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Zeno1405241556

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  1. Pardon the necropost.You may want to consider making the reflects a little smaller.You can do this by adding in a central black colour to your gradient or shifting the central point. Or, you can feather out the bottom part of the reflection.From what I've seen, Apple doesn't use this effect to mirror more than 1/4 of the size of the object. It makes it look a sliver more interesting.Moving away from the Apple style, you may want to add in a solid colour break (e.g., top black, bottom grey) where the image and reflection meet and add a gradiant overlay to it. This would appear to be a sort of ground.
  2. In this post, I will not offer anything towards the existence of God, nor towards the opposite case. However, it should be noted that many of the arguments used in this topic are prime examples of circular reasoning. You can not use theology or any books of theology (i.e., Bible, Qur'an, etc.) to prove the existence of God. Theology presupposes the existence of God. How can you have a branch of reasoning devoted to the study of God if there isn't one? You can't; therefore, God must exist in order for theology to be useful and true. That being said, it should be clear why theology can not be used in proofs for God's existence -- if you were to use theology, obviously you'd of already had to prove God exists, or assumed it. Any series of deductions based on even a single assumption is completely unreliable. Some may also want to quip Anselm's ontological arguement for the existance of God. He describes there are being two possible cases: God doesn't exist and He is only imaginary God exists and He is also imaginary (that is, that He is in our imagination as well as His real existence) Anselm goes on to define God as a "being than which nothing greater can be conceived". That is, that there is nothing better or even thinkable than God. So the question is thus: which is greater of the two former cases? (For sake of clarity, consider the imaginary case as A, imaginary alone, and the case of the actuality as A+B, imaginary and actual. A + B is obviously greater in value than A.) Basic deduction would lead you to say that God existing both actually and mentally is greater, which is true. But this is not a proof of God's existence. Rather, this is a logical trap -- another circular arguement. This proof of God's existence presupposes that God exists. If God didn't exist, the definition of what God is would not apply and we would never have gotten stuck in this trap. The reason this is an invalid arguement is that you can never enter it. The two arguements chase each others' tails in a circle, with no end, and no beginning. If we were to jump into this arguement simply because it works, we could jump into all sorts of lies. Consider: Why should we drive on the right side of the road? Because that is the law. And the law is the law. But people also drive on the left side of the roads, because that is the law where they are from. An argument with the basic structure of "A is A because A is A" should be laughed and scorned at, not taken to heart in one of life's most perennial questions. Moving on to personal case studies, that is, personal experiences, these are also unreliable. Sensation and perception can not be relied on. The stove didn't seem hot before you put your hand on it. And the straw doesn't really bend when it's submerged underwater. There isn't really toast burning, you're just in deeeeeeeeep trouble. Things don't really shrink when you walk away from them. Hot peppers aren't actually hot. Sensation can be distorted by thousands of every day things. While it is true that sensation is used in scientific discovery, it is used alongside of tools. If there were a scientific way to prove the existence of God, I would be all for it. Saying; however, that you can sense or feel God's [insert random chosen adjective here] or presence is completely ridiculous. Can you also feel the number I have in my head? Or see what colour my aura is? Probably not. And don't ever bring the word "feel" into a rational argument. The best way I have seen to prove the existence of God is Aquinas' theory of medieval synthesis [The most famous quote of this is "since therefore grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it." Here, grace is theology, and nature is philosophy. Aquinas reasoned that philosophy could not aquire divine knowledge -- and it's true. Or at least I've yet to encounter any perfect arguements for the divine. To compensate for philosophy's ineptness, Aquinas reasoned that we must also apply theology, or take Divine Revelation by faith, in order to learn of the divine. Problem : you can not use theology as a way to argue the existence of God!! In respect to the other proofs offered by Aquinas (namely, from the first article of the first question), from what I have read of his Summa (only the first question -- it's dull stuff and insanely long. That one page is 1/10 of one of the questions. Aquinas compiled 99 questions plus two appendices, basically questions, into the Summa Theologiae) they seem to be mostly cop-outs. For example, the arguement of efficient cause states that something had to cause the existence of things. That must be God. There's a bit of a jump there, considering nothing ties the required spark of existence to God besides folklore (though those who believe in God have no trouble believing that there is nothing that sparked His existence), and, furthermore, it assigns a role to God before proving that He exists. In the end, we are to infer that God exists because he does a plethora of things like that. Again, a circular argument. In short: No more Bible. No more Qur'an. No more stories of internal experiences. They aren't reliable. And besides, you don't read the Bible or the Qur'an. They simply no longer exist, especially the Bible. There have been so many alterations of the original text that there is no way to tell what the original said. For example, the Bible says, on homosexuality, that if man does unto man as man does unto women it's a horrible sin. The original text was ambigious. A more accurate translation could have been "if man do unto people as man do unto person" (i.e., orgy). And anyone who can quip the King James Bible as the Word of God has got the be kidding. The Bible wasn't written in English. I do not know much about the Qur'an, but I assume there are those who would quote English translations (and transliterations, due to errors) as Divine Word. Unless you can find a manuscript, you most likely are not reading His words. Are you familiar with telephone tag? Use cold hard reason and facts. And on the subject of proving that something does not exist, how do you do that if science and reason have thus far proved unsuccessful? Do we agree that something either exists or doesn't, or is there a shared quality defining things that neither exist nor not exist? Surely, in disproving the existance of something, you are proving that it doesn't exist.
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