Praise be to Zeus!!!! and his son Apollo who sent a plague upon the Danaans (Greeks) when Agamemnon stole the daughter of one of his high priests (Chryses) as a spoil of war and would not return her by Apollo's own bidding after his priest’s prayers!!!!!!
Consequently, this caused the feud between Prince Achilles and King Agamemnon when Achilles was told by the diviner and visionary of Zeus (Calchas) the cause of the plague upon Agamemnon's soldiers and Achilles told Agamemnon to return the priests daughter.
King Agamemnon, furious, returned her but took Achilles' girl (whom was also a spoil of war) – as having to give away his own was unfair!
And here in the tale of the Iliad via mortal prayers, the various different gods show favour to the various different warriors, commanders and kings and a war of sorts breaks out in heaven and on earth as the gods bicker and quarrel over the outcome of the overall situation and Zeus tries desperately to restore peace to Olympus . . .
(Ahhhh) It's fun being a 24 year old narcissist genius with a buff-bod, you know?
It gets you laid a lot in the holidays, but the girl's find the pillow-talk of Transcendental German philosophy really off-putting (I don’t advise it, Wandering Gnome).
Wandering gnome, wherefore art thou? Gnome? Where is my half-wit little gnome?
Gnome? By Jove! Wherefore art thou?
By Jove! (Jove: Chapman’s name for the Greek God Zeus in his Shakespearian translation of Homer’s Iliad – I've read that one, too).
For the layman (to whit, for the gnome: stick with Fitzgerald’s translation) or rent that brain-vomit with brad-pit called 'Troy'
Would that we could remove the concept of 'religion' from 'God', ey, Charlos? For starters, my man!
Let us imagine we were all Greeks 1000 years B.C.
We would be brought up to believe in Zeus, 'the father of Gods and men'.
We would believe in Apollo, son of Zeus and master archer of the silver bow!
In Athena, the grey-eyed daughter of the god of heaven: the father of gods and men!
In Hephaestus, master artificer also seated in the hall of Olympus!
In the goddess Hera, and Odysseus etc.
And these beliefs would be passed and would pass and did pass from generation to generation, and were believed in without question.
UNTIL
something interesting happened . . .
Around about 750 B.C. Homer (of whom little is known) composed 'The Iliad' and at some point Hesiod 'The Theogony'
And the first philosophers were a couple of Centuries thereafter born, for after witnessing these tales of men and their own mythical Gods watching over their actions, they began to question if these Gods of their's were actually REAL and therefore a sufficient explanation of the given world.
In 570 B.C. Xenophanes is recorded as having out-right stated as a bold refutation: 'the gods have been made in man's own image!'
And so each one of you Dogmatised fools one day will look back on your 'son of God', not Apollo (son of Zeus), but Jesus (son of Jehovah), who could walk on water, and heal people with his hands, and turn water into wine, and restore a severed ear, and was born of a virgin womb and of an immaculate conception . . .
and see that it is nothing but a mythology built up around a wise man and great philosopher who made the fatal error of preaching his philosophy (love of wisdom) to a rabble of dogmatised blockheads, dullards and fools such as yourselves instead of committing it to paper and leaving his wisdom intact to mankind’s posterity like the great ‘wisemen’ before him, Plato, Aristotle, from whose teachings he himself took and learnt: ‘know thyself’ IS PLATO’S! 'Do unto another as you would' etc was also said B.C.
One day you will all awake from your non-sense.
For all the idiots expounding dogmatic nonsense as refutations of academia and science on these threads, I quote to ye Homer's Iliad: 'By the will of Zeus due order in debate!'
And I, a philosopher born, assert: whether you believe in God or not, that if you seek an explanation of this world, keep thy eyes solely thereon.
Sir, I would much appreciate if you went back and read the two posts I addressed to your notion of man as the worst adapted to survive on the planet and reconsider or reconfirm your conviction to me.
Furthermore, I would like to say regardless of our differing views, that you and your posts embody the essence and feeling of a true Christian and therefore everything I find to be praise-worthy to no end of the accomplishments of the life of that great man Jesus Christ who, while I do not accept as my personal savoir or as the son of God, I do accept as a great, wise and brilliant human being and teacher of mankind whose teachings and tragic life have helped forward the human race in its understanding of its huge predicament.
I applaud you and respect you, sir - one way or another.
But I find there is so much more to seek and discover from other great teachers of mankind to TEACH us how to live. And that Christ, and even The Bible, is a limited resource to me.
