₦airaland Forum

alfaman2: I am saying it is a guesswork, so could it be completely wrong? YES!

alfaman2: As I said before in my imaginary example in the op, people in another planet observing the flight of big birds on earth years ago, might, because there are no flying animals on their own planet, just conclude scientifically, that earth's gravity is too low for things to stay on the ground. If somebody puts to doubt their lack of gravity explanation, they will just start asking the questions you are asking: So, are you saying theory of gravity is completely wrong? Are you saying it's incomplete? That's nothing new. Are you saying the details need work? Again, nothing new. They might even invent a dark matter to explain away the flying animals.
This is exactly what we are doing with the BBT. It doesn't make sense and we are inventing explanations for it to make sense. We are observing events and making conclusions based on these events and the measurable characteristics and physical laws of our own world even though these might be different from the laws governing other parts of the universe.

alfaman2: As for the 80 million years, I know it is not a big percentage but it shows uncertainty. Infact the previous day, they announced 50 million years, then revised it. And it is not definite. They can annouce more billions of years in the coming years as they try and wriggle their way out of the problems posed by their theory. This is the one thing about lies: you need to tell other lies to cover the previous ones. But after a time you stop making sense. Ask religious people.

alfaman2: In all spheres of science, even in the guesswork sector, if I tell you that I know where and when something started and I know the rate and speed of acceleration and direction of movement, you could reasonable expect me to calculate the position of the said object at any moment. This simple calculation befuddles the Big Bang theorists. And you call it just an issue. It is more than that my friend. It is stark incompetence. It is being found out with the hand in the cookie jar. It is as senseless as a tortured jew dying on a tree because I enjoy life. It's meaningless.
And the "predictions" are still guessworks that can be explained by other theories. Scientists are now discovering what they call "anomalies" in the data provided by oberving cosmic background radiation when compared to the big bang theory. http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0403353

alfaman2: Yes, you are right, I think multiverse makes a lot of sense because of expansion. Don't get confused. Expansion does not confirm BB, mind you. It's just another observation. Multiverse answers more questions than the big bang does. It might explain what the universe is expanding into amongs others. Don't get me wrong. I'm neither supporting nor crusading against any theory. All I'm saying is that some make sense while others don't.

wiegraf: Maybe. But really, if it cannot be verified in any way, like our good friend dog, you might as well be atheistic to its existence, no?

advocate666: Except nothing makes the existence of multiverses impossible. Infact, it is more probable than a unique verse seeing that our universe is expanding. What is this expansion? Is it an expansion or a deformation caused by the "gravitational" pull of other verses? What is it "expanding" into?

wiegraf: It boils down to the scientific method.

You know a doctors methods are based on the scientific method, while those of a priest are based on blind faith. By their very nature the priests recommendations are based on chance. The doctors? no.

Despite this, you still don't put 100 percent faith in the doctor, or even the scientific method, but it's by far and away the most practical way to resolve whatever the problem is. If problems persist, you start to question the doctor, get a second opinion from other doctors, verify his background, asses whatever his diagnosis is, etc etc. Or you can even do all this from the onset, but that wouldn't be too practical in most situations.

So all this is just being practical, with the pastor? No, not so much.

Tldr; Blind chance vs the scientific method.

NL member: You want proof?
Ok, look around you. See how perfect the world is? The sun and moon are in perfect orbit, if there was even 1cm difference between them then life on earth will be impossible.
That shows that God created the world.

Logicboy03: Thank Gawd that people have already pointed out your foolishness in asking these questions. It is clear that you dont want to discuss this issue sensibly on this thread.

alfaman2: I'm saying that it makes no sense. It explains nothing that can't be explained by other theories. It creates more problems and confusion than it resolves.

Even if we ignore all its inadequacies, its fundamental fails woefully in calculating the exact size of the universe, which it could easily do if it were right in any way.

striktlymi: Well Wieg, I don't quite agree with the bold. If you hold on to the following comment:

then the implication there is that some being has made every decision for us. If someone has already made our decisions then there is no way we can show that the individual did not make our choices too. The word determine can have the following definitions:

de·ter·mine
/diˈtərmin/
Verb
Cause (something) to occur in a particular way.
Firmly decide: "she determined to tackle him the next day"; "he determined on a plan".

which shows clearly that if an individual has determined our future then that individual necessarily decides what we do, which precludes our ability to make our very own choices. If this ability to make choices is not ours then the individual can be said to have made every choice for us which in effect is the same argument I put forth initially.

striktlymi: The above sounds more like you wanting omniscient to mean an ability to determine someone's future. But you know that does not define omniscient. The fact that someone is omniscient does not mean that the individual determines anyone's future...like I have mentioned before, an ability to see into the future impeccably does not mean an ability to decide that future.

striktlymi: Nah...that sounds more like TBJ's method of predicting the future . An omniscient being need not do that...it's more like knowing the outcome of every action before the action takes place.

There is an infinite number of choices we can make for every decision making process but the probability of us making one choice at any time (t) is always one i.e. P(t) = 1. This choice we make is already known to this omniscient being before it is made; which really does not undermine the fact that we made the choice irrespective the 'knowledge' of this omniscient being.

wiegraf: For instance, assuming you somehow had this knowledge of the future and did all you could to change it, you would fail. So would the omniscient as well actually, else he'd be wrong.

wiegraf: Supposing you somehow had knowledge of the future and did all you could to change it, you would fail regardless of whatever any agent tried to do, yes?

striktlymi: Not exactly...if one hypothetically gets a hold of what the future would be and he or she works to change it, that change will definitely occur but the snag there is that the individual has determined another future for himself which the omniscient being knows about.If you have read the story of Nineveh and how they changed their future then you would get a glimpse of what I am talking about.

striktlymi: God does not decide our future for us, he only knows what will happen. No one's future is cast in stone...we have ample opportunity of changing a future that seem almost certain (given a foreknowledge) but this change is already known to the omniscient one.



The future is not cast in stone! We all have our choices to make without someone determining it for us.

striktlymi: As I have explained before, the choices are numerous but the choice we finally settle for is always one at any given time.


There is always an option to every decision we intend to make and no one's future is cast in stone.


No body's path is predetermined!

