Landlord

Taylor, does your fiance's name happen to be Becky Sidel? Looks like her, if not. Also, Vince, I'm sorry I posted my thread in the correct forum, next time I'll cheat

How is this different than the picture thread?

Going back to the "no, or very little, evidence that points towards the existence of God", I'd be interested to see what Huser_x or others would argue against what I claim to be evidence, the universal morality of human beings (my super way too long post a while back). I'm sorry if I missed someone directly countering that post, I know HuskersNow mentioned it a bit but I don't think anyone else said much, I cold be wrong though I've been kind of out of wack the last day and a half.

Really like the man cave , I absolutely love nice cozy basements such as that one.

If you're doing a season long one, I would suggest using a few songs, or else something that is really long. Too much footage to accurately cram into a 3-4 minute song, 7-9 minutes would probably be best. Here's my suggestions: Red - Wasting Time (has a lot of heavy beast that would be good to sync hits up to) Escape The Fate - The Webs We Weave Dropping Daylight - Brace Yourself Dead By Sunrise - Inside of Me Breaking Benjamin - Crawl not suggesting all of them, just think they are all options (but I would prefer you don't use Breaking Benjamin , they are lousy)

Bump...freaking board software is weirrddddd, it still says knapplc is the last to post in this thread

It actually was really mild mannered and respectful (for the most part).

I used to post a lot like WVHusker did. I'm not really sure what it is, but it feels as I get older (I've been posting on different message boards for about...7 years now, which is a long time for a young person like myself), I just can't be bothered to muster up the energy to form coherent thoughts on a lot of topics, so I post less and less (ie I only post in threads that are REALLY interesting...when in the past I would post in threads that were mildly interesting or weren't really that interesting at all). See what I mean? I have no idea if that even made sense, the only thread I can bother putting a lot of time into is the religion debate thread.

Do you want me to accept that you define your beliefs on so many illogical and irrational contradictions? Fine...I accept it. The real question is do you accept that? Do you accept the fact that you stated so many contradictions yet continue to have faith in its existence? Accept whatever you want. You think they are contradictions, I think they make perfect sense, I tried explaining it, but you kept saying the same things. Maybe you're right, maybe I'm right, no point in continuing on with it if the way I see it doesn't make sense to you (or maybe you just dismissed my argument altogether...that's ok too).

My dorm room from last semester (living at home now) click for full-size

I really enjoyed this thread until the point where huskerjack came in...there's no point in arguing if you aren't going to listen to what the other says. Now I will just watch knapplc and Husker_x go at it.

I mean a real one, not the dumb board software default one .

Why are you posting in this thread again? You realize we are talking about God? I don't know what you think I am redefining? I was merely trying to provide a different way of perceiving how God most likely works. This is taken out of context, you know, just a little bit. I said it would be impossible for an omnipotent being to create a society of free souls without also creating an independent world. You are the one who keeps trying to make the point how God operates within logic and reason, so I don't know why this is hard to understand for you. Omnipotence doesn't allow a being to do that which is intrisically impossible. If you were to say "God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it", you haven't really said anything about God at all. All things are possible with God, intrinsic impossibilities (such as creating a race of free creatures without creating an independent world) are not things at all, but nonentities, and thus, impossible.

Can we add a favicon? Pleaseeee? I could definitely help with CSS stuff too, if needed.

I really believe our offense will be just fine next year. Zac, or Cody, whoever gets the nod, will be healthy (to start out at least), we return everyone but Hickman (which just means players are going to get better, and this year really seems like an anomaly to me. It seems that as soon as things weren't working, the entire coaching staff decided to cut our losses and make sure the offense didn't hurt the team, instead of trying to use the offense to help the team. I really think that if they hadn't decided to do that, we might have lost some more games (that is if we kept trying to run a real offense, instead of just deciding not to) but I think we possibly could have won some that we lost (namely Texas), and I really think that since we aren't going to give up before we even try next year, things will work out well!

