Snow Pics

[Jeff]

[quote="john_kidder
The framers ....were trying to prevent tyranny. ..from a state which said that one man and one religion should dominate all - ....they were products of the Enlightenment - liberal humanists to a man, [/quote]

The Enlightenment 8) "The age of Reason"

Jefferson used the term with some regularity in his writings. Liberals?? by today's standards ?? Sure, why not.

Anyone doesn't think climate change is real either hasn't been paying attention the last 50 years or wasn't paying attention in High School history & science. Criminy, they're digging up marine fossils in Montana !!

Humans are well on their way to deforesting virtually the entire planet. CO2 levels high? Care to estimate how much CO2 the Amazon Basin soaked up daily, prior to decimation. Same with North America, Europe & Asia. This is where the wood in our guitars came from.

Hundreds of freaking Multi Million population Cities all over the planet, birth rate in the undeveloped world is astounding.

Transportation systems clogged with traffic. Highways designed to move traffic at 60 - 70 mph, now you're lucky if you do 25 mph at peak times.

This, as a daily routine is, in my opinion, hardly indicative of enlightened society:

Problem I have is the folks at the helm right now ain't the Founding Fathers.

Founding fathers did their job magnificently, founded a Nation,
went home & tended their farms.

Al Gore may very well be a Pulitzer Prize winning genius, I don't know for sure. I do know he is a second generation career politician, Bios I've read say he has a degree in "Government" from an Ivy League school, attended some sort of Divinity School & took a shot at law school. Finishing neither.

Al's daddy, Albert Gore, Sr., retired after 32 years as Representative and Senator from Tennessee. Al applied for the job & the rest is history.

2 generations of "Public Service" from the Gore family.

And !!! Al isn't alone, most all the major political players have done nothing but "Public Service" for a living. By all outward appearances it's a lucrative living.

From time to time reports of corruption have surfaced. Presidential Pardons granted in the last few days of office is a quaint little custom. Mother Theresa a few of these folks are not:?

So.. yes I am a bit skeptical, this is no game for false prophets.

 

[JerryR]

Anyone doesn't think climate change is real either hasn't been paying attention the last 50 years or wasn't paying attention in High School history & science. Criminy, they're digging up marine fossils in Montana !!

Aw - comeon - y'all know the world was made in 4,004 BC and all these here fossils are the work of the devil to lead the righteous astray :twisted:

 

[West R Lee]

John,

It's extemely hard for me to sound intelligent anytime, but at 4:30 a.m. ? "Tyranny" is what I meant. Regardless, they were trying to ensure that government would never be allowed to declare a "State Religion", not prevent a public show of Christianity, or create an environment in which Christianity and government could not coexist. The entire concept has deliberately and brilliantly been taken out of the context by liberals, and the origional intent is lost to many.

A very good book that goes into great detail about liberal abuse of our court system was written by a man named Bill Sammons, "At Any Cost". Mr. Sammon went to Florida immediately upon the deadlock of the 2000 election. He covered much of the court proceedings and "vote counting" in Florida and the gross manipulation of our court system by the Democrats, who insisted on disenfranchising the votes of the very people who gave them the right to abuse the system, our military. A true disgrace. Bush won the popular vote, the electoral college, and in the courts, yet there are still those quacks who insist that his election was illegitimate. I would think the behavior exibited in Florida by the Gore camp in making a circus out of our legal system would infuriate any American, Republican or sane Democrat. What a mockery! I actually found the entire situation to be somewhat embarressing, wondering what the rest of the world must think of our system?

The little woman is still decorating out there. We're still trying to make our temporary home presentable, and with all these relatives coming in, still so much to do.....painting, puttying, sanding, general cleaning, decorating. Folks coming in from Oklahoma and Alabama...always my favorite time of the year. Things will be easier next year at "The Lazy B".

Any ideas on your house John?

West

 

[coastie99]

Thought some of you guys down south (cj, west) would like to see what christmas looks like up here in the north. Enjoy.

]

Hey Tim !

Be nice if Santa brought you one of these...................

 

[countryboy]

I'll take 18" of snow any day over this nightmare we had a couple of years ago!!!!

