14 August 2008 21:06
# 2005 was the warmest year ever recorded, closely followed by 1998 and 2007. Twelve of the 13 warmest years on record were between 1995 and 2007.
# The reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are based on the peer-reviewed, published work of 2,500 scientists in more than 130 countries.
# Climate is average weather. It’s what all the weather adds up to over time, to give averages for temperature, rainfall, snow and frost.
# The difference in climate between a warm period and the middle of an ice age is between 4°C and 6°C.
# 125,000 years ago (during the last warm period between ice ages) temperatures were around 1.5°C higher than they are now; the sea level was 4-6m higher.
14 August 2008 20:41
Professor Flew has recently written his forthright views on Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion. His article, reproduced below, shows Professor Flew’s key reasons for his belief in a Divine Intelligence. He also makes it clear in There is a God (page 213) that it is possible for an omnipotent being to choose to reveal himself to human beings, or to act in the world in other ways. Professor Flew’s article is offered here as testimony to the developing thinking of someone who is prepared to consider the evidence and follow its implications wherever it leads.
8 August 2008 19:22
1) If in doubt – ask a question.
Don’t be afraid to question things. Don’t be afraid to offer a question even though other people in your peer group have not questioned before.
2) Place experience over authority.
If one reflects upon what the authority figure is conveying to you, does it pan out with your real life experience? For example, if someone tells you that all red heads are moody – have you experienced this in your life?
3) Understand People.
Does the person communicating with you have an agenda that might be influencing what they are telling you? What is motivating this person? Why do you think they think this way?
7 August 2008 23:49
Authors like Weinberg and Dawkins helped me maintain a kind of physical addiction to the atheistic outlook. I certainly took pleasure in reading them far beyond what was justified by the content, which, as we’ve seen, was deeply pessimistic in tone and without value as argument. Thus there was probably something chemical going on in my brain… Just as smokers continue to light up in order to relieve nicotine anxiety… so did I find comfort in reading such statements, though small comfort, from the ever present sense of despair that came with my bleak view of the universe as a place without meaning.
Which “evidence” are you going to follow and why?
1. http://www.dabase.org/dualsens.htm
2. http://www.dabase.org/dht7.htm
3. http://www.dabase.org/rgcbpobk.htm
4. http://www.kneeoflistening.com
The “evidence” written down and “officially” compiled 1700 years ago about a “person” (Jesus) of whom we know absolutely nothing about—it is ALL conjecture.
1.www.dabase.org/exochrist.htm
2. http://www.jesusneverexisted.com
And by people who we know absolutely nothing about.
And of whom we have no idea as to what their motives were in constructing the Bible as they did. Why they chose certain available texts. Left others out. And heavily edited even the texts they did choose.
And why, in a time and place when ALL the Sacred Scriptures of the entire Great Tradition of Humankind are freely available on the internet, does the “truth” have to turn out to be “christian”—or based on the writings of a small then insigificant cult (or cults) in Israel/Palestine—-as though their cultic writings have a binding hold on all of Humankind throughout the rest of HIS-story.
Such a point of view is totally obnoxious and INEVITABLY leads to “religious” wars of conquest—or wars of conquest justified by the local cultic deity.
1. http://www.adidam.org/flash/truthandreligion/index.html
2. http://www.dabase.org/proofch6.htm
Thanks for the comment. I’m not sure which POV is totally obnoxious? The mainstream historical evidence that Jesus really existed seems reasonable to me (admittedly a non-scholar). Wikipedia provides a comprehensive background to this topic.
“historicity [of Jesus] is still regarded as effectively proven by almost all Biblical scholars and historians”
As to the compilation of the Bible, this was indeed a process over hundreds of years, but the canon has been stable since approx 400 AD.
People fight wars of conquest for many reasons, but have you ever read the Sermon on the Mount? Also, as Jesus was about to be crucified he told Peter to put away his sword.
I think you have a fairly limited understanding of the Christian faith, but I wish you well in your quest for truth.
PS: To all Hyper-skeptics like Sue, see this demolition of crappy arguments that Jesus never existed.