RickK

I mean, are they really a "pharmaceutical" company who makes something, or are they just a web presence with 3 guys in an office building re-selling Chinese-made sugar pills with fancy labels and bogus claims? I've tried to find a company profile on the web - nada. I've tried to find an estimate of the size of the company - only one website, and it said "1-4 employees". I looked up their address - a suite in a mid-sized suburban office building shared with 6 other companies and an organic food luncheonette. I tried to find any employees of JBNI on LinkedIn or Spoke - nothing. Yet their products are hyped all over the web, and two gentlemen named Walli and Case are quoted pitching the products. If they're a real company, there must be some sort of production facility and some research center and some physicians on the payroll. Where are they?

I know some small, private companies that explicitly try to have no profile on the web, and I can find more info on them than I can find on JBNI.

Curious

Why do you believe Paul was inspired by Jesus, when many of his teachings contradict the words of Jesus and the OT?

And why do you believe Paul was divinely inspired but you don't believe Joseph Smith Jr. was divinely inspired?

This isn't for LDS or secularists/atheists. It's a question to non-Mormon Christians. Do you believe God spoke through Moroni to Joseph Smith Jr.?

Here are some of mine. Got any to add?

"You can safely assume that you've created God in your image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."

-- Anne Lamott

"If god doesn't like the way I live, Let him tell me, not you."

-- Unknown

"Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of 10 things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these 10 things he has a special place full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry for ever and ever until the end of time...but he loves you."

-- George Carlin

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

-- Philip K. Dick

"Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but live for it."

-Charles Caleb Colton

"If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced?"

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned."

-- Unknown

"No man believes that the Bible means what it says; he is always convinced that it says what he means."

-- George Bernard Shaw

"Faith is deciding to allow yourself to believe something your intellect would otherwise cause you to reject -- otherwise there's no need for faith."

-- Unknown

"When one person suffers a delusion, it is called insanity. When many suffer from a delusion, it is called religion.

-- Robert M. Pirsig

"Believing is easier than thinking. Hence so many more believers than thinkers."

-- Bruce Calvert

"The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference."

-- Richard Dawkins

"That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence"

-- Christopher Hitchens

"The most preposterous notion that H. sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history. The second most preposterous notion is that copulation is inherently sinful".

-- Robert A. Heinlein

"I also don’t think that there is really a theory of intelligent design at the present time to propose as a comparable alternative to the Darwinian theory, which is, whatever errors it might contain, a fully worked out scheme."

-- Phillip Johnson (father of the Intelligent Design movement)

http://sciencereview.berkeley.edu/articles.php?iss...

"Creationists not only embrace ignorance, they lower the lights and play Barry White songs while trying to get its bra off."

-- Glitter

Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.

I still say a church steeple with a lightening rod on top shows a lack of confidence.

Science is evidence without certainty. Religion is certainty without evidence.

"Why did God sacrifice himself to himself, to correct a mistake he made himself?"

- Jhuger.com

"Remember that the burden of proof is on the person alleging the existence of something. If someone tells me that the Easter Bunny is hiding in somebody's clothes closet somewhere in North America, there is no need for me to search every closet on the continent. The person making the claim has to produce the rabbit or stop wasting my time."

-- Frank Zindler

"Reason is the greatest enemy faith has."

-- sign outside Baptist Church in Beryl, AR

"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

--Sir Stephen Henry Roberts

"I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition [Christianity] one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded on fables and mythology."

--Thomas Jefferson

"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."

--Thomas Jefferson

'Puritanism' - the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.

-- HL Mencken.

With or without religion good people will do good things and evil people will do evil things....but for good people to evil things, that takes religion.

-- Weinberg

You call atheism a religion? Atheism is a religion like health is a disease.

-- Unknown

"If it turns about tha

Just curious.

1) God/Allah/Ra/whatever created all species as they exist today.

2) God/Allah/Ra/TheIntelligentDesigner started life and the evolutionary process, and tweaks it along the way.

3) Aliens seeded the world with life.

4) The spiritual consciousness of the universe is having a dream, and we're living it.

5) Species naturally evolve from earlier species through various mechanisms including but not limited to natural selection.

People keep implying that atheists have no meaning in life.

But I think the whole religious belief in an afterlife actually makes this life less meaningful. Which would make you value this life more:

1) This life is just a test, and the price of admission is to confess your sins and repent; or

2) This life is all you get - make the most of it.

People perform magic tricks on stage and TV every day. We see it, it is recorded for posterity, it is completely documented, and yet we know that it is all illusion.

By contrast, there are NO accounts of Christ's resurrection written within several decades of the supposed event. The accounts we DO have, written decades later, are dramatically inconsistent. And there is barely any historical record of Jesus's existence at all. Yet people treat his resurrection from the dead as incontrovertible truth.

Why, in this one instance, does so little evidence result in so much certainty?

I've been called "close-minded" because I refuse to accept somebody's religious beliefs. But my atheism would change instantly if real evidence of something supernatural actually appeared.

