Arden Chatfield
Posts: 6657
Joined: Jan. 2006
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I'm starting to think Quintilis is a deep-cover troll just messing with their minds at OE:
| Quote | he faults you mention as well as many others might lead one to conclude that God is, at best, indifferent to our plight (and perhaps the Bible was a medieval swindle, complete with a clause cleverly-inserted - much like the one about the appointment of US Attorneys into the PATRIOT Act - allowing the post-Romans to keep eating their pork). The notion of a "perfect" and completely benign God is a relatively recent invention, a sanitized "fact" usually presented to children but generally outgrown even by fundamentalists. Certainly Aristotle didn't think the "gods" perfect and the Jewish YHWH admitted he was "jealous" (hardly a mark of perfection - it seems more like a sign of insecurity).
I don't think much is gained by starting with the supposition that God (or, on this site, the designer) was either perfect or had perfect foresight. Clearly there are flaws and compromises in biological designs; no one is disputing that. And the fact of extinction indicates that perhaps the designer designed without knowledge of how the future would play out. (Although it's POSSIBLE the designer designed dodo birds SPECIFICALLY to supply meat to Dutch and Portuguese sailors for a brief period during the late 1500s - perhaps to help them with their spreading of Christianity. This would seem to confirm that God is Christian and not Islamic - otherwise He would have let the closer-by Arabs do the extinctifying.)
I don't have all the answers and neither does anyone else here. The best we can do is be open to new ideas, non-dogmatic, and bounce theories around. We're all wearing our Science Caps when we're in here and this frees us to debate, play Devil's advocate, and use other rhetorical devices. That way we can approach truth in a reasoned way, not accepting facts unquestioned from oracles and what not. |
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"Rich is just mad because he thought all titties had fur on them until last week when a shorn transvestite ruined his childhood dreams by jumping out of a spider man cake and man boobing him in the face lips." - Erasmus
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