Research on Belief in God

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Jan 27, 2013
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Eshnar said:
Would you mind stopping the image spam and tell us your point? thanks

http://www.sirbacon.org/links/quotesabout.html
One of the most important visionaries of what the new science might entail was the English philosopher Sir Francis Bacon.(1561-1626) Francis Bacon spent his later years pursuing a literary career and developing a philosophy of science which was to prove an inspiration for many who would follow him. For Bacon the relationship between science and spirituality was clear-- science would serve the Christian faith. Through science, man would be restored to the state of grace which he had enjoyed in the Garden of Eden before the Fall, to the "sovereignty and power."...which he had hid in his first state of creation. According to Bacon, not only science would restore man to his rightfull dominion over the Earth, it would also create the perfect moral Christian society. Bacon outlined this vision in his treatise, The New Atlantis (1627) In this he describes an idealised land where all people live in harmony without crime or promiscuity., "free from all pollution and foulness." Citizens of this "New Atlantis have access to all manner of technologies, including flying machines, submarines, and a huge range of medicines fro healing the sick, and prolonging life. These wonders are made possible through the work of a group of 36 "fathers" who form the core of a scientific institute cum monastic colony known as Solomon's House. It was this fictional institution that inspired the founders of the Royal Society in 1660, an organization that continues to play an important role in the scientific community to this day.- Katy Redmond, from her prize winning essay Science and Spirituality : Complimentary or Contradictory, appeared in Resurgence Magazine, Oct, 2003
 
May 11, 2009
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When God created humans he, or her, did not envision road and TT bikes. Otherwise he might relocated certain features of the human body. ;)
 
RetroActive said:

The exact opposite of Bacon's thoughts (though I'm not sure atheists have the intellectual abilities to fully understand it). Could be considered "culture creation" ;)

Within the five centuries that preceded Christianism, the alliance between religion on the one hand and law and politics on the other hand were not so close. The efforts from the oppressed class, the overthrow of the sacerdotal caste, the work of the philosophers, the progress of thought had shaken the old principles of human association. […]

With Christianism not only was the religious sense revived but he also took a higher and less material expression. While we used to create gods of human soul or great physical forces, we now started to conceive God as a real essential stranger to human nature on the one hand and to the world on the other hand. The “Divine” was decidedly placed outside the visible nature and above it. While every man once had made its own god, and there had been as many as there were families and cities, God appeared then as a unique, immense, universal, the only one animating the worlds and the only one to fulfill the need to adore, which is within the man. Instead of the religion that once, among the people of Grece and Italy, was nothing but a set of practices, a series of rituals that we repeated without seeing any meaning to it, a sequence of formulae that we often no longer understood, because the language had grown old, a tradition that was transmitted from ages to ages and only held its sacred character only from its old days, instead of that, religion was a set of dogmas and a great object proposed to faith. It was no longer external ; it was mainly seeded in man’s thought. It was no longer stuff, it became spirit. Christianism changed the nature and the form of adoration ; man no longer gave God the food and the drink ; the prayer was no longer a formula of incantation ; it became an act of faith and a humble request. The soul was in another relationship with the deity : the fear of the gods was replaced by the love of God. […]

As far as the government of the State is concerned, it can be said that Christianism transformed it in its essence, precisely because it did not interfere with it. In old ages, the religion and the State was only one, each people adored its god and each god governed its people ; the same code regulated relationship between men and the duties towards the gods of the city. Religion then commanded the State and appointed its leaders via the lot and the augurs ; the State in turn interfered into the realm of the conscience and sanctioned any offense to rituals and to the cult of the city. Instead of that Jesus-Christ tought that his empire is not of this world. He separated religion from the government. Religion, no longer being terrestrial, only gets involved as less as it can with matters from the Earth. Jesus-Christ adds: “Give Caesar what is Caesar’s and God what is God’s.” It is the first time we so clearly distinguished God from the State for at that time, Caesar was still the great Pontiff, the Roman religion’s leader and main body ; he was the guardian and the interpreter of beliefs ; he held in his hands the cult and the dogma. His own person was even sacred and divine. […]

On the one hand politics definitely emancipated from strict rules that the old religion paved the way for it. You could govern the men without having to bow to sacred uses and without requiring the opinion of augurs and oracles, without complying every acts with beliefs and with the cult’s needs. Politics was freer in its looks ; no authority other than that of the moral law hindered it anymore. On the other hand, if the State was more of a master in some things, its action was also more limited. A whole half of the man escaped it. Christianism tought that man only belonged to society by a part of himself, that he was committed to it by his body and its material interest, that subject of a tyrant, he had to comply, that citizen of a republic, he had to give his life of it but that for his soul, he was free and only committed to God. […]
Duty typically no longer consisted in giving one’s time, forces and life to the State. Politics and war no longer was the whole for man ; all virtues were no longer comprised into patriotism ; because the soul no longer had any fatherland. […]
Among the Persians and Hindus, among the Jews, the Greeks, the Italians and the Gauls, the law was included in sacred books. Hence every religion made the law at its own image. Christianism is the first religion that never claimed that the law depended on it. It was only busy with men’s duties, not with their interest relationships. […] It placed itself outside of the law, like of any purely terrestrial things.


Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges in La cité antique (1864) !
 
Jan 27, 2013
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Echoes said:
The exact opposite of Bacon's thoughts (though I'm not sure atheists have the intellectual abilities to fully understand it). Could be considered "culture creation" ;)

Within the five centuries that preceded Christianism, the alliance between religion on the one hand and law and politics on the other hand were not so close. The efforts from the oppressed class, the overthrow of the sacerdotal caste, the work of the philosophers, the progress of thought had shaken the old principles of human association. […]

With Christianism not only was the religious sense revived but he also took a higher and less material expression. While we used to create gods of human soul or great physical forces, we now started to conceive God as a real essential stranger to human nature on the one hand and to the world on the other hand. The “Divine” was decidedly placed outside the visible nature and above it. While every man once had made its own god, and there had been as many as there were families and cities, God appeared then as a unique, immense, universal, the only one animating the worlds and the only one to fulfill the need to adore, which is within the man. Instead of the religion that once, among the people of Grece and Italy, was nothing but a set of practices, a series of rituals that we repeated without seeing any meaning to it, a sequence of formulae that we often no longer understood, because the language had grown old, a tradition that was transmitted from ages to ages and only held its sacred character only from its old days, instead of that, religion was a set of dogmas and a great object proposed to faith. It was no longer external ; it was mainly seeded in man’s thought. It was no longer stuff, it became spirit. Christianism changed the nature and the form of adoration ; man no longer gave God the food and the drink ; the prayer was no longer a formula of incantation ; it became an act of faith and a humble request. The soul was in another relationship with the deity : the fear of the gods was replaced by the love of God. […]

As far as the government of the State is concerned, it can be said that Christianism transformed it in its essence, precisely because it did not interfere with it. In old ages, the religion and the State was only one, each people adored its god and each god governed its people ; the same code regulated relationship between men and the duties towards the gods of the city. Religion then commanded the State and appointed its leaders via the lot and the augurs ; the State in turn interfered into the realm of the conscience and sanctioned any offense to rituals and to the cult of the city. Instead of that Jesus-Christ tought that his empire is not of this world. He separated religion from the government. Religion, no longer being terrestrial, only gets involved as less as it can with matters from the Earth. Jesus-Christ adds: “Give Caesar what is Caesar’s and God what is God’s.” It is the first time we so clearly distinguished God from the State for at that time, Caesar was still the great Pontiff, the Roman religion’s leader and main body ; he was the guardian and the interpreter of beliefs ; he held in his hands the cult and the dogma. His own person was even sacred and divine. […]

On the one hand politics definitely emancipated from strict rules that the old religion paved the way for it. You could govern the men without having to bow to sacred uses and without requiring the opinion of augurs and oracles, without complying every acts with beliefs and with the cult’s needs. Politics was freer in its looks ; no authority other than that of the moral law hindered it anymore. On the other hand, if the State was more of a master in some things, its action was also more limited. A whole half of the man escaped it. Christianism tought that man only belonged to society by a part of himself, that he was committed to it by his body and its material interest, that subject of a tyrant, he had to comply, that citizen of a republic, he had to give his life of it but that for his soul, he was free and only committed to God. […]
Duty typically no longer consisted in giving one’s time, forces and life to the State. Politics and war no longer was the whole for man ; all virtues were no longer comprised into patriotism ; because the soul no longer had any fatherland. […]
Among the Persians and Hindus, among the Jews, the Greeks, the Italians and the Gauls, the law was included in sacred books. Hence every religion made the law at its own image. Christianism is the first religion that never claimed that the law depended on it. It was only busy with men’s duties, not with their interest relationships. […] It placed itself outside of the law, like of any purely terrestrial things.


Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges in La cité antique (1864) !

O.K. You've thoroughly confused me. Aren't you a RCC? How you jive the above quote with the RCC is beyond me.

