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Post by Emperor AAdmin on May 19, 2008 10:05:56 GMT -5
Einstein: Belief in God as "childish superstition" Albert Einstein described belief in God as "childish superstition" and said Jews were not the chosen people, in a letter to be sold in London this week, an auctioneer said Tuesday. The father of relativity, whose previously known views on religion have been more ambivalent and fueled much discussion, made the comments in response to a philosopher in 1954. As a Jew himself, Einstein said he had a great affinity with Jewish people but said they "have no different quality for me than all other people". "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish."No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this," he wrote in the letter written on January 3, 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, cited by The Guardian newspaper.The German-language letter is being sold Thursday by Bloomsbury Auctions in Mayfair after being in a private collection for more than 50 years, said the auction house's managing director Rupert Powell. In it, the renowned scientist, who declined an invitation to become Israel's second president, rejected the idea that the Jews are God's chosen people. "For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions," he said."And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people." And he added: "As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."Previously the great scientist's comments on religion -- such as "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind" -- have been the subject of much debate, used notably to back up arguments in favor of faith. Powell said the letter being sold this week gave a clear reflection of Einstein's real thoughts on the subject. "He's fairly unequivocal as to what he's saying. There's no beating about the bush," he told AFP. www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/14/einstein-letter-belief-in_n_101626.html
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Post by Emperor AAdmin on May 19, 2008 10:13:24 GMT -5
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Post by Emperor AAdmin on May 19, 2008 10:16:00 GMT -5
No, but it should.
Until about 1832, when it first seems to have become established as a noun and a concept, the term "scientist" had no really independent meaning. "Science" meant "knowledge" in much the same way as "physic" meant medicine, and those who conducted experiments or organized field expeditions or managed laboratories were known as "natural philosophers." To these gentlemen (for they were mainly gentlemen) the belief in a divine presence or inspiration was often merely assumed to be a part of the natural order, in rather the same way as it was assumed—or actually insisted upon—that a teacher at Cambridge University swear an oath to be an ordained Christian minister. For Sir Isaac Newton—an enthusiastic alchemist, a despiser of the doctrine of the Trinity, and a fanatical anti-Papist—the main clues to the cosmos were to be found in Scripture. Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen, was a devout Unitarian as well as a believer in the phlogiston theory. Alfred Russel Wallace, to whom we owe much of what we know about evolution and natural selection, delighted in nothing more than a session of ectoplasmic or spiritual communion with the departed.
And thus it could be argued—though if I were a believer in god I would not myself attempt to argue it—that a commitment to science by no means contradicts a belief in the supernatural. The best known statement of this opinion in our own time comes from the late Stephen Jay Gould, who tactfully proposed that the worlds of science and religion commanded "non-overlapping magisteria." How true is this on a second look, or even on a first glance? Would we have adopted monotheism in the first place if we had known:
1) That our species is at most 200,000 years old, and very nearly joined the 98.9 percent of all other species on our planet by becoming extinct, in Africa, 60,000 years ago, when our numbers seemingly fell below 2,000 before we embarked on our true "exodus" from the savannah?
2) That the universe, originally discovered by Edwin Hubble to be expanding away from itself in a flash of red light, is now known to be expanding away from itself even more rapidly, so that soon even the evidence of the original "big bang" will be unobservable?
3) That the Andromeda galaxy is on a direct collision course with our own, the ominous but beautiful premonition of which can already be seen with a naked eye in the night sky?
These are very recent examples, post-Darwinian and post-Einsteinian, and they make pathetic nonsense of any idea that our presence on this planet, let alone in this of so many billion galaxies, is part of a plan. Which design, or designer, made so sure that absolutely nothing (see above) will come out of our fragile current "something"? What plan, or planner, determined that millions of humans would die without even a grave marker, for our first 200,000 years of struggling and desperate existence, and that there would only then at last be a "revelation" to save us, about 3,000 years ago, but disclosed only to gaping peasants in remote and violent and illiterate areas of the Middle East?
To say that there is little "scientific" evidence for the last proposition is to invite a laugh. There is no evidence for it, period. And if by some strenuous and improbable revelation there was to be any evidence, it would only argue that the creator or designer of all things was either (a) very laborious, roundabout, tinkering, and incompetent and/or (b) extremely capricious and callous, and even cruel. It will not do to say, in reply to this, that the lord moves in mysterious ways. Those who dare to claim to be his understudies and votaries and interpreters must either accept the cruelty and the chaos or disown it: they cannot pick and choose between the warmly benign and the frigidly indifferent. Nor can the religious claim to be in possession of secret sources of information that are denied to the rest of us. That claim was, once, the prerogative of the Pope and the witch doctor, but now it's gone. This is as much as to say that reason and logic reject god, which (without being conclusive) would be a fairly close approach to a scientific rebuttal. It would also be quite near to saying something that lies just outside the scope of this essay, which is that morality shudders at the idea of god, as well.
