Hi Schree
long time no see
hey where you be?
remember me?
Lots been happening
since last we blogged mamma,
We got us a Prez named Obama.
Take care, Frankie

Properlybasic:

My mind has been made up since I discovered Atheism about 45 years ago. But I want to understand, as a realist, what on earth makes a person ‘religious?" What is religion? What does it do for mankind? You like the word disingenuous, but I'm not being dishonest, if anything you and your ilk are.
Tilting at Windmills, yes indeedy: Like I wrote; I can't beat you in this real/unreal debate because I am solidly ensconced within the confines of objective reality. You on the other hand have no such obstacles. Trust me Frank? Famous last words. If love, logic, consciousness, Free Will, and moral values were physical concretes, you wouldn't be a Theist. These things certainly are not visible to the naked eye, but they most assuredly exist. So because you cannot ‘see' or ‘touch' them, then their existence is only ‘explicable' by there being a God. Have I more or less got that right? Besides, according to you, Natural Law is limited. Absolutely, same as my Atheism, locked into the confines of objective reality. Again, your world has no such restrictions, and your world is not my world. One of the problems this presents for me, an objectivist, realist, whatever, is that you see nothing wrong and absurd in Biblical Logic. The omniscience and omnipotence of God is absolutely logical in your world. So about Logic, (law of non-contradiction, identity, and so forth) you have in mind terms like necessity, eternalness, immutability, objectivity? And so forth.) What you are trying to say is that when Aristotle came up with epistemology it was necessary to define the reality God had in place before him. Exactly. Aristotle saw reality all around him, he saw human life, animal life, plant life and he studied them, in fact had his own private zoo, and put them into a non-contradictory order which will last as truth for ever. He saw, heard, smelled, felt, and tasted reality, the only way he could, with his five basic senses, which is, like all living things the only faculty he had for perceiving and identifying reality. The mind is the only instrument on earth for perceiving and conceptualizing reality. Things like microscopes and calculators and computers, and Hubble Mirrors are simply extensions of his mind, for whatever they discern can only be logically defined by the human mind. And the human mind can only deal with concrete and abstract reality. Einstein's theory of Relativity is abstract, yet it has been physically proven to be correct. But of course, how do I explain its all being here way before "a priori" Galileo, Newton and Einstein? They explained it, that was the purpose of their research. Galileo said to his Bishop, look into my telescope, see for yourself. The Bishop answered, I won't, it will challenge my belief in the almighty. The earth is not the center of our system, the sun is, so that part of the bible is wrong. By the way, the Bible is the only source of knowledge you have regarding God and eternity, and immutability, (there is no such thing as perpetual motion) everything comes to an end. It might take a billion years but the end is inevitable. Arithmetic? Even if man and his objective mind did not exist on this planet, 1 + 1 would equal 2. That is immutable. All we did was give names to the abstract concept of counting, or adding, or multiplying etc. Can you e-mail me a 2? it has to be something concrete, an apple, a nail, a cyclotron, the Hubble Mirror. And everything that is man- made on this planet from a nail to a cyclotron is a product of the human mind. Poems are writ by fools like me, but only God can make a tree! Prove it. Yes, trees exist, prove God made. Reduced to its irreducible primary, your mind is locked in to the idea that ‘something' had to have created the universe. Therefore, that something is God! Now there is a leap of logic, if I ever saw one! All that B.S. about ‘convening' natural Law is of course an attempt to demean it. So God created the absolutism of 1+1=2, before Him this truth did not exist eh???? If there were no universe, nothing but dusty, rock-strewn space, with one functioning pocket watch, we would see Time! Time is the only thing that is immutable and evermore, nothing can stop time. So at what point in time did God begin? And how long did He wait before creation? No way of knowing because the measurement of time is based on the universe, on the sun and the revolutions of the earth around the sun, so how did God know day one before he had created that arrangement? It takes logical laws to decipher physical laws, in a sense they are one and the same thing. Movement is a physical law! Logic says movement is changing of position from one point to another. Cold is not the opposite of Hot, it is the absence of heat. A refrigerator does not make things cold, it removes the heat from the objects stored in it. That is physical Law. I suppose one could conclude that defines making things cold, but cold is an effect and withdrawing the heat is the cause. Another physical absolute by the way, Cause and Effect. Even your God can't get around that one. It is the inexorable way the law of Nature works. In all your mindless blathering, where did you show that Logical laws are necessary, but physical laws are not? If there are no physical laws why do we need Logic? But to bring this nonsense to a close, let us define our parameters. I say there is only one reality, if there are two realities, they are diametrically opposed. Reality has to include all that exists anywhere in our Universe. They must follow the Law of Cause and Effect, nothing can happen without something causing it to happen. Don't jump on that as the verification of your thesis, because how did God happen, what caused Him? Oh yeah, right, God is Eternal, you know that for sure! You don't have to show how you know that, it is in the Bible!!!! There is a philosophical, psychological question that is asked. If God created existence, where did he exist before existence existed? I know that doesn't stump you at all. However, because I consider myself reasonably rational, and intelligent, your answer will simply not abide my world, only yours. In your world there is no definition of mental illness, because the mind is NOT the tool of cognition, in fact the mind is your major impediment. At the most, it is a receptacle for your invented knowledge, derived from outer space without cause and effect, just eternal truth. Since the mind can do nothing with it, any more than it can deal with faeries or ghosts or unicorns, the information is simply disregarded because it does not follow the minds rules of observing, studying, analyzing, objective reality, and coming to logical, non contradictory conclusions. Still, I've lost this battle, because your are intellectually incapable of accepting that your reality, your regulatory reality, your submissive reality, is impotent and without meaning on our world. Besides churches and the bible, what has religious wisdom provided for man? The Light? the Telephone? The Computer? Moveable Print or paper? Nothing! The Perfection of Religion has given us Islam. Make no mistake about that. Examine that Religion and see where it gets you! Then examine the Jewish Religion, and what 15 million people have done with that one. Frankie