Everyone has the freedom to go with whatever option he or she wants.

striktlymi: No body makes that choice for the individual. Knowing a future is different from determining it. The option we go for is known but the choice made is ours.

striktlymi: How does knowing someone's response translate to determining that response? I know what will happen tomorrow to Mr. A, is different from I have determined what will happen to Mr. A tomorrow.

striktlymi: Of course you talked about the future being determined...that you did say!

striktlymi: You have really not given any reason for your accusation!

striktlymi: That would be the same as asking why the human brain is located in the head and not the stomach The simple answer is: I don't know

striktlymi: I do get the point you have made so far and frankly, looking at it from your perspective, they make sense but the ish is they are incorrect.

striktlymi: Good afternoon wiegraf,

Are you saying that when something is not a 'core requirement' then it becomes false? Now let's put under the 'knife' what you consider to be the core requirement(s)...

striktlymi: For God to determine your future, he would need to make your choices for you and this he does not do.

striktlymi: Well wieg, you still arrived at the same conclusion you tagged 'not a core requirement'...and that is not making your own decisions as regards choices. When someone gives you no option that your response is already determined by the individual then it suffices to say that the individual makes your decisions for you.

striktlymi: Now, the truth is that God does not determine our future...having knowledge of the future is not the same as determining ones future.

striktlymi: You can only accuse me of the bold if you can demonstrate that I hold the view that our futures are determined by a supreme being. My argument is that God does not determine our future...this is done by us through our actions.

striktlymi: It's just an example I expect everyone to fill in the gaps...

striktlymi: For God to determine your future, he would need to make your choices for you and this he does not do.

striktlymi: Now the above is what ooman is stressing but the truth is that the Father has the ability of doing the above but decided not to. The only 'fault' the Father has is that he knows the child would damage the TV but decided not to interfere and allow it happen. If the dad had interfered it would mean impeding on the right of the child to make his own decision.

2buff: But do YOU know? That is the question.
In trying to sound smart with yourself you have completely missed the point you have so called deemed "moot".
God is a just judge. He will not punish you for something you have not done.
He will judge you based on what you have done, so the likes of you can have no reason to say "I have been unfairly judged!".

Go and watch the movie Minority Report and stop loving the smell of your own mind-farts here.

steven pinker: THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND EARLY CHRISTENDOM


Christians downplay the wrathful deity of the Old Testament in favor of a newer conception of God, exemplified in the New Testament (the Christian Bible) by his son Jesus, the Prince of Peace. Certainly loving one’s enemies and turning the other cheek constitute an advance over utterly destroying all that breatheth. Jesus, to be sure, was not above using violent imagery to secure the loyalty of his flock. In Matthew 10:34–37 he says:

"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me."

It’s not clear what he planned to do with that sword, but there’s no evidence that he smote anyone with the edge of it.
Of course, there’s no direct evidence for anything that Jesus said or did.25 The words attributed to Jesus were written decades after his death, and the Christian Bible, like the Hebrew one, is riddled with contradictions, uncorroborated histories, and obvious fabrications. But just as the Hebrew Bible offers a glimpse into the values of the middle of the 1st millennium BCE, the Christian Bible tells us much about the first two centuries CE. Indeed, in that era the story of Jesus was by no means unique. A number of pagan myths told of a savior who was sired by a god, born of a virgin at the winter solstice, surrounded by twelve zodiacal disciples, sacrificed as a scapegoat at the spring equinox, sent into the underworld, resurrected amid much rejoicing, and symbolically eaten by his followers to gain salvation and immortality.26
The backdrop of the story of Jesus is the Roman Empire, the latest in a succession of conquerors of Judah. Though the first centuries of Christianity took place during the Pax Romana (the Roman Peace), the alleged peacefulness has to be understood in relative terms. It was a time of ruthless imperial expansion, including the conquest of Britain and the deportation of the Jewish population of Judah following the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.

The preeminent symbol of the empire was the Colosseum, visited today by millions of tourists and emblazoned on pizza boxes all over the world. In this stadium, Super Bowl–sized audiences consumed spectacles of mass cruelty. Naked women were tied to stakes and raped or torn apart by animals. Armies of captives massacred each other in mock battles. Slaves carried out literal enactments of mythological tales of mutilation and death—for example, a man playing Prometheus would be chained to a rock, and a trained eagle would pull out his liver. Gladiators fought each other to the death; our thumbs-up and thumbs-down gestures may have come from the signals flashed by the crowd to a victorious gladiator telling him whether to administer the coup de grâce to his opponent. About half a million people died these agonizing deaths to provide Roman citizens with their bread and circuses. The grandeur that was Rome casts our violent entertainment in a different light (to say nothing of our “extreme sports” and “sudden-death overtime”). 27

The most famous means of Roman death, of course, was crucifixion, the source of the word excruciating. Anyone who has ever looked up at the front of a church must have given at least a moment’s thought to the unspeakable agony of being nailed to a cross. Those with a strong stomach can supplement their imagination by reading a forensic investigation of the death of Jesus Christ, based on archaeological and historical sources, which was published in 1986 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.28

A Roman execution began with a scourging of the naked prisoner. Using a short whip made of braided leather embedded with sharpened stones, Roman soldiers would flog the man’s back, buttocks, and legs. According to the JAMA authors, “The lacerations would tear into the underlying skeletal muscles and produce quivering ribbons of bleeding flesh.” The prisoner’s arms would then be tied around a hundred-pound crossbar, and he would be forced to carry it to a site where a post was embedded in the ground. The man would be thrown onto his shredded back and nailed through the wrists to the crossbar. (Contrary to the familiar depictions, the flesh of the palms cannot support the weight of a man.) The victim was hoisted onto the post and his feet were nailed to it, usually without a supporting block. The man’s rib cage was distended by the weight of his body pulling on his arms, making it difficult to exhale unless he pulled his arms or pushed his legs against the nails. Death from asphyxiation and loss of blood would come after an ordeal ranging from three or four hours to three or four days. The executioners could prolong the torture by resting the man’s weight on a seat, or hasten death by breaking his legs with a club.

Though I like to think that nothing human is foreign to me, I find it impossible to put myself in the minds of the ancients who devised this orgy of sadism. Even if I had custody of Hitler and could mete out the desert of my choice, it would not occur to me to inflict a torture like that on him. I could not avoid wincing in sympathy, would not want to become the kind of person who could indulge in such cruelty, and could see no point in adding to the world’s reservoir of suffering without a commensurate benefit. (Even the practical goal of deterring future despots, I would reason, is better served by maximizing the expectation that they will be brought to justice than by maximizing the gruesomeness of the penalty.) Yet in the foreign country we call the past, crucifixion was a common punishment. It was invented by the Persians, carried back to Europe by Alexander the Great, and widely used in Mediterranean empires. Jesus, who was convicted of minor rabble-rousing, was crucified along with two common thieves. The outrage that the story was meant to arouse was not that petty crimes were punishable by crucifixion but that Jesus was treated like a petty criminal.

