forufes

moontanman, i see you always miss the point, which is why i usually don't reply to you. yup, glad that was simple enough. asking about God's name in a stage of evidence validation for god and hoping it would pass as anti evidence is fallacious. those definitions must have something in common to be all called god. that common ground is the target of evidence providing. saying there is no any god in general because you can't pick one from the list is as i said, fallacious. we are aware of your ignorance of the subject however, that does not make the witnesses disappear.

i think the op can be something like an inverse loaded question. that list of yours which length makes me cower in fear is a list of proposed names for god. pretty irrelevant to whether god exists or not. let's find god, then find a suitable name for him from that very long list. saying a god doesn't exist because people call him different names is like saying a car didn't pass a certain road because the witnesses differ in their accounts of its color. but nice try though, you get points for hard work

atheism is a couple of things for me.. -it's a reaction stemming from the feeling of deception upon one's discovery of some contradictions in a religion he may even not have chosen, and so disbelieves in theisms altogether, or god. so instead of looking for different answers that may fit his troubling questions, he escapes by denying the question altogether. -in the face of the harsh "realities" atheism forces it's adherents to accept, it drugs them with a large dose of ego to cope with them, and believe they are mentally more capable than the commoners and sheeple of the human race, enough to live "happily" with such realities. an example would be the fact that all what we do according to atheism is, quite simply, for naught. -in the spirit of the saying "when your only tool is a hammer, every problem seems like a nail"... ..."when your only tool is science, some nails seem like they do not exist" science by definition deals only with what can be demonstrated and repeatedly[plus other criteria]. when one cannot think but by the scientific method, he is rejecting all aspects of reality which don't fit the scientific criteria, this of course is done only on hand picked subjects like god, but unless all atheists don't believe in history, they are accepting in their lives many things which fail the scientific test. then they proceed to worship the "how" they've studied so much instead of the "who", and assign to science the characteristics of god, from being behind the existence of the universe to being the most beautiful and amazing thing in our lives, as many admit publicly...a-theists indeed.. i believe agnosticism is the way to be, not only can you not prove god's non-existence, but the journey in search for god considering its importance is not one to end in an indifferent state(at best) such as atheism, agnosticism is the state between atheism and religion... which religion, that's yet to be determined.

maybe she was too surprised to see you at the cafe that she blundered, after absorbing the fateful meeting[hours], she vented her true feelings in an email, sounding to have difficulty at accepting that what happened was true.. just go for it man

see now you're just replacing "god did it" with "science did it" if a dolphin sheds its skin and spreads tentacles and shoots laser beams from its eyes then "what else could it be other than biology?" bravo buddy..bravo..

so if -hypothetically- a dolphin starts playing wii, that's just biology? pure and simple?

it's very simple imho yoda; it's hard to imagine that something beautiful or complex to come from nothing, it's simple laymen logic. however, some say that with very long periods of time, those more than a million time our lifetime, time durations hard to even comprehend or measure with our felt time scale, small changes can build on each other, slowly and slowly till they make up the fabulous awesome thing. however, as the dolphin keepers said, the dolphins didn't know the trick at first, and picked it up in a matter of few years if not less. that is different from how nature is said to do it's work, slowly and continuously. don't you agree? i think i've explained this. you might wanna rethink this. it's just a view from a different angle, a possible one to say the least. next thing we know dolphins will speak to us and tell us god exists and we'll just say that they're intelligent enough for our neuroscientific theories to apply to them, and that their neocortex has been hijacked too! but seriously, i understand that dolphins are smart, but this here is a stretch, that's why in my first sentence in this thread i said it's a choice, whether to stretch it and say it's normal or behold the scene with awe is up to the person's "beliefs", religious they were or anti religious. thanks for the benefit of the doubt what i meant is that the complexity of that action doesn't have much biological description to it.. that's all. i'm not saying that there's no place for playing as a behavior in biology, just that considering this special "playing" behavior's complexity, it's not given the proper or adequate amount of..."answers"[?]

the pics i tried are both big in size and dimensions, it gives a red error message that "The file you uploaded is too large." as for theicon, it shows this

yup, the blue square with the v that looks like a square root. also image resizing for uploaded profile pics doesn't seem to work, guess i gotta do it manually.

