jakkelaas

I have been concentrating on my coffee table with every part of my being (mind and spirit), it is still a coffee table rather than the $1 million I was envisaging.

Your advice would be appreciated, I have a mortgage to pay and I'd like some spending money.

Thank you

Fractelle,
All I can say is LOL

Irfan Yusuf, you are denigrating my Arab Muslim colleagues are you not? I see no reason to denigrate all Islam out of 'not understanding' that an Indonesian muslim is a different person to a Palestinian Arab, a Moroccan, Turk or Persian person. I don't see the need to denigrate you for your religion either.

I don't see the West banding together under Christian ideology.

However, if a Muslim gang murder thousands of innocents (including Muslim civilians) for ideological reasons explicitly based in Islamic teaching, the whole religion suffers by their association with that ideology. We don't shoot you for that, OR Arab Muslims - just the murderers. Stiff cheese, mate.

And if the religion gives rise not to just one of these gangs but hundreds of them, individuals voluntarily becoming murderers through association at the masjid and via teaching of ignorant mullahs, then I think its bloody lucky that the West is so tolerant and inclusive as to carefully not collectively blame the religion or the ethnicities involved. However, that collective guilt IS taught by the inciters of these little dog-packs of murderers, by certain mullahs and sects, against the heterogeneous and tolerant West

Thanks for your opinion jakkelaas,

As you say "energy packets behave in the most amazing way! To put it simply, they have intelligence, this intelligence is 'spirit' or for a better word GOD. You can thus see were science ends and spirit continues."

I understand that the behavior of subatomic particles is not fully understood (thus the reason for the experiments planned at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva). However attributing unknown properties of subatomic particles as a 'spirit' or 'GOD' just shows how some people like to fill in current unknowns in life/science with an imaginary "revealed truth". Similar comments would have been made regarding things such as fertilization or the movements of the planets. If you would like to rebut you could elaborate on how the energy packets behave and how this supports your theory.

The assumption that all children born to believers become and remain believers is -- thankfully -- mistaken; a good proportion of the children of believers become atheists. It is no coincidence, of course, that religious belief is strongest in those countries where literacy and education are worst; there is nothing more destructive to religion than a good education. This is why the Taliban are so keen on closing down schools -- especially for women, who they prefer to keep in poverty and ignorance -- and why the Catholic and other churches are struggling so hard to keep their grip on at least some of the Western education system, despite the tremendous levels of abuse that have taken place under their stewardship.

Still, all things being equal we can expect to see religion dying out in the educated enlightened West while it experiences a renaissance in the developing nations -- hopefully a brief one, lasting only until they reach Western levels of education.

Since 're-establishing our Christian heritage' means re-establishing ignorance, prejudice and mind-warping superstition, the sooner we eradicate it completely the better.

Irfan,

Over the years you've posted here I've come to respect you as intelligent, well intentioned, rational and persuasive. Altogether a decent man.

I note you've quoted Tony Abott and his views on the influence of christianity on westerners.

I think both you and Tony are missing many of the basic tenets of Westernism. For you both to focus only on the Hebrew heritage is to narrow.

While the Hebrew heritage, through Christ and his message, does as Tony holds, have a fundamental impact and is a 'core document' of Westernism there are two aspects not completely nor widely understood.

Firstly, I think you'd understand all the implications when I say to you the most important aspect of Christs message was his rejection of most of the tenets of the faith of the Hebrews and their book: What we know as The Old Testament.

It was only the Council of Nicosia that included that particular 'heritage' (The Old Testament) in the Christian bible. We as Westerners, like Christ, simply don't adopt many of the beliefs or practises contained in that book. Many of the Eastern religions, generally, are rooted in the ideas of the Old Testament. That has led to a fundamental cultural, not only a religious, difference between the West and East.

Secondly as a lawyer you would understand the other great fundamental 'core documents' that help shape westerners. The philosophy of the Greeks. Neither Tony nor you acknowledge that influence and I think an argument could be put about how that influence is greater, on Westernism, than the Hebrew influence. And again that influence is omitted from the cultures based on or rooted in a belief in the types of ideas found in the old testament.

It's an interesting point of view I am putting and here doesn't allow sufficient space to expand the ideas I've touched upon.

Regards

ps nice to see you contributing here again.