The crucifixion of Jesus, of course, was never treated lightly. The cross became the symbol of a movement that spread through the ancient world, was adopted by the Roman Empire, and two millennia later remains the world’s most recognizable symbol. The dreadful death it calls to mind must have made it an especially potent meme. But let’s step outside our familiarity with Christianity and ponder the mindset that tried to make sense of the crucifixion. By today’s sensibilities, it’s more than a little macabre that a great moral movement would adopt as its symbol a graphic representation of a revolting means of torture and execution. (Imagine that the logo of a Holocaust museum was a shower nozzle, or that survivors of the Rwandan genocide formed a religion around the symbol of a machete.) More to the point, what was the lesson that the first Christians drew from the crucifixion? Today such a barbarity might galvanize people into opposing brutal regimes, or demanding that such torture never again be inflicted on a living creature. But those weren’t the lessons the early Christians drew at all. No, the execution of Jesus is The Good News, a necessary step in the most wonderful episode in history. In allowing the crucifixion to take place, God did the world an incalculable favor. Though infinitely powerful, compassionate, and wise, he could think of no other way to reprieve humanity from punishment for its sins (in particular, for the sin of being descended from a couple who had disobeyed him) than to allow an innocent man (his son no less) to be impaled through the limbs and slowly suffocate in agony. By acknowledging that this sadistic murder was a gift of divine mercy, people could earn eternal life. And if they failed to see the logic in all this, their flesh would be seared by fire for all eternity.
According to this way of thinking, death by torture is not an unthinkable horror; it has a bright side. It is a route to salvation, a part of the divine plan. Like Jesus, the early Christian saints found a place next to God by being tortured to death in ingenious ways. For more than a millennium, Christian martyrologies described these torments with pornographic relish.29

Here are just a few saints whose names, if not their causes of death, are widely known. Saint Peter, an apostle of Jesus and the first Pope, was crucified upside down. Saint Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland, met his end on an X-shaped cross, the source of the diagonal stripes on the Union Jack. Saint Lawrence was roasted alive on a gridiron, a detail unknown to most Canadians who recognize his name from the river, the gulf, and one of Montreal’s two major boulevards. The other one commemorates Saint Catherine, who was broken on the wheel, a punishment in which the executioner tied the victim to a wagon wheel, smashed his or her limbs with a sledgehammer, braided the shattered but living body through the spokes, and hoisted it onto a pole for birds to peck while the victim slowly died of hemorrhage and shock. (Catherine’s wheel, studded with spikes, adorns the shield of the eponymous college at Oxford.) Saint Barbara, namesake of the beautiful California city, was hung upside down by her ankles while soldiers ripped her body with iron claws, amputated her breasts, burned the wounds with hot irons, and beat her head with spiked clubs. And then there’s Saint George, the patron saint of England, Palestine, the republic of Georgia, the Crusades, and the Boy Scouts. Because God kept resuscitating him, George got to be tortured to death many times. He was seated astride a sharp blade with weights on his legs, roasted on a fire, pierced through the feet, crushed by a spiked wheel, had sixty nails hammered into his head, had the fat rendered out of his back with candles, and then was sawn in half.

The voyeurism in the martyrologies was employed not to evoke outrage against torture but to inspire reverence for the bravery of the martyrs. As in the story of Jesus, torture was an excellent thing. The saints welcomed their torments, because suffering in this life would be rewarded with bliss in the next one. The Christian poet Prudentius wrote of one of the martyrs, “The mother was present, gazing on all the preparations for her dear one’s death and showed no signs of grief, rejoicing rather each time the pan hissing hot above the olive wood roasted and scorched her child.”30 Saint Lawrence would become the patron saint of comedians because while he was lying on the gridiron he said to his tormenters, “This side’s done, turn me over and have a bite.” The torturers were straight men, bit players; when they were put in a bad light it was because they were torturing our heroes, not because they used torture in the first place.
The early Christians also extolled torture as just deserts for the sinful. Most people have heard of the seven deadly sins, standardized by Pope Gregory I in 590 CE. Fewer people know about the punishment in hell that was reserved for those who commit them:

Pride: Broken on the wheel
Envy: Put in freezing water
Gluttony: Force-fed rats, toads, and snakes
Lust: Smothered in fire and brimstone
Anger: Dismembered alive
Greed: Put in cauldrons of boiling oil
Sloth: Thrown in snake pits 31

The duration of these sentences, of course, was infinite.

By sanctifying cruelty, early Christianity set a precedent for more than a millennium of systematic torture in Christian Europe. If you understand the expressions to burn at the stake, to hold his feet to the fire, to break a butterfly on the wheel, to be racked with pain, to be drawn and quartered, to disembowel, to flay, to press, the thumbscrew, the garrote, a slow burn, and the iron maiden (a hollow hinged statue lined with nails, later taken as the name of a heavy-metal rock band), you are familiar with a fraction of the ways that heretics were brutalized during the Middle Ages and early modern period.

During the Spanish Inquisition, church officials concluded that the conversions of thousands of former Jews didn’t take. To compel the conversos to confess their hidden apostasy, the inquisitors tied their arms behind their backs, hoisted them by their wrists, and dropped them in a series of violent jerks, rupturing their tendons and pulling their arms out of their sockets.32 Many others were burned alive, a fate that also befell Michael Servetus for questioning the trinity, Giordano Bruno for believing (among other things) that the earth went around the sun, and William Tyndale for translating the Bible into English. Galileo, perhaps the most famous victim of the Inquisition, got off easy: he was only shown the instruments of torture (in particular, the rack) and was given the opportunity to recant for “having held and believed that the sun is the center of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the center and moves.” Today the rack shows up in cartoons featuring elasticized limbs and bad puns (Stretching exercises; Is this a wind-up? No pain no gain). But at the time it was no laughing matter. The Scottish travel writer William Lithgow, a contemporary of Galileo’s, described what it was like to be racked by the Inquisition:

"As the levers bent forward, the main force of my knees against the two planks burst asunder the sinews of my hams, and the lids of my knees were crushed. My eyes began to startle, my mouth to foam and froth, and my teeth to chatter like the doubling of a drummer’s sticks. My lips were shivering, my groans were vehement, and blood sprang from my arms, broken sinews, hands, and knees. Being loosed from these pinnacles of pain, I was hand-fast set on the floor, with this incessant imploration: “Confess! Confess!” 33"

Though many Protestants were victims of these tortures, when they got the upper hand they enthusiastically inflicted them on others, including a hundred thousand women they burned at the stake for witchcraft between the 15th and 18th centuries.34 As so often happens in the history of atrocity, later centuries would treat these horrors in lighthearted ways. In popular culture today witches are not the victims of torture and execution but mischievous cartoon characters or sassy enchantresses, like Broom-Hilda, Witch Hazel, Glinda, Samantha, and the Halliwell sisters in Charmed.

