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Cat fight. And for the record, I find Hollie very intelligent and well thought out. Could it be you don't like her calling bullshit on your bullshit?
I am sure PoliticalChic can handle her own affairs,
but I do notice that you have nothing of value or specific criticisms of PC’s claims on this thread?
Which reminds me a lot of Hollie and her “rebuttals” which were vacuous save for attitude.
The other day I was watching this guy ask for people to call in and pay $70 x 10 months and said you will receive a miracle if you pay. Do you buy that? It's a scam!
Anyways, I just googled him and it turns out he makes over $1 a year.
You keep believing you dopes.
And that is as far as your investigation of Christianity goes? Or your desire to know the truth?
Well that explains a lot.
I am not sure how you can be reached? But we will keep trying. (but not judging)
Faith is absolute trust or confidence in a belief. Conversely, scientific theories are inherently falsifiable – meaning they can be proven wrong. No claims of absolute truth are believed or need to be taken ‘on faith’ in science because none are made. True scientists say, “We are aware that our theories and conclusions are not perfect, just the best fit for the available evidence”.
Scientific knowledge is a form of justified belief grounded in empirical evidence and the demonstrable reliability of the scientific method. Faith is an unjustified belief based on fantasy, superstition and wishful thinking.
Science converges on the truth via questioning. Its solutions and explanations do not differ between nations or cultures because they can be tested by anyone, anywhere, anytime. Whatever knowledge science produces is valid everywhere. Religion, on the other hand, diverges into a myriad of forms and beliefs based on individual experiences and interpretations which cannot be tested against reality.
If all knowledge of science was lost, someone could potentially figure it out again. What is true remains true, and anyone could discover that truth again using the same method that revealed it in the first place. Conversely, if every trace of religion were wiped out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created in exactly the same way again.
Science is the pursuit of truth, not the presumption of it.
First of all, your tributes to science are far too magnanimous and noble. Science goes far beyond this pristine, honest altruism and honorable state you want to attribute to the entire historical endeavor. What did Mark Twain say?... “There’s something fascinating about science. You get such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”
Jonathan Swift (17th century English satirist) was more specific to the crux of the matter. Referencing the achievements of science and its reflection upon its own laurels. ---- "And he, whose fortunes and dispositions have placed him in a convenient station to enjoy the fruits of this noble art; he that can with Epicurus content his ideas with the films and images that fly-off upon his senses from the superficies of things; such a man truly wise, creams off nature, leaving the sour and the dregs for philosophy and reason to lap up. This is the sublime and refined point of felicity, called, the possession of being well deceived; the serene peaceful state of being a fool among knaves."
In other words, science thinks far too highly of itself and does not even put a toe in the water to answer the greatest questions and needs about life and the person. Science may maintain their field of discipline does not deal with proving God, but it appears they are surely in the business of trying to disprove Him.
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No need to tell me about faith either. You and yours always try to put it in terms that fit nicely with your agnosticism or total disbelief. Our faith is not blind. It is based on evidence and reason. We are long past wondering if God is real or not and which God. We know it is Jesus Christ. Just because you demand that nothing can be known is no concern of ours. The faith we practice is in the areas of believing in some of God’s promises or teachings, but surely not of His existence. We have faith in the real presence in the Eucharist, that our sins are forgiven in the confessional, that the Lord is assisting us in our sufferings and the sufferings of others, that all our sacrifices and acts of kindness and prayers make eternal differences in our future and those others, etc. But we do not need faith to know who the One and Only is. That is very clear and known.
But as long as you continue to believe life sprang from lifeless rocks and then formed incredible cells with thousands of machines within them, and amazing organs all by random rendezvous of molecules without any intelligent designer, I do not see where I will ever convince you? As long as you take documented miracles and call it hysteria such as the 70,000 at Fatima showing up on the day three little shepherd children prophesied a miracle would happen for all to see, I will never be able to convince you. As long as you choose to ignore the apparitions of the Virgin Mary in 1968 at Zeitoun, Egypt seen by more than 200,000 Egyptians over 20 or more apparitions on top of a Coptic Cathedral – where neither legal authorities or science could explain the vision, or the colorful lights and smoke appearing each time, I will never expect to convince you.
