Crowd is close. County or country would be closer. He get so much mail that, and I am not making this up, he has his own zip code.

Yes I would have to say that my beliefs coincide with modern science...but then again, I am naturally practical. Kind of a bore. And before any one jumps to conclusions, I am not a christian.
Now I'm going to just ask before I google. Hopefully I won't get anything thrown at me.
What in the hell is "intellegent design?" What is that all about?

If anyone can describe this to me I'd be grateful. Obviously I was not intellegently designed.

"Intelligent Design" is the idea that life is too complicated for evolution to be responsible without some sort of oustide intelligence guiding it.

Thanks.
I'll agree with that- life is complicated but, who said that something intelligent did this? Yeah. Bright fellow. :D
Oh no, here comes Zeus now.........

ID (short for idiot design) takes a look around at the complex world of living things that man is eradicating as quickly as possible, and says God did it. When I studied evolution and environmental biology in college,I was awed not by the hand of God, but by the life force in all beings which cause them to compete for food, make use of any helpful mutation that comes along (most mutations are lethal}, raise viable progeny, co-evolve with other creatures - flowers and their pollinators are execellent examples of this. On and on. In your spare time grab a book by Gregory Bateson or someone like that. You'll be stunned.

And come to think of it, why aren't the fundies upset by all the extinctions going on that are caused by man? Shouldn't that be a sin or something?:eyebrow:

:lol:

I've always been stunned by the lack of capacity of people to imagine that perhaps Evolution is *how* their God created things. I mean, believers in ID (the new more politically correct version of Creation) are always making comparisons like "you can't take a bunch of watch parts in a box, shake them up, and get a watch." No, watches are made in watch factories...there's a frigging *process*.

Why should creating something as exotic and unlikely as the vast panoply of Life be any different, damn it? And why is it an insult to God to think that he didn't just will Everything into existence from scratch, but rather had a *process*, perhaps even one that still continues today? Doh!

It's a debate of semantics. I'll go one step further and ask: why can't the Laws of Nature themsleves be thought of as God? Since any descriptive system, be it scientific or spiritual, is merely an approximation of reality, I find it helpful to think of them as attempting to describe the same thing. There is, after all, only one universe to be described, and since we are a part of that universe, we cannot make an objective observation of it. Every descriptive system we have is flawed, inevitably, by this fact. You could say God created evolution, or you could say Evolution is God, or whatever. These are just words.

I'd like to know where you pulled that little gimlet from.

Absolutely, they're just words. But, words are multilayered, we take different layers of information from the words we hear, some obvious, some less so. The word 'God' is not used in isolation from the cultures in which it is used; it therefore carries certain implicit meanings, which we with our cultural understanding, take on at a conscious and unconscious level.

If we want to talk about evolution, why not just call it evolution? Why take a word already well-laden with meanings which do not apply to the concept of evolution and use that instead, just because a couple of its meanings correspond.

Read what it literally says...

Buddhists, once we reach a certain point, don't really worry about what "happens next"... you realize you just don't have the energy to worry about it and do what you need to do to become the person you need to be now.
Plus, there is no way to know. So, you concentrate on what you have to do now.
There is no dogma of the afterlife, so one can be whatever they like, before reaching that point... most tend to be whatever their nationality was before Buddhism moved into that area. The Japanese are ancestor worshipers, the southern areas are into reincarnation, the Chinese tend to be Taoists or whatever regional "thing" they were into and the Western nations are either Christian/Buddhists or Atheists (or they adopt one of the Eastern philosophies, which always confused me).
I am an atheist.
In Buddhism there is one faith, in the altruistic final nature of the innermost being.

I wouldn't use a word outside of it's cultural associations without explaining why, and on what basis. I'm not switching words willy-nilly because of scant similarities, I'm describing my personal, unconventional idea that diverse disciplines, imperfect as incomplete, compartmentalized concepts, can be hashed together to form a more complete, "bigger" picture.

The point that is being missed in these rather rational notions is this: True Believers *need* their God to be a conscious entity, one which apparently thinks like a human being, but has awesome super powers - an entity above and apart from The All.

Doesn't make a lot of sense, but it does explain how The Almighty likes all that attention and praise. Probably gets kinda lonely being separate and apart from Everything Else.

There's no point in worshiping something that isn't conscious. Why offer thanks and praise to something that had no intent to do what you're thanking and praising it for, and doesn't hear your thanks and praise anyway?