Albert Cipriani

Hawkingfan,
I found your long-winded attempt at ridicule ridiculous.

Oooo. You positively drip with sarcasm. Makes my keyboard sticky.

“Religious findings”? Science, not religion, has findings. Religion is found… as a pearl of great price, by those worthy of it – not by swine. Love is like that too. How does Kihil Gibron’s saying go? ‘Don’t look to find love, but rather, prepare yourself to be found worthy of love.’ Something like that.

I’m disappointed in you. I spread before you a smorgasbord of issues to sharpen knives over and you focus like a pin-hole lens on the fact that rabbits don’t chew a cud. Do you really want to discuss so narrow and boring an apparent biblical contradiction? I don’t. But I don’t have a pin-hole perspective, either. If I did, perhaps I could generate a head of steam for such trivia as you seem to have. – AAAlbert Cleaning His SSSticking Keysssss –

Hawkingfan

Maybe I find your opinion (or is it a fact?) that 1% belief in uprooting a mulberry tree by command alone ridiculous?

I thought we were being serious. You said all we need is 1% belief and quoted Jesus when he said that if you have the mustard seed faith, blah...blah...blah...

And all I am saying is for you to put your money where your mouth is and make a mulberry tree throw itself into the sea. Because all it takes is 1% faith, right? Or the faith of a mustard seed? Is a mulberry tree too difficult for you? How about a blade of grass? Do you have 1% belief that you can make a blade of grass uproot itself and throw itself into the sea? I am being serious!

Are you sure it's my "sarcasm", or something else there in front of you?

And yes, "religious findings". We are told time and time again by Xians, that modern scientific theories will have to be re-written because evidence for god will be beyond its reaches whenever god is "revealed".

I'm disappointed in YOU for dodging the perfectly legitimate questions I raised (which came from your "smorgasbord") by using the example of the rabbit chewing its cud. You said that religion (esp. Catholics) ARE like science in that they refine old theories. Can you agree with me, that they forgot the one about the rabbit? If you want to avoid it, fine.

Albert Cipriani

Ooo La La Hawkingfan,
In reference to my sticky keyboard, you ask:
Excellent retort! Cracked my first smile of the day over it (Shows how humorless my day is!) So I tip my hat to you. I take my belt off to you. I... no, I won’t go there. Tho I do take back all my bad thoughts about you.

OK. I’ll take you at your word that you are being serious tho I really don’t think this is the forum for such talk, here goes.

You don’t interpret a newspaper in the same way throughout. For example, you don’t process the horoscope or Dear Abbey in the same way that you process front-page news. Well, President Clinton’s legacy perhaps makes such distinctions a bit blurry. But I think you get my drift. The Bible is no different. Some of it is poetry, some history, some psychotically symbolic, some legalistic, and some, here’s where we’re at, HYPERBOLIC.

Jesus often used hyperbole in his teachings. (E.g., can find the gnat in your neighbor’s eye but not the beam in your own eye, rich men cueing up behind the camels to squeeze through the eye of a needle.) A mulberry tree cannot live in the ocean so transplanting it therein is clearly a figure for doing the impossible, sort of like the expression “walking on water.” Ergo, Jesus’s meant that if you have least amount of faith you will be able to do the impossible.

Which begs the question of what’s impossible. Being saved is impossible. No one can be saved, even if they live impossibly perfect lives. Only through belief in God can God do the impossible for us, that is, save us. This is far greater an impossibility that the outlandish one presented by Jesus of getting a mulberry tree to grow in the ocean on command. It’s called humor. It’s called verve. It’s called panache. Jesus had it all.

Plus there’s the added implication that the mustard seed does not remain a mustard seed (unless we make mustards of it!) but grows into a very large tree, by Hebrew standards of Jesus’ day. So Jesus was also saying that no matter how little your faith, it will grow amazingly for so humble a beginning, like a speck of yeast that balloons an entire loaf of bread.

As to your point about the nonsense that Xians spiel regarding scientific theories needing to bend to the Word of God, you’re baiting me. I will not take your bait. Jobar has warned me about dissing Xians here. It’s enough for me to say that they will have to answer to God Almighty for their multitudinous misrepresentations of Him. Who knows how many of you guys are on your way to hell because of the detour you made around their intellectual train wreck.

