The Problem With All That Being Forgiven For One's Sins

Discussion in 'Religion & Philosophy' started by Finley99, Aug 6, 2014.

  1. Finley99

    Finley99 New Member

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    Though you have to admire his showmanship:

    A ghost floating on a cloud meeting his audience to escort them through pearly gates to an exclusive community.
    The 2/3 who are sinners burning eternally in a lake of fire and brimstone.
    A flood covers the earth to a depth of five miles and evaporates within a year.
    Big fish puking up live men.
    Seas separating for the good guys and drowning the bad guys chasing them.
    Compound walls falling at the sound of a trumpet.
    A human being turned into a pillar of salt in her tracks.
    Men living through a 1200 degree furnace.
    The earth standing still.
    Ten commandments presented to one man by god in the form of a burning bush.
    A man walking on water.
    A man/god on earth feeding five thousand plus women and children who also ate with two fish and five loaves then gathering 12 baskets of leftovers.
    Water turned into fine wine.
    Lepers healed by touching them.
    Selectively raising dead men.
    Virgin birth.
    Resurrection.

    A real showman indeed.
     
  2. cupid dave

    cupid dave Well-Known Member

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    Jesus told the people to go, and sin no more.

    That is like being born again, and from there on, acting responsibly as if a new person.
    Sounds like good psyche to me.


    John 8:11
    She said, No man, Lord.
    And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.
     
  3. cupid dave

    cupid dave Well-Known Member

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    Still, you do admit that sexual promiscuity in a society harms the kids of the next generation.

    So if the religious instruction helped you control your sexual urges to a large extent, the purpose was accomplished, even though you may not even now admit to the harm sex can do if permissive.
     
  4. Finley99

    Finley99 New Member

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    You are so totally ignorant. Sexual encounters are the reason all of us are here.....and lucky to be here for that matter. Marriage is a thing devised by man. If one chimp had lost a confrontation with a croc or a leopard VOILA! Your ass wouldn't even be here. Possibly me too.....we might be cousins.
     
  5. cupid dave

    cupid dave Well-Known Member

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    ?
    What about the bastards...?

    When sex is promiscuous, the country fills up with bastards.

    First, they suffer all the Child Abuse of every types, but then represent the people who commit 70% of all violent crime.
    Today, half of all babies born are "illegitimate," or bastards.

    What about these kids who are getting Child abused????
     
  6. Finley99

    Finley99 New Member

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    MOD EDIT - Rule 9 what about the offspring of a well known, well off family who in fact was fathered by the postman or gardener? Society and religious people in general are the reason some humans are ostracized or discriminated against. Start treating everyone the way you would like to be treated and there wouldn't even be a problem. By the way.....isn't that what the rule book says to do?

    Matthew 7:
    12 Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.
     
  7. cupid dave

    cupid dave Well-Known Member

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    Fatherlessness is like Welfare single mothers or divorced women raising their kids, even if a step-father becomes involved.
    That FACTS on this is as shown below:


    Statistics on Fatherlessness
    CHILDREN NEED BOTH PARENTS
    (*)
    It’s a Fact
    Here’s why:

    63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes. (Source: U.S. D.H.H.S., Bureau of the Census).

    90% of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes.

    85% of all children that exhibit behavioral disorders come from fatherless homes.
    (Source: Center for Disease Control).

    80% of rapist motivated by displaced anger come from fatherless homes. (Source:
    Criminal Justice and Behavior, Vol. 14, pp. 403-26).

    71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes. (Source: National Principals Assoc. Report on the State of High Schools).

    85% of all youths sitting in prisons grew up in a fatherless home. (Source: Fulton County Georgia jail populations, Texas Dept. Of Corrections, 1992).

    These statistics translate to mean that children from fatherless homes are:

    5 times more likely to commit suicide
    32 times more likely to run away
    20 times more likely to have behavioral disorders
    14 times more likely to commit rape
    9 times more likely to drop out of high school
    20 times more likely to end up in prison

    Children from "fatherless families of single mother" homes are*:
    (*)
    • 15.3 times more likely to have behavioral disorders
    • 4.6 times more likely to commit suicide
    • 6.6 times more likely to become teenaged mothers
    • 24.3 times more likely to run away
    • 15.3 times more likely to have behavioral disorders
    • 6.3 times more likely to be in a state-operated institutions
    • 10.8 times more likely to commit rape
    • 6.6 times more likely to drop out of school
    • 15.3 times more likely to end up in prison while a teenage
    • 73% of adolescent murderers come from mother only homes
    •(*) 6.3 times more likely to be in state operated institutions
    (*)
    Daughters who live in mother only homes are 92% more likely to divorce**
     
  8. Finley99

    Finley99 New Member

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    You know why? Because they are ostracized and mistreated by a holier than thou citizenry.

