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The sooner the C of E is kicked out of government and schools the better.
Good points.
Seems a bit unfair he limited himself to only helping people in such a small region of the globe too.
You'd have thought he might have popped fro continent to continent curing a few Chinamen of blindness here, raising a few Swedes from the dead there.
But no he's happy just to tell a few people in the Middle East and leave it to them to tell the rest of the world. What if those people had never gone and spread the word and just kept it to themselves? All those babies born with original sin but nobody would even know that to cure them of it you need to baptise them in the name of God.
Obviously baby cancer has no such easy fix though. I can't help feeling most parents would prefer baptism cured cancer rather than original sin but He works in mysterious ways that we pathetic humans can never understand.
The gospels were all written between about 50-70 years after the event.
That's like me trying to write a history of the Suez crisis from scratch with witness testimony only (mostly second hand as life expectancies would have been far lower). No access to news reports, TV footage, the internet, books. Just people who knew someone who knew a bloke who was there. And then the rest of the world taking my cobbled together account as a 100% accurate record of the events.
At best the gospels should be treated as a sketchy account of what happened and the miracles questionable (and thats being very generous).
Don't question anything.
Don't doubt anything.
Don't think.
Yet people of faith are to be 'respected'. Why would you respect somene who unquestioningly laps up any crap someone feeds them?
'Yesterday I signed up for PPI, replied with my credit card details to a Nigerian lottery email, paid £5k into a Ponzi scheme and bought a copy of Hitler's diaries on Amazon.'
'Wow I really respect you. You're not a gullible moron in the slightest.'
Or your president.
Sounds like my second year of high school's RE teacher.
No I'm just kidding. He was dumb, but in a different way.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/mar/13/archbishop-canterbury-calls-for-churches-to-open-doors-to-rough-sleepers
The link below puts things into context and, remember, they pay no tax.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/05/21/church-england-enjoys-stellar-returns-investment-fund/
I wonder who Jesus used to run his investment portfolio?
So literally billions of people are unworthy of your respect?
I don't think I've ever encountered someone so pompous, arrogant, and obnoxious on a message board.
But keep going, because you sure are unintentionally funny!
Why is an idea "less wrong" due to it being believed by millions of people? Why should beliefs be more respected due to the " size of the crowd?" Thats just "mob rule".
By offering respect to certain ideas, it implies a level of legitimacy which simply is not there. Should every idea (and person who believes it) be respected?
If you get chatting tomorrow to your neighbour and he invites you to come and see the fairies at the bottom of his garden, do you seriously respect him? I would be concerned for his mental health.
@Escalus5 I cannot speak for @TheWizardOfIce or any other heathen here, but while I respect everyone of my fellow primates (because that's what humans are), I do NOT respect beliefs that are not supported by evidence, especially if they are harmful. And I suggest you Google argument at popularity.
What a stupid analogy.
I'm getting a little concerned about the mental health of certain people in this thread, who appear to be pathological narcissists.
Please explain why you think this? If I have said something stupid, I'm always interested in why it's stupid.
Can you answer the question without deflecting to a "tu quoque". Actually the questions.
That is, if they are analogies. If not, god demanded a man to sacrifice his firstborn, which is worse.
You’re aware this is a scripted comedy TV show?
Ta muchly.
If you want pomposity I suggest you head to the average religious forum where they will no doubt put me in the shade.
At least I just limit things to having no respect rather than thinking people should all be killed or burn in hell for eternity. I'm a cuddly teddy bear to the average religonutter.
'Unintentionally funny' - not my words...
"Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanation. What I meant by 'we would know the mind of God' is, we would know everything that God would know, if there were a God, which there isn't. I'm an atheist."
“When people ask me if a god created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the big bang, so there is no time for god to make the universe in. It’s like asking directions to the edge of the earth; The Earth is a sphere; it doesn’t have an edge; so looking for it is a futile exercise. We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is; there is no god. No one created our universe,and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization; There is probably no heaven, and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.”
“There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.”
PS meanwhile...https://www.reddit.com/r/Catholicism/comments/84azah/pray_for_the_soul_of_stephen_hawking/
By something do you mean someone? If so why would something have any of the characteristics of a god?
