Thread for Tony Fearon to to pontificate about Catholicism

[punt kick]

Getting way too complicated.Quite simply my religious faith is simply based on the fact that Jesus Christ lived,died,and rose again,and this gives some purpose to another wise finite biological span.Now I know people will say that Jesus existence cannot be technically proved.However I feel that if this was some sort of fairytale it wouldn't have survived into its third millennium.

If at the end I have been wrong I still have lost nothing.

Are you basing this on text written about 60 years after his death, by folk who never met him and then translated and adopted to suit religious leaders agendas?

[seafoid]

"However I feel that if this was some sort of fairytale it wouldn't have survived into its third millennium."

"Two things are infinite," Albert Einstein said. "The universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the universe."

[Lar Naparka]

Proper order bc, and while you're at it, bugger Steven Hawking and every other cosmologist you can think of also.
I mean Tony says, "God created the world. That is, he made it out of nothing."
But Steven says, "He did on me arse, the world created itself. Matter appeared from nowhere and this is happening all the time."

I haven't read everything Prof. Hawking has written, but I haven't seen him quoted thus. I'm pretty sure he would say simply that we don't know what, if anything preceded the Big Bang.

I don't think it's a question that will easily be answered, but most sensible people see the logical fallacy in the God of the Gaps proposition, which assumes that everything we don't (yet) know is necessarily explained by God. The problem is, God is becoming more and more idle and redundant as we discover how the world works.

What was there before the Big Bang may be unimaginable but eventually mathematically explicable. That wouldn't be a unique state of affairs. Try imagining or visualising an imaginary number or a complex number. Yet, for example, we wouldn't have our electricity supply, much less computers without the mathematical explanation of them.

Or what about the wave/particle duality of light. Completely unimaginable but quite simply explicable for practical purposes. Like wise the Uncertainty Principle and quantum mechanics in general.

We're not as far along in understanding the mind, but all available research is pointing to the mind being the manifestation of the physical firing of neurons and no doubt we'll get there eventually and give God another six months of the year off all in one go.

He'll still be clocking in for a few minutes every few months, though to attend to the people who confuse science and philosophy, which is where nearly all of his work is concentrated these days. Science has made fairly good strides with the "How" question in the last 400 years. The philosophers have been at it for millennia with the "Why" question and they're still no further on. It's a harder question, though the answer may be simple.

Sorry Hardy, I meant to get back to you before now but fate, and a few Mayo exiles looking for match tickets, intervened.
The book in question is "The Grand Design," written by Stephen Hawking and the quote that interests me most is the following:
"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

You can read more about it here
I'm quite happy to accept that Stephen Hawking's IQ is a lot higher than mine and the same goes for many who work in the same field of research but in the end any theory remains unproven, unless backed up logical, deductive reasoning.
The trouble for me is that theoretical physicists have reached the stage of research where only illogical answers can be assumed. I know I'm stating this rather awkwardly but I feel that unless there is clear proof, backed by logical deduction, we can only assume that antimatter and black energy actually exist. According to the esteemed professor in question and many other brilliant minds, the cosmos came into being around 13.8 billion years ago. There appears to have been a set moment in time where matter spontaneously began appearing out of nowhere. Energy, time and space followed suit, unless I am greatly mistaken.
Now, as you put it, "I'm pretty sure he would say simply that we don't know what, if anything preceded the Big Bang."
Therein lies my problem or at least my scepticism. We don't know what, if anything preceded the Big Bang. According to Hawking, it was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, Gravity brought the cosmos into being.
Here the Doubting Thomas syndrome kicks in.
If, because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and has created itself from nothing and the process of creation began at a specific "time" before time itself came into existence, then without doubt the good professor has to say that we simply don't what preceded the Big Bang.
In other words, all of his deductive research hangs on an unproven and unprovable thesis.
He certainly leaves us with more questions than answers.
In summation, Tony (I can never be sure that he is serious about anything he writes,) claims that an eternal force, aka. God, kickstarted Creation for some unknown reason of his own and seems to have left us to our own devices since then. Nothing that I have seen or heard convinces me that this is what actually happened. But the same can be said of the work of theoretical physicists, en masse, to date.

[haranguerer]

Getting way too complicated.Quite simply my religious faith is simply based on the fact that Jesus Christ lived,died,and rose again,and this gives some purpose to another wise finite biological span.Now I know people will say that Jesus existence cannot be technically proved.However I feel that if this was some sort of fairytale it wouldn't have survived into its third millennium.

If at the end I have been wrong I still have lost nothing.

I think theres little doubt Jesus lived, and he sounded like a great man. But we sorta went overboard on everything we then attached to him. Including him coming back to life

[seafoid]

Getting way too complicated.Quite simply my religious faith is simply based on the fact that Jesus Christ lived,died,and rose again,and this gives some purpose to another wise finite biological span.Now I know people will say that Jesus existence cannot be technically proved.However I feel that if this was some sort of fairytale it wouldn't have survived into its third millennium.

