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DELLAPELLE JOHN

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Posts posted by DELLAPELLE JOHN

  1. Without an operational definition, it is hard to define the greatest team.

     

    If you are going for wins, then you are looking at the 1973 Dolphins and 2007 Patriots.

     

    If you are going for the team with the most talent, I think the 92 & 93 Cowboys need a serious look. Yes, these teams both beat us in the Super Bowl. They had a ridiculously good offensive and defensive line. They had a Hall of Fame QB, receiver, and running back. They had a stellar tight end and a top notch full back. Their second receiver, Alvin Harper, was a talented player.

     

    The 89 and 94 49er's also are deserving of a look as well as the 85 Bears.

     

    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!

  2. 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

  3. Opinion only, good and bad are value judgments only and therefore either opinion or faith based and either way don't make something any more or less valid unless backed by definitional truths.

     

    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

  4. Ahhh, now you get into an interesting example. First off for practical purposes I would stipulate that Colorado is not on the east coast. But from a proof standpoint, my first question back to you is define coast and east? Lets assume the US exists for right now.... we can discuss the provability of its existene later.

     

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

  5. Ah, the old tried and true actual experience argument... nice try, back to the old circular reasoning form of arguing.. so is your experience based in reality? You cannot prove it to me because you cannot prove to me that you exist, so I would have to take your argument about scientific experience on faith, because perceptually, I, nor you can prove each other's existence.... and as a result the validity of experience, whatever form it might take...

     

    Nice try though and a rather light weight one if you ask me. <_<

     

     

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

  6. An infinite regression is infinite. Therefore your statement is retarded.

     

     

    I can be a lot more certain about the plausibility of something that has been repeated a million times than about something that happened once in a story. Say, Gravity vs. the Resurrection of Jesus.

     

    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!

  7. The problem with your statement is that since science is a process of infinite regression and the length of that regression is unknowable and unprovable, you can not state with any certainty how far down the path you actually are and how much faith any one of your assumptions require. Therefore either according to your argument all knowledge is relative and unprovable or it cannot be fully known and therefore requires faith. Either way neither can explain your existence or for that matter mine... You could be just a pathetic recurring on-line narcissistic dream or just a way for me to waste time.

     

     

    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

  8. DC Tom you must have had the same professor I had in college, but I am betting "John" still doesn't get that even he has to have faith in order to make the arguments he is making, whether he knows it or not, ironic isn't it.

     

    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....??????

  9. How do you gather empirical data on an unprovable???? <_< You really, really are an idiot.

     

    by asking if there is any empirical data in the begining before something is either proven or disproven, which there wont be because it not proven, its faith...lol

     

    I'd appreciate it if you'd stop beign an idiot. Seriously...if you can't twig to the difference between "unprovable" and "disprovable", you're simply not equipped to participate in this discussion.

     

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

  10. JOHN.......there is no "requirement" in religion of scientific evidence having to be present in any discussion.

     

    Thats ones of the tenets of FAITH.

     

    Could you please get a firm grasp...****...get ANY grasp on what faith !@#$ing even MEANS before you keep this nonseniscal pile of rubbish and schlock you THINK is a discussion going?

     

    Jesus !@#$ing Christmas.

     

     

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

  11. So there's no difference between an empirically unprovable believe and an empirically disprovable belief?

     

    You really are an idiot.

     

    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.

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