Unscientific survey of 'poly religious beliefs

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by child of Thor
cutting edge science is full of it isn't it? dark matter, singularities, big bang etc? Atleast that stuff does make me think of a 'god' type thing.

Isn't this a "god-in-the-gaps" argument?

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by child of Thor
prove it then


But prove that there is not a divine creator or some such force in the universe.

I believe the onus is on the other sides- they have to prove that someone/thing is there.


So far no divine post has been received at this address.

Curious how with the advance of science and greater, more accurate tests for evidence, the number of seemingly inexplicable occurrences and divine interventions has died off. Now it seems instead of multitudes being fed with a coupleof crackers and some whitebait, the parting of the Red Sea and whole cities being cast down into fire and brimstone we have vague blobs appearing on tacos or damp flagstones, or the name of 'Allah' appearing in an aubergine slice.

Really, David Copperfield can do better than that....

[Whaleboy]

Originally posted by child of Thor
But prove that there is not a divine creator or some such force in the universe.

Such a proof is unnecessary. The universe is still here is it not? That it is here does not presuppose a creator, in obscure terms, it is not necessarily needed since there is no logical barrier (per se) to a consequence without a cause (it works the other way; consequences are a necessary result of a cause).

The burden of proof is on the theists to prove that there positively is a God, because they're proposing it they have to make their case before it can be accepted as true, or they can logically say "prove otherwise".

[Whaleboy]

Really, David Copperfield can do better than that....

So George Foreman ...isn't God?

[Provost Harrison]

Originally posted by Whaleboy


So George Foreman ...isn't God?

Nope, he just has a fine selection of grills I'm afraid...easy to mix the two up...

[Whaleboy]

"The fat drains directly into my mouth"

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Whaleboy


So George Foreman ...isn't God?

God would have kept beating Ali, and found a way to keep all that fat on the meat and still let it be healthy.


And he would be called George Head Honcho or George Bossman, not George Foreman.

[Whaleboy]

Touché!

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Whaleboy
Touch?

Touch ? I don't have access to tele-dild0nics, I'm afraid.


And buy me a macchiato first, you forward fellow.

[Whaleboy]

You ever considered editing amateur erotica?

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Whaleboy
You ever considered editing amateur erotica?

Editing ?

Nah, I like being creative, not cleaning up other people's mistakes and giving them a semblance of literacy.

I've always found editing to be rather akin to reading particularly badly written and poorly spelt 'Poly posts on a unicycle on a greasy slide.


I shouldn't complain too much though- I had a friend who helped edit a dictionary/encyclopaedia of Akkadian, and not only did he have to read the Akkadian, but he had to decipher his former tutor's handwriting- which was actually worse than reading the Akkadian.


Anyways, let me know if you want to give your erotica the once-over, you saucy sh@gger you.

[Whaleboy]

Anyways, let me know if you want to give your erotica the once-over, you saucy sh@gger you.

Noo!! It's nothing if not verbose, quite literally

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Whaleboy


Noo!! It's nothing if not verbose, quite literally

molly's favourite author: James Joyce.


Ergo, virtuosity in verbosity not a problem. Nor indeed viscosity after scrutinosity of said verbosity.


Risselty rossolty ro ro ro....

[Mr. Harley]

I was born and raised Catholic. I cannot say when my faith started to falter, it must have been soemtime when a combination of three things that hit my life between ages seven and nine. My mother came very close to dying the first time, her intestinal system totally shut down and no longer absorbed nutrients for over a month. She dropped down from a trim 125 pounds to 80 pounds. My memories of this are totally blocked.

At the same time my father, devout Catholic that he was, started the intense verbal abuse that would last a decade and more or less cause my brother's personality to slowly dissolve. In many ways that is much worse than what follows, watching someone you adore have their personality slowly shredded over a decade has a kind of slow motion horror, and causes you to develop very negative feelings toward the perpertrator. Yet when the perpetrator is your father, the inidividual you are supposed to trust you cannot hate him. You want so desperately to bellieve in your father. It doesn't help that the local Church thinks he is this wonderful, upstadning individual.

