On Jul 15, 11:04*am, abo mahab wrote:
Belief in God by Shaikh Shahidullah Faridi
Published by Alyaa on 2009/4/19 (12 reads) It is mistakenly imagined
by some that belief in a Supreme Being as the Creator and Controller
of the universe is a mere emotional aspiration, a superstition of
ancient times, irrational and illogical, and exploded by modern
science. It is believed that scientists (physicists, biologists and
others) have erected some theory which both refutes and replaces the
traditional belief in God. Such ideas have only a very superficial
grounding, and are the result of ignorance or an indifference to both
the fundamentals of religious faith and the scope of the physical
sciences. It is a significant fact in the history of world thought
that very few people have ever made it their business to refute the
existence of God. The views of the universe which are considered to be
anti-religious are almost all agnostic, not atheistic, that is to say,
they attempt to ignore the existence of God instead of denying it.
This is true of certain views of modern science as well as of the
ancient non-religious theories. The universe in which we live
comprises an evident system of causes and effects, of phenomena and
their results, and it is possible to discuss them indefinitely and
construct theories about them, giving a superficial appearance of
completeness. This is done, however, only at the expense of ignoring
fundamentals or claiming that they cannot be known. If one were to
search for a convincing statement based on firm principles that the
existence of a Supreme Being is impossible, one would not be able to
find it.
The reason for this state of affairs is that belief in God is at once
instinctive, rational, evidential and intuitional, and it is only by
deliberately neglecting to consider it that the non-religious attitude
is maintained. It is instinctive in that man has an innate feeling of
his own inadequacy and helplessness, which accompanies him from the
cradle to the grave, a feeling accompanied by the complementary desire
to seek refuge and support with a being who controls all those forces
before which he feels himself inadequate. We put this feeling forward
as instinctive, although it will immediately be perceived that it is
also evidential. The weakness of man before all the uncountable
influences over which he has no control is a fact so obvious as to
require no discussion.

What is less well grasped by some who have claims to intelligence is
that belief in God is fully supported by reason and logic, the
principles on which all human intelligence stands. For instance, it is
a basic requirement of reason that an effect cannot exist without a
cause. However hard we press our mental faculties, we cannot conceive
rationally of a causeless effect, and if we wish to postulate one we
can only do so by temporarily putting our reason on the shelf. Reason
leads us to the conclusion that just as the elements which compose the
universe are effects of certain causes, the universe itself must be
the effect of a cause, a cause which is itself mightier than and
outside the universe. Non-religious thinkers have to ignore the origin
of the universe and postulate something existing in the beginning
without any known cause. This postulate is essentially non-rational
and therefore unscientific, but it is a necessity for those thinkers
who have unconsciously or deliberately decided not to consider
fundamentals. Of these there are even some who openly proclaim their
refusal to discuss or admit any metaphysical concept. This kind of
attitude, however, can only be upheld by abandoning reason. Reason
itself guides us inexorably to the conclusion that there is an
ultimate cause, the Cause of causes, beyond this universe of time,
space and change; in fact, a Supreme Being.

Another of the basic demands of reason is that diversity cannot exist
without a fundamental unity. Whenever the human mind is confronted
with diversity, it immediately sets to work to synthesise it into
unities, then to synthesise these unities into higher unities and so
on until it can go no further. The ultimate result of a rational
consideration of diversity is to arrive at a unity of unities, a
Supreme Unity, the producer of all diversities, but itself essentially
One. Whichever fundamental of reason we select, if we follow its path
we are led inevitably to the same goal - belief in God, the Supreme
Being.

