Posted on 03/10/2002 11:53:20 AM PST by JediGirl
Patience. You'll get "the point" soon enough.
Honestly, though, I already know how Jedigirl and others non-brimstoners feel about your threats.
I'm actually more interested in how other christians feel about your threat: Are Gargantua's threats of "Do it or fry!" the be-all end-all of arguments on christian morality, as he seems to think? Is Hellfire the end of all your arguments about why one should be a christian? Are threats and intimidation all your Messiah offers? Are they ANY of it? What do YOU think of people like Gargy here? Is their Christianity truth?
That depends on your notion of "distance." Take the set of natural numbers (or real numbers, if you prefer) and append a "positive infinity" point to it. Extend the Euclidean metric on your original set by allowing "infinity" to be a possible distance. It's no longer a proper metric, but something has to give when you work with infinity. Now we obtain the following: the distance from any natural (real) number to positive infinity is...drumroll, please!...INFINITY! (thankyouverymuch).
And thus infinity is the same (infinite) distance from every natural (real) number. No number is any closer to infinity than another. Interesting theological implications, perhaps...
Of course, you may redefine your metric so as to realize your desire to make 1,000,000 be closer to infinity than 1,000. However, you then lose the truth that the distance from 1 to 2 is the same as the distance from 101 to 102. Is it worth it?
Granted, from 1,000's point of view, 1,000,000 would appear to be closer to infinity, given that 1,000,000 is between 1,000 and infinity. But how much closer? You can't nail down a translation-invariant notion of distance that will answer this. For this reason I would respectfully suggest that "closer" is an ill-advised choice of word.
Don't you guys still believe in mathematics? If not, what do you use these days?
And yes, I do use mathematics, but my formal schooling only extends to college algebra; everything else I pick up pretty much from conversations like this one {;^)>
What Happened When Stalin Read Darwin?
Russian dictator and revolutionist, Joseph Stalin (1879-1953), is regarded as one of the most notable men in Russian history. He was also one of the most influential in world affairs in the periods immediately before and after the Second World War.
But early in his life Stalin experienced a dramatic change of career. While studying at the Tiflis Theological Seminary, he began to read the works of Charles Darwin. He developed a critical mind and revolutionary bent. One of his friends later said in a book - which was published in Moscow while Stalin was still in power - that when Stalin began to read Darwin he became an atheist. At the age of 19, in 1898, Stalin was expelled from the theological seminary because of his revolutionary connections.
Ain't Google wonderful?
Creation Magazine. Now that's an unbiased source. That's like going to the DU to read about conservative ethics. Yeah right.
These are biblical promises made by God. Let them who have ears hear.
Are you sure you can make this notion precise?
You might start by specifying the space you wish to use. I doubt you are thinking of the set of ordinals including omega, since the natural topology would be the discrete topology. So shall we agree that we are using the set of reals with an appended positive infinity?
Next, we need to specify a topology. Shall we agree that it is to be the "order" topology for our space? That is, the topology is the set of arbitrary unions of finite intersections of intervals of the form (a, b), where a and b are any two points in the space.
But now for your notion of closeness. Compactness does not help you here. Note that closed intervals are not the only compact sets in this topological space. There are infinitely many compact sets in this topological space that contain the points 1000 and infinity but do not contain 1,000,000. There are also infinitely many compact sets that contain 1,000,000 and infinity but not 1000.
Open neighborhoods do no better. We can observe the same thing for open sets as for compact sets.
Your notion of "closeness" seems to be based not on topology at all, but on intervals, i. e., order. Since 1000 < 1,000,000 < infinity, there are intervals containing 1,000,000 and infinity that exclude 1000 but not any that contain 1000 and infinity that exclude 1,000,000.
In this sense we can say that A is "closer" to C than B is to C. But we can't say how much closer it is. This is a weaker notion of "closeness" than we might like.
Notice what would happen if we were starting with the complex numbers rather than the real numbers. The Euclidean metric gives us a precise notion of "closeness"—until we append an infinity point. Then, as with the real numbers, we find that there is no translation-invariant metric that can be defined. However, there is no natural order on the complex numbers either. Then on what basis would we say that one complex number was "closer" to infinity than another?
BTW, it's nice to think about real mathematics again...thanks for the reply.
I give about as much weight to Stalin's statements as I do Jeffrey Dahmer's. Anyone who pushes responsibility for their actions away from themselves to a philosophy is copping out. I think the same case could be said for people who try use the same arguments to try to explain why philosphy X is better than Y because X has killed less people. This includes the author of this thread. Crazy people are found on both sides of the aisle, and trying to say that one side is crazier than the other is devolving the argument to an ad hominiem attack.
ThinkPlease: I give about as much weight to Stalin's statements as I do Jeffrey Dahmer's. Anyone who pushes responsibility for their actions away from themselves to a philosophy is copping out. I think the same case could be said for people who try use the same arguments to try to explain why philosphy X is better than Y because X has killed less people. This includes the author of this thread. Crazy people are found on both sides of the aisle, and trying to say that one side is crazier than the other is devolving the argument to an ad hominiem attack.
Oh, please, spare us the sophistry. Here's my original post. I stand by the facts cited and that ideas have consequences.
Godless Communism was responsible for upwards of 100 million deaths in the 20th Century, most of which were committed by the regimes upon subject populations. And how many fundamentalist Christian terrorist groups are you aware of? . . . "Secular Humanist" Darwinism was embraced by both Hitler and Stalin.
Perhaps I get too touchy when dealing with you, Phaedrus. Too often your comments are very blunt, and perhaps that rubs me the wrong way.
While I don't dispute that Stalin killed 100 million people, I do dispute that the very Godlessness of communism, or Darwinism was a major contributing factor in it.
Face it, when crazy people will do crazy things with any idea, look at Torquemada, or Bin Laden, or Richard the Lion Hearted or those idiots in Africa right now, or any other figure who uses religion to bludgeon people to death because they didn't worship the same religion they did. If you want to include Stalin et al, whatever, but others shouldn't get the idea that religions aren't immune to this kind of insanity either.
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