Then there is my sister being burned. Instead of slow motion horror, it's all very quick and very focused. She was almost four, and had 65% of her body burned from 2nd throught 4th degree burns. We didn't call them fourth degree then, but they were burns that went through the skin into the underlying muscles and tendons.

When they took her out (I was home and called the ambulence, my mother could not because she had, due to the emergency nature of it, put her out with her bare hands. Her hands were in mitts for the next three months, and were never right after that. They could see bone at the hospital - I knew none of this at the time I just called the ambulence) I will never forget the black shreds of skin hanging off her face, still steaming (this may be why I have terrible problems with visual memory). The smell of the melting synthetics (inexpensive flammable children's clothing, my family got to be a statistic) combined with burning flesh is something that is indelibly stamped in my mind. Burning meat while melting a spatula on the edge of the frying pan is not a good idea for me.

The I get the next decade of trying to help out, giving my parents extra time to rub the scar tissue every night with cocoa butter and other ointments to keep it soft. My sister would try to be brave about it, but after a while she would still whimper. You see, scar tissue doesn't grow, and can actually tighten. My sister has deformed ribs despite everything the surgeons and parents could do, it is hard to keep up with normal growth. You see, to add injury to injury, she has that fine freckling Irish skin, and forms Kelloidal scars at the graft sites. Her "skin" is approximately 80% scar tissue. Oh, and it gets better on the nights after any of her fifty plus childhood surgeries (she had another ten in her thirties) - they get to change dressings. I would help sometimes with that, and the sounds are not always whimpers depending on how badly they stick to the surgical sites.

Of course my father stops seeing his glass as full at all, which in hindsight I understand. It's hard to see you glass as 10% full. It probably contributes heavily to his myocardial infarction (heart stoppage) - all three of them - that nearly kill him when he is 39 seeting our family back even worse financially. Back on topic - so of course the abuse gets worse, and my brother's condition deteriorates. My youngest sister has a very bad accident that mangles her knee, to the point that later in life she gets down from a cabinet and it buckles backwards. She becomes resentful because, unlike in a normal family where a child with that serious an injury gets a fair bit of attention, she gets helped some, gets told to do her knee exercises, and then it's back to taking care of the burned sibling. It wasn't until her 30's that she managed to get past how this set of dynamics had warped her.

And why doesn't my mother divorce him? Especially after the time he takes a 1/2" machine v-belt and "spanks" my sisters on their bare bottoms with it? It's that funny little thing called medical insurance. You know, the burns, the knee, etc. She threatened to put him in jail, I was there listening to her yell one of four times she ever did, but she really couldn't report him. The medicaid system where we lived, and the hospitals she would have been in coupled to the care the burned sister received, would have killed my sister (the system has improved since then, and then started back downhill). In over sixty operations even with the best health care she almost died three times - once immdiately after the burns and twice afterwards, post-op infections. That is why, whenever any conservative whines that we cannot afford a public health care system, or we spend too much on medicaid, etc, - I hope when he dies and goes to hell, he gets to spend a century or so under the tender ministrations of my father.

So my brother goes into the military - oh did I mention on top of it all he may have Asperger's syndrome - and after 16 years, when he seperates his pelvis from his spine in an accident in a military hospital when a 300 pound patient slips and my brother tries to catch him - they kick him out with 15% medical, unable to work as a physical therapy assistant (his training, but the pelvic injury...) and with no feeling from the ankles down. Plus the gentle treatment by my father left him without the werewithal to fight it.

In this same time span we discover that the local Doctor who treated my mother seriously mistreated her. She finally changes doctors, and they rushed her into surgery. They drained five pints of puss out of her abdominal wall (she had NOT been gaining weight, stupid incompetent butcher) - they are called adhesions - and removed all her large intestine, and a goodly part of thesmall one. Plus she had a serious kidney dysfunction. This was all due to fully blown Krohns disease, a nice little illness which combines Lupus, Colitis, and rheumatoid arthitis (and she got the bonus of added complications). She had all three, and the arthritis obligingly settled in her spine. Oh, and important later on. They stopped counting at 200 polyps in under three feet when they biopsied her large intestine.

