Just to add another level of annoyance, layer materials so they have to constantly switch tools to effectively dig them. Furnace, crafting table and then sand/gravel. Change the material order randomly throughout. Then, as a final defense, don't be in the walls when they arrive. You'll be a mile away atop a mountain laughing at the invaders as they search your castle for chests that either aren't there or have nothing of value in them. Then, set off your elaborate chain of TNT you installed into the floor of your base.
I myself am atheist so if anyone cares to correct me on anything above feel free. I don't wish to say these are your personal views, merely how I would explain why people turn to religion.
Religion at the top is an institution meant to control the thoughts and actions of it's followers using a deity as leverage for power. I could tell you that you should do something, but what do I know? I'm just a guy, I'm fallible and power hungry. But if God tells you to do something, through the words of a book which I am wise enough to interpret because God chose me to be His conduit to the world, then I have all the backup in the world to support whatever claims I make. I am no longer a fallible human being out for power, but the very voice of God himself which loves everyone and would never lead you astray.
At the bottom levels, religion isn't so heinous. People are genuinely looking for something to guide their lives. Something that they can trust and will never lead them wrong. God seems like the best kinda source for that. God is consistent but science changes. Science doesn't tell you how to live. Doesn't give you answers to your day to day problems or if it does, it's in terms no layperson can understand.
"How did the world begin?"
Science: A singularity exploded and caused the spreading particles out into space where they combined together to form protons, neutrons and electrons to become hydrogen which then...
Religion: God made you and everything in it in his infinite Love and Wisdom.
The latter tends to make much more sense to someone who doesn't understand physics and is predisposed to look for a simple divine explanation. There's nothing to worry about because your loving God created everything and there is purpose to all things. Science tends to read out as cold and uncaring to such people.
"What should we do about homosexuals? I personally find their sexual habits off color and do not want me or my family to engage in that kind of thing"
Science: It is a combination of genetic predisposition, psychological development and environmental factors and tend to be stable and functional human beings notwithstanding other factors. Homosexuality is not contagious and there is no evidence that it is destructive behavior in any way. If someone you know is homosexual, there is likely nothing you can do about it.
Religion: God said not to be homosexual. So in our religion, there are no gays to worry about.
Again, the latter sounds like a good escape from something you don't want to be doing. nice and simple. Gay bashers will use this as justification for crimes but the majority just do not want to be around it and feel their religion shields them from such things.
Please, then, explain to me how the belief that apples exist arose by trust. Because I'm damned sure the first person who ever held the belief that apples exist did not do it because he trusted someone else's claim that an apple existed, he did it because he recieved sensory perception of a mostly round red or green fruit that would come to be known as "apple". It had nothing to do with him trusting other people.
Trust is an awful way to determine truth. Science, on the other hand, is the most consistantly reliable method for determining truth that humans have ever known.
Well you start by trusting your senses. For all you know you could be hallucinating Apples. But beyond that bit of philosophy. The first person had his evidence. Then he goes home and tells his family that there are apples. The family would trust that the person did indeed observe apples and that they do exist. Now they believe apples exist. Perhaps the neighbor doesn't quite trust the person, and so doesn't believe that apples really exist.
Belief is based in trust. Truth is based in evidence, as you say. But they are two different things. Some people don't want to know the truth. They are comfortable with what they believe. Some people will not trust that your evidence is true, and so do not believe.
Is that better worded? I know my last post was kinda off... I'm not trying to convert people here. That's impossible in my experience. I'm merely postulating why people do the things they do. Which is what truly interest me. Anyone else care to explain why they do the things they do?
The singularity that would expand into our universe was probably a singularity present in another universe, and when it became unstable it began to expand rapidly, generating separate time and space from its parent universe.
There is no evidence to this claim. The Big Bang event is a miracle in itself. Science can quite easily explain everything that happened after that event. But before and at the event, we do not know. God is just as plausible an explanation as the one you gave.
Lastly, just because we dont' have an answer to a question doens't mean we are justified in following whatever superstition claims to have an answer. If you don't know, then the correct answer is not "My religion tells me this, so it must be true", instead its "I don't know, but let's find out".
You do sound angry when you write Nazzer. Perhaps it is just the conviction and insistence that there is no other way to live life but to know truth and have all the evidence. People find meaning differently from yourself. If someone believes that God created the universe, it is because they found a source they believed was credible and trustworthy. Just as you base a lot of your own beliefs on people who tell you that they did indeed do the research or thought about things very deeply. You have faith that things were done to ensure their claims were true. I realize the difference is that if you were to choose, you too could do the same research and produce the same results and that is the boon of the scientific method.
I need a question answered because it bugs me to no end...
God created Satan, The garden of Eden, a tree which he specifically pointed out that people shouldn't eat from, and humans with the capacity to defy him.