    Treat everybody the same and it won't require a magna cum laude graduate from Harvard law school to become the president of the United States.

    Oh.....forget that. When a C student from Yale couldn't even get into the university of Texas law school he not only became president he told 1000 lies to gain support for removing the guy from office who had tried to assassinate his daddy seven years before. It only cost 4500 young American lives, over 30,000 more seriously wounded and a trillion dollars. No Big Deal.
     
  9. cupid dave

    cupid dave Well-Known Member

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    So you believe that Welfare kids suffer all these abuses because the church people are mean to them?
     
  10. junobet

    junobet New Member

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    I’m pleased to hear you believe in “the intelligence manifested in nature”. In other quotes of his you’ll find that Einstein does not shy away from calling that intelligence God. So this is where we meet somehow. ;-)

    As for an “air of arrogance and superiority”: those would be rather unchristian sentiments (see Luke 18:9-14). So if those sinners you have in mind feel superior, they misunderstood what forgiveness is about.

    I do however sense quite a lot of “arrogance and superiority” in the highlighted bit of your post.

    Personally I feel in no way superior to you for believing in an afterlife. In fact I’m sure that God loves you at least as much as he loves me and I have little doubts that you’ll go to heaven just the same as I will. If anything – knowing the dark corners of my soul better than I know yours - I’m more worried about my own salvation than I’m worried about yours.
     
  11. junobet

    junobet New Member

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    So you too are vengeful? As I said: IMHO that is a sad state to be in.

    Should anybody ever murder a child of mine, I’d sincerely hope the murderer finds God’s forgiveness.

    Read Luke 18:9-14: Forgiveness is not granted for worship (the self-righteous Pharisee certainly worships God), but for repentance, i.e. for realizing with pain the gravity of one’s own sins and what it did to your victims, and for feeling truly sorry for what you have done.

    And I should hope that I myself can find the peace that comes with forgiving the murderer. What good would it do me if I spent the rest of my life consumed with hatred? It certainly wouldn’t bring my child back, it would just increase my own misery.
     
  12. Finley99

    Finley99 New Member

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    You're full of it. Albert Einstein was an atheist:

    "I came, though the child of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents, to a deep religiousness, which however, reached an abrupt end at the age of twelve. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies" ~Albert Einstein~
     
  13. Gorn Captain

    Gorn Captain Banned

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  14. Gorn Captain

    Gorn Captain Banned

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    Even more difficult a question. If a person TRULY doesn't believe that they are committing evil....and believes they are "saved" and that Jesus is their Lord and Savior.....

    according to dogma, only God can say they were wrong, but how do WE determine that?
     
  15. Gorn Captain

    Gorn Captain Banned

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    cupid, have you ever stepped back....sort of "out of yourself" and asked....

    why is it that of ALL the things in the world, you pin the blame for EVERYTHING on ONE thing....

    women having sex?
     
  16. junobet

    junobet New Member

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    This may come as a surprise to you, but not believing bible stories to be true does not automatically make one an atheist. Even many (if not most) Christians don’t believe them to be literally true.
    And you may want to brush up on your ‘hero’ Einstein’s religious views. In fact he did not consider himself an atheist:

    “Albert Einstein's religious views have been studied extensively. He said he believed in the "pantheistic" God of Baruch Spinoza, but not in a personal god, a belief he criticized. He also called himself an agnostic, while disassociating himself from the label atheist, preferring, he said, "an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being." (…)
    Einstein stated: "I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being."[1] According to Prince Hubertus, Einstein said, "In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views."[19]”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Albert_Einstein
     
  17. junobet

    junobet New Member

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    I’m not aware of the existence of such a thing as “standard Christian dogma”. But I can point to where you were inaccurate concerning some of the most prominent Christian streams of thought:

    The Church with the most members is the Roman Catholic one. According to Roman Catholic dogma there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church. But they’ve got a pretty broad view about who can be counted in. In Roman Catholic eyes – unbeknownst to her and anybody else but not to God - that agnostic/atheist do-gooding lady of yours may well be in.