These words ‘an eye for an eye makes the world blind’ - I would like to impart to you if you have not come across them before. They could easily have come from Christ himself. They were said by Mahatma Ghandi in his Autobiography upon whose cover is written the words ‘God is Truth’.
I have always kept these three words close to me.
God is truth: and this, sir, is how I seek him. And I am somewhat of a mercenary in doing so, if you can forgive that.
Some several pages ago I remember you said ‘be as Christ-like as possible’
I give assent to the fact that no man who truly strives in this endeavour can go morally wrong if he understands that there was only one true Christian, and he died on the cross - and that there is no such thing AS a Christian, only an aspiring one.
And that is my own philosophy on your religion which I impart to you with all respect, sir, as the clear ambassador of it that you are.
I am not a bad man, sir, but I am an unapologetic, ruthlessly self-appointed mercenary of truth and I am willing to burn in the fires of hell for all eternity if that is my punishment for forsaking every religion on Earth other than the worship of the search for the sanctity of TRUTH.
Since I keep those three words of Gandhi so close to me:
Truth is my God, and my life is my search for Him in His many manifestations of it.
How narrow American minds have become, how far-removed from ‘reality’, from ‘nature’, from their ‘roots’ – from WHERE we come from, from what we ARE. From what great human beings and pioneers of knowledge have had to teach us of what we are. And how they take the limits of their own narrowed-view for the limits of not only the world’s but the whole of mankind’s history and even pre-history – as if man is and has always been this soft weak little ’ling hunched over a keyboard over whom society in its best intentions and in HIS ‘best interest’ has set-laws over him like a garrison in a conquered town and made him feel guilty of his own natural impulses and desires it has so strived to suppress.
Make NO mistake!
Man is the most fully capable, physically equipped, suited and astonishingly - nay, astoundingly! - adaptable survivalist in the history of the world. He made it through an ice age!!!!!
And if the dodo was better adapted to survival than man, and man is the least adapted to survive ‘in nature’, then I give assent to the fact that: all wood burns, therefore all that burns is wood.
YOU – a meek and mild Christian (all credit to you) may be torn apart by a lion; a Zulu youth used to have to go out bare-foot clothed in a lion-cloth, find one and kill it with an assegai before he was allowed to ‘go into the women’ and become a man (have a wife - or rather, wives – and therefore children).
They wore proudly the dressings of deadly leopard skins and cheetah furs they went out and hunted with spear and raw-hide shields; and had carpets on the dirt floors of their huts made from cured full and complete lion hides; paws, claws, head and teeth included.
Every single Zulu warrior under Shaka Zulu’s reign had to go out and kill a lion just shy of with his bare hands as an initiation right to be a Zulu warrior.
Man is perfectly suited to adapt and survive in nature, and has indeed done so excellently (an understatement!!!!) since his origin!
The English, as an adjunct to this, as ambassadors to the queen, proposed to King Shaka that a persecuted, crucified Jew was the son of God and the savoir of mankind, the power and the glory, the way the truth and the life - and The King of Kings.
To which Shaka replied: There can be only ONE kind of kings: Shaka! And the Heavens belong to ZULU!
Then they blew the Zulus away with muskets and cannons and destroyed and disbanded the Zulu Empire forever and even today there are Zulu decedents of King Shaka who, in the saddest example of a glorious race robbed of its culture and heritage, accept Jesus as their ‘personal savoir’ in some ungodly, unholy union and cross-mixture and sick-amalgamation of the destruction and highway-robbery of their own unique and individual culture.
This is what you get in reply from someone who actually understands this endeavour as appose to someone who, I would like to say DOES not, but rather must admit 'CANNOT'.
‘And to further burden your elite society, he is allowed to propagate his 'intellectual' vomit upon mankind.’
Thank God they ARE ‘allowed’ !!!!!!!!
His words – and the fact that they are thankfully available as opposed to suppressed - do not further burden our ‘elite society’, but rather help us to study and further understand why people turn out this way.
But I find that since ‘we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God’, on what sufficient grounds can one therefore assert oneself an Atheist? It can only be evidence weighing heavily on one side of the scale of argument, but – the element of doubt STILL exists because of the insufficient totality of the grounds!
Therefore one still asserts the non-existence of God on SUBJECTIVE grounds and not purely OBjective ones.
For an understanding of the necessity of sufficient grounds in subjective considerations lending themselves to assertions one must read ‘The Four-Fold Root’ of the principle as expounded most excellently by Dr Arthur Schopenhauer.
I am INDEED an intellect!
