Joshua

Or perhaps it's the overemphasis on sex as opposed to caring about others apart from their bodies that is the cause for the increased amount of sexual assault crimes.

Labels are society's way of saying "I'd rather know about you then know you." We want to be able to put people in a box and think we know them. But we don't. The world's a big scary place when we stop pretending we know everything and everyone. But then the wonder of life around us returns. Plus, it's easier to hate someone if you think you know them. People like to hate Christians because they convince themselves everyone who's a Christian is a certain way. In fact, I just replied to another topic in this category where someone was ranting against all meat-eaters, religious people, SUV users, capitalists, and republicans. As I pointed out, that includes most of the known world. If we say all meat-eaters are jerks and convince ourselves of it, it's easy to hate them and be indignant of them. But as a Christian I believe one of my first priorities is to love and forgive everyone no matter what they've done, just as God's forgiven me. By saying I'm guilty with everyone else, it opens me up to show grace, love, and mercy to everyone even as God has shown such things to me. Now that I think about it, perhaps labels are people's way of having an excuse to look down their noses at those who are different from them, perhaps to stress their individuality, uniqueness, and prideness.

Umm... it sounds like the problem might be disliking everyone with a view different to what you stand for. If you hate meat-eaters, that's pretty much most of the world's population isn't it? Then religious followers narrows it down considerably more. Getting rid of the Republicans... how many are left now? I hope you're counting. I suppose some of the remaining ones might be SUV drivers and capitalists as well. My point is, you're calling some 99 + % of the world brainwashed here. Now that might be true, but to put it gently, you might want to consider that the problem isn't with the whole world, but with yourself.

While we're on the subject, since scholars like Newton, Pasteur, Galileo, Sir William Ramsay, and others proclaimed their belief in the God of the Bible, does that discredit their professionalism and accuracy? Also, if Big Bang theory is correct and stuff can "poof" into existence from nothing, why don't we see little poofs all over the place making stuff all the time? And if we came from monkeys... why didn't the other monkeys evolve? Why are there still monkeys? Furthermore, if you say it was dependent on exact circumstances needed to make it happen... wouldn't you still need 2 monkeys to evolve at once to continue the new breed? What are the chances of that? And happening repeatedly?

No. Regardless of how Hussein treated people, we weren't supposed to be there because of that. Our nation's leaders blatantly lied to us the people so we'd fight a war for their own private purposes. There was a brief pretense at finding those who gave the disinformation just to get the heat off them but I haven't heard of anyone being found responsible. Our leaders seem to want control of the middle east, perhaps for the oil. Afghanistan was understandable... Iraq was not, especially considering the lying about WOMD to get Americans to go along with it. And now they're trying to get us after Pakistan. I am loyal to my country. But like Mark Twain says in "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" that doesn't mean loyalty to the leaders. In Connecticut the constitution, he notes, says that if the leaders are hurting the people every person is responsible to stand up if that's what they feel and give their voice against it, even if they're the only ones doing so. And if the rest don't feel that way, it's their responsibility to vote them down. Twain says it's not about the laws or government or leaders, but the people. Isn't that what America was made to be for? A government for the people, by the people? Isn't it then disloyal to say we should blindly trust our leaders even as they betray the very people they were elected to represent?

Can we know nothing of God's nature as Islam tells us? Or did God reveal Himself to us through His Son Jesus Christ to whom all the prophets gave witness hundreds of years before? Only Christianity or Islam can be right there about God's revelation to the human race.Do we get to God by doing good works or can we never be "good enough" so that as Jesus says we "must all repent, or all likewise perish" and fall on God's mercy? Again, only Islam or Christianity can be right there about how we reach God, is it through being a good person or solely through the person of Jesus Christ, as He says "I am the way, the truth, and the life, no man comes to the Father but by Me." Do we hate our enemies as Islam says or forgive them as Jesus teaches that we may be "the children of the Father in Heaven, who sends His rain on the just and the unjust"? Again, only Christianity or Islam can be right about how to treat our enemies and those around us.Do we find eternal rewards through "killing infidels" like the Koran teaches or through the pattern revealed all through the Bible, of confessing our mistakes like David, Moses, Isaiah, and Solomon and asking God to forgive us? Again only Christianity or Islam can be right here. Though they may seem outwardly similar when we look at the vital essentials of what these religions believe about who God is, how we reach Him, how we attain eternal merit, and how to treat others, we find them to be drastically different. Like night and day, light and darkness, heat and cold, they are diametrically opposed.