Institutionalized torture in Christendom was not just an unthinking habit; it had a moral rationale. If you really believe that failing to accept Jesus as one’s savior is a ticket to fiery damnation, then torturing a person until he acknowledges this truth is doing him the biggest favor of his life: better a few hours now than an eternity later. And silencing a person before he can corrupt others, or making an example of him to deter the rest, is a responsible public health measure. Saint Augustine brought the point home with a pair of analogies: a good father prevents his son from picking up a venomous snake, and a good gardener cuts off a rotten branch to save the rest of the tree.35 The method of choice had been specified by Jesus himself: “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.”36

Once again, the point of this discussion is not to accuse Christians of endorsing torture and persecution. Of course most devout Christians today are thoroughly tolerant and humane people. Even those who thunder from televised pulpits do not call for burning heretics alive or hoisting Jews on the strappado. The question is why they don’t, given that their beliefs imply that it would serve the greater good. The answer is that people in the West today compartmentalize their religious ideology. When they affirm their faith in houses of worship, they profess beliefs that have barely changed in two thousand years. But when it comes to their actions, they respect modern norms of nonviolence and toleration, a benevolent hypocrisy for which we should all be grateful.

steven pinker: THE HEBREW BIBLE


Like the works of Homer, the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) was set in the late 2nd millennium BCE but written more than five hundred years later.12 But unlike the works of Homer, the Bible is revered today by billions of people who call it the source of their moral values. The world’s bestselling publication, the Good Book has been translated into three thousand languages and has been placed in the nightstands of hotels all over the world. Orthodox Jews kiss it with their prayer shawls; witnesses in American courts bind their oaths by placing a hand on it. Even the president touches it when taking the oath of office. Yet for all this reverence, the Bible is one long celebration of violence.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. And the Lord God took one of Adam’s ribs, and made he a woman. And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living. And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain. And she again bare his brother Abel. And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him. With a world population of exactly four, that works out to a homicide rate of 25 percent, which is about a thousand times higher than the equivalent rates in Western countries today.

No sooner do men and women begin to multiply than God decides they are sinful and that the suitable punishment is genocide. (In Bill Cosby’s comedy sketch, a neighbor begs Noah for a hint as to why he is building an ark. Noah replies, “How long can you tread water?”) When the flood recedes, God instructs Noah in its moral lesson, namely the code of vendetta: “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.”

The next major figure in the Bible is Abraham, the spiritual ancestor of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Abraham has a nephew, Lot, who settles in Sodom. Because the residents engage in anal sex and comparable sins, God immolates every man, woman, and child in a divine napalm attack. Lot’s wife, for the crime of turning around to look at the inferno, is put to death as well.

Abraham undergoes a test of his moral values when God orders him to take his son Isaac to a mountaintop, tie him up, cut his throat, and burn his body as a gift to the Lord. Isaac is spared only because at the last moment an angel stays his father’s hand. For millennia readers have puzzled over why God insisted on this horrifying trial. One interpretation is that God intervened not because Abraham had passed the test but because he had failed it, but that is anachronistic: obedience to divine authority, not reverence for human life, was the cardinal virtue.

Isaac’s son Jacob has a daughter, Dinah. Dinah is kidnapped and raped—apparently a customary form of courtship at the time, since the rapist’s family then offers to purchase her from her own family as a wife for the rapist. Dinah’s brothers explain that an important moral principle stands in the way of this transaction: the rapist is uncircumcised. So they make a counteroffer: if all the men in the rapist’s hometown cut off their foreskins, Dinah will be theirs. While the men are incapacitated with bleeding joysticks, the brothers invade the city, plunder and destroy it, massacre the men, and carry off the women and children. When Jacob worries that neighboring tribes may attack them in revenge, his sons explain that it was worth the risk: “Should our sister be treated like a LovePeddler?” 13 Soon afterward they reiterate their commitment to family values by selling their brother Joseph into slavery.

Jacob’s descendants, the Israelites, find their way to Egypt and become too numerous for the Pharaoh’s liking, so he enslaves them and orders that all the boys be killed at birth. Moses escapes the mass infanticide and grows up to challenge the Pharaoh to let his people go. God, who is omnipotent, could have softened Pharaoh’s heart, but he hardens it instead, which gives him a reason to afflict every Egyptian with painful boils and other miseries before killing every one of their firstborn sons. (The word Passover alludes to the executioner angel’s passing over the households with Israelite firstborns.) God follows this massacre with another one when he drowns the Egyptian army as they pursue the Israelites across the Red Sea.

The Israelites assemble at Mount Sinai and hear the Ten Commandments, the great moral code that outlaws engraved images and the coveting of livestock but gives a pass to slavery, rape, torture, mutilation, and genocide of neighboring tribes. The Israelites become impatient while waiting for Moses to return with an expanded set of laws, which will prescribe the death penalty for blasphemy, homosexuality, adultery, talking back to parents, and working on the Sabbath. To pass the time, they worship a statue of a calf, for which the punishment turns out to be, you guessed it, death. Following orders from God, Moses and his brother Aaron kill three thousand of their companions.

God then spends seven chapters of Leviticus instructing the Israelites on how to slaughter the steady stream of animals he demands of them. Aaron and his two sons prepare the tabernacle for the first service, but the sons slip up and use the wrong incense. So God burns them to death.

As the Israelites proceed toward the promised land, they meet up with the Midianites. Following orders from God, they slay the males, burn their city, plunder the livestock, and take the women and children captive. When they return to Moses, he is enraged because they spared the women, some of whom had led the Israelites to worship rival gods. So he tells his soldiers to complete the genocide and to reward themselves with nubile sex slaves they may rape at their pleasure: “Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.” 14
In Deuteronomy 20 and 21, God gives the Israelites a blanket policy for dealing with cities that don’t accept them as overlords: smite the males with the edge of the sword and abduct the cattle, women, and children. Of course, a man with a beautiful new captive faces a problem: since he has just murdered her parents and brothers, she may not be in the mood for love. God anticipates this nuisance and offers the following solution: the captor should shave her head, pare her nails, and imprison her in his house for a month while she cries her eyes out. Then he may go in and rape her.

With a designated list of other enemies (Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites), the genocide has to be total: “Thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them . . . as the Lord thy God has commanded thee.” 15

Joshua puts this directive into practice when he invades Canaan and sacks the city of Jericho. After the walls came tumbling down, his soldiers “utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.”16 More earth is scorched as Joshua “smote all the country of the hills, and of the south, and of the vale, and of the springs, and all their kings: he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded.” 17

The next stage in Israelite history is the era of the judges, or tribal chiefs. The most famous of them, Samson, establishes his reputation by killing thirty men during his wedding feast because he needs their clothing to pay off a bet. Then, to avenge the killing of his wife and her father, he slaughters a thousand Philistines and sets fire to their crops; after escaping capture, he kills another thousand with the jawbone of an ass. When he is finally captured and his eyes are burned out, God gives him the strength for a 9/11-like suicide attack in which he implodes a large building, crushing the three thousand men and women who are worshipping inside it.

Israel’s first king, Saul, establishes a small empire, which gives him the opportunity to settle an old score. Centuries earlier, during the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, the Amalekites had harassed them, and God commanded the Israelites to “wipe out the name of Amalek.” So when the judge Samuel anoints Saul as king, he reminds Saul of the divine decree: “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” 18 Saul carries out the order, but Samuel is furious to learn that he has spared their king, Agag. So Samuel “hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord.”

Saul is eventually overthrown by his son-in-law David, who absorbs the southern tribes of Judah, conquers Jerusalem, and makes it the capital of a kingdom that will last four centuries. David would come to be celebrated in story, song, and sculpture, and his six-pointed star would symbolize his people for three thousand years. Christians too would revere him as the forerunner of Jesus.