I might have to! I'm currently working on three different site designs, plus always getting requests from the athletic department and individual teams at Wayne to do posters, and etc., I barely have time to make sigs anymore. I really enjoy making them for you guys though, and I like seeing the gratitude when I finish one, so for right now they stay free . Besides, who would pay for a signature? edit: huskerguy, really like those, the black stroke on the players makes them look really clean

Faith itself is neither good nor bad, it's entirely dependent on what you place your faith in. After reading his post, I've come to realize that I am strikingly similar to Knapplc. I have my doubts about a lot of things that are cornerstones to Christianity (never doubts about my salvation or about Jesus...but about the teachings and how one should try to live their life, and what is truly right), and I spend the majority of my life looking for ultimate truth, and it's hard to deal with sometimes. Being a college student, I can't tell you how frustrating it is to be a Christian and hang out with a Christian crowd, but not to have others share your skepticism and to judge you when you ask questions or challenge things that other people blindly accept. Despite all that though, Jesus saved my life as far as I can tell (of course I'm sure some of you will say that's just my self-justification) and I try my best to repay Him for it, which is all He asks. This is an issue I haven't really decided for myself, because it has a few factors involved in it. I know my grandparents are old-school Christian types. They go to services, they like gospel music, and after church on Sunday, they go to lunch with some friends and then have a nap. As far as I can tell they don't proselytize or engage in scare tactics with strangers. How could anyone construe their faith as harmful? However. The issue I take with faith is this: it is essentially the end of questioning. Ask a creationist how we have a universe or anything in it. Their answer: God did it. Well, you might as well say magic did it. The conversation is now over. And more generally, what is the actual value of adhering to a claim you have no evidence for? Why is it that when it comes to a god claim this is suddenly a virtue? Same Harris likes to use the example of a man who believes he has a giant diamond buried under his backyard. The man has never seen the diamond, though, and nor does he have any evidence of its existence. But it brings him comfort. He likes the idea of the diamond. Now we have some questions to ask ourselves. Is this man justified in his belief? Further, is his belief a good or moral thing? Will this belief influence in any respect his behavior? It's reasonable to assume that a man who believes his has a diamond under his lawn might 'take no care for the morrow.' He might blow his life savings on junk. Bottom line, what's the net gain of his belief? The other issue is that by the measure of faith––belief without evidence––you can literally believe anything you want to. Do you think Muslims are any less zealous than you, or Hindus, or Scientologists? All major religions also have a stickler claim of exclusivity, now leaving us with a cosmic game of Russian Roulette. So, maybe you can answer this. Why one over the other? You're asking me why Christianity, and not Islam or Buddhism, etc.? The answer to that lies in the gospel. When you only look at the philosophical side of things, there is no argument to choose any 'religion' over the other because they all boil down to exactly the same thing. The differences lie in the details, and the gospel of Jesus Christ has more credence, as far as I can tell in my search for truth, than any other religion. I could answer by saying "because I have felt God in my life", and I sincerely believe that I have, but so have billions of others of different faiths than me, so that is a strawman argument. Edit: Maybe it's just me, but I am really, really enjoying this thread.