O how many Atheists upon whose path I have come who refute the existence of God on the basis of the existence of suffering in the world and the genetic unfairness of which I have above alluded to (not that Charlos is one of these).
However, nevertheless, God does not show favouritism to believers anymore than to Atheists. If indeed to anyone.
God does not show favouritism!!!
Debating whether God is fact or fiction is not asinine (it only becomes so when we are hit with dogmatic grounds proposed as proofs, whether for or against God as fact/fiction); in fact I gave the conclusion some several pages ago and it is an irrefutable fact: the conclusion to this thread is clearly (yawn) that God can neither be proved or disproved on any sufficient given grounds, therefore this element of doubt [which exists in both propositions for and against god] even if all else under subjective consideration is given AS certainty, owing to the element of doubt as the insufficient reason in the totality of the given grounds, really leaves even the most devout believer in the end as an Agnostic.
People believed the world was flat until someone went out and proved it was round. Because of DOUBT. Because he questioned what was given as a certainty on insufficient grounds!
Like God – but, moreover, like the NATURE of God.
What was it again that great sceptic who philosophised all that dogma stifling the learned world away with a hammer, said again? Oh, yes!!!: ‘I am no man: I am DYNAMITE!’
And the people I have referred to as blockheads, dullards and fools, have been the people who have come on this thread and attacked intellectuals and academics like Trish who actually BELIEVES in a God per se:
‘Are you capable of a single original thought with your brain, YOUR brain?, evidently not from the answers you have given’ etc.
Now I know you apologized for this, and Trish accepts that - but I do not side with anyone who attacks the learned. Ever.
The question of this thread asks for proof to back up God's existence or non-existence;
Almost every stout believer (in the form of a religious nut) has just attacked any attempt to disprove god while not expounding any proofs: this attack is proposed as the proof.
And some absolute bloody idiot drew up a tally showing that most believe in god as ‘proof’ (sufficient grounds) that god exists. Haha. That Gnome, I believe.
Well, indeed the majority believed the world was flat!!! And that was no sufficient proof that the world was!!!
And I say all THIS, of all things, as a believer IN 'God'.
I don’t see why you or anyone should be shown favouritism (or expect to be shown it because they ‘believe’ - if not indeed as a prerequisite because they do!).
Foolish people!!!
But if you think it's God, that's fine - maybe you are right. BUT . . . maybe you are wrong.
And thereby hangs THIS ‘proverbial tale':
There is an element of doubt as apposed to one of certainty; for since the certainty of God in your case is taken as a given, the element of doubt is by you and almost all devout believers accounted for with the word ‘Faith’. You must have faith, otherwise you will be hounded daily by doubt and indeed have to face this doubt - your answer for it: FAITH.
But for we independent and free-thinking spirits who do not fear the notion of a divine rebuke, the element of doubt is not a call to faith OR a call to a dead-end-doubt or refutation of God but a call to KNOW, to SEEK ENDLESSLY TO UNDERSTAND ‘OUR’ PROBLEM!
Faith is an objective dead-end to us – the path of least resistance to be taken. A subjective comforter! And it is not a virtue. Ergo: ‘I have faith in God’ - therefore what?
Also, with all due respect, your experiences indeed make you unique: we are all unique, just like everybody else. ;-)
Everyone is going through the same thing, everyone is going through LIFE, it’s trials and tribulations (you are one of the fortunate, by the sounds!!!).
Children are born disfigured, deformed, DEFECTIVE and therefore severely disadvantaged from the outset: some have poor eyesight, others are born blind, deaf, disabled - some strong, healthy, very intelligent, beautiful, or absolute buffoons!!!; some ugly, some into rich and noble families - indeed even to royalty with the best chances of success and the best education and all the best things in life - others to addled drug addicts to be neglected and left to die in their cots or condemned and never given a chance to have a good life from the moment they are born. From the OUTSET!
And yet people like you, with all due respect, speak of freewill as some kind of divine virtue God bestowed on us all like the highest possible gift and good and justification of a world like this.
Children are born under the burning African sun with no water to drink and no food to eat and die and putrefy in the colourless grass and are pecked at and eaten by bald hunch-backed vultures, their little remains fought over by growling scavengers, flies, worms and ants.
So the Lord provides!!! - here food for his ANIMALS!
If ‘God’ is to be thanked it is for putting someone like this on our thread in light of our wandering (detracting?) gnome who clearly doesn't actually have any scientific, philosophic or on the whole academic understanding of our question: 'God . . . fact or fiction?'. Or even any sufficient general knowledge to back up his sophistic, rhetorical nonsense.