But in Hebrew scripture David is not just the “sweet singer of Israel,” the chiseled poet who plays a harp and composes the Psalms. After he makes his name by killing Goliath, David recruits a gang of guerrillas, extorts wealth from his fellow citizens at swordpoint, and fights as a mercenary for the Philistines. These achievements make Saul jealous: the women in his court are singing, “Saul has killed by the thousands, but David by the tens of thousands.” So Saul plots to have him assassinated.19 David narrowly escapes before staging a successful coup.

When David becomes king, he keeps up his hard-earned reputation for killing by the tens of thousands. After his general Joab “wasted the country of the children of Ammon,” David “brought out the people that were in it, and cut them with saws, and with harrows of iron, and with axes.” 20 Finally he manages to do something that God considers immoral: he orders a census. To punish David for this lapse, God kills seventy thousand of his citizens.

Within the royal family, sex and violence go hand in hand. While taking a walk on the palace roof one day, David peeping-toms a naked woman, Bathsheba, and likes what he sees, so he sends her husband to be killed in battle and adds her to his seraglio. Later one of David’s children rapes another one and is killed in revenge by a third. The avenger, Absalom, rounds up an army and tries to usurp David’s throne by having sex with ten of his concubines. (As usual, we are not told how the concubines felt about all this.) While fleeing David’s army, Absalom’s hair gets caught in a tree, and David’s general thrusts three spears into his heart. This does not put the family squabbles to an end. Bathsheba tricks a senile David into anointing their son Solomon as his successor. When the legitimate heir, David’s older son Adonijah, protests, Solomon has him killed.

King Solomon is credited with fewer homicides than his predecessors and is remembered instead for building the Temple in Jerusalem and for writing the books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs (though with a harem of seven hundred princesses and three hundred concubines, he clearly didn’t spend all his time writing). Most of all he is remembered for his eponymous virtue, “the wisdom of Solomon.” Two prostitutes sharing a room give birth a few days apart. One of the babies dies, and each woman claims that the surviving boy is hers. The wise king adjudicates the dispute by pulling out a sword and threatening to butcher the baby and hand each woman a piece of the bloody corpse. One woman withdraws her claim, and Solomon awards the baby to her. “When all Israel heard of the verdict that the king had rendered, they stood in awe of the king, because they saw that he had divine wisdom in carrying out justice.” 21
The distancing effect of a good story can make us forget the brutality of the world in which it was set. Just imagine a judge in family court today adjudicating a maternity dispute by pulling out a chain saw and threatening to butcher the baby before the disputants’ eyes. Solomon was confident that the more humane woman (we are never told that she was the mother) would reveal herself, and that the other woman was so spiteful that she would allow a baby to be slaughtered in front of her—and he was right! And he must have been prepared, in the event he was wrong, to carry out the butchery or else forfeit all credibility. The women, for their part, must have believed that their wise king was capable of carrying out this grisly murder.

The Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery. People enslave, rape, and murder members of their immediate families. Warlords slaughter civilians indiscriminately, including the children. Women are bought, sold, and plundered like intimacy gadgets. And Yahweh tortures and massacres people by the hundreds of thousands for trivial disobedience or for no reason at all. These atrocities are neither isolated nor obscure. They implicate all the major characters of the Old Testament, the ones that Sunday-school children draw with crayons. And they fall into a continuous plotline that stretches for millennia, from Adam and Eve through Noah, the patriarchs, Moses, Joshua, the judges, Saul, David, Solomon, and beyond. According to the biblical scholar Raymund Schwager, the Hebrew Bible “contains over six hundred passages that explicitly talk about nations, kings, or individuals attacking, destroying, and killing others. . . . Aside from the approximately one thousand verses in which Yahweh himself appears as the direct executioner of violent punishments, and the many texts in which the Lord delivers the criminal to the punisher’s sword, in over one hundred other passages Yahweh expressly gives the command to kill people.”22 Matthew White, a self-described atrocitologist who keeps a database with the estimated death tolls of history’s major wars, massacres, and genocides, counts about 1.2 million deaths from mass killing that are specifically enumerated in the Bible. (He excludes the half million casualties in the war between Judah and Israel described in 2 Chronicles 13 because he considers the body count historically implausible.) The victims of the Noachian flood would add another 20 million or so to the total.23
The good news, of course, is that most of it never happened. Not only is there no evidence that Yahweh inundated the planet and incinerated its cities, but the patriarchs, exodus, conquest, and Jewish empire are almost certainly fictions. Historians have found no mention in Egyptian writings of the departure of a million slaves (which could hardly have escaped the Egyptians’ notice); nor have archaeologists found evidence in the ruins of Jericho or neighboring cities of a sacking around 1200 BCE. And if there was a Davidic empire stretching from the Euphrates to the Red Sea around the turn of the 1st millennium BCE, no one else at the time seemed to have noticed it.24

Modern biblical scholars have established that the Bible is a wiki. It was compiled over half a millennium from writers with different styles, dialects, character names, and conceptions of God, and it was subjected to haphazard editing that left it with many contradictions, duplications, and non sequiturs.

The oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible probably originated in the 10th century BCE. They included origin myths for the local tribes and ruins, and legal codes adapted from neighboring civilizations in the Near East. The texts probably served as a code of frontier justice for the Iron Age tribes that herded livestock and farmed hillsides in the southeastern periphery of Canaan. The tribes began to encroach on the valleys and cities, engaged in some marauding every now and again, and may even have destroyed a city or two. Eventually their myths were adopted by the entire population of Canaan, unifying them with a shared genealogy, a glorious history, a set of taboos to keep them from defecting to foreigners, and an invisible enforcer to keep them from each other’s throats. A first draft was rounded out with a continuous historical narrative around the late 7th to mid-6th century BCE, when the Babylonians conquered the Kingdom of Judah and forced its inhabitants into exile. The final edit was completed after their return to Judah in the 5th century BCE.

Though the historical accounts in the Old Testament are fictitious (or at best artistic reconstructions, like Shakespeare’s historical dramas), they offer a window into the lives and values of Near Eastern civilizations in the mid-1st millennium BCE. Whether or not the Israelites actually engaged in genocide, they certainly thought it was a good idea. The possibility that a woman had a legitimate interest in not being raped or acquired as sexual property did not seem to register in anyone’s mind. The writers of the Bible saw nothing wrong with slavery or with cruel punishments like blinding, stoning, and hacking someone to pieces. Human life held no value in comparison with unthinking obedience to custom and authority.

If you think that by reviewing the literal content of the Hebrew Bible I am trying to impugn the billions of people who revere it today, then you are missing the point. The overwhelming majority of observant Jews and Christians are, needless to say, thoroughly decent people who do not sanction genocide, rape, slavery, or stoning people for frivolous infractions. Their reverence for the Bible is purely talismanic. In recent millennia and centuries the Bible has been spin-doctored, allegorized, superseded by less violent texts (the Talmud among Jews and the New Testament among Christians), or discreetly ignored. And that is the point. Sensibilities toward violence have changed so much that religious people today compartmentalize their attitude to the Bible. They pay it lip service as a symbol of morality, while getting their actual morality from more modern principles.

striktlymi: LWKMD!!! One million likes!!!

