Melanie Stephan thread

Hi “Melanie” (an explanation on the quotes coming further down the post),

I’ve decided to move your four last “responses” here, as well as copy your earlier ones to create an exclusive post. My responses are quoted (you can tell by the date following them) or interspersed.

This is not a Lie or a Joke. Jesus returned in Spirit in the Spring of 2006. He talked to only one person. Again this is not a lie.
Jun 30, 11:09 AM

… and, where did this “contact” occur?
Jun 30, 5:33 PM

Hi Albert, God, Jesus and the Holy Ghost came to North America. Not to far from where Joseph Smith’s alleged talk with God happened. Maybe God just likes this place.
Jul 12, 9:19 AM

Marc thread – on Buddhism and the significance of “naming the nameless”

Marc, I’ve brought the thread over to my site.

As it seems , there are many names & words for God & Christ, & there are others, was not Elijah God incarnate as well.

The name “Elijah” meant “God is Lord”.

The Pillar and Ground of Truth – removed comment

I’m not entirely sure why Father Stevens took down this comment, but it’s here for reference.

Continued from this thread below:

Thanks for the quick response. My comments interspersed below. I did find them to be helpful.

Albert,
1. Respect – assuming the best about someone even if you disagree with them, not attacking their motives or intelligence. Ad hominem is disrespectful

I can agree with this – it’s nearly the definition of ad hominem. Bringing it into a subjective context, what do you think about a layman referring to you as “Brother”? Or, under what circumstances would you consider “Brother” to be non-disrespectful?

Eric Open thread – on Ecclesiology, heretical teaching and practices

[Ed: For context, reference my removed comment.]

As I mentioned, I’m not entirely sure what you meant by your phrase (although I do know the meaning of the phrase itself). Please elaborate.

You wrote:

albert wrote: “A recent goal of mine has been to root out heresies from the church. Granted, this has been a rather large task, but the multiplicity of errors I’ve seen are just too blatantly out of sync to ignore, lacking resemblance to a heart, soul, strength and mind in geniune worship of God. This is because I see myself as a teacher of sorts, although I lack what is seen as “credentials” – Ph.D/Master’s of Divinity. (That’s a partial reason why I’m back in school right now).”

Kyrie, eleêson.

Jesterballz thread – point by point rebuttals and partial methodology for determining Truth

Jesterballz, I’ve migrated the thread to my site for readability/loading time.
Taken from this post for readability.

I honestly can’t see how you can seriously say “I welcome civilised argument in the comments” when your name is “jesterballz”.

In any case, we can do this the easy way (testing for coherency, universality, and uniqueness of claim to truth) or the polemic way (point by point rebuttal/back and forth until no conclusion is reached). Up to you.

You said:
There are a whole lot of people out there who believe in “God”. Billions of people are Christian, Muslim or Jewish, and are following their religion (most often blindly). But I strongly refute the claim that this particular “God” exists, and I have pretty good reason, too. So all those curious people out there, please read this and maybe you will realise your mistake. That said, I am not accusing anyone who believes in God of being stupid. Please make comments to explain your reasoning if you disagree with my theory.

Shadow thread – Garden of Eden theology

Shadow,

Sorry for the late response. The thread has clearly blown up, so I’m taking the liberty to move it to my blog for legibility.

I said (quoting jesterballz‘s logic):

If everyone is thinking alike, someone isn’t thinking. – George Patton. [ed: my quote]

I’ve addressed your topic in my For Atheists page under Junaman thread – Empiricism vs. Rationalism, but I’ll respond to your logic w/in the framework of Christianity:

1. Assume God exists.

Define “God”. You do that in 2, 3, 6, 7 and 8, not 1. The Old Testament, throughout the course of its 39 books, does it in a similar fashion, but comes up with a different conclusion.

Junaman thread – Empiricism vs. Rationalism – Pt 5

The formatting always gets lost in translation… even with html. Bleh.

The tags are a good indicator of what this thread’s about (maybe will work on a summary later).

A: It’s fine, I suppose. But the longer it takes, the more disingenuous your pursuit of “exposing incompetence”, as it were, will look (recent post(s) nonwithstanding).

J: You put a bit much weight on a tagline…

That’s not just a tagline… it’s also the title of your blog.

…How is this conversation exposing incompetence.

Well, that one should be obvious. The incompetence comes in the form of dogmaticism regarding the “ultimate truth” of science, which is implied from your For Christians page.

The real incompetence is not whether you believe in a god [or not], but what you use that belief for, what objective you try to achieve with that belief.

I can agree if you’re referring to “amoralism”, e.g. in the case of Hitler and Bush. I don’t think proselytising necessarily bring you to the same conclusion.

Junaman thread – Empiricism vs. Rationalism – Pt 4

A continuation of part 3 (reposted for readability, loading time, and the fact I knew it would be intially filtered by akismet). Topics include the probability of mass hallucination (ref: 1st century Christianity | apologetics), Junaman’ s atheistic generalization of rationalism, the scientific method, the fallacy of “rational knowledge”, and reasons why “objectivism” is a fallacy (with brief mention of why the Nobel Prize exists).

Sorry for taking so long to reply…

It’s fine, I suppose. But the longer it takes, the more disingenuous your pursuit of “exposing incompetence”, as it were, will look (recent post(s) nonwithstanding).

First of all, not all religious people claim they have “seen” or “experienced” god,

This is true, but…

secondly the ones who have can all claim they saw different things,

…this is a generalization, which leads you to inaccurately conclude…

no one’s belief is truly identical to another’s, hence is it really a “mass hallucination”, or just different people hallucinating different things.

Cy thread – on dogmaticism, religious indoctrination, and politicized religion

Had a good feeling it would’ve been caught by akismet (whoops, I’ve been calling it azkimet) and, most likely, not undeleted by Vance. Thread has been continued here.

It is not needful for me to defend my unbelief in a deity. It is up to the theists to defend their belief in a deity. They do this to their own satisfaction but not to mine.

This is dogmaticism at its finest. I hope you recognize that, and are secretly joking.

Important distinctions between Y2K and Peak Oil

This post is actually a repost (without permission) of a thread I was reading on the Peak Oil discussion group, ROE2 (Running on Empty 2). Just another example of the great minds that are gathering to do something (hopefully) to have a positive impact for the future (of which I was again reminded by the weather abruptly turning cold here, and freezing as the result of trying to stay warm with only a small space heater and some winter clothes). Re: Y2K,was Re: Alternate Energies Posted by: “J libby” jlibby331

Thu Oct 19, 2006 4:35 pm (PST)

Y2K would never have been a civilization ending disaster. I suppose worse case scenario, it migh have caused a major recession, but we would have recovered qucikly. As mentioned here some time ago, I worked on banking software in the late 80s and we were making changes to software than. At that time, many programs couldn’t handle 30 year loans because of the 2 digit dates. But it certainly didn’t bring the mortgage loan business to a halt. Things that didn’t get fixed quick enough caused billing problems, but it all got worked out without causing major problems. The same would have been true of Y2K, if things weren’t fixed quick enough, there would be problems. But much effort and money were put into the problem by government and business to fix the problems. But they were known problems and people knew how to fix them. The media is what created the hype on Y2K. You don’t see that on PO.