He appears to want an answer to everything that is a layman's answer and will not accept a scientific/philosophic/but above all objective one - such as the one which has been given (all credit to him).
Let him be (and may he continue to judge the kind of person I am/we are).
It is this 'Atheist' Charlos who gave me a very excellent piece of advice earlier when I was struggling with the refutations of a plethora of blockheads, dullards and fools:
Mundus vult decipi. Ergo decipiatur !
Hey Charlos, to THEM you may be an atheist, to God - you're the welcome opposition!!! To science and the objective truth to be attained thereby: an asset!!!
I myself believe in 'God' in so far as I lean towards a belief in 'God' rather than away from one - however having said this I am a deeply non-religious believer in ‘God’. Perhaps something only an intellect can fully understand!
But, indeed:
Mundus vult decipi. Ergo decipiatur !
We academics are, after all, the stupid ones and have always been! That is why we have been so strongly opposed!!!! And rightly so!!!
Everything you say is right, wandering lawn ornament!
This person is attacking the person I was attacking for attacking me and thinks it’s me because he has not paid attention to the threads.
'The greatest minds have nothing further to enlighten you?'
This is what omega send to me and what I attacked blockhead!!!
So thank you for attacking me and inadvertently attacking her (blockhead).
By the way, I am towards my Doctorate in philosophy at age 24, little wise wondering gnome. I think you wondered for too long. The ‘hamster wheel’ of philosophical thought to which you allude concerning freedom of the will was agreed with by Albert Einstein.
And since this thread is ‘God . . . fact or fiction? . . . it is not about what we believe but what we can KNOW and thereFORE believe.
Otherwise: I believe if I drive a car into a school bus of Palestinians I will go to heaven and have 15 Virgins . . .
I call you out as a dullard, sir. You attacked omega while attacking me to defend her BY attacking me.
You asked men to be honest (something they often aren't), so i'm going to be honest.
Do stretch marks turn me off? No. BUT . . . they don't turn me on, either.
That's the honest answer.
They're not a turn on; they're not a turn off.
They're just what they are.
I have stretch marks from bodybuilding under my lats and where my upper bicepts meet my deltoid.
I would take every precaution to minimise the possibility of stretch marks (oils etc) because they are unsightly like any other blemish to the skin/body.
And yes, i think woman worry much much more about stretch marks than men even care about their stretch marks.
Really, I don't care. Beautiful, pretty, nice girl with a great figure and fantastic personality and a stretch mark? The hell with the stretch mark!!!!
Yeah, sure, a moment after I got a post from you saying 'who the f----- are you calling average' (rather immature) i get a 1-star rating from a man (and it still remains the only one).
hahaha
Enjoy the 10 I gave you.
In conclusion: women prefer virile, confident, competitive, strong, intelligent, healthy, wealthy men by instinct and not the glasses-wearing church-goer who claims to be, what - Gods REAL gift to woman?
That ill-virtue is a compromise based on one's own lack of appeal.
Again, the great intellect required to perceive new insights into the nature of 'god' will instantly single out empty notions, absent-statements, sophisms, rhetoric and tactical rhetoric.
God will be found by anybody who looks after him with a true heart.
It seems to Omega that trusting in our own fallibility is not wise but - what then? Trusting in someone else's fallibility - is wiser?
Or in The Holy Bible, of which Sir Isaac Newton wrote excellently and extensively of the notable corruptions? Perchance you have not read much of Newton (who wrote more about Religion - to many people’s surprise - than anything else)?
But, according to this real asset to the progress of this thread, I myself 'seem to be talking about wisdom, wisdom which academia (studying the greatest minds that ever lived or walked upon this earth) will not be giving me'.
Ha-ha-ha-ha: so shall it always be.
It was a wise man who invented beer, like Socrates said.
mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur - indeed!!!!!!
'The world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived.': Titus Petronius
I think he was a Roman Playwright or Poet?
Thank you for the advice; one dedicates one's life to truth and this is indeed a truth.
I believe in God because Jesus was his son. If I drink his blood and eat his flesh I am free of sin. He died for my sin. The priest turns the wine into his blood and the pale piece of bread into his flesh.
I believe in freewill because I can do what I will.
Ah, wise one's - but can you will what you will?
Or do you even understand the implication of this?
Maybe Omega can shed some light on this problem of free will or out-right refute it with some more quotes plucked from Wikiquote?
EastbayRay Forum Posts (781)
RE: whats the worst crime the world has ever seen committed ?..and did they get away with it ?
laughable.