Methinkshe
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Posts posted by Methinkshe
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I saw you it doing throughout the entire thread and thought I'd have a go. Sorry if I stepped on your toes.
Already have.
It was a serious point. Methinkshe took the thread off-topic several posts ago because her on topic posts were not convincing. Having had no success on the off-topic approach she tried to stop further debate by claiming she didn't want to take the thread off-topic. It was a bit late for that.
As far as I recall, the thread went off at a tangent in response to Steve Cook's overpopulation claims.
However, my memory could be wrong and, tbh, I cannot be bothered to retrace a dozen or more pages to discover exactly whose post about what caused the thread to end up as a discussion about the existence of God.
Nevertheless, in recognising that the thread had gone off-topic, out of courtesy to the OP I declined to continue the sub-debate about the existence of God. That was my sole motive, whatever else you care to believe.
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yep, QE is working but we need to do it bigger.......weimar, here we come...
Hey, have you joined the inflationistas? I thought you were a confirmed deflationist.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/li...iffs-karen-buck
Haven't seen this elsewhere on the forum so apologies if already posted.
I don't think people should get away scot-free from their debts myself, but allowing people to indulge in gangster behaviour to retrieve debt is appalling. Another nail in the coffin of our liberties and this will undoubtedly lead to bloodshed if permitted.
We've had several threads on this topic over the past 12 months or so, but it is such an important topic that imo it easily bears another thread. It is a total infringement of liberty and I've no idea what our representatives in parliament were thinking of when they passed such an illiberal bill.
And couple it to the recent proposal to farm out tax collection to private companies and you have a recipe for rebellion - I mean, since when did the Inland Revenue ever manage to get tax returns/tax owed correct? One is forever hearing about IR mistakes that take years to put right - if ever. Can you imagine bailiffs forcing entry to collect tax that is deemed to be owed only because of an IR mistake? And private companies will act first and think later - driven as they are by profit and commission.
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How do you know that you know God?
I'll offer just one example.
Because God has given me His spirit of love (Christ-in-me, which is true Christianity) so that I find I no longer desire to repay evil with evil but to bless those who curse me and to show love to those who show me hatred and persecute me, just as did Jesus.
But that's only the beginning........................
Now, I said that out of courtesy for the OP, I would retire from the discussion about God which is rather off-topic. I do not want to be drawn back into the general debate about the existence of God, but thought I should just answer your question.
So back to the topic in hand..............
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Maybe not :-
"Downing St says reports Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is to resign post is "speculation"
Maybe she's resigning to spend more time with her husband and his collection of porn films.
Now they're saying she'll be gone in the next reshuffle, which was almost a given anyway.
Dunno. Sky is running with it and Times online has picked it up.
Jacqui Smith 'to resign as Home Secretary'
I thought she'd done it to spite Gordon - take the initiative from him in the reshuffle.
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Breaking news: Jacqui Smith to resign.
Well, she was going to be fired anyway.
Home Secretary to leave Cabinet
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Nor will it fit into many other views of God. So, how do you know your version of the "truth" is the real one?
A scientific view of the world, however, is entirely testable
To use an analogy.
My father died ten years ago. Now, suppose for the sake of this argument, you wanted to find out what sort of a man he was. You could look up public records, possibly discover a family tree, and maybe even find letters he had written to a newspaper, or discover that he was a member of this or that club or group, that he had built this house, sold that one etc etc.
But if you wanted to know what he was like as a man, to understand his character, what motivated him, why he bought and sold this or that house, then you would come to me, or my siblings, or my mother or to someone else who knew him.
You wouldn't go to others who also only had available to them the same limited information available to you.
It's not a great analogy and only illustrates how best to go about knowing God. The final step, knowing God for oneself, has to be experiential. Moreover, it is difficult to impossible for me, a mere finite mortal, to explain the immortal and infinite.
It seems to me that you are a bit like a tribesman in a remote corner of the Amazon Forest who, when an explorer comes by and says that by using his satellite phone he can communicate with people thousands of miles away, refuses to even try the phone and insists that it is just not possible.
I cannot dictate to God the way He has chosen to communicate with humanity. He calls the shots. And the way He has chosen is spirit to spirit on a one-to-one experiential basis.