The link I provided wasn't the best but it was purposefully varied (and provocative, for the curious...) to support my insinuations. What is exactly opposite of Bacon's thoughts? If Bacon was a Freemason and a Rosicrucion (they certainly believe this to be true) then you can't believe he interpreted Christianity in an orthodox, fundamentalist way at all. Same as Newton. Or the Jesuits.;)

It is all culture creation. The evidence for ancient reflections at work in modern times is ubiquitous. I think they've (and we have) gone mad (again and still). Blunt force trauma therapy to hammer the world into a utopian universal empire isn't quite the same as universal man lifting up the world through wisdom and understanding.

This transhumanist agenda is this same old dream that's gone completely lunatic, imo.

The Kybalion of Hermes Trismegistus
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvV8vLON-nY
 
Why do you think Fustel's observations contradict my beliefs? It's 100% pure catholicism !!

I was referring to Bacon's claim that science would make a moral Christian society while Fustel claims that religion has nothing to do with purely terrestrial things. It's seeded in man's thoughts. It's immaterial.

It's true that Fustel hated the Jesuits and Rousseau. He thought that they were the driving force behind 1789 (which is definitely wrong). Anyway, I'm not a Fustel fan, ideologically but this (the Ancient City) is strict honest observation of facts, so no ideology is involved and he was definitely right.


By the way, since I'm in a quoting mood, lol, this is dedicated to all atheists who strongly believe in Huntington's Clash of Civilizations (and Remaking of World Order) and who would love to see Christians and Muslims fighting each other, transforming the current financial crisis by a religious war. Those who really believe that Right-wingers hate Muslims while left-wingers are tolerant, while it has always been the exact opposite.

“Never has a man proposed for himself, voluntarily or involuntarily, a goal more sublime, since this goal was beyond measures: undermine the superstitions placed between the creature and the Creator, give God back to man and man back to God, reinstate the rational and saintly idea of divinity in the midst of this prevailing chaos of material and disfigured gods of idolatry.
Never has a man accomplished in such a short time such an immense and long lasting revolution in the world, since less than two centuries after his predication, Islam, preaching and armed, ruled over three Arabias, and conquered to God’s unity Persia, the Khorasan, Transoxania, Western India, Syria, Egypt, Ethiopia, and all the known continent of Southern Africa, many islands of the Mediterranean, Spain and part of Gaul. ‎
If greatness of purpose, smallness of means, and astonishing results are the three criteria of a human genius, who could dare compare any great man in history with Muhammad? The most famous men created arms, laws, and empires only. They founded, if anything at all, no more than material powers which often crumbled away before their eyes. This man moved not only armies, legislations, empires, peoples, dynasties, but millions of men in one-third of the then inhabited world; and more than that, he moved the altars, the gods, the religions, the ideas, the beliefs and the souls. Philosopher, Orator, Apostle, Legislator, Conqueror of Ideas, Restorer of Rational beliefs... The founder of twenty terrestrial empires and of one spiritual empire, that is Muhammad. As regards all standards by which human greatness may be measured, we may well ask, is there any man greater than he?"


Alphonse de Lamartine, History of Turkey (1854) :)
 
Mar 13, 2009
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Churches in Britain are being turned into pubs, libraries, supermarkets, appartments.... more and more every year.

I think this is a great and wonderful thing. I congratulate the church responsibles for being realistic enough to know that it is better to sell these buildings and have them used for something useful than not used at all.

I hope to visit one of these pubs or libraries some day... though I wouldn't want to live in a church. Isolation must be terrible and heating must cost a fortune!

http://news.yahoo.com/pubs-flats-supermarkets-britains-churches-reborn-061835030.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B55XC8cuO7g
 
BigMac said:
So it seems that Da Vinci was right and Magdalena a.k.a The Prostitute really was Jesus' wife. Yet another historic misrepresentation of the catolic church.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-ancient-papyrus-scroll-verified-9255110.html

"The papyrus is small, barely three inches wide, and covered in dense, incomplete lines of crudely written Coptic text...."


So to begin with, this manuscript is incomplete.


"...But written on the papyrus are words that experts now believe are a record of a conversation between Jesus and his disciples that may become as important as documents that form the basis of the accepted New Testament...."


Ah ha....the experts believe :rolleyes:....based on what?


"...“The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife”, as it has become known since its discovery two years ago, refers to Jesus saying the words “my wife” and was this week confirmed by scientists not to be a modern forgery, but an ancient document dating from between the sixth and ninth centuries AD, or possibly earlier. ..."


That in of it's self proves nothing. What were the words surrounding the phrase "my wife?" Was he quoting someone else, was he telling a parable? They don't explain any of that.