If at the end I have been wrong I still have lost nothing.

I think theres little doubt Jesus lived, and he sounded like a great man. But we sorta went overboard on everything we then attached to him. Including him coming back to life

Jaysus Chrisht lived. They fitted Jewish messiah narrative to him. He came out of a vagina after she got the ride but it had to be a Virgin birth . He had to rise again. So there was no body in the tomb.
He was made to fit the story. Most Jews didn't buy it. They still don't.   But he was right time and right place  .

[Esmarelda]

Getting way too complicated.Quite simply my religious faith is simply based on the fact that Jesus Christ lived,died,and rose again,and this gives some purpose to another wise finite biological span.Now I know people will say that Jesus existence cannot be technically proved.However I feel that if this was some sort of fairytale it wouldn't have survived into its third millennium.

If at the end I have been wrong I still have lost nothing.

[sid waddell]

Getting way too complicated.Quite simply my religious faith is simply based on the fact that Jesus Christ lived,died,and rose again,and this gives some purpose to another wise finite biological span.Now I know people will say that Jesus existence cannot be technically proved.However I feel that if this was some sort of fairytale it wouldn't have survived into its third millennium.

If at the end I have been wrong I still have lost nothing.

Not so. You'll have lost the possibility of an eternity in heaven.

[seafoid]

Getting way too complicated.Quite simply my religious faith is simply based on the fact that Jesus Christ lived,died,and rose again,and this gives some purpose to another wise finite biological span.Now I know people will say that Jesus existence cannot be technically proved.However I feel that if this was some sort of fairytale it wouldn't have survived into its third millennium.

If at the end I have been wrong I still have lost nothing.

Not so. You'll have lost the possibility of an eternity in heaven.

Tony will have booked the wrong Heaven.
This will be much worse than 2003.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zat9CRfUr-E

[johnneycool]

Getting way too complicated.Quite simply my religious faith is simply based on the fact that Jesus Christ lived,died,and rose again,and this gives some purpose to another wise finite biological span.Now I know people will say that Jesus existence cannot be technically proved.However I feel that if this was some sort of fairytale it wouldn't have survived into its third millennium.

If at the end I have been wrong I still have lost nothing.

Krishna has probably lasted longer so can we deduct that he/she/it/them are even more genuine?

[T Fearon]

I am amazed how those who ridicule religion and faith become so exercised by those who are believers? Why do they even care?

[LCohen]

That's why it's called faith.Not logical,a mystery,cannot be proved or disproved.

What about likelihood?

Is there anything that you can point to that indicates that, as you believe that the universe was created by a god (ie the Christian or even catholic version) that magicked themselves into existence just beforehand and then hung around to oversee the affairs of man my reading thoughts, judging thoughts and intervening and getting terribly offended if people chose not to believe in him or ride the hole off their consenting adult partner outside marrige? And produced a son in the form a species that god got around to creating billions of years after he created the earth? And this was so the son could be murdered to redeem a sin that all children are born with rather than committed personally and was originally committed by 2 people that the omnipotent god would know did not exist?

Far fetched??

[LCohen]

I believe.There's millions like me.Simple as that

Sanity in numbers??

[LCohen]

So she did consent. I finally got an answer, and not from Tony. Christ, Tony, it wouldn't have been so hard to give me an answer, would it?

You can't just throw rape into a conversation without serious cause. You cannot just say x raped y and require someone to deny it and you would not accept similar carryon from someone else.

God has plenty of time for rapists and rape facilitators. He singled them out as the best of men

[sid waddell]

Getting way too complicated.Quite simply my religious faith is simply based on the fact that Jesus Christ lived,died,and rose again,and this gives some purpose to another wise finite biological span.Now I know people will say that Jesus existence cannot be technically proved.However I feel that if this was some sort of fairytale it wouldn't have survived into its third millennium.

If at the end I have been wrong I still have lost nothing.

Not so. You'll have lost the possibility of an eternity in heaven.

Tony will have booked the wrong Heaven.
This will be much worse than 2003.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zat9CRfUr-E

Ah it couldn't be. 2003 was the year in which it turned out God was a Tyrone man.

[LCohen]

Getting way too complicated.Quite simply my religious faith is simply based on the fact that Jesus Christ lived,died,and rose again,and this gives some purpose to another wise finite biological span.Now I know people will say that Jesus existence cannot be technically proved.However I feel that if this was some sort of fairytale it wouldn't have survived into its third millennium.

If at the end I have been wrong I still have lost nothing.

Forget about what you have lost and focus on what others were deprived of.