Merry Christmas everyone!!!!

CountryBoy

 

[Scratch]

Anyone doesn't think climate change is real either hasn't been paying attention the last 50 years or wasn't paying attention in High School history & science. Criminy, they're digging up marine fossils in Montana !!

Aw - comeon - y'all know the world was made in 4,004 BC and all these here fossils are the work of the devil to lead the righteous astray :twisted:

A work of God, not satan, JR; and easily explained in the book of Genesis (7-9). But ya gotta believe in the one thing science can't explain... Faith!! Merry Christmas, my Guild bro...

 

[cjd-player]

+1 for Scratch

Plus, a couple of thoughts about science. The established "scientific method" is a wonderful, structured and diciplined methodology to investigate, understand, and exploit (in a good way, not bad or to excess) the wonderous universe around us. However, the scientific method has one gaping void when it comes to historical events. The scientific method can only investigate and measure repeatable events. If an event happend or happens only once, then the scientific method is useless, and we are left only to conjecture and speculation. Thus, science (the scientific method) can never proove or disprove a world-wide flood, the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs, the formation of the earth, the continents, the solar system, or even the universe. In the end, all of these issues are issues of faith. There are those who believe in a God, whose creation is documented in the Bible, and there are those who believe in some sort of physio-chemical phenomenon as the creation of the universe, and other variations/combinations of the two.

As a scientist by profession, I cannot make the leap of faith to a physio-chemical phenomenon as the creation of the universe. I believe there is simply too much hard evidence to support the Biblical account of creation and the meaning of life. Not evidence that is sufficient for scientific proof by the scientific method, but evidence that is consistent with the Biblical account. I cannot make the leap of faith to say that life is just a meaningless happenstance of a freak combination of chemicals and heat.

Whether we recognise them or not, these issues are foundational to the fundamental beliefs that each of us holds. We either have worth because we were created for a reason and purpose, or we are a random, meaningless, and finite series of chemical reactions.

Some other food-for-thought nuggets about science (most are quite pollitically incorrect, so are rarely publshed in the media): If there was a world-wide flood, we have no pre-flood evidence to know what the world was like. So all of the geological and other evidence of the origins of the earth and its features is contaminated.

Scientists have shown (using the scientific method) that the speed of light is not a constant, and has changed significantly even within the past 100 years. So this throws out most of the assumptions involved in so-called carbon dating.

The post-erruption events at Mt. St. Helens have disproved many prevoius hypotheses (which are usually called theories, but incorrectly so according to the scientific method) about geology. For example, petrified wood formed at the bottom of the lake after just a few years, and sediment layers were "incorrect".

Just some food for thought if you choose to think about it.

 

[HoboKen]

I believe we have moved away from snow pics.....But, having done so.......

I guess I'm Neo-Thomistic in my philosophy. As far as I am concerned no matter how much we learn about how everything was created....sort of like blind men trying to describe an elephant when all each is feeling is only one part of the elephant, .....in fact the more we learn about how it was done, the more I come to believe even more that as I survey in awsome wonder, just what his hands have made, I can't help but proclaim My God how great thou ar't. The song was voted one of the top five greatest gospel songs ever written......I know of no other song that leaves me so drained and yet so alive after I sing it in our Gospel Group presentations. If I only bought the Guild JF-55-12 to do one song, How Great Thou Ar't would be that song.....and it deserves no less than a Guild JF-55-12 to play it on!

HoboKen

 

[West R Lee]

Very profound by both of you.

West

 

[cjd-player]

I believe we have moved away from snow pics

We haven't had snow here in the 'burgh for a couple of weeks. So I can't post any snow pics. Anybody want to see rain?

How Great Thou Ar't

Amen and Amen

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So HoboKen, do you think we're down for the count without Fast Wilie? I do. (Just something else profound to talk about while waiting for snow :mrgreen: .)
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[dreadnut]

Albert Einstein said "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."

So true, they're not mutually exclusive, folks. Science doesn't disprove God's existence, it proves it. Einstein also said "I want to know the mind of God, science is just the details."

I can only marvel at the consistency of design, from the smallest atom to the solar system to galaxies and beyond, everything is based upon a nucleus surrounded by orbiting bodies...