    As for the traditional Lutheran/Calvinist doctrine of “Sola fide”, it’s a bit more complicated than you make it out to be: Good faith will bring forward good fruit. If you don’t do good, it’s a sign that your faith must be foul. So no, you can’t rightly say you believe in Christ and continue to be a selfish sinning prick, as a good many Protestants admittedly seem to think.

    Concerning most modern day European and US mainline Protestants, but also concerning many modern day Catholic theologians, your ideas are just woefully out of date:
    “The history of the doctrine of universal salvation (or apokastastasis) is a remarkable one. Until the nineteenth century almost all Christian theologians taught the reality of eternal torment in hell. Here and there, outside the theological mainstream, were some who believed that the wicked would be finally annihilated (in its commonest form. this is the doctrine of 'conditional immortality').[1] Even fewer were the advocates of universal salvation, though these few included same major theologians of the early church. Eternal punishment was firmly asserted in official creeds and confessions of the churches.[2] It must have seemed as indispensable a part of universal Christian belief as the doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation. Since 1800 this situation has entirely changed, and no traditional Christian doctrine has been so widely abandoned as that of eternal punishment.[3] Its advocates among theologians today must be fewer than ever before. The alternative interpretation of hell as annihilation seems to have prevailed even among many of the more conservative theologians.[4] Among the less conservative, universal salvation, either as hope or as dogma, is now so widely accepted that many theologians assume it virtually without argument. (…)”
    http://www.theologicalstudies.org.uk/article_universalism_bauckham.html
    (you may want to read the rest of the article for more info)
     
  18. Tram Law

    Tram Law Banned

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    i look at how actions and behavior affect others. Some harmful actions and behavior are easy to spot while others aren't. And I also look at cause and effect rather than just effect.
     
  19. Finley99

    Finley99 New Member

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    Atheist, Agnostic...six of one half a dozen of the other. I call myself Agnostic but after people read or hear my views they call me Atheist.

    Read Einstein's obituary:

    http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0314.html


    By THE NEW YORK TIMES

    Albert Einstein was born at Ulm, Wuerttemberg, Germany, on March 14, 1879. His boyhood was spent in Munich, where his father, who owned electro-technical works, had settled. The family migrated to Italy in 1894, and Albert was sent to a cantonal school at Aarau in Switzerland. He attended lectures while supporting himself by teaching mathematics and physics at the Polytechnic School at Zurich until 1900. Finally, after a year as tutor at Schaffthausen, he was appointed examiner of patents at the Patent Office at Bern where, having become a Swiss citizen, he remained until 1909.

    It was in this period that he obtained his Ph.D. degree at the University of Zurich and published his first papers on physical subjects.

    These were so highly esteemed that in 1909 he was appointed Extraordinary Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Zurich. In 1911 he accepted the Chair of Physics at Prague, only to be induced to return to his own Polytechnic School at Zurich as full professor the next year. In 1913 a special position was created for him in Berlin as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute. He was elected a member of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences and received a stipend sufficient to enable him to devote all his time to research without any restrictions or routine duties.

    Elected to Royal Society

    He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society in 1921, having also been made previously a member of the Amsterdam and Copenhagen Academies, while the Universities of Geneva, Manchester, Rostock and Princeton conferred honorary degrees on him. In 1925 he received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society and in 1926 the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in recognition of his theory of relativity. He received a Nobel Price in 1921.

    Honors continued to be conferred on him. He was made a member of the Institute de France, one of the few foreigners ever to achieve such a distinction. Other great universities throughout the world, including Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, Madrid, Buenos Aires, Zurich, Yeshiva, Harvard, London and Brussels, awarded honorary doctorates to him.

    One of the highest American scientific honors, the Franklin Institute Medal, came to him in 1935, when he startled the scientific world by failing to deliver more than a mere "thank-you" in lieu of the scientific address customary on such occasions. He made up for it later by contributing an important paper to the Journal of the Franklin Institute dealing with ideas, he explained, that were not quite ripe at the time he received the medal.

    Dr. Einstein married Mileva Marec, a fellow-student in Switzerland, in 1901. They had two sons, Albert Einstein Jr., an electrical engineer who also came to this country, and Eduard. The marriage ended in divorce. He married again, in 1917, this time his cousin, Elsa Einstein, a widow with two daughters. She died in Princeton in 1936.

