The problem with being an infidel.

wolfgang59,

Recently we (my family) have taken to thanking the FSM, tooth fairy or other random "deity" at meal times to remind ourselves how lucky we are and not to take our comfortable lives for granted.

If you work really really hard at it, you just might be able to rest in the assumption that Jesus of Nazareth is just like the tooth fairy.

Here's how you could go about it.

1.) Like Jesus show a 2000 year old tradition forming a backround in the expectation of a coming national messiah. Show that a tooth fairy had as much national backround history and culture related to its arrival.

2.) Like [/b]Jesus[/b] publish words and deeds that eyewitnesses claim were said and performed.

3.) Like with Jesus bring forth four biographies or so examining the major aspects of said person's activity.

4.) Like with Jesus weigh the impact of said tooth fairies enfluence on world culture for the last 20 centuries.

Maybe you could compare record of the number dimes placed under pillows with the rise of Christian congregations. )

5.) Like with Jesus over the last 20 centuries review the number of countries and languages which have volumes written concerning a tooth fairy.

(You might go to your local Public Library and compare the number of books related either pro or con about a tooth fairy with those discussing in some way Jesus Christ.

6.) Open your Yellow Pages and compare the number of references to Christ or Christian with the number of references to the tooth fairy.

7.) Compare how many websites are devoted to subjects "Chistian" or related to Jesus with those related in some way to a tooth fairy.

8.) Compare the number of biographies and autobiographies of confessed or alledged Christians with those of people devoting their lives to service of a tooth fairy.

9.) Compare the number of songs written around the world related to Jesus or things Christian with those pertaining to a tooth fairy.

10.) Compare say Foxes Book of Christian Martyrs with some equivalent volume expounding on the death of people for the sake of a tooth fairy.

11.) Review how many serious philosophical writings discuss in depth Christ for the last six hundred years with those seriously discussing with equal volume content a tooth fairy.

12.) Even casually asking about 50 people at random. Ask them which by and large they have given any thought concerning -

a.) a tooth fairy

b.) the claims of Jesus Christ

See how your numbers compare.

13.) Compare any claims of said tooth fairy with claims of Jesus.

Ie. What is said about the few following problems of human beings.

a.) the origin of the mankind

b.) the problem of moral waywardness

c.) the problem of death

d.) any teaching of redemption, salvation, reconciliation.

14.) Compare what prophecies the tooth fairy is said to have fulfilled with those believed to have been fulfilled by the coming of Jesus.

15.) Consider how much argumentation has been had in the modern media involving a tooth fairy as compared to that related to the historicity or claims of Jesus Christ.

16.) Even go to the CHILDREN'S section of the Public Library and compare the number of children's books related in some way to things Christian with issues pertaining to a tooth fairy.

Maybe after researching some of these issues you will come back with a silly grin on your juvenile face saying - "Oh, Jesus is just the same as the tooth fairy, you know ?"

And you'd be a lying fool.

Originally posted by robbie carrobie
I suspect that it may be our bodies, only without the debilitating effects of sin (imperfection) leading to imperfections and ultimately death. After you have died, you have paid the 'price', of sin, it would both be unloving and unjust of God to resurrect you into a sinful and imperfect state again. So if you had an abnormality of some kind, i sus ...[text shortened]... radicated. Christ gave a token of this when he walked the earth and healed people miraculously.

Fascinating stuff.

I assume our bodies will be "rebuild" for this purpose. Cause, you know, either our stinking bags of bones rot away, or we have it burnt, so it's not in tip-top shape anymore.

Will it rebuild as a newly-born, or as an 18 year old, or 40, or.... ?

Originally posted by Great King Rat
Fascinating stuff.

I assume our bodies will be "rebuild" for this purpose. Cause, you know, either our stinking bags of bones rot away, or we have it burnt, so it's not in tip-top shape anymore.

Will it rebuild as a newly-born, or as an 18 year old, or 40, or.... ?

And of course to 're-build' our bodies requires the information of precisely
where every molecule, cell and synapse was at the point you are resetting to.
And more besides.

This information must continue to exist in some form for this to happen.

Seems to me that that would be, in this particular religion, the soul.

It doesn't matter if this information is stored in whatever gods equivalent of
synapses is. It must still be stored.

Ooh, I'm not sure why it would need to be stored in a soul. I imagine (obviously!) God would have quite a few harddisks available for storing that kind of information.

Or, seeing how he's god, he probably stores it all in "The Cloud" 😏

Originally posted by Great King Rat
Ooh, I'm not sure why it would need to be stored in a soul. I imagine (obviously!) God would have quite a few harddisks available for storing that kind of information.

Or, seeing how he's god, he probably stores it all in "The Cloud" 😏

Is not all the genetic information one requires stored in DNA? It would appear to me to be a rather trivial affair for God to recreate a life form having this information.