Don't try team Islam o oga wieg! You don forget say na vex you dey the last time you guys played. How can you win with Maclatunji as the referee?

okeyxyz: So what's your take on the exchange between these guys? Or you are just "retweeting" for activity and debate?

sam harris: I’m up against a book deadline and have had to step away from blogging for a few months. One of the benefits of this time, as well as one of its frustrations, is that I’ve had to ignore the usual ephemera that might have otherwise captured my attention. For instance, in recent days both Salon and Al Jazeera published outrageous attacks on me and my fellow “new atheists.” The charges? Racism and “Islamophobia” (again). Many readers have written to ask when I will set the record straight. In fact, I consider both articles unworthy of a response, and I was quite happy to have a reason to ignore them. But then I noticed that the columnist Glenn Greenwald had broadcast an approving Tweet about the Al Jazeera piece to his fans (above).

I’ve had pleasant exchanges with Greenwald in the past, so I wrote to him privately to express my concern. As you will see, I came right to the point. I was simply outraged that he would amplify this pernicious charge of racism so thoughtlessly. However, I am even more appalled by his response. The man actually has thought about it. And thinking hasn’t helped.

Here is our unedited exchange:
* * *


On 2 April 2013, Sam Harris wrote:

Glenn—

Before you retweet defamatory garbage about me to 125,000 people, it would nice if you looked at the article from which that joker had mined that “very revealing quote.” The whole point of my original article, written in 2006, was to bemoan the loss of liberal moral clarity in the war on terror—and to worry about the influence of the Christian conservatives in the U.S. and fascists in Europe.

http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/the-end-of-liberalism/

Here is the very revealing quote in context:

Increasingly, Americans will come to believe that the only people hard-headed enough to fight the religious lunatics of the Muslim world are the religious lunatics of the West. Indeed, it is telling that the people who speak with the greatest moral clarity about the current wars in the Middle East are members of the Christian right, whose infatuation with biblical prophecy is nearly as troubling as the ideology of our enemies. Religious dogmatism is now playing both sides of the board in a very dangerous game.

While liberals should be the ones pointing the way beyond this Iron Age madness, they are rendering themselves increasingly irrelevant. Being generally reasonable and tolerant of diversity, liberals should be especially sensitive to the dangers of religious literalism. But they aren’t.

The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.
To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.

Sam


On Apr 2, 2013, Glenn Greenwald wrote:

Sam -

To be honest, I really don’t see how that full quote changes anything. You are indeed saying - for whatever reasons - that the fascists are the ones speaknig most sensibly about Islam, which is all that column claimed.

I know Murtaza’s writings really well and he’s always trustworthy and diligent, and I think he was here, too.

I’m not sure how you can blame me for tweeting an article published in Al Jazeera and written by a respectable commentator, but I’m happy to post your email to me - or some edited version of it as you wish - and tweet that, too.

Glenn Greenwald


On 2 April 2013, Sam Harris wrote:


You have got to be kidding…

A few points that it would be nice to get into your brain:

1. There is absolutely nothing racist about my criticism of Islam. I criticize white, western converts in precisely the same terms—in fact, I am even more critical of them, because they weren’t brainwashed into the faith from birth. And one of my main concerns—always ignored by “trustworthy and diligent” people like Murtaza—is for all the suffering of women, homosexuals, freethinkers, and intellectuals in indigenous Muslim societies. One of my friends (and heroes) is Ayaan Hirsi Ali—whom I’m constantly having to defend from similarly tendentious attacks from my fellow liberals. How you get “racism” out of these convictions, I’ll never know. (But you know how Murtaza would summarize this point: “Harris says, ‘Some of my best friends are black’!”) The truth is that the liberal (multicultural) position on Islam is racist. If a predominantly white community behaved this way—the Left would effortlessly perceive the depth of the problem. Imagine Mormons regularly practicing honor killing or burning embassies over cartoons…

2. I wasn’t making common cause with fascists—I was referring to the terrifying fact (again, back in 2006), that when you heard someone making sense on the subject of radical Islam in Europe—e.g. simply admitting that it really is a problem—a little digging often revealed that they had some very unsavory connections to Anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, neo-Nazi, etc. hate groups. The point of my article was to worry that the defense of civil society was being outsourced to extremists.

3. If you can’t see that Murtaza’s article is an unscrupulous exercise in quote-mining, you’re not paying attention. How can I blame you for retweeting it? The article is defamatory—indeed, it is beneath responding to—and it was destined to be buried in noise until you retweeted it. You endorsed it and amplified its effects—hence my annoyance. What part of that process don’t you understand?

Sam


On Apr 2, 2013, Glenn Greenwald wrote:

Sam -

You can sneer and hurl insults all you want, but I’ve long believed that the crowd of which you’re a part has been flirting with, and at times embracing, Islamophobia. I’m sure you saw the Salon article by Nathan Lean from a couple days ago, which I believe I also tweeted, that made the same point (http://www.salon.com/2013/03/30/dawkins_harris_hitchens_new_atheists_flirt_with_islamophobia/).

I understand “the process” perfectly fine. I think you’re embarrassed that people are now paying attention to some of the darker and uglier sentiments that have been creeping into this form of athesim advocacy, and are lashing out at anyone helping to shine a light on that. A bizarre and wholly irrational fixation on Islam, as opposed to the evils done by other religions, has been masquerdaing in the dark under the banner of rational atheism for way too long.

The fact that you intended to convey a more-in-sorrow-than-anger tone when praising fascists for their uniquely “sensible” view of Islam doesn’t change the fact that you did say exactly what Murtaza said you said.

My offer to publish our whole email exchange and then tweet it still stands so that anyone is able to decide for themselves. Let me know if you’d like me to do that.

Glenn



On 2 April 2013, Sam Harris wrote:


Glenn—

Yes, I saw the Lean piece—also absurdly unfair. The idea that “new atheism” is a cover for a racist hatred of Muslims is ridiculous (and, again, crudely defamatory). I have written an entire book attacking Christianity. And do you know what happens when I or any of my “new atheist” colleagues criticize Christians for their irrational beliefs? They say, “Of course, you feel free to attack us, but you would never have the courage to criticize Islam.” As you can see, our Christian critics follow our work about as well as you do.

Needless to say, there are people who hate Arabs, Somalis, and other immigrants from predominantly Muslim societies for racist reasons. But if you can’t distinguish that sort of blind bigotry from a hatred and concern for dangerous, divisive, and irrational ideas—like a belief in martyrdom, or a notion of male “honor” that entails the virtual enslavement of women and girls—you are doing real harm to our public conversation. Everything I have ever said about Islam refers to the content and consequences of its doctrine. And, again, I have always emphasized that its primary victims are innocent Muslims—especially women and girls.

There is no such thing as “Islamophobia.” This is a term of propaganda designed to protect Islam from the forces of secularism by conflating all criticism of it with racism and xenophobia. And it is doing its job, because people like you have been taken in by it.