AWWWWEEESSSOME!! it's reaaal great..thanks a million guys..real refreshing..like christmas come early. one thing i'de hope get fixed, many forums based on vbulletin show the same mini icon on tabs, making you confuse tabs of different forums, scienceforums used to have that atom icon, now it doesn't, so i'm mixing it with tabs of other forums.. but otherwise this thing is terrific.

WOW! i was gonna say before i saw the video that it's merely a choice, you see what you want to see..but man, now that i've seen it, there's just no way "nature" could've done that. i think because the "billion of billion of years" trick isn't exactly applicable here to erase the awe at such beauty.. you see, human abilities are more advanced than what we saw, and so are many other animals' abilities, but those were always there, we don't remember when did we acquire them, so it's easy for some people to come and say those amazing abilities came from nothing actually, and cover it up by "billions and billions of years" to answer the bafflement at their claims' illogic. but here, we saw it in the making, an aquarium with dolphins who never knew that complex beautiful trick, then one learns of it, the others catch on, now they're all doing it.. and in as short as a human's lifespan to notice it.. no billions of billions of years, no natural selection for the fittest to reproduce, not much evolution..just some smart animals doing a smart trick because they can do it, similar to when one of our children learns to walk on his hands, then the rest of the kids in the block follow suite, but animals... just that. no biology, no science. no seriousness and race survival..just playtime..

what if i believe in god but don't like america bullying others?

some thoughts; -many of the users who really deserve the user awards.. i couldn't remember because they don't have avatars..as a matter of fact, thats usually a sign of one's seriousness in coming here(or that they're too dumb to post an avatar..) that they don't really much care for being remembered as the people behind the words..for their words to get all the light.. which is truly the most beneficial for a discussion forum with the goal of knowledge sharing. -were the mods and experts excluded so they don't take all the positions or so they could keep thinking they would take all the places if they allowed in? -why did only few people participate here?

replace [religious beliefs] with: [law enforcement system] [parental upbringing] or, in this case... isolating themselves solely into their state constitution perspective? or, in this case... isolating themselves solely into their parents' perspective? this whole thing is a joke... god tells you you do good, you get good, you do bad, you get bad... that makes people listening to him suffering from the stockholm syndrome? same for parents? same for the police and judicial system? but then again, religion was once hijacking us, now it's taking us hostages... so we get it, no need to keep sending the message with different wording..religion is evil and horrible, and not only that, science is writing it all over the place, and you're the only one with the x-ray sight to warn us about it:-).

for the OP; so what role does your god play in your life? and if he can't, then you won't? how are the two related? vice versa will be asserted by a layman religious person.(it's just a theory) what i'm saying is; philosophically, this is an argument from ignorance. it slowly dies away?

which is what democratic countries do[?]

lol, ok look at it this way; a drunk doesn't like pain, especially huge amounts of it, he also wants to live long. he also likes to enjoy cheap beer. now, if given the choice between getting liver cancer and dying early or living sober, he'd chose the latter. however, not being aware of how they affect each other would result in him voting for one who allows alcohol to one who doesn't, albeit the latter being suitable more for him by his own standards. that's where doctors come in as parents who say that candy is good but not worth the dentist's drill. democracy removes the parents and lets the kids vote.. maybe my examples are to an extreme but i'm sure you get the point:-). the knowledgeable will not tell the commoners what is better and what is worse,they will not choose for them, rather they will help the commoners realize their own choices more realistically. like advisors or salespeople[yeah right:D]

yup. i also have some points regarding the subject of this thread, can i post them here?

hmm..how do i figure... let's consult (for me it's return to)wiki, shall we? i chose this one although the others worked fine too. you can't dismiss(or call for the dismissal of) a person's current argument because of his previous arguments, simple as that.

or is it not? i'm not exactly willing to debate something here, it's just something that's been stuck in my head for sometime. if you choose what the majority chooses, you're saying what the majority chooses is right. that's wrong of course. a handful of smart people are able to and should decide what's better for the rest. iow, many people are like children, they need grownups to look after them and overwrite their "wants". an experienced advisor shouldn't have the same voice as a cook or a cab driver.

you wouldn't tell them there was a science-based argument elsewhere unless you thought that's how this one should be and how it's not..or are you having a certain number of views for your baby thread in mind to be reached? THAT, is the definition of an ad hominum. i don't care(neither does anybody, including you supposedly) about the debater's other views and other said false arguments, discuss only the present argument here, not the arguer nor his previous arguments. no problem luke.