Paul lifted the eating restrictions quickly.

Your last sentence sums it up well from a biblical point of view.

Religion exists to make people feel better about what they can't explain, mainly because as human beings the unknown is very scary.

I guess for a lot of people it is simply easier to accept some explanation (and the dogma it inevitably accompanies) than to make up their own minds.

For those people, we will ask one of the smartest people whoever lived what he thinks about it:

http://condor.stcloudstate.edu/~lesikar/einstein/Einstein2b.html

Sorry about the spacing.

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