Thomisticguy:
It is interesting to note that your main thrust as a man of the cloth is to prove that God exists. Before we begin, I have a question which has more or less bothered me for many years; what is the core tenet of the Baptist Religion? I know it is involved in politics and current events, and influences its congregants philosophically and politically, like no other religion that I know of.
Back to my original concern. I gather this impression from your blogs. If you ever should prove that God actually exists, you will have to invent a new one. While certainly I am a devotee of Darwinism as I'm sure you have gathered, I have not actually read or studied his work, and only have a general knowledge of it, picking up bits and pieces of scientific confirmation of his theories over the years, so perhaps he has some answers to certain questions I would like to ask. In a sense my questions might be twisted to fit your contentions. But I would suggest you think again.
The God I envision has nothing to do with what religionists call Morality. That Morality is a weapon for subjugating mankind. It is religiously defined Good and Evil, which means it is NOT based on Reality and Natural Law. The Good is what God says it is, as is Evil. In Nature Good is that which is beneficial to man, and Evil is that which is detrimental to man. For the Bible, Good is submission to God, and Evil is turning away from God. What on earth does that have to do with life on earth? Nothing of course: if followed, life on earth is a misbegotten waste of time to be suffered until we die, and then the Good Stuff, eternity in the blessed monotony of Heaven. Now How's that for a reward for throwing away your God given life? I say God given because that is part of my personal theory. My God gave me life, (actually my parents did that by sinnin') which is a scientific obligation. Now in your Bible God gave us two prototypes, Man and Woman, and from them cloned the rest of humanity. Isn't that amazing? My God experimented, which kicks the poop out of the theory of omniscience. He created, over the life of our Planet, every conceivable kind of life form. You can imagine any type of creature for a science fiction story, and remembering that all animal life is the way it is as its means of survival. There are no superfluous or gratuitous attachments to their bodies which are strictly ornamental. Everything that an animal has is required. That is the error of sci-fi creatures, they have growths and anomalies on their bodies which have no function, other than to make them weird and unhumanlike. But God tried everything he could think of, and I wonder why! Was He trying to come up with the perfect life form? Probably not. Also, he started the whole business in the oceans and lakes that peopled our planet. And some of those water-animals eventually started to use their fins to crawl onto land and as we now recognize with certainty, they evolved, (there is a dirty word) into land creatures. But to keep this short, my God imbued all this Life with the knowledge and means to survive and procreate in perpetuity. He taught bees how to make their hives and honeycombs and spiders to spin their webs, and bower birds to make their bowers, and beavers to make their lodges. And He saw that it was good. But nothing is a hundred percent, even God made an error, he caused the wonderful primates akin to Gorillas and Chimpanzees to evolve into something He hoped would be even better than they were. He produced reasoning man. And reasoning man assumed that he was the ultimate species, the epitome of animal life. He thought wrong. It is in the Nature of the reasoning human mind to create the world we have achieved in Western Civilization. When man abandon's that gift, is taught that it is evil, he ends up with Saudi Arabia and Islam. Above all, he ends up in abject slavery. Never mind God, prove to me that Religion is good for man and what good means in Religion. Frankie

