Beware

[FortunaMaximus]

Subfallen,

Must you?

hitch,

Thanks. That's news to me. I stand corrected.

I would be very surprised if China would not look outward or develop desalinization tech. Importing water would be a natural extension, I think. Eastern Siberia perhaps.

[vhawk01]

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If a person thinks back on his own life he most probably can see where he received a stupendous blessing against all odds.

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Charming -

"Lucky", "miraculous", "against all odds!"...these labels only exist because we live with incomplete information. You wouldn't be surprised to hit your 1-outer if you stacked the deck, would you? No, only when the cards are shuffled!

On the macro scale of big life events, our knowledge is so incomplete that it's silly to make any post hoc probability estimates at all. Once event 'M' has happened, there's basically no reason to believe that P(M) was any less than 1.

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This is a silly response. Its not that it isn't true, its just that its the wrong answer to Splendour's conundrum. What you should have said was "good luck interviewing those who havent received what appears in hindsight to have been a wonderful blessing."

[dragonystic]

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"It is likely we would not understand if he did.

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and we, are able to understand the "mysteries of godliness" as explained to the prophe;mysteries of godliness" as explained to the prophets of the Lord and more fully revealed in sacred places.

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that follows

[tame_deuces]

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Maybe the lord should have explained it right away then.

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Maybe the Lord had an inkling just how long the wait would be but that being ever ready served a double purpose: 1) it helped people practice his teachings better by underpinning them with the urgency of Judgment Day 2) by telling his people to watch future generations will be ready for him.

He knows he is planting a seed thru his handpicked men and the very beginning of the planting is incredibly important for the planting to grow and thrive. If he waters them with life giving words then his church can sustain the test of time.

"No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." "Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding with the hand mill; one will be taken and the other left." "Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come." (Matthew 24:36, 40 & 42)

Edit: Note that the double purpose saves more people across time while the Gospel is being spread across the globe.

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Yep, that's what you get when you believe in perfection. Layers and layers upon ad hoc explanations.

Christianity is just a rambling of collections of old Abrahamic beliefs haphazardly slung together with some new chapters on the end. Anyone remotely into linguistics and literary science knows this with a 100% certainty.

Believe in your god all you want, its the people that again and again and again return to this little black book of collected stories from older religions, distorted by dozens of translations, its meaning changed by thousands of scholars until what you read today and say today is completely different from what was read and said about it 1500 years ago. THAT is what boggles my mind.

The shameless certainty that this evolved view of Christianity, almost completely different from the original Christians (whose churches still operate today) must somehow be completely correct. That god somehow shields your belief from errors. Someone even managed to find a suitable race for Jesus and all his followers.

It is like some bizarre worldwide Disney version of history.

[Splendour]

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Maybe the lord should have explained it right away then.

[/ QUOTE ]

Maybe the Lord had an inkling just how long the wait would be but that being ever ready served a double purpose: 1) it helped people practice his teachings better by underpinning them with the urgency of Judgment Day 2) by telling his people to watch future generations will be ready for him.

He knows he is planting a seed thru his handpicked men and the very beginning of the planting is incredibly important for the planting to grow and thrive. If he waters them with life giving words then his church can sustain the test of time.

"No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." "Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding with the hand mill; one will be taken and the other left." "Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come." (Matthew 24:36, 40 & 42)

Edit: Note that the double purpose saves more people across time while the Gospel is being spread across the globe.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yep, that's what you get when you believe in perfection. Layers and layers upon ad hoc explanations.

Christianity is just a rambling of collections of old Abrahamic beliefs haphazardly slung together with some new chapters on the end. Anyone remotely into linguistics and literary science knows this with a 100% certainty.

Believe in your god all you want, its the people that again and again and again return to this little black book of collected stories from older religions, distorted by dozens of translations, its meaning changed by thousands of scholars until what you read today and say today is completely different from what was read and said about it 1500 years ago. THAT is what boggles my mind.

The shameless certainty that this evolved view of Christianity, almost completely different from the original Christians (whose churches still operate today) must somehow be completely correct. That god somehow shields your belief from errors. Someone even managed to find a suitable race for Jesus and all his followers.

It is like some bizarre worldwide Disney version of history.

[/ QUOTE ]

I actually find the way non-believers discount the biblical prophecies to be the ones straining the bound of human credulity. It's incredible that some of the wildest things in the bible can actually be supported by the discoveries and happenings of today. The 2 destructions of the Temple in Jerusalem and the re-rise of Israel today corroborate the book's prophetic nature. For the book of revelations to be able to describe an event that resembles a chemical attack (something they had no knowledge of 2000 years ago) is unbelievable. The Apostle John would have looked like a maniac in his time so why would he give us the book of Revelations if he wasn't himself sure it was a divine revelation.

Ben Franklin discovered electricity yet I don't think he could have foretold the myriad inventions that would spin off from it. The best invention he could come up with was the lightning rod. He never anticipated what Edison would do with his discovery. So I highly doubt the Apostle John could have made all these "imaginary conjectures" and put them into Revelations. Only we can see today how the Euphrates drying up is possible and its only in the 20th century that any country approached the ability of assembling a 200 million man army.

Dispute the linguistics all you want. That Israel is back is a fact. That the Temple was destroyed on two occasions is a matter of historical record. That we now have the technological savvy to insert credit card type apparatuses in our hands if we wish. That is so close to being a fact that its scary.

The Apostle John wasn't ad hoc. He was prophetic in the book of Revelations. Its only now that we are entering a time in which his prophecies could actually logically occur.
We finally have the practical scientific knowledge for many events described in Revelations to come to pass.

[Subfallen]

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If a person thinks back on his own life he most probably can see where he received a stupendous blessing against all odds.

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Charming -

"Lucky", "miraculous", "against all odds!"...these labels only exist because we live with incomplete information. You wouldn't be surprised to hit your 1-outer if you stacked the deck, would you? No, only when the cards are shuffled!

On the macro scale of big life events, our knowledge is so incomplete that it's silly to make any post hoc probability estimates at all. Once event 'M' has happened, there's basically no reason to believe that P(M) was any less than 1.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is a silly response. Its not that it isn't true, its just that its the wrong answer to Splendour's conundrum. What you should have said was "good luck interviewing those who havent received what appears in hindsight to have been a wonderful blessing."

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Heh, but she covered that base (quote in context):

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If a person thinks back on his own life he most probably can see where he received a stupendous blessing against all odds. If he can't remember one then I bet he has plenty of friends that can verify they had one.

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[vhawk01]

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If a person thinks back on his own life he most probably can see where he received a stupendous blessing against all odds.

[/ QUOTE ]

Charming -

"Lucky", "miraculous", "against all odds!"...these labels only exist because we live with incomplete information. You wouldn't be surprised to hit your 1-outer if you stacked the deck, would you? No, only when the cards are shuffled!

On the macro scale of big life events, our knowledge is so incomplete that it's silly to make any post hoc probability estimates at all. Once event 'M' has happened, there's basically no reason to believe that P(M) was any less than 1.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is a silly response. Its not that it isn't true, its just that its the wrong answer to Splendour's conundrum. What you should have said was "good luck interviewing those who havent received what appears in hindsight to have been a wonderful blessing."

[/ QUOTE ]

Heh, but she covered that base (quote in context):

[ QUOTE ]
If a person thinks back on his own life he most probably can see where he received a stupendous blessing against all odds. If he can't remember one then I bet he has plenty of friends that can verify they had one.

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I meant that all the counterexamples are dead, because being alive (I'm nearly positive) would count as a blessing.