27 Jan 2012, 5:56 pm
27 Jan 2012, 9:03 pm
27 Jan 2012, 9:06 pm
27 Jan 2012, 9:07 pm
27 Jan 2012, 9:12 pm
ProfessorP wrote:
abacacus wrote:
ProfessorP wrote:
Awesomelyglorious wrote:
ProfessorP wrote:
How coincidental that none of this "evidence" ever seems to appear to people that don't believe in the first place.
Evidence appears to both believers and unbelievers. Years ago an atheistic fellow faculty member managed to get on my tenure committee and voted against me. I received tenure anyway, but found myself hating this person. I prayed to not hate him but to love him instead. Within a week, the faculty member was diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas. He underwent an operation during which the physicians concluded that the cancer had metastacized. They did not want to remove the tumor, and told him that he had only a month or two to live. Other faculty hated this person so much, that at the next faculty meeting they told him they were glad they he would not be around to vote against them.
I had begun attending a student prayer meeting (my first experience with group prayer), and students prayed with me for this person. I went to the faculty member and offered to pray with him. He accepted the offer. At the end of the prayer, he jumped up and said that he felt perfect. He showed no signs of cancer after that until near his death some ten years later. He came to a student prayer meeting and told me that he saw a glow around us as we prayed. The students and I prayed for four other cancer patients in succession, each of whom had been diagnosed as terminal. One had already collected viatical benefits from his life insurance. All four of these patients became well and lived for years. After that, word of this got around my campus and many people began asking for prayer on terminal illnesses. Somehow, this healing stopped, and the other people were not healed.
This is just one of many miracles I have personally witnessed, but I mention it since it involves a miracle for an avowed atheist.
At that rate of miracles, someone in that prayer group was a saint.
ProfessorP
Yellow-bellied Woodpecker
Joined: 31 Dec 2011
Age: 74
Gender: Male
Posts: 53
Location: San Clemente, CA
27 Jan 2012, 10:29 pm
28 Jan 2012, 1:10 am
28 Jan 2012, 1:38 pm
ProfessorP wrote:
I am also something of a sinophile. I apologize to my Chinese students for the West's part in the Opium Wars.
What do you fancy about the Middle Kingdom 
?
I am fascinated by how China has stayed together as a more or less unified and intact culture for over two millennia. I also like the meritocratic aspects of Chinese culture, their culture's great reverence for the intellectual and how they seem to usually be the among most level-headed civilizations on the globe. I frankly believe Chinese culture is superior to most other cultures, including in many ways Western Culture. It is interesting how Rome collapsed, never to reunite, yet Imperial China only went away for but a while. By far my biggest problem with Chinese Civilization is the sexism, but this seems, at least to me, to be changing thanks to the PRC's ideological system.
ProfessorP
Yellow-bellied Woodpecker
Joined: 31 Dec 2011
Age: 74
Gender: Male
Posts: 53
Location: San Clemente, CA
28 Jan 2012, 2:08 pm
Abgal64 wrote:
ProfessorP wrote:
I am also something of a sinophile. I apologize to my Chinese students for the West's part in the Opium Wars.
What do you fancy about the Middle Kingdom ?I am fascinated by how China has stayed together as a more or less unified and intact culture for over two millennia. I also like the meritocratic aspects of Chinese culture, their culture's great reverence for the intellectual and how they seem to usually be the among most level-headed civilizations on the globe. I frankly believe Chinese culture is superior to most other cultures, including in many ways Western Culture. It is interesting how Rome collapsed, never to reunite, yet Imperial China only went away for but a while. By far my biggest problem with Chinese Civilization is the sexism, but this seems, at least to me, to be changing thanks to the PRC's ideological system.
As we both know, China developed a very high level of culture much earlier than did Europe. I used to very much admire the meritocracy , but I have wondered if its presentation in history is too glorified. I wonder now about the extent that natural human tendencies to corruption would have influenced China's stated meritocracy.