Did you happen to see The Book of Mormon? Do you know how the Mormons protested this attack upon their faith? They placed ads for Mormonism in the Playbill. Imagine staging a similar production about Islam: Would it be “bizarre and wholly irrational” for Trey Parker and Matt Stone to worry that the Muslim community might have a different response?

Your treatment of these issues, and of me in this email exchange, has been remarkably disingenuous. If I had endorsed a similarly libelous attack on you and broadcast it to all my readers, you would also be annoyed. Just imagine how you would view me if I then defended my actions in the way that you have here, claiming that you are just “embarrassed” to have been found out to be the racist that you are.

Yes, I think we should publish this. It might be useful for our readers to see how difficult it is to have an honest conversation about these things, even in private.

Sam

—-

Olodostein: Twister, Can't you discern ? Una too like trouble abeg . In the abundance of water, the fool is thirty

This reminds me of when USA was taken unaware and struck on 9/11 , multitudes came out to the streets of America praying, crying for God divine intervention, direction and Wisdom on how to grasp the reality that befell them. So much for their Might...

Na pride go finish Human.

Deep Sight: If you examine carefully what you are saying you will realize that you are in fact seeking to shirk responsibility. You are denying the personal responsibility for actions which we as free willed being must bear. That will not do.

Deep Sight: The responsibility of the omnipotent will be to establish laws that guide the established reality.

ds: Immaterial: Because that which creates matter cannot itself be matter as nothing finite is its own cause.

ds: Transcendental: Because that which creates a universe cannot be itself the same universe as well, following on the same law. It must stand outside of it. Thus, transcend it.

Deep Sight: a perfect God who is so imperfect that it has to constantly return to its work to intervene and help things.

Deep Sight: Now, like a government, the best that God can logically do is to ensure that there is embedded in reality a system of consequences: really no more that speaking the basic law of cause and effect: which as a cycle of happening ensures the self-correction of the super-structure of happenings over time. This is called Karma in Oriental Religions, nemesis, what goes around comes around, you reap what you sow, etc. Nevertheless I will not dwell on this right here but will revert to it later in the thread as the discussion evolves. I should however note very briefly that the consequences of this law of reality often produce more and greater suffering and it could not logically be otherwise, and an omnipotent could not make it different, as that would fall foul of our rule of logical absurdities.

Deep Sight: I have often described God as simply the compound of self-existent laws. Such laws could not logically be otherwise. I would even go so far as to say that the omnipotent did not choose the laws: the laws are a self-existent component of reality - which is in fact exactly what the omnipotent itself is.

Deep Sight: 1. Is it "natural evil" when a lion hunts down an eats a zebra? Is that suffering of the zebra something that an omnipotent entity should do something about to avoid?

Deep Sight: 2. Is it "natural evil" when the earth goes through its very natural cycles of storms, hurricanes, tectonic shifts, earth quakes, solar storms, and such other perfectly natural phenomena? Are such natural phenomena something that an omnipotent entity should stop, in the scheme of things?

Deep Sight: Good evening, noble, kind and gentle sir.

donlyone: If you are as enlightened as you claim, you would have noticed that nowhere in my post did I say I support the 'witch pressing' explaination of what you call sleep paralysis, my point is that we should not take what people say at 'face value' just as you would not take traditional african view at face value.

When I spoke of what happened to me, I did no say it was witches or demons but, I only wrote I expirienced, but you made your own conclusion.

donlyone: The research is rubbish, take it from me, I have been beaten severely in my dream several times and usually woke up with bruses and one time I had a long deep scratch on my leg.
I never tell my parents for fear of being taken to church for "deliverance".

I still remeber vividly,just before dawn, how someone sat on both my legs, my arms were paralysed but my eyes were open, yes, I was looking around the room, there was a silhouette over my legs. I was praying with my mind like JESUS PLS SAVE ME.

You don't have to believe in God, but please don't say the supernatural does not exist.

donlyone: Also no where in your post did adress the issue of same researches carried out by different researchers yielding OPPOSITE RESULTS as in the case of COCACOLA.
What is your explanation for foods and drugs that were approved as healthy for consumption based on research only for such foods and drugs to turn out very harmful.

donlyone: When it comes to research, there is always a MARGIN OF ERROR which is usually understated. You approve of this research as if it has STOOD THE TEST OF TIME. When other researches are carried will Know if indeed its correct.

donlyone: Next time you want prove a point, refrain from name calling, let points and reasoning speak for you. NAME CALLING in arguement is for BUSH MEN

donlyone: What load of crap.
Its like anything a white man says is true to black people. One research concluded that that black people are not intelligent, another one, that black women are not beautiful, and we accept that rubbish.

Mzsolex: for the last time, am not here to debate with you guys... I was only here to make a point. Which is leave xtrians be. Thank y'all for all the analysis, the curse words, your time.... With that am done here. #phreaks

Olodostein: The young man has said times without number that he Love his wife. It is because of this Love that he is seeking solution for his household. He come across as compromising and not someone that can't take responsibility for his problems and actions. But from your posts, You are a very negative person. The bitterness in your heart has blinded your eyes to the truth. You are a very bitter woman/person and have underlying issues that you need to take care of. What manner of woman in her husband house should be posting at 2:30am in the morning ready for an E-fight ? With the manner by which you came across, your husband could be the one that adopted your Surname instead of the other way round. You need Jesus wholeheartedly in your house.

Farabale or else you shall see where Psychology/Theology go hand in hand and your convert personality and mental sickness unlocked in this thread for people to see you for who you really are..... your posts are riddled with clues.

dorox: I think it is bad manners quoting a lengthy post only to make a short reply, but not in the case of this gem by wiegraf. It deserves to be Quoted in full a thousand times and given a million likes for its sheer beauty.
It is my hope that donlyone and his ilk have enough sense to understand what you have written, otherwise the time and effort you used in creating this beautiful write up would have been in vain.

donlyone: What load of crap.
Its like anything a white man says is true to black people. One research concluded that that black people are not intelligent, another one, that black women are not beautiful, and we accept that rubbish.

Scientists have been known to doctor evidence to support their claims also alot of scientific ideologies are accepted on faith. For instance, on this topic, people are talking about "SELF INFLICTED INJURIES, SLEEP WALKING and SLEEP PARALYSIS in the same logic.

How can you harm yourself physically when you are paralysed?

wiki: Sleep paralysis has been linked to disorders such as narcolepsy, migraines, anxiety disorders, and obstructive sleep apnea; however, it can also occur in isolation

donlyone: Scientists have been known to doctor evidence to support their claims also alot of scientific ideologies are accepted on faith.

Reyginus: Wiegraf, you are trying to miss the point too. The post you are quoting is isolated to the point my friend ezme is trying to pass across. As we've witnessed so far, he questions the basis for a event told by AnOnimus, which is geered towards countering sleep paralysis, to be true, and ends up neglecting to do same for sleep paralysis and somnambulism respectively. The phenomenon we should be out to understand. Now, he's lying on the word 'document' as the divide and determining factor, and the problem is even more complicated. Is the word now the yardstick for measuring true and false events, that I'd like to know?

musKeeto: Lmao... U and your long educative posts... You estimate their comprehension abilities too high imo...