How is humanity guilty for any of our sin? It sounds like humanity was set up to commit sin so God could punish us and then send his Son down a few thousand years later to die for our sins... that we still have anyway. But God is the good guy simply because if we don't do as he sais, we get thrown down into hell with an irate Satan, who hates humanity because we're the reason he's in the predicament he's in now... Which, again God created....
I wanna know why I should follow someone like that. Any satisfactory answer will win a convert to the religion of choice. PM me if you want to avoid flame wars with anyone else. I'm willing to talk civil.
Plus, you should do a little research before claiming that cells don't respond to negative behavior. It's not just your own body but those around you. An example of this is an abusive husband. If he continues to beat his wife out of anger, she will certainly have health problems,
Thank you for making my day with that statement. I will agree with you 100% that beating your wife, or anyone for that matter, causes health problems for that individual.
Anyways... You are right though. Randomly hacking at a strand of DNA will likely cause it to fail or cause it to function in an undesired way (ie. cancer). However like anything, if you have enough permutations of something you are bound to get a desirable outcome. Say... 3 billion years of branching generations, statistically higher life was bound to form.
Also there are plenty of mutations that occur which do nothing at all however when stacked up a certain way can form something new. Even adding or losing a whole chromosome has happened in humans through the last few decades, not to mention the last million years or so.
You can't say change can happen, but it can only happen so much. Change happens and continues to happen. Micro evolution turns to macro evolution given enough time. We just haven't been physically observing the natural world long enough to view a complete change from one species to another. However we have a lot of evidence to support that species have evolved from common ancestry.
Finally, sin is not a mechanism which affects DNA or lifespan (directly). Sin is the knowledge you have done something you believe is morally wrong (original sin). Which can affect your mood to be sure. You will notice illness or pain more acutely and will attribute it to punishment for your sin. You may even develop psycho-somatic disorders from your guilt which may cause the onset of stress which I guess could in theory shorten your lifespan. However, the notion that thinking "evil" thoughts kills us... it's beyond my understanding.
First order of business: All apologize to Nazzer for assuming he was losing it. Your writing style plays out like yelling in my head. I don't know why.
and secondly, not trying to take another swing, just asking...
Quote from Nazzer »
Oh, and when you say "Why must god be explained?", it's pretty much just like me saying "Why must the existence of the universe be explained?". We can't say anything about the universe before the Planck Time, so we should be okay with "I don't know".
Why does the existence of the universe need to be explained? Isn't it enough that it does exist? I've always found it curious as to why we need to know things about the beginning of the universe when more pragmatic problems are here to be solved.
Some people don't need to know the truth. It is enough that everything exists.
Define death with evolution then. If death was a part of the DNA, it would be a negative trait, thus evolution fails.
It is better to have more incomplete beings then a smaller number of better versions of them.
Like I said earlier, More incomplete, ageless beings would crowd resources and eventually starve them out anyways. The better versions would have their weaker generations die off and leave the stronger and more adapted to survive with the available resources, which in turn would out compete the incomplete beings.
It's been argued that the most successful species on the planet are short lived and produce many offspring.
Death isn't a "trait" of evolution in just the same way that crashing isn't a "feature" of Windows Vista.
"Trait" and "Feature" define two separate things. A trait is just how something is. A feature was designed into something. A trait of Vista could be that it tends to crash.
Perhaps you're thinking of death in the wrong way? Obviously organisms can always be disrupted enough to cease functioning through injury or disease. However science has begun to pinpoint a few genetic markers which could be causes for aging. If this is true it could be reasonable to hypothesize that death was a benefit to an early species' survival and passing of genetic material.
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Religion at the top is an institution meant to control the thoughts and actions of it's followers using a deity as leverage for power. I could tell you that you should do something, but what do I know? I'm just a guy, I'm fallible and power hungry. But if God tells you to do something, through the words of a book which I am wise enough to interpret because God chose me to be His conduit to the world, then I have all the backup in the world to support whatever claims I make. I am no longer a fallible human being out for power, but the very voice of God himself which loves everyone and would never lead you astray.
At the bottom levels, religion isn't so heinous. People are genuinely looking for something to guide their lives. Something that they can trust and will never lead them wrong. God seems like the best kinda source for that. God is consistent but science changes. Science doesn't tell you how to live. Doesn't give you answers to your day to day problems or if it does, it's in terms no layperson can understand.
"How did the world begin?"
Science: A singularity exploded and caused the spreading particles out into space where they combined together to form protons, neutrons and electrons to become hydrogen which then...
Religion: God made you and everything in it in his infinite Love and Wisdom.
The latter tends to make much more sense to someone who doesn't understand physics and is predisposed to look for a simple divine explanation. There's nothing to worry about because your loving God created everything and there is purpose to all things. Science tends to read out as cold and uncaring to such people.
"What should we do about homosexuals? I personally find their sexual habits off color and do not want me or my family to engage in that kind of thing"
Science: It is a combination of genetic predisposition, psychological development and environmental factors and tend to be stable and functional human beings notwithstanding other factors. Homosexuality is not contagious and there is no evidence that it is destructive behavior in any way. If someone you know is homosexual, there is likely nothing you can do about it.