I am a Canadian, a victim of Political Change, and therefore an educated observer of the passing scene.
The recent contest for the Democratic ticket for President of the United States had to be one of the most unique campaigns in American history. A woman, a former First Lady, and a Negro Senator competing to be nominated as the Democratic candidate in the race to the White House. What does that say for the concept of American Democracy? Now that it has been resolved, and Barak Obama has won the candidacy, the real struggle begins. In defense of their political positions and why they should be chosen candidate, both offered Americans change. Therein lies the problem. Change means to alter, to reshape, or recolor, or both. It means to make wrong things right; right things wrong; long things short or short things long. Is this really what America needs, or wants? America, until 2003 was the wealthiest, most powerful and productive nation that ever existed in human history. George Bush, the outgoing President made malicious changes to that condition which left this once monumental nation at the mercy of one caveman. America is now virtually alone, stranded as a singular super power, charged with the task of rescuing Western Civilization. So what kind of changes is Obama going to bring to America? He is going to move to the left, this is the given. In case no one has noticed, the left, from Marxist Communism to Keynesian Fascism has brought modern civilization to the misbegotten State of affairs it now faces. Mark Twain observed that Love and Compassion has turned our planet into a graveyard. He wrote that over a hundred years ago. Lincoln wrote " our fathers brought forth on this Continent a Nation conceived in Liberty." It is crucial to our understanding of the problems the Western World is facing today, that the core issue, the irreducible primary of Life, is Freedom. That is what Franklin and Jefferson and Madison et al wanted for America. That is what their Constitution essentially gave us, if we could but maintain it. It worked. It worked better than any system ever worked in mankind's history. It worked because the American People were as Free as any people had ever been. So why only in America? Because America spoiled the game, and no other significant nation on earth was willing to completely surrender regulatory power over its people. Human history has shown that above all else, absolute Freedom was not an acceptable societal circumstance. FDR began the process to which Obama's Democrats are heir. The whole world knew it was only a matter of time till the glory of the Left finally defeated America's will to Freedom. All they had to do was sit and wait. Obama is not going to bring anything new to America, what he offers is as old as history itself, regulations and the Welfare State. In the United States of America. Is John McCain offering the alternative to Obama's change? I do not know what McCain stands for. We will find it out in the coming months. Even if he only offers to keep things where they are now, the Conservative stance, it is better than the changes Obama offers America. But Americans are caught up in the delusion that change will bring them to a better world, a world as good as in Germany or France. McCain has all the arguments to win hands down in a rational world, but this is no longer a rational world. He has to go back to the beginnings after 1776 and bring back the old philosophies which made America the Greatest Nation that ever existed on earth. Frankie

myself: no philosophy here. Just trying this out again, I have blogged on this originally, which got the whole religion and political thing going. Still haven't thought of another good subject to fight about, but if you come up with something, let me know. Frankie