Besides the conclusion arrived at by purely rational processes, man is
led to the belief in God by observation and experience. One of the
principal reasons for man’s refusal to recognize the existence of God
is the intellectual arrogance produced by his appreciation of his own
powers of analysis and synthesis, of harnessing physical forces by his
ingenuity, and of constructing complex machines to do his work for
him. But pride is caused by concentrating too much attention on one’s
own virtues and blinding oneself to one’s defects. What are the best
of man’s mechanical inventions but a poor and crude imitation of what
already exists in an infinitely finer form in nature? By copying in an
elementary fashion some of the functions of the human eye, he has been
able to evolve the camera; but what comparison has this machine, made
out of lifeless materials, to the living stuff of the eye, and to the
refinement, brightness, clarity, flexibility and stability of its
vision, its immediate connection with the mind which sifts and
appreciates all it sees, all without a complicated system and
controls, and directly under the command of the human will? Take any
organ of the body and study it - the heart, the brain - and it will
immediately be obvious that it is quite outside the scope of man’s
ability to conceive and fashion such an instrument. The petty
imitations of man are attributed to his great cunning, artistry and
intelligence. Is it then reasonable, logical or scientific to
attribute the infinitely finer and more perfect instruments of nature
to such vague and blind energies called by names such as the ‘life
force’, or ‘matter in evolution’, and leave them undescribed and
unexplained? If logic has any validity (and if it has not we had
better stop thinking altogether and become animals), the intelligence
which conceived and wrought myriads of such delicate and astonishing
devices must be infinitely superior to the human intelligence (even
the human intelligence is one of its products), and have control of
all the materials and workings of the universe. Such an intelligence
can only be possessed by a Supreme Being, the Creator, Fashioner and
Sustainer of all things.

If we ponder our own place in the world, we find that we (as well as
all other beings) are kept in being by a most intimate combination of
forces and conditions, which is so delicate that even a small
dislocation would cause our total destruction. We live, so to speak,
continually on the brink of annihilation, and yet are enabled to carry
on our complex existences in comparative immunity. We cannot live, for
instance, without daily rest; both the human body and the human mind
are constructed to need it. This fact is not in itself surprising, but
what is surprising is that the solar system collaborates with us in
our human frailty and provides us with a day and a night exactly
suited to our needs. Man cannot claim to have compelled or persuaded
the solar system to do so; nor can the solar system claim to have
modelled human physical and mental energy to conform to its own
movements. Both man and the solar system are evidently linked in a
total organisation in which man is the beneficiary; the organiser of
these inexplicable concordances can only be a Supreme Controller of
the universe and mankind. Sweet water is a necessary condition of
human existence; it is equally necessary for those plants which
produce man’s staple foods, which themselves depend on each other. If
sea water were to invade our rivers and wells or rain down from the
sky, is there any doubt that we should all die of hunger and thirst in
a few days and the whole world become an empty desert? Yet sea water
is only held back by an invisible barrier over which we have no
control, and the sun and the clouds co-operate in order to desalinate
our water for us and so give us life. This linkage of interdependence
and concurrence could be extended indefinitely by taking examples from
the physical world, and to describe it as ‘fortuitous’ is only begging
the question; moreover it is a contradiction in terms. Fortuity is the
name for something which does not come within any known system or
regulation, an apparently meaningless and haphazard occurrence. To
call a system which is a balanced and cohesive organization fortuitous
is obviously self-contradictory and fallacious. A ‘fortuitous system’
is, simply, an absurdity. If we observe carefully we can see that the
whole of the universe is interdependent and interlinked and therefore
not fortuitous but planned. Belief in God means, precisely, belief in
a Planner of the universe.

A basic element in human consciousness - a suprarational element - is
a sense of value and purpose in respect to life. Even the worst of men
is prevented from becoming completely bestial by this feeling, and in
the best of them it dominates their whole existence. The senses of
good and evil, right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, fitness and
unfitness, truth and falsehood are such that however attacked by the
missiles of constructive analysis, they remain intact within their
intuitional fortress. In all ages and conditions, man has not been
able to divest himself of the idea that behind its external effect,
every action possesses a quality by which it may be judged and graded
in the scale of final values. In addition to the consciousness of the
existence of these values, there is the feeling that it is the purpose
of man’s life to attain those qualities which reflect the highest of
them, that not only are they excellent in ...

read more »

Waddayaknow! Koran-beater crap is just like Bible-beater crap!

Pearse

Gary Forbis wrote:
On Jul 13, 5:33 am, "Chas. Chan" wrote:
In fact, China alone is now the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse
gases and its economy will surpass the United States’ by mid-century
if not sooner.

Pass US by mid-century? I guess that's not bad for ten times as
many people.

Here's the thing. Unless it gets greenhouse gases under control
it won't need to worry about passing US economically. Maybe it
can go Soylent Green. (While it's a cheezy movie that postulates
machines can't run at relatively low tempratures for machines but
high for humans, economics will drive up the cost of the fuel to
pump out those greenhouse gases. Unless China is as stupid as
we are and subsidizes fuels that produce greenhouse gasses it
will substitute cheaper alterenatives as they come on line.)
After they get done with Three Gorges, I wonder if they'll try wind in
the Taklamakan. That basin is 500 foot below sea level, with the
Himalaya and Tien Shen mountains on each side. As the basin heats up,
the hot air rises, and cold air flows down out of the mountains to
replace it.