Here is what C.S. Lewis believes regarding how to know if there is a higher being or not (Note: This isn't even him trying to prove the existence of the Christian God, he has different arguments for that entirely, this is just his philosophy regarding some kind of higher intelligence), I apologize if it gets long, but I know it's helped me make sense of things a bit. Ever since childhood, we have all experienced times where someone gets the raw end of a deal, and you hear the "How would you like it if someone did that to you?" or "Come on, you promised", etc. This is a universal feeling between all humans, and it isn't only a feeling that something displeases you personally, it's an appeal to some kind of standard or behavior that we expect other people to know about and live up to. This is a common thing I'm sure everyone would agree, and when a person is pleading for someone else to live up to this standard, the other person rarely responds "Screw your standards.", instead they try and find some way to justify their actions so that they don't really go against the standard at all. It looks a lot like both parties involved had some kind of idea of a Law or Rule of decent behavior or morality, whatever you want to call it, that they both agreed upon. Now this Law or Rule (let's call it a law), back in the days of the older thinkers, used to be called the Law of Nature. They didn't mean gravity or genes when they talked about laws of nature, they meant the law of right and wrong, or the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all of us are governed by what we call natural laws today (gravity, genetics, etc.), that man also had this Law of Human Nature, but the difference was that it was the only law which we could actually choose to disobey. The Law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that everybody knew it by nature, that the idea of morality was obvious to every one, and that it didn't need to be taught, speaking for the majority. Now the first thing most would argue is that this Law is unsound, since different civilizations, cultures, ages, etc. have different moralities, but that isn't really true. There are differences between groups sure, but there is never anything even close to a total difference. What does that mean exactly? Think of a civilization where people were admired and worshiped for running away from battle, or where children looked up in pride at someone who betrayed the people who trusted him, it just doesn't work, and there aren't any examples of that kind of morality in any recorded history. Men have disagreed about who you should be unselfish towards or how many wives you should have, but they don't disagree that you shouldn't always put yourself first or that you should take every woman you like (again, speaking for the majority of people, there will always be perversions of everything). Even people who claim not to believe in a Right and Wrong still ultimately argue in their favor. If someone breaks a promise to you, and you try breaking one back to him he will complain about it being unfair. A nation may say that treaties don't matter, but then they say the treaty they were trying to break was an unfair one. But if treaties don't matter, or if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong, then what's the difference between a fair and unfair treaty? If you can accept the existence of a universal Law of Right and Wrong then the next point is that none of us are really keeping the Law. Every single day we all fail to practice the behavior that we expect out of those around us (even if you don't believe in a universal moral code you would still probably agree with this, unless you have shamefully low standards of decency), and we all try and come up with excuses or justifications, which serves as more evidence that we all believe in this Law of Nature. After all, if we don't believe in universal decency, why do we try and justify our actions? And I'm not just talking about petty things like being late to work, I'm talking about lying to yourself. I'm talking about when you're married and you take a peek down another woman's blouse, but tell yourself that your eyes were just wondering, or about when you pass someone accepting donations for charity, and you decide that you shouldn't be bothered wasting your time just to give a dollar. So what does this tell us about the universe we live in? Obviously, as far as we can remember men have been trying to figure out what the universe really is, how it came to be, etc., and there are two popular opinions. The first is the materialist view, that says matter and space just happen to exist, and nobody knows why. Everything just happened the way it due to chance. The other view is the religious view. According to it, there was something behind the creation of everything, and that it is conscious, has a purpose and prefers one thing to another. And on this view it made the universe, partly for reasons unknown to us but partly to creat creatures like itself - that is creatures that have the ability to think and reason. Now the question "why anything comes to be" is not really a scientific question, not knocking science, but it's job is to observe what can be seen as existing. The statement that there is such a thing behind the things science observes, or that there isn't are not statements science can make, and the more scientific a man is the more he would agree with this statement. Even if science had all knowledge of everything in the whole universe, the questions "Why is there a universe?" or "Does it have any meaning?" would remain the same. Given that, if there is something behind the creation of the Universe, it will either have to remain unknown or will have to reveal itself in some other way. The great side of this seemingly bleak situation is that there is one thing in the universe that we know more about than we could learn from external observation, and that is ourselves, because we obviously do not only observe men, but we are men. I guess you could say we have "inside information". Since we do have this intimate knowledge of ourselves, we know that we find ourselves under this universal moral law, which we didn't create, but that we still can not escape. Now anyone studying Man from the outside would have no clue as to this moral law, because he could only observe what we do (the same as science can only observe what nature does) when the moral law is about what we ought to do. The final point is this. If there is a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe - the same way that an architect of a house could not actually be a wall or ceiling or stairway. The only way it could reveal itself would be inside of ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way, which is exactly what happens inside of all of us. Ok yeah, that was really long, sorry Anyways, that is the basis (I actually paraphrased the best I could), and I can post more if it generates responses.

Default, you look a lot like a friend of mine, and your wife and little girl are gorgeous! How old is she? Minnesota Husker, what does a guy have to do to get up on the roof with you? Man that is really neat.