If nothing could cause you to change your mind about your faith, do you consider yourself open-minded?

People always say "Hitler and Stalin were atheists". True or not, this is irrelevant, as neither of them actually did all the killing. The murders were carried out by the populations of Germany and the Soviet Republics - populations raised from birth with religious dogma.

Did being trained as children to accept religious dogma without question make it easier for them as adults to accept political dogma without question?

Slavery, women's rights, harsh physical punishment of children, death to witches - our morals have changed for all of these in the past 1000 years. The Bible hasn't changed in that time.

So how can we say morals come from the Bible?

For example, if someone says "I don't care what evidence you show me, I KNOW women are not as smart as men", would you consider that person close-minded?

My atheism would end tomorrow if there was one piece of evidence that couldn't be made up by deluded or deceitful humans.

What would it take to change your mind and cause you to give up or change your faith or core beliefs?

I voted on one question, and the vote worked (though I had to refresh the screen to see it). I voted on another question, the blue "vote best answer" buttons all went away, but my vote didn't register. There were no votes on any of the answers, even after I refreshed.

This has been happening for the past couple days. Is it a general problem on Y!A or specific to some users?

For that matter, why do they bother to show Joseph's relationship to David at all, since Mary was a virgin. Joseph has no relation to Jesus, right?

Or is Hinduism monotheistic because all 3 are aspects of the same single being?

If you believe God created the universe, then you know that:

- man didn't create the fossils showing transition through the ages from one species to another;

- man didn't create DNA that connects us to all living things with traceable inheritance of traits;

- man didn't lay down successive layers of rock to show the transformation of Earth and its life over billions of years;

- man didn't cause isotopes to decay on a fixed clock, allowing us to measure the age of ancient things;

- man didn't create galaxies, celestial mechanics, red-shifted light or the cosmic microwave background radiation;

and

- God didn't write the Bible.

So, why do biblical literalists believe they are honoring God when they reject His direct evidence in favor of the words of men?

Here are some I've collected:

"You can safely assume that you've created God in your image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."

-- Anne Lamott

"If god doesn't like the way I live, Let him tell me, not you."

-- Unknown

"Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of 10 things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these 10 things he has a special place full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry for ever and ever until the end of time...but he loves you."

-- George Carlin

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

-- Philip K. Dick

"Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but live for it."

-Charles Caleb Colton

"If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced?"

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned."

-- Unknown

"No man believes that the Bible means what it says; he is always convinced that it says what he means."

-- George Bernard Shaw

"Faith is deciding to allow yourself to believe something your intellect would otherwise cause you to reject -- otherwise there's no need for faith."

-- Unknown

"When one person suffers a delusion, it is called insanity. When many suffer from a delusion, it is called religion.

-- Robert M. Pirsig

"Believing is easier than thinking. Hence so many more believers than thinkers."

-- Bruce Calvert

"The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference."

-- Richard Dawkins

"That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence"

-- Christopher Hitchens

"I also don’t think that there is really a theory of intelligent design at the present time to propose as a comparable alternative to the Darwinian theory, which is, whatever errors it might contain, a fully worked out scheme."

-- Phillip Johnson (father of the Intelligent Design movement)

http://sciencereview.berkeley.edu/articles.php?iss...

"Creationists not only embrace ignorance, they lower the lights and play Barry White songs while trying to get its bra off."

-- Unknown

Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.

I still say a church steeple with a lightening rod on top shows a lack of confidence.

Science is evidence without certainty. Religion is certainty without evidence.

"Why did God sacrifice himself to himself, to correct a mistake he made himself?"

- Jhuger.com

"Remember that the burden of proof is on the person alleging the existence of something. If someone tells me that the Easter Bunny is hiding in somebody's clothes closet somewhere in North America, there is no need for me to search every closet on the continent. The person making the claim has to produce the rabbit or stop wasting my time."

-- Frank Zindler

"Reason is the greatest enemy faith has."

-- sign outside Baptist Church in Beryl, AR

"When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

-- Stephen Roberts

"I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition [Christianity] one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded on fables and mythology."

--Thomas Jefferson

"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."

--Thomas Jefferson

'Puritanism' - the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.

-- HL Mencken.

With or without religion good people will do good things and evil people will do evil things....but for good people to evil things, that takes religion.

-- Weinberg

You call atheism a religion? Atheism is a religion like health is a disease.

-- Unknown

Many Jewish authors wrote many apocalyptic books, almost sensational "novels", in the couple centuries before and after Christ. Scholars believe this was to give the downtrodden Jews and Christians some hope that they would be delivered from their misery.

Why do you suppose Revelations was selected for inclusion in the New Testament, and not one or more of the other apocalypses?

And... which novels of our times today do you think will become "canonical" in 2000 years?

Some people said that some children are born with birth defects because they were created by their parents, and not by God:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Al8pm...

If God creates children, why are there deformities? If their parents create children, why is abortion such a sin?