This happens every single day, and has for millennia. Its windpower you
know will be there every day.

America has already seen a shift in our population to warmer
climate "races". Does China have the necessary mix for
population substitution based upon climate change?
They are not going to have substitution. If that which now goes on in
the USA ever gets to the point where it disturbs productivity, the
warmer races will not be fed, housed, or had their homes heated. Both
Chinese and Aryan races evolved in temperate zones over the last dozen
millennia at least, and instinctively put up the resources to survive
the winter. Darwin will sort it out.

wrote:
On Jul 15, 11:04 am, abo mahab wrote:
Belief in God by Shaikh Shahidullah Faridi
Published by Alyaa on 2009/4/19 (12 reads) It is mistakenly imagined
by some that belief in a Supreme Being as the Creator and Controller
of the universe is a mere emotional aspiration, a superstition of
ancient times, irrational and illogical, and exploded by modern
science. It is believed that scientists (physicists, biologists and
others) have erected some theory which both refutes and replaces the
traditional belief in God. Such ideas have only a very superficial
grounding, and are the result of ignorance or an indifference to both
the fundamentals of religious faith and the scope of the physical
sciences. It is a significant fact in the history of world thought
that very few people have ever made it their business to refute the
existence of God. The views of the universe which are considered to be
anti-religious are almost all agnostic, not atheistic, that is to say,
they attempt to ignore the existence of God instead of denying it.
This is true of certain views of modern science as well as of the
ancient non-religious theories. The universe in which we live
comprises an evident system of causes and effects, of phenomena and
their results, and it is possible to discuss them indefinitely and
construct theories about them, giving a superficial appearance of
completeness. This is done, however, only at the expense of ignoring
fundamentals or claiming that they cannot be known. If one were to
search for a convincing statement based on firm principles that the
existence of a Supreme Being is impossible, one would not be able to
find it.
The reason for this state of affairs is that belief in God is at once
instinctive, rational, evidential and intuitional, and it is only by
deliberately neglecting to consider it that the non-religious attitude
is maintained. It is instinctive in that man has an innate feeling of
his own inadequacy and helplessness, which accompanies him from the
cradle to the grave, a feeling accompanied by the complementary desire
to seek refuge and support with a being who controls all those forces
before which he feels himself inadequate. We put this feeling forward
as instinctive, although it will immediately be perceived that it is
also evidential. The weakness of man before all the uncountable
influences over which he has no control is a fact so obvious as to
require no discussion.

What is less well grasped by some who have claims to intelligence is
that belief in God is fully supported by reason and logic, the
principles on which all human intelligence stands. For instance, it is
a basic requirement of reason that an effect cannot exist without a
cause. However hard we press our mental faculties, we cannot conceive
rationally of a causeless effect, and if we wish to postulate one we
can only do so by temporarily putting our reason on the shelf. Reason
leads us to the conclusion that just as the elements which compose the
universe are effects of certain causes, the universe itself must be
the effect of a cause, a cause which is itself mightier than and
outside the universe. Non-religious thinkers have to ignore the origin
of the universe and postulate something existing in the beginning
without any known cause. This postulate is essentially non-rational
and therefore unscientific, but it is a necessity for those thinkers
who have unconsciously or deliberately decided not to consider
fundamentals. Of these there are even some who openly proclaim their
refusal to discuss or admit any metaphysical concept. This kind of
attitude, however, can only be upheld by abandoning reason. Reason
itself guides us inexorably to the conclusion that there is an
ultimate cause, the Cause of causes, beyond this universe of time,
space and change; in fact, a Supreme Being.

Another of the basic demands of reason is that diversity cannot exist
without a fundamental unity. Whenever the human mind is confronted
with diversity, it immediately sets to work to synthesise it into
unities, then to synthesise these unities into higher unities and so
on until it can go no further. The ultimate result of a rational
consideration of diversity is to arrive at a unity of unities, a
Supreme Unity, the producer of all diversities, but itself essentially
One. Whichever fundamental of reason we select, if we follow its path
we are led inevitably to the same goal - belief in God, the Supreme
Being.