Religion, remember, is theism not deism. Faith cannot rest itself on the argument that there might or might not be a prime mover. Faith must believe in answered prayers, divinely ordained morality, heavenly warrant for circumcision, the occurrence of miracles or what you will. Physics and chemistry and biology and paleontology and archeology have, at a minimum, given us explanations for what used to be mysterious, and furnished us with hypotheses that are at least as good as, or very much better than, the ones offered by any believers in other and inexplicable dimensions.
Does this mean that the inexplicable or superstitious has become "obsolete"? I myself would wish to say no, if only because I believe that the human capacity for wonder neither will nor should be destroyed or superseded. But the original problem with religion is that it is our first, and our worst, attempt at explanation. It is how we came up with answers before we had any evidence. It belongs to the terrified childhood of our species, before we knew about germs or could account for earthquakes. It belongs to our childhood, too, in the less charming sense of demanding a tyrannical authority: a protective parent who demands compulsory love even as he exacts a tithe of fear. This unalterable and eternal despot is the origin of totalitarianism, and represents the first cringing human attempt to refer all difficult questions to the smoking and forbidding altar of a Big Brother. This of course is why one desires that science and humanism would make faith obsolete, even as one sadly realizes that as long as we remain insecure primates we shall remain very fearful of breaking the chain.
Christopher Hitchens is the author of God Is Not Great and the editor of The Portable Atheist.
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Post by Emperor AAdmin on May 19, 2008 10:17:18 GMT -5
Yes.
Once upon a time there were a number of strong scientific arguments for the existence of God. One of the oldest and most prevalent is the argument from design. Most people look at the complexity of the world and cannot conceive of how it could have come about except by the action of a being or force of great power and intelligence.
The design argument received perhaps its most brilliant exposition in the work of the Anglican archdeacon William Paley.
In his Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearance of Nature, first published in 1802, Paley wrote about finding both a stone and a watch while crossing a heath. Though the stone would be regarded as a simple part of nature, no one would question that the watch is an artifact, designed for the purpose of telling time. Paley then proposed that objects of nature, such as the human eye, give every indication of being similar contrivances.
When Charles Darwin entered Cambridge in 1827 he was assigned to the same rooms in Christ's College occupied by William Paley seventy years earlier. By that time the syllabus included the study of Paley's works, and Darwin was deeply impressed. He remarked that Paley's work "gave me as much delight as did Euclid."
Yet Darwin ultimately discovered the answer to Paley and showed how complex systems can evolve naturally from simpler ones without design or plan. The mechanism he proposed in 1859 in The Origin of Species (inferred independently by Alfred Russel Wallace) was natural selection, by which organisms accumulate changes that enable them to survive and have progeny that maintain those features.
But, as Darwin recognized, a serious objection to evolution existed based on the known physics of the time. Calculations by the great physicist William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) estimated ages for the sun that were far too short for natural selection to operate. However, at the time, nuclear energy was unknown. When this new form of energy was discovered early in the twentieth century, physicists estimated that the energy released by nuclear reactions would allow the sun and other stars to last billions of years as stable energy sources.
Prior to the twentieth century, the simple fact that the universe contains matter also provided strong evidence for a creation. At the time it was believed that matter was conserved, and so the matter of the universe had to come from somewhere. In 1905 Einstein showed that matter could be created from energy. But where did that energy come from?
This remained unanswered for almost another century until accurate observations with telescopes determined that an exact balance exists between the positive energy of matter and the negative energy of gravity. So, no energy was required to produce the universe. The universe could have come from nothing.
Independent scientific support for a creation was also provided by a basic principle of physics called the second law of thermodynamics, which asserts that the total disorder or entropy of the universe must increase with time. The universe is growing more disorderly with time. Since it now has order, it would seem to follow that at some point in the past, even greater order must have been imparted from the outside.
But in 1929, astronomer Edwin Hubble reported that the galaxies were moving away from one another at speeds approximately proportional to their distance, indicating that the universe was expanding. This provided the earliest evidence for the Big Bang. An expanding universe could have started with low entropy and still have formed localized order consistent with the second law.