Religion: God said not to be homosexual. So in our religion, there are no gays to worry about.
Again, the latter sounds like a good escape from something you don't want to be doing. nice and simple. Gay bashers will use this as justification for crimes but the majority just do not want to be around it and feel their religion shields them from such things.
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Well you start by trusting your senses. For all you know you could be hallucinating Apples. But beyond that bit of philosophy. The first person had his evidence. Then he goes home and tells his family that there are apples. The family would trust that the person did indeed observe apples and that they do exist. Now they believe apples exist. Perhaps the neighbor doesn't quite trust the person, and so doesn't believe that apples really exist.
Belief is based in trust. Truth is based in evidence, as you say. But they are two different things. Some people don't want to know the truth. They are comfortable with what they believe. Some people will not trust that your evidence is true, and so do not believe.
Is that better worded? I know my last post was kinda off... I'm not trying to convert people here. That's impossible in my experience. I'm merely postulating why people do the things they do. Which is what truly interest me. Anyone else care to explain why they do the things they do?
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Me when I had long hair... Just to fit in with everyone else.
Me trying to look sexy
Me looking tired.
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This is how I start every map ^^
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There is no evidence to this claim. The Big Bang event is a miracle in itself. Science can quite easily explain everything that happened after that event. But before and at the event, we do not know. God is just as plausible an explanation as the one you gave.
You do sound angry when you write Nazzer. Perhaps it is just the conviction and insistence that there is no other way to live life but to know truth and have all the evidence. People find meaning differently from yourself. If someone believes that God created the universe, it is because they found a source they believed was credible and trustworthy. Just as you base a lot of your own beliefs on people who tell you that they did indeed do the research or thought about things very deeply. You have faith that things were done to ensure their claims were true. I realize the difference is that if you were to choose, you too could do the same research and produce the same results and that is the boon of the scientific method.
Evidence is not the source of belief. Trust is.
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God created Satan, The garden of Eden, a tree which he specifically pointed out that people shouldn't eat from, and humans with the capacity to defy him.
How is humanity guilty for any of our sin? It sounds like humanity was set up to commit sin so God could punish us and then send his Son down a few thousand years later to die for our sins... that we still have anyway. But God is the good guy simply because if we don't do as he sais, we get thrown down into hell with an irate Satan, who hates humanity because we're the reason he's in the predicament he's in now... Which, again God created....
I wanna know why I should follow someone like that. Any satisfactory answer will win a convert to the religion of choice. PM me if you want to avoid flame wars with anyone else. I'm willing to talk civil.
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Thank you for making my day with that statement. I will agree with you 100% that beating your wife, or anyone for that matter, causes health problems for that individual.
Anyways... You are right though. Randomly hacking at a strand of DNA will likely cause it to fail or cause it to function in an undesired way (ie. cancer). However like anything, if you have enough permutations of something you are bound to get a desirable outcome. Say... 3 billion years of branching generations, statistically higher life was bound to form.
Also there are plenty of mutations that occur which do nothing at all however when stacked up a certain way can form something new. Even adding or losing a whole chromosome has happened in humans through the last few decades, not to mention the last million years or so.
You can't say change can happen, but it can only happen so much. Change happens and continues to happen. Micro evolution turns to macro evolution given enough time. We just haven't been physically observing the natural world long enough to view a complete change from one species to another. However we have a lot of evidence to support that species have evolved from common ancestry.
Finally, sin is not a mechanism which affects DNA or lifespan (directly). Sin is the knowledge you have done something you believe is morally wrong (original sin). Which can affect your mood to be sure. You will notice illness or pain more acutely and will attribute it to punishment for your sin. You may even develop psycho-somatic disorders from your guilt which may cause the onset of stress which I guess could in theory shorten your lifespan. However, the notion that thinking "evil" thoughts kills us... it's beyond my understanding.
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Borlaug > Jesus?
Discuss.
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and secondly, not trying to take another swing, just asking...
Why does the existence of the universe need to be explained? Isn't it enough that it does exist? I've always found it curious as to why we need to know things about the beginning of the universe when more pragmatic problems are here to be solved.
Some people don't need to know the truth. It is enough that everything exists.
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Like I said earlier, More incomplete, ageless beings would crowd resources and eventually starve them out anyways. The better versions would have their weaker generations die off and leave the stronger and more adapted to survive with the available resources, which in turn would out compete the incomplete beings.
It's been argued that the most successful species on the planet are short lived and produce many offspring.
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"Trait" and "Feature" define two separate things. A trait is just how something is. A feature was designed into something. A trait of Vista could be that it tends to crash.
Perhaps you're thinking of death in the wrong way? Obviously organisms can always be disrupted enough to cease functioning through injury or disease. However science has begun to pinpoint a few genetic markers which could be causes for aging. If this is true it could be reasonable to hypothesize that death was a benefit to an early species' survival and passing of genetic material.