I almost become a priest, sort of like my brother going into the military. I find out how the Catholic Church is really organized, some of the modern history - Ex Cathedra my a** - and leave the Church. In hindsight I suspect I was desperately trying to prove to myself that I wasn't losing my faith, but hindsight, by definition, is always 20-20.

She spends the next ten years dying - eight years after I leave home. I get to quit college - raise my sisters for three years quite badly, thank you (they have mostly forgiven me, context and all), and take care of a steadily faling woman who was an IQ 180 and now at times has trouble talking. It's random, so you never know if you are going to have a good day, or a day when you have to do it all, including changing the ileostomy bag, etc.

Oh, and that wonderful man, my father? He cannot deal with, and at times yells at her that she can overcome it with her mind. I'll never forget the wonderful time when I had spent the better part of five hours rubbing her muscles down (definitely low brain function she's barely coherent) trying to keep her from going into convulsions - the kidney thing hadn't been diagnosed yet - and then having him come barging into the room yelling at her. She would curl back up and start quivering, and I would have to relax all the muscles again. I finally told my father to f**k off and called the ambulance. A little while later my sisters are old enough to deal with it, and I leave. Sadly for my youngest sister, she now gets to be my father's abuse target. She develops a bit of an attitude at this point.

My mother's health continues to deteriorate, until I receive a call that mom is in the hospital, and she is asking for you. And my father (the whole Terry Schiavo thing got me thinking back to this), after I make a panic rush to see my mom due to possible liver cancer, decides he's spent enough of his life waiting around. So I see my mom - she's quite yellow at this point, I had never actually seen jaundice - and she was holding on just for me.

Funny thing. I had picked up this collection of little ceramic figurines, oh about six inches tall or so, my mother had always liked them. I was giving her one for each Christmas and birthday. Well, I'd given her four, and I had eight more. I ran up to the attic and grabbed them, and took them with me. I have a photo of her, yellow and puffed out at her hospital bed smiling with those eight ceramic figures because I made it. I would have had to throw them out if I'd forgotten them and found them later, now I keep them simply because.

I leave, and she starts to fade out of coherency as the body to shut down due to the metastisized liver cancer. Unfortunately as her mind fails she wants to go home, she tries to get up with all these tubes attached, and they strap her into the bed. Even more unfortunately my Father neglected to tell anyone she is a claustrophobe, and he leaves her strapped into a bed to die as her mind fails. I would have paid for the home care. And, to take advantage of me as the union representative who opposed the little tin god running the government facility where I worked, he f**ks with me, weasals out of giving me bereavement leave, and I miss the funeral. I learned to hate after this, a lesson it took me a long time to unlearn.

Then there is my burned sister. Who finally, in her mid-thirties, waiting for most of a decade for her future husband to grow up, gets married to a man who can see past her burns. Oops, he's partriotic and all that, joins the military after 9/11 and she gets a medal and a government supplied headstone.

Add in the fact that we have discovered my wife has a serious mental handicaps that may prevent her from ever leaving a normal life, and we've only ascertained exactly what the problems are after she almost - accidently - seriously injured my little girl. We'd had hints, and had her evaluated, but it was missed. Review of the evaluations and how they did them show it was done just for state money, with no serious attempt to actually properly do the work when behavioural interventions might have worked.

She has nearly caused several potentially lethal accidents, I have had to intervene multiple times. She tries hard not to and that is what clued me in that she had a big time serious problem - no mother puts their child at risk, at least no normal parent that often. It did not show up at first, and the problems were masked by other factors.

So forgive me if I am just a little suspicious of a theistic god. Just a trifle bit. If aforementioned being is personally responsible for what has happened in my life, or decided that he didn't need to intervene at all, I am going to have some really serious discussions with him/her. That's why I am deistic. I do not believe we are in the hands of an infinitely sadistic being.

[Spiffor]

That's a really terribe story, Shawn I feel for you.