I think I know a perfect definition, we came up with it in a Bible study group of mine:There are 3 parts to love. First there's emotion. This is seeing the other person for who they really are and caring about them. From this emotion, you get the 2nd part, knowledge or memory of that emotion. This way when you're not feeling particularly emotional/loving you make the 3rd part, choice/commitment to acting in their best interests apart from your feelings. These continual choices apart from the emotions lead to more emotion for the person as you come to care even more deeply about them because of the commitment to them and their well-being.So love has 3 parts, emotion, knowledge/memory, and choice/commitment. I also would add it is most clear whether a person loves you when it comes down to acting in your best interests or their own. Love is also by definition caring about the other person at least as much as yourself. This is why Jesus says to love others as ourselves. When we have to choose whether or not to help the other person even though it means sacrifice and pain on our part, that's when the rubber meets the road so to speak. This is why so many people THINK they're in love these days, they think it's just emotion. But as the above definition shows, it's more then that. It means making self-sacrificing choices on their behalf, not necessarily to satisfy their wants, but rather their needs. If it's just about their wants, if they want to walk off a cliff you'd let them. But that's not love, love is warning them because you're concerned about their welfare even if they aren't. So many people divorce and break up dating/marriage relationships because it's all about the big ME. They don't care about the other person much. It's about what the other person can do, how they make me feel. Once they no longer get an emotional "high" feeling out of it, they're out of there. Once the other person no longer can provide them with finances or security or popularity they once wanted, they're out of there. They're in it just for what they can get out of it.Let me tell, that's not love. Our society thinks it is. I wrote a poem on the subject actually, here's what I think it's really called: LoveWhat all think they've gotAnd so many do notIt's life's biggest mustDon't confuse it with lustAny heart it can thawFulfils God's moral LawYou can give to the poorLet your body be burnedWork incredible miraclesSpeak in tongues never heardAnd if you're missing outOn this which you most needThen let there be no doubtYou have nothing indeedMany claim to serve GodBut escape this commandAnd they find it so oddThis is His great demandAnd for all of your knowledgeAnd wisdom, and powerWhich makes others to trembleAnd still others to cowerIf you're lacking in thisThen all you have is mootFor you're missing the pointThis, God's great attributeIt never harms othersIs patient and kindMeekly it suffersWith no evil in mindBearing all, believing allHoping all, enduring allNever failing, over all travailingThis, God's gift from above-This Is Love

On the plus side, you can get really good on your feet learning to maneuver through those high school hallway crowds I owe a lot of my foot coordination, balance, and maneuverability to those high school days

Meh, I just advise anyone wanting to get in shape to play more sports. Weights are good for conditioning to get better at sports but if someone wants to get healthy I tell them to just play baseball, basketball, football, or soccer with some people nearby. Practice and get better. Race people, go jogging. I'm more a sports person then a weights person.

I guess it shows where our priorities in the United States lie. We don't even pay our teachers enough money to stick around as our children lose out more and more despite proclaimed "no child left behind" programs, even as we spend money on fighter jets and a war that is inflating our national deficit. Did you know making a SINGLE fighter jet can cost over ONE BILLION DOLLARS?

What bothers me is that so many are concluding basically "there's no one right way." Think about it.The laws of logic tell us that which is mutually exclusive can't contradict other things to which it's mutually exclusive with more then one being right. Either God exists or He doesn't. Those are mutually exclusive concepts. Either God is all loving or He isn't. Those are mutually exclusive concepts. My point is, contradicting points can't be true. Islam says we can't know anything of God's nature. Christianity says God created us to share a relationship with Him where we come to know Him. Islam says God did not reveal Himself to humanity through His sinless Son becoming man. Christianity says differently. Therefore, one or the other can be true, but not both. There is either one God as monotheistic religions say or many as polytheistic religions like Hinduism say. In pretending all ways can be true and lead to God we're saying the very laws of logic don't exist without realizing it! We can disagree and treat each other with respect, but let's not come about with this ridiculous notion that there is no ultimate truth and all ways can be equally right.

Seeing as printers are coming dirt cheap these days and it seems some times like the ink cartridges cost more then the printers, why not make the printers capable of holding bigger cartridges? It doesn't sound like the refill idea would be too feasible or cost efficient, but I like the idea of a printer with a holding area for a giant surplus cost ink cartridge. At least then the ink would be coming cheaper for the cost ultimately and refilling would be something to be done far less often.