Originally posted by Great King Rat
Fascinating stuff.

I assume our bodies will be "rebuild" for this purpose. Cause, you know, either our stinking bags of bones rot away, or we have it burnt, so it's not in tip-top shape anymore.

Will it rebuild as a newly-born, or as an 18 year old, or 40, or.... ?

again its purely speculative and I suspect that time or age becomes meaningless when one is destined to live forever. Once you eradicate sin, you eradicate imperfection, ageing, sickness and so while one is in some sense perfect, its a relative perfection, you would for example, if you had no previous aptitude for snooker be able to score 147 breaks every time or even at all, despite having perfect eyesight, balance, hearing etc

Originally posted by robbie carrobie
Is not all the genetic information one requires stored in DNA? It would appear to me to be a rather trivial affair for God to recreate a life form having this information.

No. No it's not.

Quite apart from the fact that your body is the result of complex interplay between
the expression of your DNA and your environment...

Your MIND which is the most important part, with all it's memories, is not stored in your
DNA.

Originally posted by googlefudge
No. No it's not.

Quite apart from the fact that your body is the result of complex interplay between
the expression of your DNA and your environment...

Your MIND which is the most important part, with all it's memories, is not stored in your
DNA.

what else is required then, do tell.

No one has claimed that memories are stored in DNA, infact, it may be possible that memory is eradicated, which would make absolute sense if you suffered a trauma of some kind.

Originally posted by robbie carrobie
what else is required then, do tell.

Well DNA, despite being often described as such, is not a blueprint in the same way
that we have blueprints for buildings.

A blueprint for a building if detailed enough can be used by intelligent agents (ie us)
to construct that building exactly. We READ the blueprint and that gives us the information
we need to then construct the building, using stuff we already know about engineering
and such.

DNA doesn't work like that, it's not read by an intelligent agent who then uses the information
to build a body.

DNA [and I am going to oversimplify wildly here] Produces proteins that make it's host
cell behave in certain ways, and the cell sends signals to the DNA which change the
proteins it makes.

A person is not built, they self assemble.

You start with a single cell that starts dividing, as more cells accumulate their environment
changes and cells in different positions in the ball of cells start to behave differently and to
differentiate into the different types of cells that will eventually form the different organs.
This ball of cells is in a uterus, and this provides nutrients and hormones which influence
the development.

The same ball of cells in a different uterus will turn out (perhaps subtly, perhaps not) differently.

Some of the cells in this growing person will become neurons and will go on to form the persons
mind.

This mind is influenced both by the way the cells formed under the direction of DNA but also
they will be massively effected by the experiences of the person in question.

The structures formed are formed because of the environment the person experienced.

And thus the structures that make up the mind are not stored in the DNA.

So they would have to be stored separately, and given the degeneration of a persons mind and
the loss of data in it, it would have to be a storage of all the information over their life, and
not just an image of the mind at death.

Originally posted by googlefudge
Well DNA, despite being often described as such, is not a blueprint in the same way
that we have blueprints for buildings.

A blueprint for a building if detailed enough can be used by intelligent agents (ie us)
to construct that building exactly. We READ the blueprint and that gives us the information
we need to then construct the building, usin ...[text shortened]... a storage of all the information over their life, and
not just an image of the mind at death.

Yes i understand how it creates proteins, ill ask again, what else is needed? and i repeat no one has claimed the structures which make up memory will be replicated.

The enviroment in which somebody grows up has a huge impact on how that someone develops.

If I'm not mistaken, whether or not someone is gay is primarily decided in the uterus and is caused by hormones from the mother. It therefore stands to reason if somebody is resurrected without having stayed in a uterus for 9 months, this may result in a different person.

Well DNA, despite being often described as such, is not a blueprint in the same way that we have blueprints for buildings.

I think you are deflecting from the larger picture to make issue of some much more minor point.

A blueprint for a building if detailed enough can be used by intelligent agents (ie us) to construct that building exactly. We READ the blueprint and that gives us the information we need to then construct the building, using stuff we already know about engineering and such.

DNA doesn't work like that, it's not read by an intelligent agent who then uses the information to build a body.

The Human Genome Project would object that the thousands of man-hours used to decipher code for hopefully useful information in dealing with diseases.

No one is saying intelligent little men are running around in the cell reading blueprints in that regard. But the biological deciphering and adhering to the instructions of the DNA molecule suggests a intelligent reading of that which has been intelligently written.

Francis Collins is sympathetic to common descent and other aspects of evolution. But he wrote a book "The Language of God" about the DNA molecule. He's an expert on the DNA molecule.

YouTube

DNA [and I am going to oversimplify wildly here] Produces proteins that make it's host cell behave in certain ways, and the cell sends signals to the DNA which change the proteins it makes.

Signals intelligently designed and signals intelligently deciphered. That is what there is evidence for.