    To Institute at Princeton in '32

    When the Institute for Advanced Study was organized in 1932 Dr. Einstein was offered and accepted, the place of Professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and served, also, as the Head of the Mathematics Department. The institute was situated at Princeton, N.J., and Dr. Einstein made plans to live there about half of each year.

    These plans were changed suddenly. Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany and essential human liberty, even for Jews with world reputations like Dr. Einstein, became impossible in Germany. He announced that he would not return to Berlin, sailed for Europe and went to Belgium.

    Immediately many nations invited him to make his home in their lands. In the late spring of 1933 Dr. Einstein learned, in Belgium, that his two step-daughters had been forced to flee Germany.

    Not long after that he was notified through the press that he had been ousted from the supervising board of the German Bureau of Standards. His home at Caputh was sacked by Hitler Brown Shirts on the allegation that the world-renowned physicist and pacifist had a vast store of arms hidden there.

    The Prussian Academy of Science expelled him and also attacked him for having made statements regarding Hitler atrocities. His reply was this:

    "I do not want to remain in a state where individuals are not conceded equal rights before the law for freedom of speech and doctrine."

    In September of 1933 he fled from Belgium and went into seclusion on the coast of England, fearful that the Nazis had plans upon his life. Then he journeyed to Princeton and made his home there. He bought a home in Princeton and settled down to pass his remaining years there. In 1940 he became a citizen of the United States.
    Einstein Noted as an Iconoclast In Research, Politics and Religion His Early Spare-Time Reflections in Bern Led to Strong Belief in Social Equality and Hope for a World Government
    In 1904, Albert Einstein, then an obscure young man of 25, could be seen daily in the late afternoon wheeling a baby carriage on the streets of Bern, Switzerland, halting now and then, unmindful of the traffic around him, to scribble down some mathematical symbols in a notebook that shared the carriage with his infant son, also named Albert.

    Out of those symbols came the most explosive ideas in the age-old strivings of man to fathom the mystery of his universe. Out of them, incidentally, came the atomic bomb, which, viewed from the long-range perspective of mankind's intellectual and spiritual history may turn out, Einstein fervently hoped, to have been just a minor by-product.

    With those symbols Dr. Einstein was building his theory of relativity. In that baby carriage with his infant son was Dr. Einstein's universe-in-the-making, a vast, finite-infinite four-dimensional universe, in which the conventional universe--existing in absolute three-dimensional space and in absolute three-dimensional time of past, present and future--vanished into a mere subjective shadow.

    Dr. Einstein was then building his universe in his spare time, on the completion of his day's routine work as a humble, $600-a-year examiner in the Government Patent Office in Bern.

    Published Four Papers

    A few months later, in 1905, the entries in the notebook were published in four epoch-making scientific papers. In the first he described a method for determining molecular dimensions. In the second he explained the photo-electric effect, the basis of electronics, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1921. In the third, he presented a molecular kinetic theory of heat. The fourth and last paper that year, entitled "Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," a short article of thirty-one pages, was the first presentation of what became known as the Special Relativity Theory.

    Three of the papers were published, one at a time, in Volume 17 of the German scientific journal, Annalen der Physik, leading journal of physics in the world at the time. The fourth was printed in Volume 18. Neither Dr. Einstein, nor the world he lived in, nor man's concept of his material universe, were ever the same again.

    Many other scientific papers, of startling originality and intellectual boldness, were published by Dr. Einstein in the succeeding years. The scientific fraternity in the world of physics, particularly the leaders of the group, recognized from the beginning that a new star of the first magnitude had appeared on their firmament. But with the passing of time his fame spread to other circles, and by 1920 the name of Einstein had become synonymous with relativity, a theory universally regarded as so profound that only twelve men in the entire world were believed able to fathom its depths.

    Legend Grew With Years

    Paradoxically, as the years passed, the figure of Einstein the man became more and more remote, while that of Einstein the legend came ever nearer to the masses of mankind. They grew to know him not as a universe-maker whose theories they could not hope to understand but as a world citizen, one of the outstanding spiritual leaders of his generation, a symbol of the human spirit and its highest aspirations.

    "The world around Einstein has changed very much since he published his first discoveries * * * but his attitude to the world around him has not changed," wrote Dr. Phillipp Frank, Dr. Einstein's biographer, in 1947. "He has remained an individualist who prefers to be unencumbered by social relations, and at the same time a fighter for social equality and human fraternity.