I don't know about the cupholder idea. With windows, something goes wrong with the wiring and they're permanently stuck until fixed. The technology sounds like it could get a bit pricey and might be delicate as well. It might not work too long in a minivan with a bunch of rowdy kids. However... what about this?A cupholder, plastic as normal, but with something where you pull it and the plastic round parts go inside or outside each other so it can get larger or smaller. It wouldn't be tough to make, could fit many sizes, and then when the silly bottom breaks (as they often tend to do) it might still be possible to tighten it and have it keep working anyway.

It's certainly not God. He made an originally peaceful world with no disease, no wars, no problems of any kind. Changes to that came because of Satan and us choosing our own ways over God. And of course, what was God's plan? Peace, prosperity, loving relationships between all, justice, compassion, mercy, forgiveness.. basically everything perfect. So now take the alternatives to that which we as a race chose by following our own selfish lusts and desires... war, destruction, hatred, injustice, cruelty, grudging... ultimately all imperfection. We not only ruined ourselves, but the entire sum of God's creation all around us through our rejection of God's ways, which is why natural disasters, diseases, etc... are here. Some of it may even be because of God's just judgements upon our evil deeds in the past. As for the world's future, I agree with Adrian... for the most part. Everything PHYSICAL has an end if it has had a beginning. Basic physics shows us this, matter decays. But everything in us seeks that which is eternal. We weren't made for the temporary, but for the eternal. As C.S. Lewis said, "we're all eternal spirits in a world that tries to hide our true identities from us." So while I am sure this world and all the physical universe is going to end, that doesn't mean the end of our existence. In deed, the Bible says God will bring in new heavens and a new earth, and the former won't be remember or come to mind. There will even be a new place of separation from God, called the Lake of Fire, where the current Hell or Sheol will be thrown into. God has no intention of letting things run on their current course, He's just trying to convince us of the error of our ways so we'll repent and turn to Him before it's too late.

If you go by the Bible, it says that God isn't willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance. So God wants everyone to spend eternity with Him. If so, I can only assume that the promises are indeed to "whosoever" and that while our sinning may lead to God hardening our hearts, there is always a chance for any person, at least in this life, to realize their horrible mistakes, repent, and come to find ultimate forgiveness for all sins they'll ever commit and a real, living relationship with the One and only Living God. God loves creating and loves righteousness, if everything was set in stone as far as the future, how could He bear to get up in the morning? I think He's given us the ability to determine our futures and that's why He's trying so hard to knock on the hearts of everyone, and to draw all of us from Satan's clutches. It's why He wants us Christians to bring forth good works as befitting a truly repentant soul that others may find eternal life through the Christ by whom all consists and in whom we all exist.

You know why I think we keep thinking in terms of stuff like this? Because inwardly we know there's more then just the material. All material is decaying. Material stuff doesn't come from nothing. There's no poofing of material stuff into existence all around us. However much evolutionists would like us to believe it, a purely materialistic physical explanation can't explain why we're here or how we came to be. We have to look to things beyond the physical and visible for the real answers. There is indeed a spiritual realm all around us which many of the brightest and most brilliant minds in the history of the world have acknowledged, as well as the existence of a higher power. Newton, Pasteur, Galileo, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Rudyard Kipling are among those who gave voice to their belief in the God of the Bible for example. For example, Kipling and Napoleon even put theirs pretty eloquently: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ http://poptop.hypermart.net/testnapb.html I think anyone who's looked into someone else's eyes longer then the customary half second to really see the person inside, has spent time in silence to see how much in their very nature truly needs to change, or has questioned God's existence hoping to find truth and then finding ironies popping up right and left should be able to acknowledge this fundamental truth about our existence and the universe around us.

As guys we tend to think in terms of competition. Girls? Not so much. It's why they're not so into sports for the most parts, or competition. The reason for the bathrooms I think shows a fundamental difference between most girls and guys. Girls think relationally. When they go to bathrooms together or to malls together it's not to accomplish a task but to build relationships. We think of shopping as "let's go, find what we came for, conquer the shopping task!" But with them shopping doesn't have to be just to get something, but to spend time with someone they want to get to know better. When a wife wants her husband to go to the store, he might think it's just a waste of time, but she wants to spend private time with him apart from all the kids and busy-ness.

Religion can be simply another word for the beliefs by which we live our lives. In that case, it's inescapable so long as we maintain our humanity. If by religion you mean the organized pursuit of God, we can see what happens in societies that try to eliminate it. Communist countries like China, Cuba, and Soviet Russia have tried eliminating religion completely and torturing and imprisoning all who practice it. Tell me, are those countries any better than those without? Hitler made a society where the only religion was his Aryan-perfectionist ideas, and he killed many Jews and Christians who hid Jews. Was his society any better? By examining societies that have sought to destroy religion, we can thus evaluate the merit of a lack of religion.