Besides the conclusion arrived at by purely rational processes, man is
led to the belief in God by observation and experience. One of the
principal reasons for man’s refusal to recognize the existence of God
is the intellectual arrogance produced by his appreciation of his own
powers of analysis and synthesis, of harnessing physical forces by his
ingenuity, and of constructing complex machines to do his work for
him. But pride is caused by concentrating too much attention on one’s
own virtues and blinding oneself to one’s defects. What are the best
of man’s mechanical inventions but a poor and crude imitation of what
already exists in an infinitely finer form in nature? By copying in an
elementary fashion some of the functions of the human eye, he has been
able to evolve the camera; but what comparison has this machine, made
out of lifeless materials, to the living stuff of the eye, and to the
refinement, brightness, clarity, flexibility and stability of its
vision, its immediate connection with the mind which sifts and
appreciates all it sees, all without a complicated system and
controls, and directly under the command of the human will? Take any
organ of the body and study it - the heart, the brain - and it will
immediately be obvious that it is quite outside the scope of man’s
ability to conceive and fashion such an instrument. The petty
imitations of man are attributed to his great cunning, artistry and
intelligence. Is it then reasonable, logical or scientific to
attribute the infinitely finer and more perfect instruments of nature
to such vague and blind energies called by names such as the ‘life
force’, or ‘matter in evolution’, and leave them undescribed and
unexplained? If logic has any validity (and if it has not we had
better stop thinking altogether and become animals), the intelligence
which conceived and wrought myriads of such delicate and astonishing
devices must be infinitely superior to the human intelligence (even
the human intelligence is one of its products), and have control of
all the materials and workings of the universe. Such an intelligence
can only be possessed by a Supreme Being, the Creator, Fashioner and
Sustainer of all things.

If we ponder our own place in the world, we find that we (as well as
all other beings) are kept in being by a most intimate combination of
forces and conditions, which is so delicate that even a small
dislocation would cause our total destruction. We live, so to speak,
continually on the brink of annihilation, and yet are enabled to carry
on our complex existences in comparative immunity. We cannot live, for
instance, without daily rest; both the human body and the human mind
are constructed to need it. This fact is not in itself surprising, but
what is surprising is that the solar system collaborates with us in
our human frailty and provides us with a day and a night exactly
suited to our needs. Man cannot claim to have compelled or persuaded
the solar system to do so; nor can the solar system claim to have
modelled human physical and mental energy to conform to its own
movements. Both man and the solar system are evidently linked in a
total organisation in which man is the beneficiary; the organiser of
these inexplicable concordances can only be a Supreme Controller of
the universe and mankind. Sweet water is a necessary condition of
human existence; it is equally necessary for those plants which
produce man’s staple foods, which themselves depend on each other. If
sea water were to invade our rivers and wells or rain down from the
sky, is there any doubt that we should all die of hunger and thirst in
a few days and the whole world become an empty desert? Yet sea water
is only held back by an invisible barrier over which we have no
control, and the sun and the clouds co-operate in order to desalinate
our water for us and so give us life. This linkage of interdependence
and concurrence could be extended indefinitely by taking examples from
the physical world, and to describe it as ‘fortuitous’ is only begging
the question; moreover it is a contradiction in terms. Fortuity is the
name for something which does not come within any known system or
regulation, an apparently meaningless and haphazard occurrence. To
call a system which is a balanced and cohesive organization fortuitous
is obviously self-contradictory and fallacious. A ‘fortuitous system’
is, simply, an absurdity. If we observe carefully we can see that the
whole of the universe is interdependent and interlinked and therefore
not fortuitous but planned. Belief in God means, precisely, belief in
a Planner of the universe.

A basic element in human consciousness - a suprarational element - is
a sense of value and purpose in respect to life. Even the worst of men
is prevented from becoming completely bestial by this feeling, and in
the best of them it dominates their whole existence. The senses of
good and evil, right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, fitness and
unfitness, truth and falsehood are such that however attacked by the
missiles of constructive analysis, they remain intact within their
intuitional fortress. In all ages and conditions, man has not been
able to divest himself of the idea that behind its external effect,
every action possesses a quality by which it may be judged and graded
in the scale of final values. In addition to the consciousness of the
existence of these values, there is the feeling that it is the purpose
of man’s life to attain those qualities which reflect the highest of
them, that not only are they excellent in ...

read more »

Waddayaknow! Koran-beater crap is just like Bible-beater crap!

Pearse



Which is just like the Liberal's "Social justice manifesto" crap!