As long as you keep demanding carbon dating ruled the Shroud a medieval fraud even though many scientists and studies since have given very plausible explanations for that faulty testing --- and also spoke to the inexplicable qualities of that image as impossible for a forger to produce --- as long as you walk away from that without being honest about its marvels, I will never be able to convince you. As long as you ignore or dismiss hundreds of weeping statues and paintings of Mary and Jesus and just laugh it off because a few frauds were detected by some zealous crazies, I will never convince you. (Note: I notice science stays far and clear of those bleeding statues, too.)
As long as you call all these fantastic Near Death Experiences the result of “a dying brain” which makes no scientific or medical sense, I will never convince you. As long as you laugh off the testimonies of so many witnesses to exorcisms who are freaked out by the child’s ability to speak of events in the witnesses’ past they would never know, or who speaks in Latin and other foreign languages the child could never know, who utters the most vulgar, obscene tirades at all present in the most disturbing guttural language, and so many other demonic manifestations, I will never be able to convince you.
As long as you insist the bleeding wounds from Padre Pio’s hands, feet and side were caused by him secretly gouging himself for 50 years, and deny the heavenly fragrance eminating from the wounds, and deny all the witnesses who say he can read their souls and minds, and has bilocated, and of course accept the fringe scientist who says he did it all with carbolic acid --- I will never convince you. Never mind there are many other stigmatics who science says they bleed regularly with their mind control. Right. As long as you insist all these scores of saints whose bodies remain incorruptible hundreds of years after their death are all secretly preserved by tricky nuns, I will never convince you. As long as every miraculous healing at the waters of Lourdes are dismissed as mind over matter and no thanks to prayers and faith, I will never convince you of the presence of God.
I cannot explain what appears to me as this denial or blindness? But I can understand their antipathy towards those like me who insist God is absolutely known and factual, no need for faith. Anyone can bombard you with their messages or cases of importance on TV or the internet or newsprint or political promises, but let a Christian send out his message and it’s a act of us “shoving our message down your throats.” Pardon our opinions of what’s going on here, differing from yours. But why must it become so unnerving for you or them? Because of what’s at stake, that’s why, I am guessing? (again) Deny it all you want, but for almost the entire cognizant world, to wonder what happens when they die (and possess great concern) is as natural as anything a human experiences. I do not care what Ingersoll is trying to sell us. It is temporal and flawed. He calls that freedom? I call that utter despair.
"First of all, your tributes to science are far too magnanimous and noble. Science goes far beyond this pristine, honest altruism and honorable state you want to attribute to the entire historical endeavor."
Excellent!
The brain-dead attribute higher than normal attributes to "scientists."
The are simply folks who found a different way of making a living.
Many blue collar workers have as much integrity as many scientists.
Then, there is this:
"...It took only a handful of days. The students wrote a simple computer program that churned out gobbledegook and presented it asan academic paper. They put their names on one of the papers, sent it to a conference, and promptly had it accepted. The sting, in 2005, revealed a farce that lay at the heart of science.
But this is the hoax that keeps on giving. The creators of the automatic nonsense generator, Jeremy Stribling, Dan Aguayo and Maxwell Krohn, have made the SCI gen program free to download. And scientists have been using it in their droves. This week,Nature reported, French researcher Cyril Labbé revealed that 16 gobbledegook papers created by SCIgen had been used by German academic publisher Springer. More than 100 more fake SCIgen papers were published by the US Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). Both organisations have now taken steps to remove the papers.
Hoaxes in academia are nothing new. In 1996, mathematician Alan Sokal riled postmodernists by publishing a nonsense paper in the leading US journal, Social Text. It was laden with meaningless phrases but, as Sokal said, it sounded good to them. Other fields have not been immune. In 1964, critics of modern art were wowed by the work of Pierre Brassau, who turned out to be a four-year-old chimpanzee. In a more convoluted case, Bernard-Henri Lévy, one of France's best-known philosophers, was left to ponder his own expertise after quoting the lectures of Jean-Baptiste Botul as evidence that Kant was a fake, only to find out that Botul was the fake, an invention of a French reporter."
How computer-generated fake papers are flooding academia Science The Guardian
Show me a poster who speaks in glowing terms of "scientists" and I'll show you a dunce.