That would be the case with any uninformed person. So what is your
point? I would suggest you read up on different belief systems and make
an
analysis. Then come back and tell us your conclusions, with reasons for
them.

My conclusions are that of all religions, Buddhism is the least
offensive. The reasons should be obvious.

"Least offensive"? What is it then you support and advocate? As you post
this to news:alt.religion.apologetics it's time for you to expound the
religion you favour, or quit posting to religious NGs altogether, don't you
think?

Libertarius wrote in message <422E7C39.4F62DC26@Nothing_But_The.Truth>...

Pastor Frank wrote:

"Messer Xin" <xin@woc.org> wrote in message
news:0001HW.BE52A7CC002242F4F03055B0@News.Individual.NET...

On Mon, 7 Mar 2005 7:39:40 -0500, Pastor Frank wrote
(in message <1110226306.50fde22b1ad9348aaabf3d2f6b64fa29@teranews>):

It appears that either of you have some pretty weird notions
about
what
the word "god" means, and whatever definition you chose to believe or
disbelieve in, is likely non-existent.

Definitions of god are irrelevant. Buddhism simply does not use the
concept
in an important way. Belief or disbelief is not applicable.
We do not say one should or should not believe in god, gods, or God.

Just

that it is not a concern of Buddhism as such.

This is true in principle, for in no discourse I have ever read of
Gautama Buddha, does he use the word "god". In practice however, today's
Buddhism is replete with gods, which naturally need to be believed in to

do

any good.
You are posting to a religious apologetics group, where religionists
advance explanations of their belief systems, not merely deny the
applicability of other belief systems to their own. We are already

convinced

that there is no limit to incongruence between Buddhism and
Christianity,

so

you need not waste your time listing any. But perhaps you could find the
rare parallels between Buddha's teachings and those of Christ, which

would

be of much greater interest. Since I am familiar with both, it seems to

me

Christ was not altogether unfamiliar with Buddha's teachings. What is

your

assessment?

Pastor Frank

===>There never was a "Christ", so he could not have been familiar
with Buddhism.
You keep confusing the fellow from Galilee named YESHUA, who was
tried and executed by the Romans for claiming he was the king,
with the imaginary deity called "Christos". -- L.

I am so glad that I am not you, Libertarius.
http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0001/0001_01.asp

Libertarius wrote in message <422E7C39.4F62DC26@Nothing_But_The.Truth>...

Pastor Frank wrote:

"Messer Xin" <xin@woc.org> wrote in message
news:0001HW.BE52A7CC002242F4F03055B0@News.Individual.NET...

On Mon, 7 Mar 2005 7:39:40 -0500, Pastor Frank wrote
(in message <1110226306.50fde22b1ad9348aaabf3d2f6b64fa29@teranews>):

It appears that either of you have some pretty weird notions about
what
the word "god" means, and whatever definition you chose to believe or
disbelieve in, is likely non-existent.

Definitions of god are irrelevant. Buddhism simply does not use the
concept
in an important way. Belief or disbelief is not applicable.
We do not say one should or should not believe in god, gods, or God.

Just

that it is not a concern of Buddhism as such.

This is true in principle, for in no discourse I have ever read of
Gautama Buddha, does he use the word "god". In practice however, today's
Buddhism is replete with gods, which naturally need to be believed in to

do

any good.
You are posting to a religious apologetics group, where religionists
advance explanations of their belief systems, not merely deny the
applicability of other belief systems to their own. We are already

convinced

that there is no limit to incongruence between Buddhism and Christianity,

so

you need not waste your time listing any. But perhaps you could find the
rare parallels between Buddha's teachings and those of Christ, which

would

be of much greater interest. Since I am familiar with both, it seems to

me

Christ was not altogether unfamiliar with Buddha's teachings. What is

your

assessment?

Pastor Frank

===>There never was a "Christ", so he could not have been familiar
with Buddhism.
You keep confusing the fellow from Galilee named YESHUA, who was
tried and executed by the Romans for claiming he was the king,
with the imaginary deity called "Christos". -- L.

I am so glad that I am not you, Libertarius.
http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0001/0001_01.asp

Frankie, I'm going to give you a chance to show the folks just how sharp
you are. I took two statistics courses in college and I used statistics in
my daily work for over 30 years. So Frankie, why don't you give us some of
these statistical improbabilities.

Evolution in regards to the origin of the species is bad science that
cannot be supported from the fossil record. The transitional fossils,
of where one species was supposed to have changed into another,
cannot be found among fossils. There are a million missing links in
the fossil record. The fossils as they are found tend to support
the idea that God created the original species and they did not evolve
one into another despite similarities in their genetic structure.