"...Harvard Divinity School said: “After all the research was complete, King weighed all the evidence of the age and characteristics of the papyrus and ink, handwriting, language and historical context to conclude the fragment is almost certainly a product of early Christians, not a modern forger.”...


I wish they would have told us how they came to this conclusion. There were many aberrant groups during the early christian period. Not everyone who claims to be a christian is a christian.


"...It is not known who wrote the fragment, measuring 1.8 by 3.1 inches, in which Jesus speaks of his mother, his wife and a female disciple called “Mary”. It is assumed to have come from Egypt because it is written in Coptic – the form of Egyptian language used by Christians in the Roman period...."


They don't even know who wrote it. They are assuming it came from Egypt.

It's very interesting...the title of the article said "Jesus had a wife, say scientist, as ancient papyrus scroll verified." The title makes it sound like they know what their talking about. Yet if you read the article, you realize they don't have the slightest clue of what they are talking about. They sure are assuming a lot. The entire article is couched in uncertain language. Thanks for sharing.
 
Oct 23, 2011
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BigMac said:
So it seems that Da Vinci was right and Magdalena a.k.a The Prostitute really was Jesus' wife. Yet another historic misrepresentation of the catolic church.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-ancient-papyrus-scroll-verified-9255110.html

Lol, the media hype about this is beyond belief. The study that initiated the recent media attention 2 years after the discovery of the papyrus, actually states itself that it is not evidence for Jesus actually being married at all....

I don't see how an obscure papyrus fragment from the 6th-9th century is a relevant historical source for the marital status of somebody living in the 1st century. :confused:

Now matter how untrustworthy you think the Gospels in the Bible are, at least they were written in the 1st century. Can anybody explain to me how a 6th-9th century snippet of papyrus is a more or equally trustworthy source about the marital status of a man from the 1st century, compared to 1st century biographies about said man, like prof. Taussig claims in that article?

I think prof. Taussig is trying to look for some attention. :)
 
Jan 27, 2013
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The feast of Ishtar, the easter bunny and painted eggs as symbols of fertility. Yeah, the sun has passed over the Equator, Osiris has transformed death into life and Horus is born anew. Isis is in blossom again as the cold dead earth springs forth with new life. It's a resurection I tell you.

I did some planting on the 15th, under the blood moon (just for fun) and today the potatoes are springing forth after their long chill in the basement. The garlic survived it's winter and the transplant too, growing like a weed. Soon the peas, beets, chard, spinach, radishes, lettuce etc. will be poking through too. The tomatoes and peppers have already done so indoors. Glorious thing, this cycle of life.

Sometime after Beltane, shortly after the last frosts have been burned off and the may day pole dance is over it will be time to plant the corn, beans, squash, cucumbers, etc. too.

Amazing what goes on despite our nonsense.
 
Jspear said:
"The papyrus is small, barely three inches wide, and covered in dense, incomplete lines of crudely written Coptic text...."


So to begin with, this manuscript is incomplete.


"...But written on the papyrus are words that experts now believe are a record of a conversation between Jesus and his disciples that may become as important as documents that form the basis of the accepted New Testament...."


Ah ha....the experts believe :rolleyes:....based on what?


"...“The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife”, as it has become known since its discovery two years ago, refers to Jesus saying the words “my wife” and was this week confirmed by scientists not to be a modern forgery, but an ancient document dating from between the sixth and ninth centuries AD, or possibly earlier. ..."


That in of it's self proves nothing. What were the words surrounding the phrase "my wife?" Was he quoting someone else, was he telling a parable? They don't explain any of that.


"...Harvard Divinity School said: “After all the research was complete, King weighed all the evidence of the age and characteristics of the papyrus and ink, handwriting, language and historical context to conclude the fragment is almost certainly a product of early Christians, not a modern forger.”...


I wish they would have told us how they came to this conclusion. There were many aberrant groups during the early christian period. Not everyone who claims to be a christian is a christian.


"...It is not known who wrote the fragment, measuring 1.8 by 3.1 inches, in which Jesus speaks of his mother, his wife and a female disciple called “Mary”. It is assumed to have come from Egypt because it is written in Coptic – the form of Egyptian language used by Christians in the Roman period...."


They don't even know who wrote it. They are assuming it came from Egypt.

It's very interesting...the title of the article said "Jesus had a wife, say scientist, as ancient papyrus scroll verified." The title makes it sound like they know what their talking about. Yet if you read the article, you realize they don't have the slightest clue of what they are talking about. They sure are assuming a lot. The entire article is couched in uncertain language. Thanks for sharing.

I love how all of a sudden you have this high standard of evidence.

If only you applied that standard of evidence to your supernatural beliefs...