Now to your killer rabbit. The dietary laws as laid out in Leviticus, like the fruit of a certain tree in Paradise, were primarily arbitrary, like a mother telling her brat to go stand in the corner. (There’s nothing special about the corner her finger points out, but there is something special about the kid dutifully doing as he’s told and not standing in a different corner of his own choosing.)

God’s law forbade the eating of animals with paws or hooves that were not cloven. Rabbits have paws. Ergo, rabbits were not to be eaten.

God’s law also forbade the eating of animals that did not chew the cud. So even tho it looks like rabbits are chewing a cud (they’re actually sniffing, I think), because of their paws, rabbits were not to be eaten.

So the law laid down in Leviticus 11 was not to eat rabbits. The rational for obeying that law, that rabbits have paws, is correct. The rational for disobeying that law, that rabbits appear to chew a cud, is incorrect. Ergo, what you consider the bad science of the Biblical is actually the bible’s indictment of those who would use bad science (rabbits chew the cud) to justify the breaking of God’s law. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic
Albert's Rants

Albert Cipriani

d:
What you’re calling my analogy I call a psychological argument from design. It’s not enough to accept what we feel as givens. What we feel reveals how we are.

For example, someone who finds a drowning child funny is not someone who is compassionate. Someone who is still troubled one mile later after accidentally stepping on a pill bug is someone who is compassionate. Thus, through our emotional reactions we read aloud from the book of our lives.

But not everyone steps on pill bugs or witnesses a child drowning. But virtually every human being that has ever lived witnessed the moon and the stars. What were their reactions to these universally available experiences.

Stonehenge and the pyramids and a myriad of archeological evidence points to the reaction of our forefathers as being more than awe, as being the big sister of awe, that is, our ancestors worshiped the heavens. It’s not enough to accept this. One must ask why.

The answer that immediately suggests itself to me is the projection of the answer I have for myself. That is, knowing that there’s something beyond me in scale, complexity, constancy, power (e.g., tides and seasons) and beauty is illogically satisfying because my insignificant relationship with the heavens parallels my insignificant relationship with God. That is, instinct “explains” the inexplicable.

The irrational emotion of awe must not be genetic or learned but infused by God as a seed of potential faith. Awe’s utter lack of survival value leads me to believe this fairy tale. Like that other one in the Bible. The one about how rocks fell from the sky which scientists were only able to verify a couple hundred years ago. Likewise, I believe the source of our awe is, like meteorites found in Antarctica, heaven sent.

As a caveman, wouldn’t Tyrannosaurus Rex have all the qualities of the stars to make us feel awed in its presence? But taking the time to contemplate it, or build stone monuments to it from which to observe its movements would not be a good survival strategy. Ergo, if our capacity for awe were genetic, natural selection should have long ago rid our race of it.

I can think of no logical purpose for our capacity to experience awe. That’s why I think it has none. It only has a spiritual purpose.

Eyes serve no logical advantage to fish who live in the total darkness of underwater caves. And so they eventually breed themselves into a subspecies without eyes. Nature is like that, efficient. So after all these years, every time we experience the sensation of awe, our bodies are giving mute testimony to the fact that awe must have some purpose outside of Nature. Awe is the lingua franca of the supernatural. – Cheers, Albert the Traditional Catholic
Albert's Rants

parkdalian

:notworthy :notworthy :notworthy

Keith Russell

Albert:
So, you claim that the feeling of 'awe' has only a spiritual purpose?

Well, if one defines 'spiritual' as meaning 'pertaining to consciousness', then I would certainly agree.

(Of course, you might not--and probably don't--agree with my definition of 'spiritual'...)

Keith.

Hawkingfan

Hi Albert,

Thanks for your responses.
As far as hyperbole, I disagree that Jesus only meant the act of being saved. If you remember the story about the fig tree, he made it wither and said that if we believed, we could also wither a fig tree. Also, Jesus turned water into wine, fed five thousand with five loaves and two fish, walked on water, healed the sick, lame and blind, controlled the weather, etc... And his disciples walked on water, healed the sick, performed miracles, excorsized demons, etc... Jesus also said that Christians in the future "would do greater things than these". And unfortunately, because of his remarks, many people today refuse proper medical treatment for their ailments and diseases which many times have caused them to die.