Extrapolating what we know from modern cosmology back to the earliest definable moment, we find that the universe began in a state of maximum disorder. It contained the maximum entropy for the tiny region of space, equivalent to zero information. Thus, even if the universe were created, it retains no memory of that creation or of the intentions of any possible creator. The only creator that seems possible is the one Einstein abhorred—the God who plays dice with the universe.
Now, such a God could still exist and play a role in the universe once the universe exploded out of chaos. We no longer have total disorder; but disorder still dominates the universe. Most of the matter of the universe moves around randomly. Only 0.1 percent, the part contained in visible parts of galaxies, has any significant structure.
If he is to have any control over events so that some ultimate plan is realized, God has to poke his finger into the works amidst all this chaos. Yet there is no evidence that God pokes his finger in anyplace. The universe and life look to science just as they should look if they were not created or designed. And humanity, occupying a tiny speck of dust in a vast cosmos for a tiny fraction of the life of that cosmos, hardly looks special.
The universe visible to us contains a hundred billion galaxies, each with a hundred billion stars. But by far the greatest portion of the universe that expanded exponentially from the original chaos, at least fifty orders of magnitude more, lies far beyond our horizon. The universe we see with our most powerful telescopes is but a grain of sand in the Sahara. Yet we are supposed to think that a supreme being exists who follows the path of every particle, while listening to every human thought and guiding his favorite football teams to victory. Science has not only made belief in God obsolete. It has made it incoherent.
Victor J. Stenger is emeritus professor of physics and astronomy, University of Hawaii, adjunct professor of philosophy, University of Colorado, and the author of seven books including God: The Failed Hypothesis—How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist.
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Post by Emperor AAdmin on May 19, 2008 10:18:40 GMT -5
It depends.
The answer turns on whether one emphasizes belief or God. Science does not make belief in God obsolete, but it may make obsolete the reality of God, depending on how far we are able to push the science.
On the question of belief in God, the answer is clearly no. Surveys conducted in 1916 and again in 1997 found that 40 percent of American scientists said they believe in God, so obviously the practice of science does not make belief in God obsolete for this sizable group.
Neither does it for the hundreds of millions of practicing Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and members of other faiths who both believe in God and fully embrace science. Even on one of the most contentious issues in all of science—evolution—a 2005 Pew Research Center poll found that 68 percent of Protestants and 69 percent of Catholics accept the theory.
Of course, reality does not bend to the psychology of belief. Millions of people believe in astrology, ghosts, angels, ESP, and all manner of paranormal phenomena, but that does not make them real. Mormons believe that their sacred text was dictated in an ancient language onto gold plates by the angel Moroni, buried and subsequently dug up near Palmyra, New York by Joseph Smith, who then translated them by burying his face in a hat containing magic stones. Scientologists believe that eons ago a galactic warlord named Xenu brought alien beings from another solar system to Earth, placed them in select volcanoes around the world, and then vaporized them with hydrogen bombs, scattering to the winds their souls (called thetans, in the jargon of Scientology), which attach themselves to people today, leading to drug and alcohol abuse, addiction, depression, and other psychological and social ailments that only Scientology can cure. Clearly the veracity of a proposition is independent of the number of people who believe it.
On the matter of God's existence, the answer to the question slides toward a yes, depending on how far we extend the sphere of science into the space of theology. If we apply the methods of science to understanding all of nature, where would God be and how would we detect Him or His actions? That's the rub. God is described by most Western religions as omniscient and omnipotent, the creator of all things visible and invisible, an Intelligent Designer capable of constructing the universe, Earth, life, and us. If scientists go in search of such a being—as Intelligent Design (ID) creationists claim to be doing—how could we possibly distinguish an omnipotent and omniscient God from an extremely powerful and really smart Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (ETI)? I call this problem Shermer's Last Law (pace Arthur C. Clarke): any sufficiently advanced Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence would be indistinguishable from God.
Here is how the problem breaks down. Biological evolution is glacially slow compared to cultural evolution. Because of this, and the fact that the cosmos is very big and the space between the stars is vast, the probability of making contact with an ETI that is technologically equal to or only slightly more advanced than us is virtually nil. If we ever do encounter the representatives of an ETI, they will be so far ahead of us technologically that they will appear as gods to us. Consider something as relatively simple as DNA. We can already engineer genes after only 50 years of genetic science. An ETI that was, say, only 50,000 years ahead of us would surely be able to construct entire genomes, cells, multi-cellular life, and complex ecosystems. The design of life is, after all, just a technical problem in molecular manipulation. To our bronze-age ancestors who created the great monotheistic religions, the ability to create life was God-like. To our not-so-distant descendents, or to an ETI we might encounter, the ability to create life will be simply a matter of technological skill.