Watch him come back and ask you to speak English... Lol

Mzsolex: am not gonna kip arguing wit you guys... Av made my point.

Mzsolex: last time checked you still have the free will to believe what you want... The fact that they tell this stories doesn't mean you should believe them. They are only spreading this for the sake of the one's that can still be saved... They don't slit your throat, they don't burn your house, they don't bomb you for what you chose to beleive in. They only spread the word hoping someone's out there can be saved through it.

Mzsolex: The fact that they tell this stories doesn't mean you should believe them

livescience: During the most dream-filled phase of sleep, our muscles become paralyzed, preventing the body from acting out what's going on in the brain. Now, researchers have discovered the brain chemicals that keep the body still in sleep.

The findings could be helpful for treating sleep disorders, the scientists report Wednesday (July 18) in The Journal of Neuroscience.

The brain chemicals kick into action during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, a phase that usually begins about 90 minutes into a night's rest. During REM, the brain is very active, and dreams are at their most intense. But the voluntary muscles of the body — arms, legs, fingers, anything that is under conscious control — are paralyzed.

This paralysis keeps people still even as their brains are acting out fantastical scenarios; it's also the reason people sometimes experience sleep paralysis, or the experience of waking up while the muscles are still frozen. This sensation has been the basis for myths such as the succubus and the incubus, demons said to pin people down in their sleep, usually to have sex with them. [Top 10 Spooky Sleep Disorders]

The chemistry of sleep

Exactly how the muscles are paralyzed has been a mystery, however. Early studies pegged a neurotransmitter called glycine as the culprit, but paralysis still occurred even when the receptors that read glycine's presence were blocked, disproving that notion.

So University of Toronto researchers Patricia Brooks and John Peever cast a wider net. They focused on two different nerve receptors in the voluntary muscles, one called metabotropic GABAB and one called ionotropic GABAA/glycine. The latter receptor responds to both glycine and a different communication chemical called gamma-aminobutyric acid, or GABA, while the first responds to GABA and not glycine.

The researchers used drugs to "switch off" these receptors in rats and discovered that the only way to prevent sleep paralysis during REM was to shut both types off at the same time. What that means is that glycine alone isn't enough to paralyze the muscles. You need GABA, too.

Treating sleep disorders

Understanding this alphabet soup of neurotransmitters is important for people who have sleep disorders, especially an odd condition called REM behavior disorder. In this disorder, people don't become paralyzed during REM sleep. That means they act out their dreams, talking, thrashing and even punching or hitting in their sleep.

Currently, Clonazepam, an antipsychotic drug, is used to treat REM behavior disorder. The new study could point to new treatments for the problem, sleep researcher Dennis McGinty of the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the study, said in a statement. The researchers hope that the results could help explain the link between REM behavior disorder and more deadly conditions.

"Understanding the precise mechanism behind these chemicals’ role in REM sleep disorder is particularly important because about 80 percent of people who have it eventually develop a neurodegenerative disease, such as Parkinson’s disease," Peever said. "REM sleep behavior disorder could be an early marker of these diseases, and curing it may help prevent or even stop their development."

Reyginus: Really? This is getting interesting. And Post 94 too, your reply to AnOnimus was for the 'camera challenge' ton. The stench of biasm in thought ooze when you say things like this. 'I will question the authenticity of his claim, but the authenticity of a study performed somewhere, I know not I wouldn't dare question'. To you, how sensible?

donlyone: The research is rubbish, take it from me, I have been beaten severely in my dream several times and usually woke up with bruses and one time I had a long deep scratch on my leg.
I never tell my parents for fear of being taken to church for "deliverance".

I still remeber vividly,just before dawn, how someone sat on both my legs, my arms were paralysed but my eyes were open, yes, I was looking around the room, there was a silhouette over my legs. I was praying with my mind like JESUS PLS SAVE ME.

You don't have to believe in God, but please don't say the supernatural does not exist.

obadiah777: WELL IT IS WHAT IT IS. ARCHAIC BELIEFS IS THE FOUNDATION OF OUR SOCIETY. BUT LET ME BE THE FIRST TO TELL YOU THAT OTHER FORCES DO EXIST, HOWEVER ALL FORCES AND DOMINIONS BELONG TO GOD. PEOPLE TAPPING INTO OTHER FORCES ARE COMMITTING SPIRITUAL ADULTERY BECAUSE THEY ARE FORNICATING WITH THE LORDS WOMAN. YES, POWERS-DOCTRINES-PHILOSOPHIES ARE CALLED WOMEN. SO MESSING WITH THE POWERS NOT ALLOWED BY GOD MEANS YOU ARE COMMITTING SPIRITUAL ADULTERY. SO THOSE POWERS OF WITCHCRAFT DO EXIST. NEWLOADED IS WITHIN REASON AND COMPLETELY SANE WHEN HE REASONS ALONG THE LINE OF PEOPLE DOING JUJU. JUJU DOES EXIST. HOWEVER ALL POWERS BELONG TO THE LORD. THOSE DOING JUJU ARE TAPPING INTO POWERS ON THE LEFT HAND SIDE OF GOD. THE LORD ONLY ALLOWS YOU TO TAP INTO POWERS ON THE RIGHTEOUS SIDE WHICH IS THE RIGHT HAND SIDE. THOSE TAPPING INTO THE LEFT HAND SIDE ARE THOSE INTO WITCHCRAFT, SORCERY, ETC ETC AND THIS IS CALLED SPIRITUAL ADULTERY. YOU ARE FORNICATING WITH THE LORDS WOMAN

COLOSIANS 1 VS 16 For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: << ALL POWERS BOTH GOOD AND BAD WERE CREATED FOR HIM BY HIM. HE CREATED THE EVIL POWER NOT FOR PEOPLE TO TAP INTO BUT FOR HIMSELF TO USE AS A REPROACH TO THOSE WHO DESERVE IT

EPHESIANS 6 VS 12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. <<< LETS YOU KNOW THERE ARE MANY PEOPLE IN THIS WORLD TAPPING INTO THAT LEFT HAND POWER.

I GUESS MY OVER-ALL POINT IS, NEWLOADED IS WITHIN REASONABLE REASON TO THINK ALONG THE LINES HE DID BECAUSE IT IS A REALITY. PEOPLE DO JUJU.

obadiah777: HARD TO REASON WITH A PERSON WHO SAYS THE BOLDED. YOU ARE A LOCAL CHAMPION. THIS IS THE SPEECH PATTERN OF AN UNEDUCATED CLOSE MINDED PERSON. THE MAN IS NOT IN COMPETITION WITH THE WHOLE WORLD. THIS LIFE IS NOT A COMPETITION. WHAT IS ALL THIS 'HIS MATES' TALK ? *SMDH* YOU ARE CRAZY, WOMAN