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Pastimes : Ask God -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Thomas Calvet who wrote (17655)	6/17/1998 12:34:00 AM
From: Father Terrence	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 39621

Tom: You sure do a good job of fooling yourself. The bible will pass into the dust heap of history on it own lack of merits. That day will occur when the majority in the world embrace reason instead of the illusion of security that religion supposedly gives them from the unknown. What you think you "know" is not real. It's as real as the Wizard of Oz. "Hundreds and maybe even thousands are being persecuted and put to death for their faith. There must be something to this person called Jesus Christ, or maybe all these people are mad, or delusional. You cannot deny Jesus is an historical figure. You also cannot refute that the writings we have are historical and accurate." Mystics are often persecuted and put to death -- sometimes by other mystics, sometimes by Atilla powerseekers. In this century alone, millions of Jews were put to death, Chinese buddhists were persecuted and put to death, christians were persecuted and put to death, Tibetan monks were persecuted and put to death, muslims were persecuted and put to death. But the interesting thing is, throughout history, no matter who seems to be in power -- mystic or Atilla -- the men and women of reason and intellectual honesty have usually been ignored, hated, envied, and yes, even put to death because the chose NOT to bend their knee to the despot, or chose to argue with reason against the mystics. I can and do refute the writings that you have are accurate, as many historians do -- even some christian historians! Tom, you have such a small, narrow little focus on existence. You say, " There are only two conclusions that one can come to regarding Jesus of Nazareth. "1.) His is who He says He is -- God in the flesh. "2.) He was a raving lunatic! All indications show that Jesus was of sound mind. Nobody who is stark raving mad, acts like, or has such an impact on human history as He." There are many conclusions one can reach beyond these two slanted ones you tried to push forward with sloppy sleight-of-hand. For instance, say he wanted to change what he thought were wrongs in the Old Testament? Say he had a Messiah complex (which others had during those times) and say he traveled to Tibet (which records show he did) to learn from the Far East mystics and on the way back through India onto the Middle east he formulated the basics of how he would modify Judaism? Some records point to this possibility. Finally I studied black holes. I also had some lectures by Kip Thorne back in the 70s -- a leading cosmologist and theorist (other than Hawking and a few others) on black holes and time. Afraid you can't teach me anything new about that. And relating the compressionability or elasticity of time to the cosmic egg is next to futile with our present science. Once again you present conjecture and then act upon it with faith as FACT! Relating your analogy to your earlier argument about dating fossils is beyond laughable. As I said earlier in another post -- time for you to ease up on the prayer and start hitting the books harder. . . books like hard science, Aristotle, the nature of reason, etc. FT

To: Thomas Calvet who wrote (17655)	6/17/1998 2:11:00 AM
From: Chuzzlewit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 39621

I'm not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination ... That's obvious. Try to explain away carbon dating. Try to explain away the fossil record. Try to explain away continental drift. Try to explain away the fact that evolution has been repeatedly observed in nature and in the laboratory. Try to explain away the consistent homologous relationships in DNA, protein structure and anatomy that exist throughout nature. Try to explain away how salt water organisms survived Noah's flood. Try to explain how there was sufficient room on the ark to accommodate whales (which couldn't survive in all of that fresh water because the plankton was killed). Try to explain away how Jesus needed to go to the top of the mountain to see all of the people on earth (implying the earth was flat). I could go on and on with this nonsense. This is the stuff of primitive culture, not divine revelation. Best of all, though, try to explain why God all of these manifestations which fly in the face of reason. If the fossil record is wrong, if continental drift is wrong, if the theory of evolution is wrong, if the theory of gravity is wrong, if cosmology is wrong, why plant all of that convincing and consistent evidence? Could it be that maybe, just maybe, you are wrong?