By pursuing a course of scientific inquiry to its natural extension of examining the nature of God, what we will find, if we find anything, is an alien being capable of engineering cells, complex organisms, planets, stars, galaxies, and perhaps even universes. If today we can engineer genes, clone mammals, and manipulate stem cells with science and technologies developed in only the last half century, think of what an ETI could do with 100,000 years of equivalent powers of progress in science and technology. For an ETI who is a million years more advanced than we are, engineering the creation of planets and stars may be entirely possible. And if universes are created out of collapsing black holes—which some cosmologists think is probable—it is not inconceivable that a sufficiently advanced ETI could even create a universe.
What would we call an intelligent being capable of engineering a universe, stars, planets, and life? If we knew the underlying science and technology used to do the engineering, we would call it Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence; if we did not know the underlying science and technology, we would call it God.
Science traffics in the natural, not the supernatural. The only God that science could discover would be a natural being, an entity that exists in space and time and is constrained by the laws of nature. A supernatural God would be so wholly Other that no science could know Him.
Does science make belief in God obsolete? Belief, no. God, yes.
Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com), a monthly columnist for Scientific American (www.michaelshermer.com), a professor at Claremont Graduate University, and the author of How We Believe, Why Darwin Matters, and The Mind of the Market.
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Post by Emperor AAdmin on May 19, 2008 10:19:32 GMT -5
No, but only if...
we continue to develop new notions of God, such as a fully natural God that is the creativity in the cosmos.
Humans have been worshiping gods for thousands of years. Our sense of God in the Western world has evolved from Abraham's jealous God Yahweh to the God of love of the New Testament. Science and faith have split modern societies just as some form of global civilization is emerging. One result is a retreat into religious fundamentalisms, often bitterly hostile. The schism between science and religion can be healed, but it will require a slow evolution from a supernatural, theistic God to a new sense of a fully natural God as our chosen symbol for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe. This healing may also require a transformation of science to a new scientific worldview with a place for the ceaseless creativity in the universe that we can call God.
We must "reinvent the sacred," but it is dangerous: it implies that the sacred is invented. For billions of believers this is Godless heresy. Yet how many gods have we worshiped down the eons? It is we who have told our gods what is sacred, not they who have told us. This does not mean that what we deem sacred is not sacred. It means something wonderful: what we deem sacred is our own choice. At this stage in the evolution of humanity, are we ready to take responsibility for what we will claim as sacred, including all of life and the planet? If so, we must also avoid a dangerous moral hegemony and find ways to allow our sense of the sacred to evolve wisely as well. Reinventing the sacred is also likely to anger many who, like myself, do not believe in a supernatural God. For many of us, the very words "God" and "sacred" have become profoundly suspect. We think of Galileo forced to recant his heliocentric views by the Inquisition. We do not want to return to any form of religion that demands that we abandon the truth of the real world. We think of the millions killed in the name of God. We often ignore the solace, union with God, and the orientation for living that religion brings.
I believe that reinventing the sacred is a global cultural imperative. A global race is under way, between the retreat into fundamentalisms and the construction of a safe, shared space for our spirituality that might also ease those fundamentalist fears.
The new scientific worldview is just beginning to become visible. It goes beyond the reductionism of Descartes, Galileo, and Laplace in which all that occurs in the universe is ultimately to be described by physical law. In its place, this new scientific vision includes the emergence of life, and with life, of agency, meaning, value, doing, hence of "ought" and ultimately our moral reasoning. The rudiments of morality are already seen in the higher primates. Evolution, despite the fears of some faithful, is the first source of morality. While no law of physics is broken, the emergence of all this in the natural evolution of the biosphere cannot be deduced by physics alone.
What we think of as natural law may not suffice to explain nature. We now know, for example, that evolution includes Darwinian pre-adaptations—unused features of organisms that may become useful in a different environment and thus emerge as novel functionalities, such as our middle ear bones, which arose from the jaw bones of an early fish. Could we prestate all the possible Darwinian preadaptations even for humans, let alone predict them? It would seem unlikely. And if not, the evolution of the biosphere, the economy, and civilization are partially beyond natural law.
If this view holds, then we will undergo a major transformation in our understanding of science. Partially beyond law, we are in a co-constructing, ceaselessly creative universe whose detailed unfolding cannot be predicted. Therefore, we truly cannot know all that will happen. In that case, reason, the highest virtue of our beloved Enlightenment, is an insufficient guide to living our lives. We must reunite reason with our entire humanity. And in the face of what can only be called Mystery, we need a means to orient our lives. That we do, in reality, live in the face of an unknown is one root of humanity's age old need for a supernatural God.
