Yeah, I know. I'm not attacking anybody on here.

My "I can't believe you guys are debating this" was just a rhetorical statement. :)

But for the GFY Historians...this is an interesting in depth look at the Bible's actual history:
http://realhistoryww.com/world_histo...The_Bible2.htm

Notice the part about Origen. He was a "Christian Scholar" in Alexandria Egypt (that would probably get you killed in 2014 by all the muslim zealots in the middle east), and was just one of the MANY guys who decided which scriptures would be included and which ones didn't "fit" what the Pope wanted to be in the bible.

That book that we all grew up with is a carefully constructed piece of mind control that has been tweaked for over 2000 years.
And we all grew up watching our parents, grandparents, and the rest of our family "believing" in it. So we were conditioned from birth.

It's no wonder that even intelligent people take pause and go "I wonder if it's really true". It's hard to overcome that kind of brainwashing.

But if you research it you find out quick that the stories that were told around the campfire by that small Jewish tribe were much older stories that had already been passed down from other cultures and plagarized to fit the Jewish religion and later Christianity.

And if you really step back and use your brain and not your heart...you don't even have to research it. The sheer absurdity of what the bible (or any religions manifesto) says is beyond belief.

I believe it's a very elaborate work of fiction.

every damn word :thumbsup

Some of the history of it I believe, yes.

Robbie the bible has survived 1700 years because the STORIES ARE AWESOME!!!! one of the best written books around

Until I was 5 or 6 years old I had no idea what religion I was born into, there was no religion mentioned in my house yet by the time I was 4 years old and aware of the world around me I knew God and had my own conception of him. Where did I get it from? Television and movies, every morning I'd wake up to watch the early morning cartoons, sitting in front of the TV in the dark long before TV had 24 hour a day programming - the national anthem would come on followed by a minister or priest with a 5 minute show/sermon talking about God and Jesus. Must be true, they wouldn't put him on TV if he was a liar. Then part of the morning cartoon show I watched religiously was a stop animation show called 'Davey and Goliath', produced by the same company that made 'Gumby and Pokey', it was about a little boy and his dog Goliath. I had no idea that show was funded by a Christian organization. Every episode was some life lesson the boy would find out came from Jesus and the Bible. When I'd sneeze my mother would say 'God bless you', I'd hear other adults say things like 'God dammit' 'God willing' 'I hope to God' etc - it's everywhere in our culture, whether your parents are religious or not a kid is going to have some belief in this person/thing named God very early in life. And it's very hard to shake - I bet the majority of agnostics and atheists when they or a loved one is facing death say some kind of prayer to God out of fear and desperation. Most wouldn't admit it.

I believe in something, I'm just sure what it is.

I used to watch that same clay-mation show! You're right...we are indoctrinated even if it isn't by our parents.
Probably why Atheists activists groups are always trying to get that shit out of the schools.

a good one , to stand on its own :thumbsup

https://scontent-a-vie.xx.fbcdn.net/...92776323_n.jpg

The day that people read the bible while on the toilet is the day I believe that. :1orglaugh

Fittty .......Beliebers :Graucho

https://scontent-a-vie.xx.fbcdn.net/...92776323_n.jpg

I'm finding myself increasingly fascinated with this guy. He seems to be a 50 year old functioning at the level of a 12 year old. Starting to really wonder why and what's going on in his head.

fact: if the stories weren't good the bible would not be around today :2 cents:

Well, if you read my posts then you know why I think it is around.

But, hey...if you think people just love to read it because of the great stories and that's why it's still "around", that's your opinion.

but crucially, there are no documents that say that his life was a myth from around that time either. other religions of that time period do not say that he never existed, instead they try to discredit him as a charlatan or a magician.

I watch a documentary a few months back that was very interesting. apparently around that time there was dozens of men wandering around the middle east each with their own followers and each with their "miracles" (apparently one of them, who's name I have forgotten now, was really popular and it was a close call that we could have ended up worshiping him instead.) anyway, the documentary goes on to say that over time the myths of each of those men slowly started being attributed to an ever shrinking group of prophets until there was one man left who's life story absorbed the myths of all of his contemporaries - Jesus.

heh - "Mein Kampf" by Adolf Hitler also was printed millions of times

If somebody does function at the level of a 12 year old it's not as interesting as 'crazy'. I have a family member who because of problems at birth, an extreme premature birth, does function intellectually at a 3rd grade level. They cover it up well with strangers and co-workers, by being self aware enough not to get into discussions about things that they know are beyond their capabilities to discuss intelligently.

"Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought an idiot than to open your mouth and remove all doubt"

That raises the troubling question "what is crazy?". There are a lot of people on here who's thinking is quite twisted. The difference between "crazy" and "not" as least as far as perceptions are concerned is whether or not they follow their bizarre logic to its conclusion or cross that very thin line and act.

Most psychopaths are well functioning people. Most psychopaths with below average IQs aren't.

Can a creationist kindly point me to the Biblical chapter that explains 500-million year old fossils.

In today's headlines:

http://calgary.ctvnews.ca/scientists...park-1.1680819

https://youtube.com/user/clownx2009

he's just batshit mental

Really enjoyed the musical.

