How are these people allowed to vote?

most of the Founding Fathers believed in the same being. we have to accept people as they are. i believe that if only "smart" people were allowed to vote, our problems would still be at much the same level of awfulness.

I don't believe in voting restrictions, but I find their double standards funny. I think 16 years old would be a better voting age. 16 is a nice, round number since an election occurs every 4 years and 16-year-olds have been around for 4 elections. In my state, 16-year-olds can have their income taxed if they make enough and they need to pay for things like a fishing license. If you go fishing as a 16-year-old without a license, you can get fined for it, but you also can't vote against it.

It doesn't make sense to me.

It will make sense to you when you're older and you realize that all these people who voted for Trump or W Bush or Clinton or Reagan, etc, weren't really just pretending to be on the somewhat 'limited capacity' side. Who knows what kind of cartoon character they would have voted for when they were younger than 18.

I myself am damn glad I was too young to vote in 1980.

First I was for Ted Kennedy, then it was, "Wait, Chappaquiwho?"
Now I can't stomach any of the Kennedys, including and especially Saint JFK.

Then I was for Reagan. Yes, Ronald Reagan. When he was talking about trimming government waste, I thought he meant trimming the waste government wasted on itself with high salaries and $40,000 toilet seats.

Then I was for John Anderson.

In retrospect, I wish I could have voted for Carter. And this was decades later, well after I was 18.

Thing is, I'm the only individual I've ever encountered in the entirety of my life who thought of themself as an imbecile, even when I was a kid. Everybody else thinks they're smart, even those with the IQ of a pickled walnut - them more so than others, in fact.

Ok, not everybody's that mentally incapacitated when they're young, but even the more intelligent ones are constricted by their own experience and naivete.

i'd vote for a reduction in the voting age, but it probably won't happen soon.

People who believe the end of the world will be a good thing because they will go to heaven and those unlike them will go to hell shouldn't be allowed to hold government office. There, I said it.

because it's only the 19th and you live in a free country, it's your right to say it.

I'm gonna come back and say it again on the 21st.

Indeed one does.

Well MrMcMemer, I have reviewed many of the "Contradictions" you have provided, and am disappointed to find nothing but unclear meaning, or deliberate misinterpretation.

Here's some contradictions in the gospels:

The gospels were written in the order of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, and they keep adding things.

Mark- Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome go to the tomb, and the stone has already been moved away, and there is ONE angel sitting inside the tomb.

Matthew- Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb. The stone was not moved, but all of a sudden, an angel came down to earth and rolled the stone away. There was also an earthquake.

Luke- "The women" go to the tomb and the stone is moved away. They went inside and there were TWO angels inside the tomb.

John- Only Mary Magdelene goes to the tomb and when she gets there, the stone has already moved away. She sees NO angel and finds out Jesus is gone so she runs back to tell the disciples. John is also the only one to add the story of doubting Thomas, probably to add some sort of lesson to the readers.

To summarize;
We start with THREE women, then go with TWO, then have an UNSPECIFIED number, and then we end with only ONE woman.
We start with an already MOVED stone with ONE angel INSIDE the tomb, have an UNMOVED stone with ONE angel OUTSIDE the tomb then move, then add TWO angels INSIDE the tomb, and then end with NO angels and a story about faith.

Also, I might add that they meet Jesus when running back to the disciples in Matthew but not the others.

You can't make this stuff up. If this was such an important event, how are there so many mistakes and contradictions?

And yet the alternative is that nothing created the universe. Tough choice eh?

Who says the universe was created?

So the universe has existed forever?

How exactly is that like religion. I dont think the problem is that complicated. There is life in the universe, and life can only exist if there is other life before it.

Simply, we don't know.

Just because we don't know yet doesn't mean god is automatically the correct answer.

2000 years ago we thought the sun orbited the earth. Science is all about figuring things out.

Indeed. There is a great debate to be had over this topic.

Certainly the potential for life and consciousness is inbuilt into matter and the "quantum foam" from which it is believed the universe came. On some level consciousness "has always existed" (I use quotes because we're probably not talking about time and cause and effect as we understand it).

Yeah, the problem is exceedingly complicated in currently existing language.

Where did the "quantum foam" come from? Because if it has always existed, then that is no less wild then the claim that god has always existed.

actually, it is. if God has always existed, as you suggest, then it's possible for something to have always existed. if it's possible for something to have always existed, then a universe (or its ingredients) could have always existed. if a universe (or its ingredients) could have always existed, then why must God exist at all?

but TwoWayMirror is probably right. we're not looking at the matter in anything like a correct way.