Consider these facts:
There are serious scientists and mathematicians that deal with the
laws of probability that will tell you that this universe with all of
its ordered complexity, could not have come into being by chance. To
have that much order and complexity, the universe had to be designed
by an intelligent creator. There is enough coded information in one
human chromosome to fill a small library of books. This had to be
designed by an intelligent creator.
The probability against that happening by chance is very
very high. It's like giving a chimpanzee a typewriter and letting him
hit the keys at random. The probability against his being able to type
a small library full of books by hitting keys at random is so high that
for all practical purposes you can consider it impossible.
Because of this, there are some scientists and mathematicians who
are forced to believe in the existence of God by logic alone.
In order for a single cell to live, all of the parts of the cell must
be assembled before life starts. This involves 60,000 proteins that
are assembled in roughly 100 different combinations. The probability
that these complex groupings of proteins could have happened just by
chance is extremely small. It is about 1 chance in 10 to the 4,478,296
power. The probability of a living cell being assembled just by chance
is so small, that you may as well consider it to be impossible. This
means that the probability that the living cell is created by an
intelligent creator, that designed it, is extremely large. The
probability that God created the living cell is 10 to the 4,478,296
power to 1. [The probability of this was calculated by Fred Hoyle, famous
astronomer and mathematician.]
The laws conscerning entropy are well established in physics. Entropy
is the measure of the randomness or disorder in a system. Entropy is
always observed to increase in natural physical processes. Natural
processes in science always tend toward more disorder. The idea that
the universe could develop the ordered complexity that it has, by
natural processes violates the law of entropy, that says disorder must
increase in natural processes. Therefore, one must conclude that the
complex order that we see in the universe did not come about by chance
scientific processes. It was developed on purpose by an intelligent
creator. God created it.
The law of entropy exists in thermodynamic systems involving heat,
that is true. Entropy also exists as a measure of disorder in a system
in statistical mechanics having nothing to do with thermodynamics.
S=klnp + c. S = value of measure for a system in a given state. P is
the probability of the occurence of that state. K is a fixed constant
and c an arbitrary constant. Heat is disordered energy. Entropy is a
broader term describing either heat or the amount of disorder in a
system. The chemical reactions that you suppose will produce hundreds
of thousands of ordered building blocks of amino acids to produce
genes cannot occur by chance processes because statistical mechanics
says that the reactions will tend toward more disorder. Genes and
chromosomes have hundreds of thousands of complexly ordered parts.
Accoording to statistical mechanics this much order cannot come from
chance scientific processes. It had to come from an intelligent
creator.

There are no existing physical rules, that have been observed by
science, that indicate that ordered complexity can evolve by random
chance occurences. In Science there is an observed law of entropy. In
all natural occurences in science, the amount of disorder increases.
In other words, the physical laws that are observed in nature lead to
more disorder; they do not lead to ordered complexity.
The only thing observed to cause more complexity is an intelligence,
of some sort deliberately assembling something together.
Example: A pile of building materials stacked in a pile is hit by a
tornado. When the pieces come down, they do not assemble themselves
into a house. They just fall into a more disordered pile of building
materials. An intelligence must deliberately assemble the materials
into a house to get ordered complexity.
God created the ordered complexity in the universe. There are no
observed scientific processes that can account for it happening by
itself.

Natural selection will weed out inferior members of a species
according to environmental requirements. But, this only leads to a
species changing to another variety of the same species known as a
subspecies; that is all that is observed in nature. [Crickets in dark
caves become white with no eyes; also fish in caves.] But natural
selection has not been observed to cause one species to change into
another new species. Fish do not change into amphibians; amphibians do
not change into reptiles; reptiles do not change into mammals. Natural
selection cannot account for the origin of the different species.
There are a million missing links in the fossil record as it has been
found. The intermediate stages that would be necessary for fish to
become amphibians, and reptiles to become mammals, have not been found
in the fossils. The fossils show evidence that all of the species were
originally created by God and they did not evolve into one another.
"Biochemical systems are exceedingly complex, so much so that the
chance
of their being formed through random shufflings of simple organic
molecules is exceedingly minute, to a point indeed where it is
insensibly different from zero" - Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, p.3

"No matter how large the environment one considers, lfe cannot have
had a random beginning. Troops of monkeys thundering away at
random on typewriters could not produce the works of Shakespeare,
for the practical reason that the whole observable universe is not large
enough to contain the necessary monkey hordes, the necessary
typewriters, and certainly the waste paper baskets required for the
deposition of wrong attempts. The same is true for living material"
Ibid., p.148

