Were you ready on May 21? I hear Camping's followers maxed out their credit cards since they wouldn't have to pay, with the world ending and all.
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From the LA Times, May 2, 2011: ============= Keith Bauer, a 38-year-old tractor-trailer driver from Westminster, Md., took last week off from work, packed his wife, young son and a relative in their SUV and crossed the country. If it was his last week on Earth, he wanted to see parts of it he'd always heard about but missed, such as the Grand Canyon. With maxed-out credit cards and a growing mountain of bills, he said, the rapture would have been a relief. On Saturday morning, Bauer was parked in front of the Oakland headquarters of Camping's Family Radio empire, half expecting to see an angry mob of disenchanted believers howling for the preacher's head. The office was closed, and the street was mostly deserted save for journalists. Bauer said he was not bitter. "Worst-case scenario for me, I got to see the country," he said. "If I should be angry at anybody, it should be me." ==============
I guess it would depend on who wanted to believe that talking donkeys and serpents were real or if a God was such a prick that he would have his son needlessly murdered and say what a good God am I. Please be more responsible to your children than God was to his only son. Regards DL
Every day is judgement day. If your worldview is aligned with reality, you might not be judged too harshly by it.
Off on the wrong foot right from the get go. They chose to believe him, despite what Christ had said i.e. no man knowing the day or the hour.
Then no. The immediate antecedents of domestic cattle were wild animals, the Aurochs, which were domesticated to some extent and then bred to make a new species. Enough genetic drift occurred during domestication that domestic cattle did not come about from anything othe. No, the best knowledge available to me is my own experiences. No holy text can trump that. No scripture can override what I've seen and heard and felt. And I have not seen your singular god, but a manifold family of gods. But that's just my view, and my experiences. Yours are different, and that's fair enough. For you. They do not apply to anyone else. So quit trying to proselytise and shove your religion down my throat. I don't have the arrogance to tell others what they should believe. You shouldn't either. Your rambling makes even less sense than Photizo's. It's a total non sequitur.
The random universe is not new. It was not invented by science in the last century. The whims of the gods of polytheism were around thousands of years ago. This was also part of the dark ages. Monotheism went from nature by political action committee, to nature by cause and effect. This is basis for the age of enlightenment or reason. Random appeals to the uneducated and irrational masses, because one does not have think if you live by the theory of random, because all opinions become relative, since there is no reason for anything, other than dice. But if we assume order, greater challenges are added to life to find the way. This appeals to those who like to think.
Except that the period of Classical and Hellenistic Greece and Rome are considered a cultural golden age. Not "the dark ages". And the Greeks didn't see the world as one ruled by cause and effect? Tell that to bloody Aristotle, who pretty much defined the concept. The gods were not seen as random, but part of a greater order and structure of the universe. "Order" in the abstract isn't the sole purview of monotheism. The mythology of the Olympian gods is an overarching narrative of establishing order and harmony over the universe, and doing away with the old era of chaos and monstrousness. Norse mythology is conveyed as one long epic struggle of order versus chaos. This isn't anything new.
The battle for order versus chaos, always places chaos in the dark and scary side of the equation, with modern relative morality, often paranoid and compulsive, tending to favor a random universe. Monotheism reduced things to one source and not two competing sources thereby reducing random. It is like Democrats and Republicans will hold no punches with each other. However, in fighting, in either party, is more controlled, since there is one leadership for all. This helps the party maintain order. It is interesting that the Golden Age appears in BC. This golden age last into early AD, and then starts to decline and go backwards to a darker time; Dark Ages, like a helix that has returned to an origin, and has to build up again. My theory is, this had to do with the migration of the ego or conscious mind, from the left to right side of the brain. The golden age had the ego in the right side of the brain. The left side of the brain gives us a differential POV; see the details, while the right side is more integral and allows us to see order. The left side allows us to differentiate the world, while the right side allows us to integrate this data. Art is from the right brain. It brings endless options into a focus that touches us. The dark ages appear, Jesus predicted, as the collective ego or conscious mind migrates toward the left brain and people began to differentiate the world, more and more, until the old integrations of the Golden Age, no longer seem work as smoothly; too much new data. This would cause chaos to appear; Dark Ages. If you try to maintain the status quo with so much new data, it appears like a random spirit has been placed among you trying to undermine. Like today, we generate and collect huge amounts of differential data, beyond the rate we analyze. Old ideas or integrations are maintained, but everyone can see these fall short, through bits and pieces in the accumulating data. One fudges the status quo with concept of random. There is a decline in culture, because conscious use of the right brain is lacking behind the left brain. The right brain could take advantage of all this data collection, but it is not allowed, since the left brain will use a traditional dogma integration and random to takes the place of free style integration; organic. The Golden Age was organic integration.
Simple minds want simple answers and not complex questions. IMHO: The world/GOD/our minds/ don't work that way. One thing/one GOD by it's nature must be all inclusive.
Bible? fancy fantasy, not reality as you would expect from a proofreading creator, (it is supposed to "his" word afterall). Case in point: Genesis 1:1. "in the beginning "god" created heaven and Earth--" right? --wrong!: the Earth had to wait ~ 10 billion years after the beginning to come together from stuff that was cooked up in generations of dying stars, stars that did not die because of sin. (neither are we, the talking snake notwithstanding). IMHO but there are a few lucky shots, consistent with science,-- what else would one expect from ~ 30 000 pretentious sounding verses?.
In between. It's likely that it contains traces of real history, but rewritten and shaped to make a better "educational" book for teaching the religion. So my idea is, there are some valuable thoughts in there, but besides that, I find most of those thoughts in other sources too, so it's not a favorite source of mine in questions of ethics and morale - and I have big doubts that there are gods of any sort, so that part of the book is completely irrelevant to me.