Well, if you believe in God that ties in pretty well to this. In that case there is a spiritual battle going on all around us where Satan is trying to maintain his hold on us through all his worldly powers as God tries to draw us to Him and the purpose of a relationship with Him for which we were initially created. What's more, it makes this world and this life nothing more then a testing ground for the true realities, to see which of the 2 eternal realms we will inhabit, one with God or one apart from Him. Look around, are there ironies in life to the point that they can't be explained away as mere coincidence? And if so, when and why did they start appearing? As for the idea of waking up every day as someone else, how then does memory tie into that? And what about when we stay away for more then a full day? You could always test that theory and stay awake longer tonight.

They could probably do with some more environmentally friendly (assuming this option is such) ways of producing electricity. Even more pressing though is I think an alternate fuel source. BP connect has Amoco Ultimate that's better for emissions but with the fuel prices rising hopefully there's more incentive for companies to find an environmentally friendly fuel source that doesn't involve oil. The oil companies are eating us alive and acting like monopolies with their price fixing and because it's such a necessary commodity there's not much we can do about it until we find an alternative fuel source.

Thing is, even if it were a plausible possibility, the video game companies would surely fight it like crazy. They make their consoles so they can't play each other's games precisely because they're in competition against one another. And Sega's not competing with MicroSoft just in video game console making, but in other technological fields as well. They don't want to help their huge opponents by making a console capable of playing their opponent's games as well. They want everyone to play on their console only so they can get more of the market share.

You know, there's a comic in one of my textbooks which has its source as "The New Yorker Collection 1989 Mick Stevens from cartoonbank.com" where a family is sitting down to eat with a subheading of "The Stat Family." The mom on the left is saying "Eighty-Two Percent of the population doesn't get enough fibre in its diet!" The girl next to her says "Two out of three kids in America can't spell 'cholesterol.'" The boy across the table says "Ninety-nine percent of those interviewed said they hated carrots!"And the dad on the far right says cheerfully "Statistics are totally wrong fifty six percent of the time!"

Sorry to hear about that. We're using Comcast right now and have experienced no problems. Perhaps it's more location-specific to your area? As for the speed, from what I understand, cable internet connections work so that everything is on one... server kind of. The more customers in the area, the slower the connection for each one. It's been a while since I heard that info though so I hope someone will let me know further about that or if I am incorrect in anything.

Morality governs chiefly how we harm God and other people. It's for this reason that Romans 13:10 says that love is the fulfilling of God's Law because it doesn't harm others. Without others around it is hard to harm them, we then can only harm God. Only when others are around is morality outside of harming God then necessary. Therefore, to test your theory you would need people growing up isolated without prior cultural experience rather then one person alone. As an interesting point, how long did many of those sacrificing nations exist? Many are chronicled of being destroyed in the Bible's book of Judges, something many Christianity critics point to as cruelty. While the practice continues today in the form of abortion, it is interesting to note that nations using it have consistently met a terrible demise, while Israel whose holy scriptures emphatically deny it still has their nation, original land, culture, language, holy scriptures, and history. When you say before religion was invented, how do you determine that? The Bible says the first human's children sought to worship God, one by offering an animal, the other by offering produce. And of course Adam and Eve had a relationship with God before they messed it up. What do you then term as religion? Ultimately, God's existence can not be dependent on our knowledge of Him. Just because I don't know you exist, doesn't mean you don't. Just because I don't hear the sound a tree makes in the forest doesn't mean a sound wasn't made (unless you define sound as something heard by someone). As for societies without religion, they have most definitely been attempted. Lenin attempted to kill all following a religion. Both Russia and China have attempted to create religion-free countries. So then, what would you say their morals look like?

God also gave us intelligence such that we are capable of creating atomic bombs and blowing up the earth. Should we do that as well? Ultimately, who decides what is right and wrong? You are judging it based on your feelings but then conclude that we should not be stuck with this "kind of moral thinking." Isn't that a contradiction? Ultimately, how do we decide what is right and wrong if we all contradict in our feelings of it? And finally, it's the same kind of "moral thinking" that holds us back from killing off all our old people, the sick people, and the poor people. Some could argue that the world would have less to feed and more population room without them. Should we kill them in the same way since it's simply "moral thinking" holding us back from being more advanced? Is society's advancement then worth the lives of the helpless?