    "Many famous scholars live in the distinguished university town," (Princeton) Dr. Frank continues, "but no inhabitant will simply number Einstein as one among many other famous people. For the people of Princeton in particular and for the world at large he is not just a great scholar, but rather one of the legendary figures of the twentieth century. Einstein's acts and words are not simply noted and judged as facts; instead each has its symbolic significance * * *"

    "Saintly," "noble" and "lovable" were the words used to describe him by those who knew him even casually. He radiated humor, warmth and kindliness. He loved jokes and laughed easily.

    Princeton residents would see him walk in their midst, a familiar figure, yet a stranger, a close neighbor, yet at the same time a visitor from another world. And as he grew older his otherworldiness became more pronounced, yet his human warmth did not diminish.

    Outward appearance meant nothing to him. Princetonians, old and young, soon got used to the long-haired figure in pullover sweater and unpressed slacks wandering in their midst, a knitted stocking cap covering his head in winter.

    "My passionate interest in social justice and social responsibility," he wrote, "has always stood in curious contrast to a marked lack of desire for direct association with men and women. I am a horse for single harness, not cut out for tandem or team work. I have never belonged wholeheartedly to country or state, to my circle of friends, or even to my own family. These ties have always been accompanied by a vague aloofness, and the wish to withdraw into myself increases with the years.

    "Such isolation is sometimes bitter, but I do not regret being cut off from the understanding and sympathy of other men. I lose something by it, to be sure, but I am compensated for it in being rendered independent of the customs, opinions and prejudices of others, and am not tempted to rest my peace of mind upon such shiftless foundations."

    Center of Controversies

    It was this independence that made Dr. Einstein on occasions the center of controversy, as the result of his championship of some highly unpopular causes. He declared himself a stanch pacifist in Germany during World War I and brought down upon his head a storm of violent criticism from all sides. When outstanding representatives of German art and science signed, following the German invasion of Belgium in violation of treaty, the "Manifesto of Ninety-two German Intellectuals," asserting that "German culture and German militarism are identical," Dr. Einstein refused to sign and again faced ostracism and the wrath of the multitudes.

    But he never wavered when his conscience dictated that he take a course of action, no matter how unpopular. One of these occasions came on Jan. 12, 1953, when he wrote to President Harry S. Truman:

    "My conscience compels me to urge you to commute the death sentence of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg," the two convicted atomic spies who were executed five months later. In June, 1953, he wrote a letter to a school teacher in which he characterized certain tactics of a Congressional investigating committee as "a kind of inquisition" that "violates the spirit of the Constitution," and advised the "minority of intellectuals" to refuse to testify on the ground that "it is shameful for a blameless citizen to submit to such an inquisition." Faced with this evil, he said, he could "see only the revolutionary way of non-cooperation in the sense of Gandhi's."

    Later that year Dr. Einstein advised a witness not to answer any questions by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin, relating to personal beliefs, politics, associations with other people, reading, thinking and writing, as a violation of the First Amendment, which provides constitutional guarantees of free speech and associations. The witness, in refusing to cooperate with the subcommittee then headed by Senator McCarthy, said he was doing so on the advice of Dr. Einstein, who confirmed the witness's statement.

    "He was a severe critic of modern methods of education. "It is nothing short of a miracle," he said, "that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry. For this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom."

    His political ideal, he emphasized frequently, was democracy. The distinctions separating the social classes, he wrote, "are false. In the last analysis they rest on force. I am convinced that degeneracy follows every autocratic system of violence, for violence inevitably attracts moral inferiors * * *. For this reason I have always been passionately opposed to such regimes as exist in Russia and Italy today."

    This was written in 1931, two years before Hitler came to power.

    Dr. Einstein believed that a socialist planned economy was the only way to eliminate the inequalities of capitalism. However, he fully recognized that "planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual."

    His love for the oppressed also led him to become a strong supporter of Zionism.

    In November, 1952, following the death of Chaim Weizmann, Dr. Einstein was asked if he would accept the Presidency of Israel. He replied that he was deeply touched by the offer but that he was not suited for the position.

    He never undertook functions he could not fulfill to his satisfaction, he said, and he felt he was not qualified in the area of human relationships.

