I never thought someone would actually admit to viewing their inner monologue like this:

Look at your own diagram.

It ought to make you think of the Holy Spirit as a person. People can grant or not grant things to people.

Why wouldn't God be offended or the Holy Spirit grieved by the ugly things atheists say about God?

That's all I have to say on the matter. Arguing is banal after a while if you can't even look at things from God's (another person's) perspective.

Your attitude affects your interpretive ability. How would you ever be able to get in the Spirit even accidentally when you're so busy finding fault with God?

I object to the notion of reason vs. faith. It really should be obfuscation vs. reason with necessary faith to fill in the gaps.

I mean...who has all the comedians? Who really has the totally disjointed ideas meshed together, often relayed in emotional outbursts?

Does not exist.

Beliefs based on a preponderance of evidence is necessary (such as believing the sun will rise tomorrow). However, faith as its used colloquially is not only unnecessary, but sometimes harmful.

Quote: The Messiah’s return — the final revelation of Jesus Christ — is yet to be fulfilled.


Through faith [we] are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith — of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire — may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed (1 Peter 1:5-7).

Jesus Will Return! Are You Ready?
http://graceministries.in/?p=441


How long is the line of Adam and Eve? What if God has a number in His head (a quota) He wants to fill? I can't answer either of those questions.

But revelation is progressive.

Maybe we're not suppose to be able to answer every question before they're revealed not that it will stop us from considering them and sometimes jumping to wrong conclusions.

Reason.

how about faith in reason and reasonable things?

See post #29

this.

and this.

For example, it may be the case that Jews have a particular DNA sequence structure that non-Jews do not. Their DNA may give them advantages in life. I don't know if this is 100% true, but so what?

The point is, correlation is not causation, and you can't deduce things unless they are repeatably demonstrable, such as the law of conservation in electromagnetism.

You also should not reason things from speculation.

/another hand-wavy religious thread

Is this part a joke?

if not: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical..._Jewish_people

We have lots of reasons to think that reasoning leads to correct truth values. A belief in the process of reasoning is itself well reasoned due the inductive basis of success that reasoning has.

The wikipedia link talks about diseases and disease rates of Jewish people based on their gene type.

I was talking about advantages in life, not survival rate.

Advantages in life =/= survival rate.

However, it might have been the case that my claim "Jew's DNA is better than other groups' DNA" is false. Maybe "Jew's social ties (on average) are better than other groups social ties (on average)".

Maybe it is something other than social ties, but my ""claim"" is that: Jews are somewhat "better" than non-Jews. Hold on, I haven't finished.

I am not wanting to have an actual discussion to determine whether or not my claim is true or false.

But the point I want to make is that, you should not assume my claim to be true on faith. Moreover, even if my claim were true and it was statistically verifyable, that does not mean that the superiority of Jews has anything to do with a magical sky creature. For anyone with rational thought, the next step would not be to jump to a conclusion about the cause of the claim, but instead to investigate what the cause might be using the scientific method.

I'm not exactly on the edge of my seat in excitement over talking about the Jews, but I was just making a point that using genes and advantage in the same sentence is ironic seeing as there are numerous genetic diseases associated with their population. As far as I know there isn't another population anymore afflicted with genetic diseases (closest would be sickle cell in peopl from african and some Indian Ocean bordering countries). I know disadvantages don't negate advantages, but I feel like one obvious advantage would be to not be so disadvantaged, if you get my drift. But yes I think they have longer than average lifespans and seemingly above average intelligence too.