 

[Guildmark]

I've come to believe this, too, Dread. Science cannot disprove God. It can only prove how he did it.

Raw material for a song that's been sitting in my desk for a few years:
Well, I'm glad they've proved the Big Bang Theory.
That's news that I can use.
But I got one more question, Fellas:
Who lit the fuse?

Preliminary title: "Clients of Science"

 

[john_kidder]

Sitting around with my son tonight, talking about religion and science and things, I remembered this bit from Robert Bringhurst’s “Masterworks of the Haida Mythtellers”. It feels appropriate to this discussion.

• 
  "You can no more record all the stories in a mythology that you can write down all the sentences in a language. A mythology is not a fixed body of stories; it is an open set. It is a narrative ecology: a watershed, a forest, a community of stories that are born and die and interbreed with one another and with stories from outside.
  
  The mythteller’s calling differs little from the scientist’s. It is to elucidate the structure and the workings of the world. Myths are stories that investigate the nature of the world (whereas novels, for example, more often look at questions of propriuetary interest to human beings alone). A genuine mythology is a systematically elaborated, extended, interconnected and adaptable set of myths. It is a kind of science in narrative form.
  
  Science too is an ecology of ideas. Science, in fact, is a kind of mythology in computational form. When science is in favour and mythology is not, it is widely claimed that science is “true” and mythology is “false”. This claim proves, on close inspection, less a theorem in science’s defense than a partisan slogan. Both science and mythology aspire to be true, and both for that reason are perpetually under revision for as long as they are alive. Both lapse into dogma when these revisions stop. Where they are healthy, both mythology and science are as faithful to the real as their practitioners can make them, although it seems to be an axiom that neither ever perfectly succeeds."

 

[Guildmark]

Sounds like an evening well spent, John. Most of us realize that answers to our questions only beget more questions. That's true for faith and science. I'm often amused that mere humans might believe their tiny little heads could ever contain or comprehend all the answers, even if we do finally find them. I don't happen to believe we were ever intended to, and thinking we can is blasphemy and hubris, but making room for corrections and additional understanding in both science and faith is a worthy and proper activity in the universe. Isaac Asimov (atheist that he was) wrote a clever short story titled "The Final Question" which addressed this matter of what might occur if we finally learned all the answers. I'd love to give away the ending, but ..... :wink: ..... nah!

Cheers! And Happy New Year to all!

 

[Scratch]

Agree that mythology and science aspire to reveal truth. Loyal to neither, I rather believe in John 14:6... There I find truth and peace...

 

[Guildmark]

No argument with that, Scratch.

1 Timothy 3: 8-10
There are deep truths of the faith, too.

 

[West R Lee]

Obviously, being from Texas, I'm not nearly as articulate as you gentleman. I would simply like to ad that to me, the word faith by definition, means to believe, sometimes in the absence of scientific proof. I don't need scientific proof.

I see God's work all around me each day. I see in in birth and in death. I see it in the weather and on this earth. I see God's work in the heavens. I'd like a scientist to explain to me exactly where the heavens end? When I look at the stars each night, where do they stop? Is there a wall at the end of the stars? Some things simply defy explanation and can't be comprehended by our finite minds.

West

 

[dreadnut]

Another astute observation by a prominent scientist, Carl Sagan:

" In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."

 

[Tim]

Figured I'd get you guys back on track with some pics of the new dumping we had yesterday.

[/quote]

 

[HoboKen]

Ah yes.......SNOW!

As I made my was this past Thursday from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh there is a long winding hill up the side of the mountain onto the Somerset Plateau via the PA Turnpike tunnel leading out onto the plateau. Rain and fog in the valley...........freezing rain and glaze ice met us as we all skated out of the tunnel onto the plateau......

"And I'm up in Somerset, and the snow plow ain't come yet,
Pennsylvania Turnpike, I'm stuck on you!"

And it was me who talked of only wanting to see ice........in my glass....not on the roads. Raiders of the Lost Ark.......Snakes, I hate Snakes!" Graders (and drivers) of the Lost Turnpike.... "ICE....I HATE ICE!!"

HoboKen