    Chairman of Atomic Unit

    On Aug. 6, 1945, when the world was electrified with the news that an atomic bomb had exploded over Japan, the significance of relativity was intuitively grasped by the millions. From then on the destiny of mankind hung on a thin mathematical thread.

    Dr. Einstein devoted much of his time and energy in an attempt to arouse the world's consciousness to its dangers. He became the chairman of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, organized to make the American people aware of the potential horrors of atomic warfare and the necessity for the international control of atomic energy. He believed that real peace could be achieved only by total disarmament and the establishment of a "restricted world government," a "supranational judicial and executive body empowered to decide questions of immediate concern to the security of the nations."

    "The hydrogen bomb," he said in 1950, "appears on the public horizon as a probably attainable goal. * * * If successful, radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere, and hence annihilation of any life on earth, has been brought within the range of technical possibilities."

    He found recreation from his labors in playing the grand piano that stood in the solitary den in the garret of his residence. Much of his leisure time, too, was spent in playing the violin. He was especially fond of playing trios and quartets with musical friends.

    "In my life," he said once, explaining his great love for music, "the artistically visionary plays no mean role. After all, the work of a research scientist germinates upon the soil of imagination, of vision. Just as an artist arrives at his conceptions partly by intuition, so a scientist must also have a certain amount of intuition."

    While he did not believe in a formal, dogmatic religion, Dr. Einstein, like all true mystics, was of a deeply religious nature. He referred to it as the cosmic religion, which he defined as a seeking on the part of the individual who feels it "to experience the totality of existence as a unity full of significance."

    "I assert," he wrote for The New York Times on Nov. 9, 1930, "that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research. No one who does not appreciate the terrific exertions and, above all, the devotion without which pioneer creation in scientific thought cannot come into being can judge the strength of the feeling out of which alone such work turned away as it is from immediate, practical life, can grow."


    "The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience," he wrote "is the mystical. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. This insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, also has given rise to religion. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms--this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong in the ranks of devoutly religious men.

    "I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own--a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human fraility. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism. It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we can dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature.

    "My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God."

    "The most incomprehensible thing about the world," he said on another occasion, "is that it is comprehensible."
     
  20. crank

    crank Well-Known Member

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    no need to be melodramatic, now. begrudging is not vengeance.

    once again, I don't think someone who wilfully kills a bunch of kids is entitled to any comfort. they forfeited such 'rights' when they did what they did.
     
  21. junobet

    junobet New Member

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    Begrudging, vengeful – not much of a difference, is there?
    And again you misunderstand what forgiveness is. It’s nothing that anybody is entitled to, it’s an undeserved gift of grace. Unlike yours or mine, God’s grace is endless. It extends to a kid who stole a couple of coins from its mother’s purse the same as to a kid who mowed down an entire High-School.
     
  22. Gelecski7238

    Gelecski7238 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    God’s ultimate forgiveness of extreme sin is hard to tolerate without a grasp of the bigger picture.

    Existence in the world of dense physical matter and loose energy is fraught with dramatic interactions. It just goes with the territory. The best one can do is strive towards ideals and not let diversionary motives get one sidetracked.

    FAILURE IS ALWAYS AN OPTION.

    Is there a reward for successive track records of ethical and moral performance? You can easily say No, but if there is any hope of escape/ascendance, the only answer is Yes.
     
  23. cupid dave

    cupid dave Well-Known Member

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    Yeah,...

    The things we refuse to look at are what the Bible is pointing out.
    Sexual misconduct by Gays and feminists hurt the kids of the next generation and created gigantic problems like Welfare and Crime,etc.

    But we like sexual promiscuity and do not want to know these truths.
    So, religion has been formed to teach people sexual prudence and not even explain why, except god said so.
     
  24. cupid dave

    cupid dave Well-Known Member

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    All true.

    The idea that sexually promiscuous America might change, and then be forgiven the consequences of a dictatorship or invasion by neighboring patriarchies, like Islam, china, N Korea,... even Russia,... makes sense,... if we fix things now.

    If adults confess their own evils of sexual promiscuity, and start eliminating Welfare, by getting married again, and having legitimate babies now,... America can start to improve and stop the Child Abuse and Crime, etc.
     
  25. Gorn Captain

    Gorn Captain Banned

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    You're not God, Tram. How do we tell what HE thinks is good or evil? "Murder"? Does that mean you should be a pacifist in a war?
     

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