DELLAPELLE JOHN

let me clarify, what is the greatest football team of all time? 1970-present

i have to go with the 94 49ers because talent combined with the coaching is second to none. i think steve young that year completed 71 % of his passes, unreal!

PERHAPS it should come as no surprise that a mere wall of water, sweeping innocent multitudes from the beaches of 12 countries on Boxing Day, failed to raise global doubts about God's existence. Still, one wonders just how vast and gratuitous a catastrophe would have to be to shake the world's faith. The Holocaust did not do it. God's ways are, indeed, inscrutable. It seems that any fact, no matter how infelicitous, can be rendered compatible with religious faith. In matters of faith, we have kicked ourselves loose of the earth. Given the degree to which religion still inspires human conflict, this is not the good news that many of us imagine it to be. One of the greatest challenges facing civilisation in the 21st century is for human beings to learn to speak about their deepest concerns -about ethics, spiritual experience, and human suffering -in ways that are not flagrantly irrational. Incompatible religious doctrines have Balkanised our world and these divisions have become a continuous source of bloodshed. Indeed, religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it was at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews v Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians v Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians v Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants v Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims v Hindus), Sudan (Muslims v Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims v Christians)and Iran and Iraq (Shia v Sunni) are merely a few cases in point. These are places where religion has been the explicit cause of millions of deaths in the past decade. It is in the face of such pointless horrors that many people of goodwill now counsel "moderation" in religion. The problem with religious moderation is that it offers us no bulwark against the spread of religious extremism and religious violence. Moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word "God" as though we knew what we were talking about. And they don't want anything too critical to be said about people who really believe in the God of their forefathers because tolerance, above all else, is sacred. To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world -to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish - is antithetical to tolerance as moderates conceive it. In so far as religious moderates attempt to hold on to what is still serviceable in orthodox religion, they close the door to more sophisticated approaches to human happiness. Rather than bring the full force of 21st-century creativity and rationality to bear, moderates ask that we merely relax our standards of adherence to ancient superstitions and taboos. But by failing to live by the letter of the texts -while tolerating the irrationality of those who do -religious moderates betray faith and reason equally. As moderates, we cannot say that religious fundamentalists are dangerous idiots, because they are merely practising their freedom of belief. We can't even say that they are mistaken in religious terms, because their knowledge of scripture is generally unrivalled. All we can say, as religious moderates, is that we don't like the personal and social costs that a full embrace of scripture imposes on us. It is time we recognised that religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance. Religious moderates imagine that theirs is the path to peace. But this very ideal of tolerance now drives us toward the abyss. Religious violence still plagues our world because our religions are intrinsically hostile to one another. Where they appear otherwise, it is because secular knowledge and secular interests have restrained the most lethal improprieties of faith. If religious war is ever to become unthinkable for us, in the way that slavery and cannibalism seem poised to, it will be a matter of our having dispensed with the dogma of faith. Moderation in religion has made it taboo even to acknowledge the differences among our religious traditions: to notice, for instance, that Islam is especially hostile to the principles of civil society. There are still places in the Muslim world where people are put to death for imaginary crimes -such as blasphemy and where the totality of a child's education consists of his learning to recite from an ancient book of religious fiction. Throughout the Muslim world, women are denied almost every human liberty, except the liberty to breed. And yet, these same societies are acquiring arsenals of advanced weaponry. In the face of these perils, religious moderates -Christians, Muslims and Jews remain entranced by their own moderation. They are least able to fathom that when jihadists stare into a video camera and claim to "love death more than the infidels love life", they are being candid about their state of mind. But technology has a way of creating fresh moral imperatives. We can no longer ignore the fact that billions of our neighbors believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the book of Revelation -because our neighbors are now armed with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that these developments mark the terminal phase of our credulity. Words like "God" and "Allah" must go the way of "Apollo" and "Baal" or they will unmake our world. BY : Sam Harris

i say the 1994 san francisco 49ers. sanders young rice hanks barton waters floyd taylor b young k norton e davis most talented roster of all time with mike shanahan as the oc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvHln-wKk9E http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQQXlSlr1Ek...feature=related

faith without reason is irrational, thats not a hyperbolic statement

so its impossible to establish a truth? ur grasping at straws here.... its more than an opinion to say colorado is on the west coast, it is a invalid statement based on our experience. if u want to say our experience is a fantasy, thats fine i take mine to be real on some good reasons i think therefore i am i have senses i can talk to others who have different thoughts not coming from me... etc etc bottom line nothng u say gives anyone any reason to believe in the christian god or islamic god or any other flying spaghetti monster...lol

u do acknowledge in epistemolgy that there are good and bad reasons for believing something y n?

whats the differnce between a good reason to support a belief, and a bad reason or no reason?

lol

east coastline (va, ny, md, nc, sc, fl,) east is the opposite of west lol

im asking a general question about how we establish what is true and what is not... i can give u reasons for why i exist or u exist, i cant give u reasons for how jesus rose from the dead. there is a major difference in belief...

ok, lets say i told u colorado was on the east coast of the US... is this a true statment or a false statement?

couldnt of said it better.... gravity is something we can know and test and experiment with, the ressurection of jesus cant be know, and the testimony cant be trusted becasuse people report all kinds of miralcles today... great point. we can be more certain in science, much more empirical and much much much more rational!

this is why we have a phrase like burden of proof, the burden rests with the the theists to prove there claim is true....

there are thousands of gods that i cant disprove their existence, does this give me a reason to believe they exist, of course not, this is why the onus is on the one making the claim not the one asking about the claim...

so how does this give us a reason to believe religion? science is in the ball game of saying i dont know and trying to evaulate things in reality, religion is in the game of saying god did this or god wants this....its the old god of the gaps argument. i have good reasons to believe gravity is real i dont have any reason to believe the spaghetti monster is real, not being able to disprove the spaghetti monster doesnt contribute to having a reason to believing it to be true. it just means there is no reason to believe it unitl evidence comes along for the spaghetti monster...lol

there is belief with reasons and belief with no reasons, ie religion... that is the differnce in belief

when u say faith; are u talking about irrational belief or just day to day belief in having a positve attitude and yes gravity does exist... nothing is certain but the difference between the two is religious faith is irrational while other beliefs like gravity or evolution are (tested) and (proven through actual experience.) there is a difference. religion cant be tested, and is therefore is irrational to claim any empirical data on, like for example god hates homosexual behavior...this is a empirical claim of knowledge with no empircial data to support it. does anyone see a problem with this line of thinking....??????

again stop with the name calling. u dont sound smarter...

there should be a requirement, otherwise people could just believe anything....

but dont u think there should be... how else do we come to know truth, either something is true or not...

i would appreciate if u could stop calling me names... i didnt do that , its immature.

elaborate, im having a hard time following u. when something is unprovable then obviously we need to gather evidence or empiricism to make a choice on what is true... if something is disprovable then there is no reason to believe it. im equating that the malpractice ex and certain beliefs about god are under the same token of being unreasonable... they are both unjustified, they have no evidence.