Bay 12 Games Forum

Thanks Bromar, I will check them out.

There is only 1 logical course of action as far as I can tell.  Build a thin tower to the sky.  Build a walkway/gangplank out until you are directly over the middle of the elven settlement.  Create a bunch of 1x1 chambers with trapdoors underneath them.  Place a cat in each chamber.  Set the cats on fire.  Place pressure plates throughtout the elven encampment to randomly open the chambers above.

Presto:  raining flaming cats.

Our great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandchildren would have died before that happens I think. Still, it's important to plan ahead so stock up on those space suits and G.E.C.K.s now.

screw the g.e.c.k.  im gonna get in one of those iso-virtual pods and live at the Playboy mansion till its over.....maybe run, "Chinese Invasion" every now and then to keep things intersting.  Or maybe get people to kill each other in the pods.  Nah, NM, thats allready been done.

Problem: God is omniscient. Omni meaning everything. EVERY. SINGLE. THING.
There is not a single fact in the universe which god is not aware of. He knows, to the nearest infinity-eth of the diameter of a nothingth of a quark, the makeup of your brain and how it works. He knows how electrons flow, and how everything is affected by gravity. He knew several thousand years ago, that today you would post on a forum trying to prove that he exists.

Hence, no free will, because he saw it coming. Because he knows everything.

If this isn't clear yet, do some thinking about the definitions of everything and omnipotent.

well, lets just run with this.  God is omniscient.  God is ultimately onmiscient.  God is so freakin omniscient that what you/I think you/I know about omnisciense (sp?) is not what omnisciense is, cuz you/I cant know what it is, cuz you/I aint omniscient.  Its fine and dandy to make a logic circle for your/mine own understanding, but if God Is ( and I think He Is ), then He is also Omnipotent ( ALL freakin POWERFUL ).  That means He craps on human logic circles about the definition of something they neither have nor understand, ie omnisciense (I am gonna go look up the spelling of that in a sec dammit).

If this isnt clear yet, do some thinking about human limitations.


but this might be too sarcastic and therefore lost on you..........   

On a side note to the whole decaying orbit of the erath thingy, the moon is actually getting further and further away from earth every "year" (i use quotations now with this word after reading this thread   ).  The earth will most likely lose its ability to sustain life from the loss of the moon well before the sun does anything funny.

or so that discovery/nova show said anyway.......... 

Your points are respectable, but I personally see a fatal flaw in them:

"Humans have free will."

In relation to theism, this is in direct contrast to "god created us". If god created us, he made us precisely as we are. It's not like god threw a 1d6 to determine whether we would eat that apple or not. He knew exactly what we were going to do, and being omniscient (notice I use that a lot?), he knew precisely how he would make us. In fact, since he knows EVERYTHING, he even knew how long it would be before he would make us, and he decided a long time before that, precisely what the history of earth and humans would be. God knew an infinite sequence of time ago, precisely what his own actions would be.

And therefore that he would make humans...
And HOW he would make them...
And how we would act once we ate the apple...
And that he had an infinite sequence, or larger (he's god, he can totally pass inifinity), of other things he could do to influence our universe in such a way as to not make us kill and destroy and inflict pain as we do today.

He would also realize that, by not revealing himself to us for the past 4000~ish years, he's caused a LOT of stress and confusion, and I think he's a jerk for that. If he exists, which I doubt.

In a nutshell, what it seems you are saying, is, If God exists, then its all Gods fault.  It would stand to reason then, that its also our parents fault.

Having free will and being created are not mutually exclusive.  When I role a d6, i KNOW every possible outcome, but I do NOT know which outcome it will be until the event happens.  God knows that:  if person A makes decision A then X will happen but if person A makes Decision B then Y will happen.  He knows how the outcomes will come to pass, just not which one we will choose.  There is no singular pre-ordained path (imho - cuz thats a whole other box of rocks in theology that I disagree with), but intstead many with inifinite outcomes, all of which God knows ahead of time, while he waits to see what we choose.  This may seem to go against the idea of Prophecy in religion, but not really, God has no trouble getting directly involved if necessary to affect the outcome.  Those are those times when he is trying to get our attention, saying, "Hey.  Stupids!  Yeah, I mean you down there!  Get with the program!"  From the Christian standpoint, He quit doing that since He sent His Son with a direct message.