But you will never know unless or until you try to know God whether the experience exists. To that extent it is testable and falsifiable as far as you, individually, are concerned. But even if you were to prove to yourself the existence of God, and were to come to know God for yourself, you would still run into the same problem that I am having now - convincing others of the validity of your experience.
And many, many people can testify to calling out to God at a point of crisis in their lives - if there is a God, show yourself to me - and discovering that He does indeed exist and is the rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.
Anyway, I can't remember how we managed to get into this debate and I think I have done more than my fair share of taking this thread off-topic, so out of consideration for the OP, I think I should retire from this particular argument.
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Ah, so your version of religion is "true" is based on your non-falsifiable interpretation of your particular flavour of religion
I see you have edited this post which appears in its original form in my reply at post #525.
But to answer your edited response:
My original post concerned the nature of God and not a "version of religion" as you put it.
God is spirit and can only be known in spirit. We can learn about God but He can only be known experientially, and on an individual spirit to spirit basis.
If you refuse on principle even to try to know God the way He has determined that He will be known, how can you possibly claim that there is no such experience, especially when not just I, but millions and millions across the globe and throughout history testify to the experience?
I know that won't fit your materialistic philosophy but that's just the way it is.
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Typical religious b*llocks
Typical secular humanist intolerance.
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Steve's not making up this stuff about over population, please watch this video to see the effects of too many people for too little resources. Its a video report from Channel 4 Unreported World about Kenya's Human Time Bomb, when people compete for limited resources things get ugly, very ugly.
You've fallen for the Rockefeller et al propaganda - the Kenya Human Time Bomb (and other population scare stories) are fiction and vehicles for the eugenicist movement. The myth of over-population is perpetuated by the likes of John D Rockefeller 3rd through donations to population control movements to ensure "quality over quantity" as Sanger, another eugenicist, put it. The myth of over-population is a cover-story invented to sanitise a diabolical eugenicist movement.
Read the following link for the background to the population bomb myth.
The Malthusian Delusion and the Origins of Population Control
This is the REALITY of what is going on in Kenya.
Population Control - The Kenyan Perspective
Population Control - The Kenyan Perspective
Written by Dr. Stephen K. Karanja, M.B.CH.B.M.MED O/G - Consultant Obstetrician/Gynaecologist
The first birth control clinic was opened in Nairobi, the Kenyan Capital, 44 years ago. The second one opened a year later in 1956 at the Port Town of Mombasa. These two amalgamated into the Family a Planning Association of Kenya (FPAK). In 1963, FPAK was affiliated with the International Planned Parenthood Federation, thus becoming the first association in Africa south of the Sahara to join this monster which has nearly destroyed our society. Our nightmare just began.Following publication of a report on the demographic trends by the Population Council (New York; 1968), which partly talked of still unproven adverse effects of rapid population growth on socio-economic development, the Government of Kenya was coerced to become overtly involved in birth control. Thus a young nation then bustling with enthusiasm, hope and ambition for its people who had endured the yoke of colonialism suddenly offered itself to imperialism like it had never seen before, as we will soon discover.
We were then only 7.9 million people in a vast empty country rich in resources but no people to exploit them. Believe it, we were said to be overpopulated—34 years from then we are only 23 million—in this vast still empty land.
The United States of America has used vast amounts of money over time to destroy the people of Kenya. USAID and other Non-Governmental Organizations funded mainly by the U.S. Government have targeted our people with a ruthlessness that makes one shudder. The International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Population Council (a subsidiary of the Rockfeller group), Population Action International, and the United Nations through its agencies like WHO and UNFPDA have targeted Kenya for depopulation at the expense of the integral development of its people. Some examples of the stark realities living side by side with the millions of dollars for population control include:
•Our health sector is collapsed. Thousands of the Kenyan people will die of Malaria whose treatment costs a few cents, in health facilities whose stores are stalked to the roof with millions of dollars worth of pills, IUDS, Norplant, Depo-provera, most of which are supplied with American money.
•Some of these contraceptives like Depo-provera cause terrible side-effects to the poor people in Kenya, who do not even have competent medical check-ups before injection. Many are maimed for life. The hypertension, blood clots, heart failure, liver pathology and menstrual disorders cannot be treated due to the poor health services. The American Government seems to want to solve the problem of poverty by reducing the number of the poor.