Faith itself is neither good nor bad, it's entirely dependent on what you place your faith in. After reading his post, I've come to realize that I am strikingly similar to Knapplc. I have my doubts about a lot of things that are cornerstones to Christianity (never doubts about my salvation or about Jesus...but about the teachings and how one should try to live their life, and what is truly right), and I spend the majority of my life looking for ultimate truth, and it's hard to deal with sometimes. Being a college student, I can't tell you how frustrating it is to be a Christian and hang out with a Christian crowd, but not to have others share your skepticism and to judge you when you ask questions or challenge things that other people blindly accept. Despite all that though, Jesus saved my life as far as I can tell (of course I'm sure some of you will say that's just my self-justification) and I try my best to repay Him for it, which is all He asks.

http://www.huskerboard.com/index.php?/topic/41224-internet-stalker-resource-thread/ :yeah :yeah

Most boards have one of these, so either we are just unique, or there is something about a picture thread that is against the rules, so I guess we'll find out which soon! Post a picture of yourself, something you own or whatever, or comment on other people's pictures! I'll start: From the Wayne State College White Out volleyball game this year Spiffied up for a dance

Why not just start a picture thread?

2nd Finally! After the OC nomination I was scared people would forget about me, thanks guys!

In my opinion, God did not want humans to sin, and did not plan for us to fall, but that doesn't prove his lack of omnipotence. Omnipotence is defined as a deity being able to do ____________, with the key word being able. God could have prevented us from sinning, but the only way that is possible is to take away free will, but since the primary reason we were created was because of love, God chose not to make us "slaves" of his desire, so to speak, but gave us the ability to choose our ways for ourselves. Free will, even though it makes evil possible, is the only way that there can be any worthwhile love or goodness in the world. The happiness God designed for us is the happiness of being voluntarily united to Him and to each other. Of course God knew that with this free will things could go wrong, and we could choose ourselves and not God, but apparently He thought it was worth the risk. The thing is you can't really disagree with that, because God is the reason that you are able to disagree in the first place, so we can't be correct and He wrong, it would be like cutting off the branch that you are sitting on. The most popular argument I have heard against God/religion is the problem of God knowing all in conjunction with having free will. The difficulty in this is thinking that God progresses along the timeline with us, or in other words, that God has a past, present and future, but that He can "see ahead" on the timeline. If that were true, if God foresaw our actions, then you would be right, there would be no true freedom in the universe. But suppose God is outside of time. In that case, what we call 'tomorrow' is visible to Him much the same way that 'today' is visible. Every moment in time is 'now' to God, so he doesn't see you doing things yesterday, he simply sees you doing them, because even though you have lost yesterday (meaning it no longer exists for you), He has not. You never suppose that your actions at this very moment are any "less" free than future actions because God knows what you are doing right now, well He knows tomorrow's actions the exact same way that he knows your actions right now. Another way of putting it is that God doesn't know your actions until you have done them, but that in the moment you acted (although it was a certain place in time for you) it was right now to God. Do you mean logic and reason? So yes, there is only one set of rules for how things work. If God is outside of these rules, then I have no reason to deal with him because he's outside of this universe. If he intervenes in this universe, then he is subject to logic and reason. God does deal within the boundaries of logic and reason, yes, but that's not really the set of rules that the other poster was talking about, and he only operates inside of logic and reason because he chooses to, not becuse he has to. He is (we will assume he exists for the sake of the argument), obviously, outside of our universe, and does just as obviously intervene, but that doesn't make him subject to universal law, although he can choose to be. It would be impossible, even for an omnipotent being, to create a society of free souls without also creating a relativey independent and 'inexorable' Nature. I like to think of it as an author writing a book. He can create characters, a story, locations, etc., he can even finish the entire thing and then go back in and change it later, but at no point does he have to operate under the parameters of the story. Another imperfect analogy, and please don't use this against me telling me that I am saying God is writing out our actions, I merely use it to demonstrate how God can have a hand in things and be a creator yet not have to follow the same rules as us, nothing more.