Yet our Abrahamic God is too narrow a stage for our full human spirituality. In the Old Testament, this God created the world and all its creatures for the benefit of humanity. How self-serving and limiting a vision of God. How much vaster are our lives understood as part of the unfolding of the entire universe? We are invited to awe, gratitude, and stewardship. This planet and this life are God's work, not ours. If God is the creativity in the universe, we are not made in God's image. We too are God. We can now choose to assume responsibility for ourselves and our world, to the best of our limited wisdom, together with our most powerful symbol: God, as the creativity in the natural universe.
Stuart Kauffman is the director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His most recent book is Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion.
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Post by Emperor AAdmin on May 19, 2008 10:53:04 GMT -5
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Post by Toskaliku on May 19, 2008 13:14:27 GMT -5
I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that the god(s) the majority of the world worship today are creations of that particular group that follows them. We have disproved most of the notions within the Old Testament for example. And both the Bible and Quran are filled with inaccuracies. If, and a big if at that, if there is a god, I have no doubt that he resembles nothing like what any book sees him as.
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Kralj Vatra
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Post by Kralj Vatra on May 19, 2008 13:27:13 GMT -5
It is evident to any Scientist that God exists. I dont know about Albert, maybe his Serb wife dint teach him a lot ;D
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PARIS DIO_MYSUS!
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Post by PARIS DIO_MYSUS! on May 19, 2008 16:25:50 GMT -5
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Post by philopoemen81 on May 19, 2008 19:58:26 GMT -5
I prefer to hold Stephen Jay Gould's theory on this... the separation of the theological from the scientific into two mental spheres. The two don't mix very well and lead to an always retreating "God of the gaps" defense from religious people everytime a new scientific discovery is made.
I'll always remember that a wiser man than me- Thomas Aquinas- said that evidence for God was neither self evident nor impossible to realize.
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Post by jerryspringer on May 19, 2008 22:18:09 GMT -5
"God is dead." Aadmin, I hope you'll move this thread to the Turkish forum as soon as possible.
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Post by SKORIC on May 20, 2008 6:41:22 GMT -5
I dont know if there is a god, who am i to say? But i dont believe in any religion.
What i dont understand about the science version of it all is how the big bang came to be from a atom sizes ball of energy that quickly expanded? How was it created? What was there before then? If there was nothing before then then how could nothing create something?? All these questions arent known for sure and will probably stay unknown. There are only theories not 100% fact.
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Kralj Vatra
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Post by Kralj Vatra on May 20, 2008 6:45:28 GMT -5
Miracles dont happen accidentally. Living creatures are far too complicated and sophisticated. God has given his love/intelligence.
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Post by jerryspringer on May 20, 2008 9:34:25 GMT -5
Then we should send him to Hague, with the Serbian war criminals.
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PARIS DIO_MYSUS!
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Post by PARIS DIO_MYSUS! on May 20, 2008 10:07:23 GMT -5
Because science and scientists people are confused about God. I'm telling them that God is in every celule and molecule also is there in neutrons and protons. Everything Great comes and goes from Jesus through Jesus! God Is He and He is *Me!! Myself, Lord/God Sun_MYSUS Christ !!!
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Post by jerryspringer on May 20, 2008 10:18:48 GMT -5
Because science and scientists people are confused about God. I'm telling them that God is in every celule and molecule also is there in neutrons and protons. Everything Great comes and goes from Jesus through Jesus! God Is He and He is *Me!! Myself, Lord/God Sun_MYSUS Christ !!! More Suffism philosophy. Keep it going....for Yahac.
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PARIS DIO_MYSUS!
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Post by PARIS DIO_MYSUS! on May 20, 2008 10:25:02 GMT -5
That is Perennial Philosophy! Perennial is another pure albanian word which related and means God ! Perennia-l Perennia=God Albanian is God's Language!! www.illyrians.org/langofgod.htmlAlso there are two of mistery words in the bible Urim and Thummim that are pure and find meaning only in albanian language. Urim=to congratulate, to wish, to bless Thumim= to course, to daamn, to bite Myself, Lord/God Sun_MYSUS Christ!!!
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Post by Niklianos on May 20, 2008 13:19:12 GMT -5
Miracles dont happen accidentally. Living creatures are far too complicated and sophisticated. God has given his love/intelligence. So Pyrros, do you advocate the world being only 6400 years old and everything was already here since the beginning of the earth?
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Kralj Vatra
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Post by Kralj Vatra on May 20, 2008 13:22:54 GMT -5
1) No 2) No
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