•Special operation theatres fully serviced and not lacking in instruments are opened in hospitals for sterilization of women and some men. In the same hospitals, emergency surgery cannot be done for lack of basic operating instruments and supplies. Most of the women are sterilized without even knowing it is final. Some with only one child. Some are induced with financial assistance to accept sterilization. Horrified sterilized women now trot from hospital to hospital looking for reversal of the Tubal Ligation. This is breaking marriages especially when the single child or two succumb to the myriad tropical diseases—with easy treatment that is not available.
•Millions of dollars are used daily to deceive, manipulate and misinform the people through the media about the perceived good of a small family—while the infant mortality rate skyrockets. Some of this money is not used to educated people on basic hygiene, proper diet or good farming methods that would be useful development, but it appears that the aim of population controllers is to decimate the Kenyan people.
•I am a practicing gynecologist in Kenya and I would like to share with you facts about some of the patients I see daily:
A mother brought a child to me with pneumonia, but I had not penicillin to give the child. What I have in the stores are cases of contraceptives.
Malaria is epidemic in Kenya. Mothers die from this disease every day because there is no chloroquine, when instead we have huge stockpiles of contraceptives. These mothers come to me and I am helpless.
I see women coming to my clinic daily with swollen legs — the cannot climb stairs. They have been injured by Depo-provera, birth-control pills, and Norplant. I look at them and I am filled with sadness. They have been coerced into using these drugs. Nobody tells them about the side effects, and there are no drugs to treat their complications. In Kenya if you injure, you injure the whole family. Women are the center of the community. The well-being of the family depends on the well-being depends on the well-being of the mother.
America has been a blessed country. This nation saved the world three times. During the first World War, the second World War and the Cold War. The American people can still save many in the world from preventable diseases. I do not believe that Americans want their taxes used to hurt other people. Why do you not stop this money being used for contraceptives and use it instead to provide clean water, good prenatal and postnatal care, good farming methods and rural electrification. Do the American people know that the millions of dollars spent for population control are used in the ways I have described? Why does your government not deal directly with our government but instead uses a third party like IPPF, which has no respect for the values of our people and our laws?
It is therefore clear, that contrary to what one is led to believe, American Aid to Kenya is not a reasonable attempt to bring about integral development, rather it is a comprehensive and highly organized campaign to kill off as many of our people as are necessary so that the U.S. and other developed countries can continue exploiting our national resources.
Therefore, for the first world to dominate the third world through contraceptive imperialism under the big stick of withholding development assistance for non-compliance makes us conclude that, not only the so-called Population Assistance to third world countries but even the "development assistance" has been tailored first to serve the interests of the richest of the rich of this world.
USAID is the single biggest supporter and promoter of population control in Kenya. The programs it funds are implemented with an aggressive and elitist ruthlessness. In Kenya the target are always the poor and the illiterate who are pressured and tricked into using dangerous drugs which are often banned in the west, or who are sterilized during childbirth without either their knowledge or consent.
You in the media, those in the White House and many in the United States Congress continue to deny these facts. We in Kenya are a people like you who are entitled to the same human rights and dignity as yourselves, but our right to live a normal human existence is ignored by globalist decision makers. If the funds you use to kill, maim, subjugate, dominate and break us to nothingness were used to cultivate our extraordinary resources, Kenya alone could feed more than half the African continent. Dear Americans, you cannot build your own security on the insecurity and degradation of others. You cannot build your own wealth on the poverty and destitution of people in the least developed nations.
Edited for typo.
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Just read "Call of the wild", a scotman's account of living in Alaska for a year. He doesn't encounter polar bears but he does encounter black bears and grizzly bears and they are very dangerous creatures. Yes, one man faced off against a bear with a very large hunting rifle (or assault rifle as some of the native Indians carry around with them) will protect you. But these are only recent inventions. A handgun is no good. You use that to kill yourself instead. Most shot guns won't stop the bear either. The bears run faster than you, they can climb, are much stronger and man is no match for it. Nor do you know that they are there. The main problem comes when you are walking through the wilderness and surprise one. Or sometimes they come to you attracted by smells and catch you unawares.
The problem is that you have to carry a heavy rifle around with you all the time. So you're dragging some felled tree back to make a log cabin, you also have to carry a rifle at the same time. Say you have put it down and need to pick it up in a hurry and find that you skin gets frozen to the rifle. People do die from bear attacks, normally when they do not have adequate fire power available to them. In the book, it is mentioned how one native indian was caught short by a bear and the only thing he had on him was a knife. He was in his prime and knew a lot about bears. He knew from experience that most of them were right handed. So he attacked whenever the bear struck with his left paw. He managed to win but was still left half dead in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness.
