Jack D Capehart's blog

BELIEVE IT OR NOT OR ...

You should not decide whether you believe or disbelieve anything until you have enough information to make that decision.  When someone wants to know if you believe something, your answer doesn't have to be only yes or no.  A perfectly good answer is that you don't have enough information to make that decision.  You can also answer that you don't want or need to make that decision.  So when someone says, "Either you believe it or you don't." that's equivalent to saying, "Either you're for something or you're against it." and in both cases their statements are false.  There are even more responses to such statements - for example, "I reserve the right NOT to make that decision" or "I don't care."

How Americans are Destroying America

By believing too much of what they get in their email, read on the internet, see on TV, and read in newspapers and magazines and then forwarding all this startling information to everyone in their address book without understanding it or checking out its validity.

 By pushing more religion into government, politics, and schools.  To see what happens when you do this look at the Middle East where countries and their schools are completely controlled by religions.

 By staying preoccupied with things like spreading hatred of gays and illegal immigrants, minor violations of your privacy, saving endangered species and climate change while virtually ignoring science education, the threat of terrorism and the need for food and medical care not only in our own country but also worldwide.

THINK!

If you believe in God, ask Him what to believe.  Don't rely on dogma, doctrine, or the Bible.  They are not reliable, reasonable, or consistant.  THINK!!  Don't accept authority.  Think for yourself!

Belief is Just a Swallow Away!

Saint Merck Pharmaceuticals (SMP) recently announced a new
product, Gospills, purportedly able to relieve the symptoms of
atheism.  The very large white tablets, each in the form of a
crucifix are reportedly hard to swallow and so have been
manufactured with score marks so they may be broken into separate
"chapters".  Some side effects have been noted in clinical trials.
 Most notably; frequent church attendance, excessive reverence,
and involuntarily shouting "amen" or "hallelujah".  In rare cases
effusive charisma has been noted.  The tablets come in two
different strengths; 5 Billigrams for most cases and 10 Billigrams
for the stubborn cases.

When is "NOW"?

If all of the stars ceased to exist today, it would be impossible for us to ever determine this fact.  The reason is that they have been sending light our way for 14 billion years and it would take that long again for us to see the last of it.  It may have already happened.

Even if our nearest star, the sun, ceased to exist, we would not know for over 8 minutes.  The next nearest star to the earth could have ceased to exist 3 years ago and we would not know yet.

This line of reasoning leads us to the inescapable fact that we are always living in the past and we can only approximate an instant called "now" for those things which are very near to us.

So our eyes are a little like a time machine always seeing things in the past.  The moon is about 1.29 seconds away, the sun is about 8 1/3 minutes away, and Mars is around 14 minutes distant.
And, of course, we can see all the way back to about 14 billion years by looking at the most distant stars.

The only way to know that God exists

The only way to know that God exists is for Him to tell you so.  All else is hearsay.

Certainty and Doubt

It's certain that I will always be doubtful and it's doubtful that I will ever be certain.

People who are certain about almost anything scare the hell out of me! Those are the people who cause wars or kill the wrong person. Probably worse than that, they teach their children to be certain and this is where religious fanatics come from.
The real problem is not so much religion versus science - it's certainty versus doubt. Religions don't allow doubt and science doesn't allow certainty and therein lies the rub!

Thomas Jefferson on Christianity

But a short time elapsed after the death of the Great Reformer of the Jewish religion before His principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing the oppressors in Church and State; that the purest system of morals ever before preached to man has been adulterated and sophisticated by artificial constructions into a mere contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves; that rational men not being able to swallow their impious heresies, in order to force them down their throats, they raise the hue and cry of infidelity, which themselves are the greatest obstacles to the advancement of the real doctrines of Jesus, and do, in fact, constitute the real Anti-Christ. (To Samuel Kercheval, 1810. C. V., 492.)

ACCURACY and PRECISION

When you read a statement like, "Did you know that 42.73% of all quoted statistics are just plucked from the air?", you should be able to see the difference between accuracy and precision immediately. The statement is very precise since 0.01% means one part in 10,000 but you know it can't be accurate because of the impossibility of measuring something like that. Too many people use the words interchangeably, so if you're one of them stop doing that!
Anytime we measure something, we can only do it with a certain degree of accuracy depending on the equipment we use and the conditions under which we work. If we know the accuracy of our equipment and the effect of the conditions under which we work then that should tell us how precisely we should state the answer. If you're using a ruler whose smallest divisions are 0.1 inch and the item you're measuring falls between two of the divisions, you might estimate the 0.0x or hundredths digit to be a 3 say but you should indicate this by recording your measurement as xx.x3 plus or minus say 0.02 or 0.01 indicating that you were guessing the last digit and also how accurately you thought you could geuss it. The 0.01 or 0.02 is sometimes called the "precision" of the measurement. In science, more accurate measurements often tell us that our theories and laws need to be changed and the precision of our measurements tell us how sure we are that they need changeing.

Deism - A Good Compromise Between Reason and Faith

Deism:    Deism is the recognition of a universal creative force greater than that demonstrated by mankind, supported by personal observation of laws and designs in nature and the universe, perpetuated and validated by the innate ability of human reason coupled with the rejection of claims made by individuals and organized religions of having received special divine revelation.

Thomas Paine may be considered to be the founder of Deism.   He became notorious because of "The Age of Reason" (1793–94), his book advocating Deism, promoting reason and freethinking, and arguing against institutionalized religion and Christian doctrines.

His book is available at:

( http://www.ushistory.org/paine/reason/singlehtml.htm )

Thomas Paine states: "There is a happiness in Deism, when rightly understood, that is not to be found in any other system of religion. All other systems have something in them that either shock our reason, or are repugnant to it, and man, if he thinks at all, must stifle his reason in order to force himself to believe them.

But in Deism our reason and our belief become happily united. The wonderful structure of the universe, and everything we behold in the system of the creation, prove to us, far better than books can do, the existence of a God, and at the same time proclaim His attributes."

He says about revelation in the “Age of Reason, Part II, Section 20 – Conclusion”:

“Revelation then, so far as the term has relation between God and man, can only be applied to something which God reveals of his will to man; but though the power of the Almighty to make such a communication is necessarily admitted, because to that power all things are possible, yet, the thing so revealed (if any thing ever was revealed, and which, by the bye, it is impossible to prove) is revelation to the person only to whom it is made. His account of it to another is not revelation; and whoever puts faith in that account, puts it in the man from whom the account comes; and that man may have been deceived, or may have dreamed it; or he may be an impostor and may lie. There is no possible criterion whereby to judge of the truth of what he tells; for even the morality of it would be no proof of revelation. In all such cases, the proper answer should be, "When it is revealed to me, I will believe it to be revelation; but it is not and cannot be incumbent upon me to believe it to be revelation before; neither is it proper that I should take the word of man as the word of God, and put man in the place of God." This is the manner in which I have spoken of revelation in the former part of The Age of Reason; and which, whilst it reverentially admits revelation as a possible thing, because, as before said, to the Almighty all things are possible, it prevents the imposition of one man upon another, and precludes the wicked use of pretended revelation.”