And I'm not sold on the cud stuff.

Albert Cipriani

Dear Keith,
I don’t have a problem with your definition of spiritual. I only use the word as a kind of short hand to close in on an quantitative idea that’s part of an erroneous qualitative concept.

Between you and me, there’s no real difference between natural and supernatural or physical and spiritual. But invoking such words to make distinctions can be useful, like how proper names are useful, but must not be confused with a real distinction.

For example, the fact that a human being calls himself Albert does not make Albert a human being. The name is just a handle to quickly focus attention away from other humans, such as John, or Mike who are every bit as human as Albert. Proper names are useful distinctions that point to things that are not essentially different.

Let us refine your definition of spiritual = consciousness. I’d say it that merely being conscious of a dog turd is not being spiritually conscious, but being conscious of the dog turd in relationship to ANYTHING ELSE, is. For example, the smell of it in my living room in relation to it adhering to the bottom of my shoe. Damn that pisses me off! And when that happens, my consciousness expands sufficiently to be dubbed spiritual consciousness. Agreed?

Remember, spiritual consciousness is merely a quantitative, not qualitative, expansion of manila-folder consciousness. I am not appealing to a difference of kind, but a difference of extent. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic 2/19/03
Albert's Rants

diana

Evening, Albert.

Let's see. I showed why your "faith in beauty is like faith in God" analogy was poor, to which you responded:

By the way, analogies aren't actually arguments. They are merely expressions of our opinion, a way to get people to understand our points of view. They do not serve as support for that opinion. At best, they can be valid analogies.

If it isn't an analogy, please explain how, exactly, it is an argument, because I don't follow.

Yes. One must ask why. Isn't the most simple answer that our "world view," as it were, simply broadens as we grow older. We notice, with each passing year, another thing that is far vaster than ourselves, eons older, that will last eons after we die. Why isn't this simply because as our knowledge and understanding grows, we are simply more and more capable of grasping just how puny and insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things? Again...why must you posit God?

This looks like an either/or fallacy to me. What do you think?

Also...you (and parkdalian) are aware that T. Rex was extinct millenia before man appeared, I'm sure.

Your appendix also has a spiritual purpose, I presume.

In the area of evolution, you appear to suffer from not one but many typical Xn myths pertaining to same. This, for example, appears to assume that evolution is an upward progression, and anything that survives must contribute in some way to survival. That doesn't sound right to me. But then, I've never claimed expertise in much of anything, particularly evolution.

I've taken the liberty of copying your last poetic offering over to Evolution/Creation, where it should get the professional attention it deserves.

d

Ted Hoffman

So Albert is back with his palavers. Those here who seem besotted by Albert's beguiling prose (and you seem to be swarming like moths to a flame), a caveat is in order for you:

Discussing with Albert is like sitting on a rocking chair - it keeps you busy but takes you nowhere.

Albert, remember me? I am the former "jaliet". Last time we "talked", I and others (of course they were thoroughbred bloodhounds) hounded you to the neck of the woods and last thing I heard, you were fumbling with the child-lock lids of your pill container in a hamfisted manner and after a while you conveniently succumbed to depression. We had to abandon the chase but I let my hounds tear down the trees for effect.

Aah, cognitive dissonance manifests itself in such different ways in people. Now you are back, cavorting and charming them all as you magically enrapture them in your prose. You are in control, they are hanging on every word you write and you are loving every minute of it. You are having your moment! Going through this discussion is like watching a toad in a pile of mud: Albert in his element.
Tying their arguments in knots and throwing the twitching bundles overboard. The sound of the bundles splashing down in the sea is sweet music to your atrophied ears.

If any one of them peers closely and scratches the veil of sophistry that you so elegantly adorn, they shall behold the clueless man that lurks beneath. An old man clutching feebly at zero.

Albert reminds me of Trevanian's Shibumi: authority without control, power without force...a man of his refinement can, to the untrained eye, refute any argument, except, he will not refute any of them. He is like a magician, pulling all sorts of things out of the hat, irrespective of what you throw at him...

We shall meet again. I am lurking, watching...