And a bear won't necessarily kill you off first. They will often eat you alive, feasting on the lower parts of the body and glands first. Footage has been caught of such a bear attack and it took the person an hour to die whilst being eaten alive.
Yes, it's an interesting story.
Nevertheless, if bears and not humans were at the top of an animal/human hierarchy, bears would be dictating the terms of human existence. As it is, we have "save the polar bear" campaigns because it is within the remit of humans to dictate the ongoing existence of bears and prevent any threatened extinction according to the value they put on the continuing existence of polar bears.
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This looks, to my uneducated eye, like a simple financial tug of war.
On one side, the Governments and central Banks. On the other, private investors.
The Gov/CB's throwing printed money at the bond market to artificially increase prices and therefore reduce yields.
"We are in charge - and we INSIST on long term low interest rates !!"
On the other side private investors:
"No we are in charge. You want lower interest rates ? Not a hope. We DEMAND higher returns for the risk of investing in your shoddy countries.
Who will win..
DOW up 200.....who the hec knows who will win?
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This is all obvious and not in dispute. It is however, not a validation of religion as some sort of "higher truth".
Don't go running ahead. No-one is talking of religion or higher truths. All I'm doing is establishing some kind of foundation for a debate.
At the end of the day, we're a tiny part of a huge universe. "Truth", for want of a better word (such as "understanding") is, in these circumstances, a journey and not a destination.Truth is nothing more or less than a 100% accurate accounts of all existence and all events. If nothing happens, there is no truth to be had about it. If nothing is, there is no truth to be had about it. Thus, truth is concerned with existence and events and their total accuracy in the recitation thereof.
You agreed with me when I asked whether truth is singular and unchanging.
That was the basis on which I continued the debate.
If you have now changed your mind, then the debate is discontinued as far as I'm concerned.
If you want to debate on the basis that "truth is a journey" then you have changed the terms and I withdraw.
The search for truth may be likened to a journey, but truth itself exists apart from you or I and our efforts to discover it. It cannot be subject to change or otherwise it is not the truth.
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You said "any hierarchy you care to name" I name a non-level playing field.
A non-level playing-field of your choosing does not constitute a hierarchy nor allow a setting for a man/animal hierarchy. It is an imposed condition. A human/animal hierarchy must be naturally established or otherwise it is a social hierarchy imposed by man.
Because you talk like oneLet me make myself plain.
Of course I do. Truth, reality, facts, "the way things are", call it what you want.
So you accept, then, that the theory of evolution has changed over the years since it was first proposed by Darwin and that it is still in flux. Thus, it is not THE truth about origins, it is just a STAB at the truth which changes from decade to decade, year to year, month to month according to the latest research and/or interpretation of evidence. If it were THE truth, it would not have changed. Yes/no?
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I am the centre of the universe, I am God, don't make me angry, I might do that whole flood thing again, this time I might not tell Noah. Now less criticism, more worshipping, and could you send cash, running the universe ain't cheap, especially with exchange rates being what they are...................
Again, all you display is your ignorance. What you write is not even worthy of being called parody. It is out and out lies. If you want to debate the nature of God with one who knows Him, you might at least take the trouble to properly inform yourself concerning his revealed nature.
Since you have not, I decline from any further debate with you on this subject. It would be pointless.
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No I don't, I'm a vengeful God and wish a pox on you.....................have you heard how unpleasant I can be, read my book.........................
Sadly, you speak from a total lack of knowledge of God.
May I recommend you read the following book? It is fiction and sometimes I hesitate to recommend it because some think it exposits doctrine (it makes no such claims) but it does go a long way to revealing the character of God to those who, for whatever reason, have a misconception about His nature.
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Ok, put a tiger and a human with whatever weapon you want in a dark room. I vote on the tiger.
Again, you have dictated a non-level playing field.
Edited to add:
A level playing field would be: put one man and one tiger on the earth and see who survives the longer. Who knows; they could even make friends!
Are you a first year philosophy student?No. Why do you ask?
Let me make myself plain.