Also, God tries to reveal Himself to us every day all day, we just arent listening.  Usually our own self-indulged towering intellect gets in the way - read as ego.

Yeah, unlike the Christians, we does not believe that the fruit is SIGNIFICANT in shaping free will.
Humans have free will since the first time they are created (from clays (I think)) and they also have knowledge, given to them by God, so they will be higher than angels (which was created from God's lights(Their arabic name means messenger)) and Djinns (which are created from smokeless fire, their name means 'invinsible').

There are some remarks by the angels that hints on the possibility of a sapient species before man, that destroyed Earth (Earth has existed already, and unlike the Christians, again, we believe that the '7 days' is just a metaphor, and that each days IS NOT equivalent to earth days. It may be Universe or Omniverse days, that is 1/355 of Uni/Omniverse years. (Please note that Jews (I think) and Arabs used moon years.))

The Devil is a djinn, that was hold highly by God, so he joint the angels in 'serving' (the term is 'ibadah', but I'm not sure what the translation is) God. Anyway, he refuses to prostrate (sujud) to Adam when God told him to. For this, he was banished from Heaven. Before so, he asked to God for immortality, until the end of times, to seek revenge on Adam's childrens. God granted his wish.

Satans are Devil (Iblis) childrens. Iblis is a djinn, so of course he can reproduce.

...
I'll continue when I have time. I'm very tired.

@Shoruke: How about the Many-worlds interpration? Since there are infinite worlds, that means that there are the few that's like us, a not too good and not too evil world.

Argh, my head's spinning.

IWM:  Any Christian that thinks the fruit gave them free will hasnt read their own Bible.  Also, many many Christians ascribe themselves to the theory of 7 days as a metaphor.  The islamic story of the Devil is one I am not familiar with, but I find what you said interesting, as it seems to have invaded western pop culture as well.



I have a question for anyone who wants to ponder it here:
what about the OTHER TREE in the garden and its place in Genesis and the fall of man?
(hint:  the tree of eternal life that God removed so we couldn't get to it after eating fruit from the first tree)

I have another question for those of Hebrew faith:
Is Jesus the third blood sacrament?  This question was once brought to my attention, and I gotta admit, i was intrigued by it.

I cant believe i am going to add to this conversation but....................

Humans (Adam, then Eve) had free will from the start.  The tree is not the Tree of Knowlegde.  That is a shortened misnomer.  It is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (it should be philisophicaly significant to everyone that good and evil are not moral absolutes, but rather an un-official add-on to what man was first made to be).  If man did not have free will, he would have been incapable of eating from the tree he would have been incapable of eating The Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil given to him by Eve, who was deceived by Satan.  I will get back to Satan shortly.

IMHO-  "Created in the image of God" means:  We have the ability to create and destroy.  Which is another way of saying we have free will, but also much more.  I believe that He created us to see what we would do, and thereby glorify Himself in the process.  If I was to point to a supporting example (but not the only one) i would point towards the part of Genesis where God brought all the animals of the earth before Adam to see what Adam would name them.  He allowed us to define them, name them, give them meaning and purpose.  I believe He delights in this and is a more honest form of worship.  This, by no means, is to say He is happy with everything we invent.

Back to Satan.  In the Old Testament, the ancient Hebrews (thats for Yanlin  ) saw Satan not as a Fallen Angel, but as Gods chosen instrument of testing man.  Satan was always the one sent to prove or disprove the veracity of someones faith before God.  This slowly but surely changed as the ancient Hebrews wrote down their lore until he became an adversary.  First an adversary against humans before God, then and adversary of God.  And then Peter's church came along and created the Devil we still use to this day in our popular culture.

While I do call myself a Christian, I have always had a hard time accepting much of the New Testament.  I feel that much of what has been done in His name is atrocius, but that is to be expected in anything controlled by man, sorta like communism (snicker, sorry, but most obvious choice as an example to me).  I stand by what John 3:16 says.  Everything else is, in the end, add-ons, as far as the New Testament goes.  I have a really hard time accepting a bunch of books as the literal Word of God (the new testament) when multiple different sects of faith have different books within it.  But i am willing to accept the possibility that maybe thats the way its supposed to be, because all people are different and God will use different means to reach them.