I agree that something has to have always existed. But how could it be, that from this "Quantum Foam" that sentient life came? And where do things like compassion and self-sacrifice come from?

well now you're showing some potential! this universe (that we certainly don't understand very well as it is, let alone its origins) seems to have certain reliable laws (that we also don't understand very well, but we're making progress on that front as the centuries pass). one of the laws seems to be 'survival of the fittest', which means very roughly that organisms that capture and eat other organisms efficiently (while evading capture themselves) get to survive and reproduce. genetic mutation and natural selection (courtesy mainly of sunlight, chemical mutagens, and evolved DNA repair mechanisms that aren't quite perfect) allow variations in structure leading to variations in survival efficiency, thereby leading to enhancements in organism competition. says the current theory, anyway.

now, if you play that movie backwards, you get increasingly simpler structures and increasingly inefficient critters. keep going and you get to a world of only lazy, single-celled entities that existed only because other principles of the universe made multi-molecular organization and their dynamics possible. perhaps sunlight, a rotating planet, and Coulomb's principle of electrostatic interactions.

now play the movie forwards again from there and you get higher levels of organization that include tissues, eyeballs, organs and brains, and then motivations like compassion and altruism. yes, it's very tempting to see a 'plan' and 'destiny' at work behind the camera, but we must bear in mind how limited our perceptions and understanding are. we understand a lot more than we did 200 years ago, but the curve of understanding suggests that we have very, very, very far yet to go. the history of our understanding also suggests that most of the thinking i just outlined id probably very incomplete and very off-target, with improvements to be contributed by future Einsteins with good vision.

notice that i didn't rule out the Hand of God. but we understand so little at present, it's very unlikely that we would understand a God in any way. now, if you want to help, you could jump on the science bandwagon and help us make some progress. the sooner you start, the more likely that you'll contribute to a breakthrough.

Apparently "survival of the fittest" was a misrepresentation of what Darwin wrote, which was about survival of the fit (not just the fittest) and survival of the adaptable.

maybe consciousness isn't a result exactly, but something that a creature can notice when its brain is sufficiently complicated. lots of other species seem to be conscious, but they may not notice it. who's to say if and when it 'became' a phenomenon? it's been proposed that plants and rocks and other things might be conscious. maybe it's a fundamental property of matter.

my work will have me thinking about entropy during the next 16 to 18 months. whatever it is, it's necessarily involved in molecular interactions including recognitions, reactivity, and catalysis. proteins have evolved according to its influence (and the other real rules of Nature) over many millions of years. if we can understand better how proteins do what they do, and then why they evolved to do it that way, then we should understand the underlying forces and rules a lot better. the alternative is to wait for a series of Einsteins to figure it out, and that would take a long, long while.

It seems clear to me that consciousness is both an inherent potential in matter and a result of entropy.

with great respect to Darwin, over the very long haul and at the level of species, i think it amounts to the same thing. adaptability is surely a part of being fit, and current species are more fit than their early predecessors. at the level of individuals, yep, most fit individuals survive most situations of their lives.

evolution is probably not exactly right as a theory. maybe what's 'really' happening is that the biosphere (including its organisms) are just dissipating solar energy, and we are catalysts that dissipate it ever more efficiently as the eons roll along. maybe the second principle of thermodynamics is exactly right. maybe life and the development of biological complexity are inevitable by that principle. the problem is, if energy inherently dissipates, why would the efficiency of the dissipation matter? what would drive that? this could be a good question, or just another bad idea ( :

i should probably have more respect for alligators and cockroaches.

What intrigues me is why consciousness would naturally result from the dissipation of energy. Are we thinking about entropy wrongly?

From my understanding, the quantum foam exists outside of time as we know it, so "always" isn't quite accurate because it has no linear past or future. Which is, actually, something I've heard about god. Eternal as opposed to everlasting.

"and life can only exist if there is other life before it."

No, because that would not only require an eternity, that would require an eternity that runs backwards. You can't have a beginning if the beginning already began. And began. And began.

Thats why the only explanation is that god has existed forever.

That is not an explanation, only or otherwise.
It is an assertion that those that feel the need to belong to something larger than themselves utilize, but without much of any actual belief of their own.

And what do you mean by that?

Religion has been reduced by most people to nothing but a club to belong to, one whose rules are usually reserved to condemn others, not themselves.
Most believers do not believe. They just like to pretend that they do.

Christianity supports theocratic socialism which many Christians seem to be very much against.

There are so many things that Christians say and do that conflict with their beliefs.

Aye, but that itself is an incomplete picture.
While Conservative Republican Christian types often take stances against government social welfare programs (including the very ones mainly individuals themselves are recipients of), volunteer and charity participation within their Churches exceed that of all other demographics. Throughout the world.

Some may argue, sure, they do it because they're compelled to by the church. The bottom line is, however, they're still doing it at greater rates than anybody else is.

Prior to the Great Depression, in fact, welfare programs were provided by Churches, not the government. Unfortunately, between funding shortages courtesy of the economic crisis and disparities in distribution to certain communities and whatnot, the federal government ended up stepping in.

And it's not just Christians who don't follow their own beliefs. Just look at the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. It literally began with Buddhist Monks during a procession. Not fire & brimstone Protestant Preachers, not Jihadist Imans, but pious nonviolent ultra mellow Buddhist Monks during a religious procession. The procession turned into a march turned into an attack turned into a riot turned into a continuing genocide.

Such as?

Here are a few hundred: https://philb61.github.io/

I wouldn't say most, but more and more certainly.