Which one?

Arguably less so than one who would spend their time stalking him.
:2 cents:

Well if you believe that the Bible is the word of god then you are without a doubt in the wrong industry.

I personally believe we are on our own but there is one verse from John (8:7) that completely captivated me when I read it. So simple yet encompassing.

"Let he who is without sin cast the first stone"

Love that.

wow - best quote Ive read in years - maybe ever...its goin in my sig

Simply no....

'Dumb' crazy isn't very interesting, more comical and sad to watch somebody with low intellect attempt to make sense of the world and contribute to it.

Intelligent psychopaths/sociopaths are very interesting, brilliant ones are fascinating and scary.

The real 'crazy', people who live in a very different reality than the rest of us, only interest me from a neurological point of view. Their wiring is all off, I don't believe schizophrenia has much to do or anything to do with how somebody was raised - though haven't done any reading on it so have no idea what experts say today about the disorder.

Sad that there are 8 billion neurons in the brain, most unmapped, and we have doctors pretending to understand all these psychiatric disorders. We have barely scratched the surface of a decent understanding of the brain.

Dusty makes it fun to learn. lol

:2 cents::1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

I don't agree, there's nothing in the Old Testament that makes nudity or heterosexual sex a sin, what's very immoral according to the Bible is fucking another man's wife or homosexuality. It's pro sex, as freaky as you want to get between a consenting couple, it commands that you have a duty to please each other, if your wife wants to piss on you then you must indulge her kinky desires.

No surprise that the Jews play a big part in the porn industry, the Bible is filled with sex.

I think "dumb crazy" is far worse as a problem. The prisons are full of "dumb crazy". Bikers, gang bangers, cartel/mafia, murderers etc.

I'm not worried much about a rare Silence of the Lambs personality that understands he's broken. Though serial killers are often psychopaths and highly intelligent, they are a very tiny part of the problem, no matter how much entertainment value they offer. The problem to me is the guy that is broken and doesn't understand he's broken. Cam_girls was a great example of that. "Medication doesn't help schizophrenia when the voices are real" as he actually said.

Intelligent sociopaths are everywhere. They are all around us. They are running companies, practicing law, ruling Wall Street etc. The US now leads the way in the growth of sociopathy. 1 in 25 people and getting worse. A shitty thing to mix with a culture that's all "me, me, me, me"

I think every aspect of who we are is a complex mix of genetics and environment/experience. And "reality" itself is very very subjective. Moreso than we accept or want to believe because we are wired to look at others as being "normal" and "like us". We are wired to assume that people think the way we think, see things the way we do etc. We can't imagine what its like to be a sociopath. We can't imagine what its like to watch a puppy get put into a microwave and not feel anything at all... we can't imagine it. This is why we are surrounded by crazy people and do not often realize it. We rarely see them for what they are.

Brain scanning technologies are making quantum leaps constantly. I think we understand a great deal and of course there is a long way to go. Peoples wiring is in large part, unique not only to them, but to them in that particular point in time.. as the neural plasticity of the brain is constantly wiring and unwiring neural connections. This, among many other reasons, is why you can't really use brain scans effectively as evidence in court. Regardless of the visible deficiency, lesion, damage etc, too much is unique to the individual.

I actually just read Connectome not too long ago, which is about the idea of mapping out an entire brain and all its neural connections.

Yes I'm going to believe 'Dusty' from YouTube over Flavius Josephus one of the first and greatest historians in human history. Jesus most likely existed, the details of his life and death who knows.

Didn't Obama commit to the project to map out the entire brain? We don't have the computing power they say right now to do it but we can start and computing power will increase.

it's lookin like bacteria may be the root cause for just about all of it (psychiatric disorders) - including autism...

Even diseases that have long considered to have a genetic component (Hereditary) are beginning to look more and more bacterial and the genes only factor in as a predisposition.

this is new school shit - you wont hear any of this from the scammers AMA or CDC.

I believe there is a bible, and that's about as far as it goes.

more and more hard core religious studies academics are coming around to the opinion that Jesus most likely did NOT exist...

there is no reason to believe that a life that is so extensively fictionalized ever even happened.

It's very subjective to call those type of people 'sociopaths', unethical, extremely selfish - in short, maybe they're just garden variety assholes.

People call Hitler a sociopath, I'm not sure of that, we seem to have a need to ascribe a mental disorder to everybody who does evil things. Then again as you've posted before the work of Gazzaniga, how much free will we have is now up for scientific debate and as we learn more about the brain maybe we'll find out we have much less than we think we do and Hitler was just an oddity, the wrong idiot in the right place and right time to fulfill his destiny.

He discusses Josephus. Maybe watch it first.

Maybe give this page a read.

http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/josephus-etal.html

Well for ages stomach ulcers were believed by doctors to be caused by stress and treated that way until it was discovered a strain of bacteria causes them.

Current research in IBS, Irritable Bowel Disorder, also long thought to be of some stress/neurotic origin is pointing towards physical causes between the gut and brain, running in both directions, as the culprit.