Lastly, the favorite battlecry of those who wish to argue the non-existence of God is, in a nuthell, "Why do bad things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people, if God is all loving?"  Well, if God was a tyrant who controlled every decision we humans made, then yeah, i would see a problem.  He would become an "asshole" as Aquizzar so eloquently pointed out.  Fact of the matter is, we got free will folks.  We can fuck each other over all we want.  Also, if a arguementative non-believer wanted to get really dirty, he/she might ask, "What about babies born defective or brain dead or retarted or.....", you get the drift.  Answer?  Honestly, I dont know.  But i have faith (ohhh, that sticky word that so iritates angry non-believers) that God will take care of them.  This is a frustrating response so someone who does not believe in a Heaven of sorts, because it threatens his/her only concept of existence, which is the here and now on earth.  It would mean they might have been born "defective" (its just a word, please dont flame me for being unfeeling towards those born different) and not been able to enjoy life, or might be crippled tomorrow and have no hope.  That would be terrifying to someone without faith.  For those who bring up "what if you child was born different?" or something along those lines, the answer is still the same.  Both "I dont know" and "I have faith".

Well, I know I said "lastly" earlier, but Im on a roll now so.......:
I think all people, all souls, existed before God created the universe in Genesis ch. 1.  I believe He gave us this universe as a place to create and destroy with pure free will.  He gave us Dominion over the earth and all things under heaven.  He gave us this playground to learn about ourselves, and therefore learn about God Himself, as He placed us into this world in His image, or, more accurately, with His abilities, but in a finite sense.  Time is a function of the reality He created for us.  It did not exist before creation, now will it after.  This life/world/universe of ours is just a nano-metrical blip in our whole existence, but we get blinded by that fact with the vagaries of our daily lives.  People have said, "You really think Hitler could have gone to Heaven if he repented right before he died?!"  I say , YES.  John 3:16.  A reminder that this world isnt all there is.  That this life is transient, just a brief moment in the totality of our existence, and that all we do here in the end will be moot when its all over and we return to God.  We draw breath for only a short while in this world, and during this period we are tested, challenged, pulled apart and besieged with a million bits of craziness everyday.  This isnt so we can be Judged worthy or not.  This isnt so that we can be divided in the goods and bads.  Thats what we humans do, so we can grasp our reality without losing our minds after eating from the tree.  God tests us so we can learn about ourselves and therefor by proxy learn about Him.  We are our fathers/mothers.

sigh, burnt out now.  I am sure non of that made any damn sense.  oh well, there it is anyway.  have at it.   

Quote from: Gorjo MacGrymm on February 18, 2009, 01:05:30 am

Quote from: jaybud4 on February 16, 2009, 05:25:55 pm

There's no floor under the walls of your house, if you could see under them.

thats not quite true.

Maybe other walls were added in after your house was built?

Every wall on the first level of a house has a floor under it.  Its called the foundation.  In a pier and beam house, there is still a flat, house-wide surface upon which the walls are built.  On the second story of houses, if a wall is on top of another wall, then there may or may not be a floor.  If a 2nd story wall does not have a wall below it on the first story, it will generally have the "floor" of the second story extending underneath it for support so that wall doesn't start to droop in relation to the rest of the room.

A wall consists of a bottomplate piece (normally a 2x4) nailed into the foundation/floor or screwed down with massive all-threads on the exterior of the house, especially in tornado country.  Upon this baseplate the studs are aligned and then a header is put into place on top of the wall.  Usually there is about a 1.5ft space between levels where joists are placed for load-bearing necesities(ack sp? on that word?)/ ducts/plumbing/wiring/etc.

If you walk into any 2 story house under construction and look up into that space, you will see the "floor" of the next level, but not any of the walls from underneath.  To locate the walls, look for where romex electrical lines and plumbing are travelling between floors.

If you live somewhere besides America, this may not apply.  I have heard that all houses in South Africa are made entirely from stone so that might work out different.  Dunno.

GMcG

ps: wow, had no idea I was gonna write that much.  I guess you can tell I do a lot of work in houses during construction.