Yes, because clearly all people of faith -- those billions who are beneath your contempt -- carry the belief that others who don't follow their doctrine should burn in hell.
You must be a big hit at parties.
Moving backwards in time, we see the universe size down to become a sizzling hot 'thing' that can no longer sustain matter but in fact must break down into fundamental particles which, eventually, "evaporate" into nothing but energy. Many people have nowadays grown used to the notion that there was once no space. Not a black, empty void, not a dark, vacuous deepfreeze. Nothing! In order to accept this particularly unsettling notion, it helps to not think of it as a weird and counterintuitive "zero-state" that must have existed for all eternity before the Big Bang, but to think of it as a "zero-state" that literally never existed before the Big Bang since "never" is the best word you can come up with for when time didn't exist either. There is, differently put, nothing to worry about since the thing you might be worrying about "never" existed. It is pointless to think of something as awkward when that something "never" was.
The only thing one could consider is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, one of the great realizations of the 20th century and not once proven wrong in the past 9 decades. And it offers a few interesting avenues to understand the Big Bang a little better. One of these goes as follows. Even in a void, temporal as well as spacial, energy can be "borrowed" from nothingness. Nothingness can be split into positive and negative energy, like 0 can be split into +1 and -1. However, the more energy you wish to borrow, the less likely the event. Ergo, we know that tiny bits of energy are borrowed all the time--if they weren't, protons and neutrons couldn't exist--but quantities large enough to fire off something like the Big Bang are rare enough so that the last time this has happened was 13.6 billion years ago. Of course the energy then borrowed is slowly leaking back away from us--the universe won't always be shining--but since time and space were created during the Big Bang, and since a process called "inflation" allowed them to expand beyond immediate self-cancellation, our Sun and our Earth and we ourselves were allowed the time to be born and to evolve into the people we are now, figuring all of this out. I'm not saying this is what really happened, but it's one possible explanation.
By contrast, to assume that the cosmic calendar was always there, blank and unused, and that suddenly something happened in it, some 13.6 billion years ago, gives the entire event a sense of purpose. When we pin a date on the calendar for, say, a party, there's a purpose involved as well. As the film of time is then unspooled beyond this point, we see a universe growing from the size of a pea to the ever-expanding 'thing' it is today. But then why did this never happen before? Assuming there was, indeed, a before, it seems strange that the universe "chose" to wait for the proper time. This is where some people clue in their religion. God wanted it to happen then, and no sooner. (I'm not going to talk about Young Earth Creationism. That bag of silliness sleeps far below my intellectual radar.) Again, people desire purpose. Purpose, divine or otherwise, provides comfort; it appeases an intuitive logic which is human, but flawed. We thrive on causality, which is why we struggle so much with notions like untimely death, sudden illness and bad luck. Alas, there's very little real causality at work in the universe, despite what your teachers taught you in Introductory Physics. The real science underpinning all other science is much more subtle in its causality rumblings. It talks about probabilities rather than certainties. Things don't happen because they mean something. They happen when they happen, not inexplicably but certainly not purposefully. Perhaps this is what poses the biggest challenge to many people of a more religious and possibly Creationist persuasion: to accept that entropy (a measure of chaos) is the driving force in the cosmos, not divine order; to accept that chance gave birth to the universe, not a divine creator. One of these notions is very old, and comes from times when people understood so little that the only reasonable explanation was gods and their will. The other is more recent, continues to survive scientific scrutiny and seems to properly fit together the pieces of the scientific puzzle. Only stubbornness, doctrine or lack of scientific education can keep a sane person from abandoning the old notion and accepting the new and tested one. One follows a human logic, the other a mathematical one. Guess which option is the better.
So you see, despite what our intuition may teach us, time probably didn't exist before the Big Bang. It's just another paramater in the total configuarion of the cosmos, neither absolute nor "death-defying". Whether this serves you an existential crisis or not, is another problem alltogether. And I'm not here to say that I find all of this so easy to contemplate. In fact I don't. I also know that the universe doesn't care what I understand or find logical or intuitively 'right'. That right there makes me, at least philosophically speaking, a good scientist. The rest of my scientific skills and knowledge is inferior to that.