A person is not built, they self assemble.

That may be semantics. I did not self assemble myself. Neither did you.

I was not around.
And my body got assembled.
And I at a certain point afterwards "I" became conscious of my existence.

But if you want to say "I" was there the moment the sperm hit the egg and "I" self assembled, I STILL see strong evidence of intelligent design.

It is much like the boot up process of a computer operating system but a million times more complicated.

In the days when I was a IBM system's support programmer I studied how the MVS operating system would go boot up. It was amazingly intricate and clever. You started with an address which told the hardware to where to get the million so instructions to load in the OS which would boot up the hardware.

Such a process revealed extensive forethought, planning, the ability to foresee, look ahead, initialize, mark out space, set boundaries, propagate tables, construct lists, set locations, establish addresses, stash info here and there, connect different parts of the program, prepare correction mechanisms, etc. etc. and all the other things related to the functioning of a computer operating system.

The biological boot up is probably many millions of times more involved and ingenious.

Some of us don't have enough faith to assume no intelligence is behind the design of the re-production of biological systems.

You say, no intelligent agency is behind this. And you are asking us to muster up more faith than is possible to muster up.

This is not a God of the Gaps argument. The assumption of intelligent design here is not based upon what man does not know, but rather upon what he does know.

Stuff like this does not happen without intelligence being involved.

You start with a single cell that starts dividing, as more cells accumulate their environment changes and cells in different positions in the ball of cells start to behave differently and to differentiate into the different types of cells that will eventually form the different organs.

That's a nice little review. But how does it suggest no intelligent planning was behind it ?

This ball of cells is in a uterus, and this provides nutrients and hormones which influence the development.

Again. Nice reminder of details. But it does nothing for me in convincing that lucky accidents are responsibe for the plan.

The same ball of cells in a different uterus will turn out (perhaps subtly, perhaps not) differently.

Step back from the trees and look at the whole forest.
Look at the big picture.
How did such a system come into existence without intelligent design ?

I don't have enough faith to believe it arose in any other way except by intelligent design.

Some of the cells in this growing person will become neurons and will go on to form the persons mind.

They will form the person's BRAIN. That they refer to the person's MIND is another yet unsolved question.

I am right now imagining an automobile driving down a road. Do you claim that those thoughts can be captured in a beaker or weighed in a scale or placed under a microscope ?

I am imagining a musical tune in my MIND. Do you have a way to tell me how much that thought weighs ?

Can you tell me what is the chemical or electrical components of the memory of yesterday's dinner?

If so, forget about a Nobel Prize to you. They should grant you the entire Nobel Organization.

We see a correlation between thinking and brain activity. But we do not know that thought can be reduced to chemical components or electrical charges.

This mind is influenced both by the way the cells formed under the direction of DNA but also they will be massively effected by the experiences of the person in question.

The Brain is enfluenced. That is grey matter. That is material. The effect on MIND is an vastly unexplored matter todate.

I am imagining my name right now. Can you examine that thought under a microscope ?

And thus the structures that make up the mind are not stored in the DNA.

What are the chemical components of your self consciousness ?

Could you list the chemicals involved in your awareness of yourself ?

Originally posted by sonship

Well DNA, despite being often described as such, is not a blueprint in the same way that we have blueprints for buildings.

I think you are deflecting from the larger picture to make issue of some much more minor point.

[quote]

A blueprint for a building if detailed enough can be used by intelligent agents (ie us) to construc ...[text shortened]... self consciousness ?

Could you list the chemicals involved in your awareness of yourself ?

amen to that!

Originally posted by Great King Rat
The enviroment in which somebody grows up has a huge impact on how that someone develops.

If I'm not mistaken, whether or not someone is gay is primarily decided in the uterus and is caused by hormones from the mother. It therefore stands to reason if somebody is resurrected without having stayed in a uterus for 9 months, this may result in a different person.

there is no clear genetic determinant of why a person is gay and even if there was, determination is not the same as causation, I really would wish that people stopped trying to propagandise that there is, its one of the most insidious and morally denigrative pieces of peer pressure that has been imposed upon society.

No single controlling cause has been identified, and research is continuing in this area,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_orientation#Genetic_factors

Originally posted by sonship
If you work really really hard at it, you just might be able to rest in the assumption that Jesus of Nazareth is just like the tooth fairy.

1. You must be really stupid.

2. You haven't read or don't remember my explanatory posts.

I DO NOT BELIEVE IN THE TOOTH FAIRY OR ANY OTHER SUPERNATURAL BEINGS

We (my family) "thank" the tooth fairy/FSM/Santa (it varies) as a joke but
also as a way of remembering those less fortunate.

That is abundantly clear from my posts and the sensible replies.

And yes, I agree, Jesus of Nazareth [b[is[/b] just like the tooth fairy!