The intellectual problem with respect to China that I have been pondering for at least a year is "how much did the Opium Wars hurt the Chinese economy and culture?" My first view of the problem is that the Opium Wars were devastating. Thinking about all of that further, however, I am not sure. The statistics I read on the number of opium users in China at the peak are that it was not a high percentage of the population. I believe that this is a question of enormous importance for politics in general and specifically for geo-politics and economics. I believe that Maoism (and consequently all of Chinese history for the past century) was a reaction to perceptions about the Opium Wars.
Perhaps, that topic could become an interesting blog by itself.
28 Jan 2012, 3:02 pm
ProfessorP wrote:
Abgal64 wrote:
ProfessorP wrote:
I am also something of a sinophile. I apologize to my Chinese students for the West's part in the Opium Wars.
What do you fancy about the Middle Kingdom ?I am fascinated by how China has stayed together as a more or less unified and intact culture for over two millennia. I also like the meritocratic aspects of Chinese culture, their culture's great reverence for the intellectual and how they seem to usually be the among most level-headed civilizations on the globe. I frankly believe Chinese culture is superior to most other cultures, including in many ways Western Culture. It is interesting how Rome collapsed, never to reunite, yet Imperial China only went away for but a while. By far my biggest problem with Chinese Civilization is the sexism, but this seems, at least to me, to be changing thanks to the PRC's ideological system.
As we both know, China developed a very high level of culture much earlier than did Europe. I used to very much admire the meritocracy , but I have wondered if its presentation in history is too glorified. I wonder now about the extent that natural human tendencies to corruption would have influenced China's stated meritocracy.
The intellectual problem with respect to China that I have been pondering for at least a year is "how much did the Opium Wars hurt the Chinese economy and culture?" My first view of the problem is that the Opium Wars were devastating. Thinking about all of that further, however, I am not sure. The statistics I read on the number of opium users in China at the peak are that it was not a high percentage of the population. I believe that this is a question of enormous importance for politics in general and specifically for geo-politics and economics. I believe that Maoism (and consequently all of Chinese history for the past century) was a reaction to perceptions about the Opium Wars.
Perhaps, that topic could become an interesting blog by itself.
Thats absurd.
The Opium Wars were a sympotom,not the disease.
The disease was the two centuries of defeat and humiliation suffered by China at the hands of the foriegn barbarians.
The foriegn barbarians being - the maritime powers of Western Europe, and Czarist Russia, and to a lesser degree- the USA.
The opium wars were just the opening chapter in which foriegner powers not only extorted prividege from China, but ended up running China.
Remember that the whole Indian subcontinent was drawn into the British Empire. China came very close to being divied up between Britain, France, and Czarist Russia.
Will Rogers quipped "how would you feel if China had gunboats on the Mississippi- 'just to protect our laundries in Memphis'?
The ulitmate humilation came when China's smaller nieghbor Japan was able to modernize faster than China enabling Japan to invade and conquer much of China's soil in the years leading to World War Two.
So the rise of Mao was a "response" to the West colliding with China. But it was a response to the whole centurey that started with the Opium Wars and culminated with the Japanese occupation of much of China proper and all of Manchuria.
But the whole period is just blip compared the length of Chinese history.
I agree that it is interesting how China became a unified state about the same time that the Roman Empire formed. But the Chinese state is still here and Rome is long gone.
ProfessorP
Yellow-bellied Woodpecker
Joined: 31 Dec 2011
Age: 74
Gender: Male
Posts: 53
Location: San Clemente, CA
28 Jan 2012, 3:21 pm
28 Jan 2012, 10:06 pm
08 Feb 2012, 5:22 pm
The people who are most vociferous in their condemnation of creationism often tend to be the sort of people who believe in the nonsense of racial equality.
The thing is: the question of whether or not the earth is 6,000 years old has far less impact on the average person's life than the question of whether or not the races of man are the same.
Really, combining atheism with a belief that somehow nature has conspired to make the human races all the same "under the skin" - despite all the evidence to the contrary - is stupider than anything creationists come out with.
08 Feb 2012, 5:59 pm
08 Feb 2012, 6:00 pm
ProfessorP
Yellow-bellied Woodpecker
Joined: 31 Dec 2011
Age: 74
Gender: Male
Posts: 53
Location: San Clemente, CA
08 Feb 2012, 9:41 pm