As far as our origins are concerned, we are here and we got here in a specific and particular way. That particular way is factual and is the truth. Because we are here, we know it occurred. And because it occurred it happened in a specific manner.
Now, we can have many guesses at how we got here, but guesses do not constitute the truth.
So, are we trying to discern the one and only truth about how we arrived at this point where you and I are debating over the internet, or do you want to argue about the best stab at truth according to current knowledge/fashion/personal opinion?
It is for this reason that I want first to establish that you accept that truth is singular and unchanging.
Edited as above.
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On the other hand the polar bear will eat the man and survive as well!
Why? Let me conjecture. Because man, being only an animal, will just lie there helplessly and wait to be crunched by the jaws of a polar bear. Or he will run, but not run fast enough. He will not use his brain and creativity to fashion a trap or a defence or anything else. He will simply succumb. And polar bears will thenceforth rule the earth.
Now I have an inkling as to why you say..........
Sounds like the polar bear is top of the hierarchy there ... -
I agree with this. I have been reading up about pandemics and viruses recently though. It seems to be that the more over crowded we become the more susceptible we are to massive culls. Compare this to when human used to live in small tribes and never moved away from their family and only had contact with a few other tribes at most.
As you say, we can't change what we are. Let's just sit back and see how it pans out. I personally have no issue with a pessimistic view of the future because I have come to realise that the meaning of life is to survive and to breed. Life only feels currently meaningless because survival is so easy at this time in our history.
God bless you.
I cannot disagree.
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Ok, if you need it spelt out to you, I put it to you that penguins come above humans in the heirarchy of "ability to survive in Antarctica"
Then, as I said before, let the playing field be made level inasmuch as penguins are adapted to the climate so allow humans to be artificially adapted via warm clothing and whatever it takes, and then establish hierarchy vis a vis who or what will eat whom or what.
And what do you hold to be true, evolution or creationism?First establish the singularity and unchangeability of truth.
Edited for bad formatting.
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I would doubt that, self delusion is THE defining characteristic of the human psyche. See that ole son of the manse himself, Gordon Brown for details. ""The truth is out there", to quote a popular TV program, but I don't think we can "handle it", to quote a well known film. I suppose you could say it separates us from other animals, but it doesn't make us special, in fact we are rather irrelevant and most certainly not the centre of the universe........despite what we might wish.
Are you contesting my claim that truth is, by definition, singular?
If not, what exactly are you contesting?
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To get back to the point, which you seem to be avoiding, you said "Humans are ABOVE animals in any hierarchy you care to name" - I named the Antarctic. Do you really think man rules over the penguins there?
The Antarctic isn't a hierarchy, it is a location.
So was that evolution or creationism?Truth
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Like you say, its artificial otherwise. The penguin might not eat the man, but the penduin will survive.
Nice bit of ad hominem there! Animals are not bad things, and I'm happy to be counted as one of them. I realise that certain religions consider animals their personal playthings, to be used and abused as they see fit, but some of us aren't that nasty.
It was not meant as an ad hom. I have often instructed my children that if they find themselves condemning another, look first to themselves to see that they are not projecting on others their own deficiencies - along the lines of; it takes one to know one. I'm sorry if my maternal instructive mode overrode the common courtesy required on an internet forum.
Tell me, do you go for creationism or evolution?I "go for" truth. That which is unchanging regardless of fashion or philosophy or the limited knowledge of the day.
Truth is peculiar in that it is, by definition, singular (against an infinity of untruths) and unchanging (against infinitely changeable stabs at truth.)
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So we're top of the hierarchy of animals?
Stick a naked human in Antarctica and the penguins will be above him. Stick him in the plains of Africa and the lions will be above him. Stick him in the highlands of Scotland and the midges will.
Why does the human have to be naked? You have cited the penguin, an animal adapted to its climate, so why not allow the human to be equally (if artificially) adapted? Given that level playing field I would argue, show me the penguin that catches and eats the human for dinner.
Sorry, but humans ARE animals, by every definition. If you disagree, can I suggest a visit to any city centre on a Friday night?I am sorry that you have such a low opinion of yourself that you feel compelled to project it onto others.
Edited for clarity and typos.
The Gilts Thread
in House prices and the economy
Posted
That was always and ever the case, wasn't it?
At least, that was why I have always considered inflation to be the inevitable outcome. Governments will ALWAYS opt for expediency and rarely, if ever, for what is right and required.