"The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the
chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is one one part in
(10^20)^2000 = 10^40000, an outrageously small probability that could
not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup. If
one is not prejudiced either by social beliefs or by a scientific
training into the conviction that life originated on the Earth [by
chance or natural processes], this simple calculation wipes the idea
entirely out of court"
Ibid., p.24

"Any theory with a probability of being correct that is larger than one
part in 10^40000 must be judged superior to random shuffling. The
theory that life was assembled by an intelligence has, we believe, a
probability vastly higher than one part in 10^40000 of being the
correct explaination of the many curious facts discussed in previous
chapters. Indeed, such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why
it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are
psychological rather than scientific."
Ibid., p.130

"All point mutations that have been studied on the molecular level
turn out to reduce the genetic information and not to increase it."
- Lee Spetner, "Not by Chance"(Brooklyn, New York: The Judaica
Press,Inc.) p.138

"It appears that the neo-darwinism hypothesis is insufficient to
explain some of the observations that were not available at the time
the paradigm took shape. ...One might ask why the neo-darwinian
paradigm does not weaken or disappear if it is at odds with critical
factual information. The reasons are not necessarily scientific ones
but rather may be rooted in human nature"
- Christian Schwabe "On the Validity of Molecular Evolution",
Trends in Biochemical Sciences, July 1986, p.282

"The really significant finding that comes to light from comparing the
proteins' amino acid sequences is that it is impossible to arrange
them in any sort of evolutionary series" - Ibid. p.289

"Thousands of different sequences, protein, and nucleic acid, have now
been compared in hundreds of different species but never has any
sequnces been found to be in any sense the lineal descendant or
ancestor of any other sequence." - Ibid. pp. 289-290

"Each class at a molecular level is unique, isolated and unlinked by
intermediates. Thus molecules, like fossils, have failed to provide
the elusive intermediates so long sought by evolutionary biology."
- Ibid p.290

"There is little doubt that if this molecular evidence had been
available one century ago it would have been seized upon with
devastating effect by the opponents of evolution theory like Agassiz
and Owen, and the idea of organic evolution might never have been
accepted."
- Ibid pp.290-291

"In terms of their biochemistry, none of the species deemed
'intermediate', 'ancestral' or 'primitive' by generations of
evolutionary biologists, and alluded to as evidence of sequence in
nature, show any sign of their supposed intermediate status"
- Ibid p.293

Duane T. Gish, The Origin of Mammals : If this view of evolution is
true, the fossil record should produce an enormous number of
transitional forms. Natural history museums should be overflowing with
undoubted intermediate forms. About 250,000 fossil species have been
collected and classified?Applying evolution theory and the laws of
probability, most of these 250,000 species should represent
transitional forms.

Dr. Walt Brown, In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and
the Flood, page 10: Fossil links are missing between numerous plants,
between single-celled forms of life and invertebrates, between
invertebrates and vertebrates, between fish and amphibians, between
amphibians and reptiles, between reptiles and mammals, between
reptiles and birds, between primates and other mammals, and between
apes and other primates. The fossil record has been studied so
thoroughly that it is safe to conclude that these gaps are real; they
will never be filled. ---

Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species: ?
the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed
[must] truly be enormous. Why then is not every geological formation
and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly
does not reveal any such finely-graduated organic chain; and this,
perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged
against the theory [of evolution].

W. I. Bird, The Origin of Species Revisited, 1954, p. 48.: The reason
for abrupt appearances and gaps can no longer be attributed to the
imperfection of the fossil record as it was by Darwin when
paleontology was a young science.

Dr. Niles Eldredge, paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural
History, "Missing, Believed Nonexistent", Manchester Guardian, 26
November 1978:?
"The search for 'missing links' between various living creatures,
like humans and apes, is probably fruitless?because they probably
never existed as distinct transitional types...But no one has yet
found any evidence of such transitional creatures?If it is not the
fossil record which is incomplete then it must be the theory."
Lyall Watson, "The Water People", Science Digest, May 1982:
"Modern apes, for instance, seem to have sprung out of nowhere. They
have no yesterday, no fossil record. And the true origin of modern
humans?of upright, naked, toolmaking, big-brained beings?is, if we are
to be honest with ourselves, an equally mysterious matter."

Dr. Collin Patterson, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum
in Britain, when asked why he hadn't included any illustrations of
transitional forms in his book, Evolution, he replied in a letter: "I
fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of
evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or
living, I would certainly have included them?I will lay it on the
line?there is not one such fossil for which one could make a
watertight argument."

Hey, Pastor Fake, tell us again how the
10 Commandments are "the words of Moses":