Broccoli!

Dear Brad Pitt.

WW2 tank commanders were generally in their early twenties or younger.

You are 51

Can you see the problem?

Moggy

Ageist.

I am about as far from a theologian as it can get…

Au contraire, I think.

It still amazes me that some can accept that energy has simply always existed but cannot accept that an intelligent beings have simply always existed.

It does?

It has always amazed me that some people…but I’ll leave that for you to fill in since it is a little obvious, don’t you think?

Hmm, good grief you believe that something came from absolutely nothing.

No, I believe that something was there before it, that it has always existed, that we are just a byproduct of part of it being recycled. You, on the other hand, believe in something for which there is nothing but your own belief concerning ancient superstitions hiding something that is absolutely nothing; what can I say.

Energy can neither be created or destroyed but you think it just suddenly exploded into existence from magic.
Ya sure you bet.

Energy can locally run out – witness an exhausted battery, or the fact that the Sun will eventually die. Care to explain where their energy went?

And where did you come from – did your god magically zap you into existence or was there some embarrassing biological process involved that creates believers and non-believers alike?
Are you saying your god isn’t magic? Walking on water – not magic? Feeding hundreds of people from next to nothing – not magic? Causing the sick to walk – not magic? All just conjuring tricks conspiring to fool the gullible – now that’s magic!

We have evolved from crawlers via knuckle-runners to be able to stand and move on two legs and we shall, eventually, develop well padded backsides due to our habit of sitting down in front of screens. This process has been well documented and is understood by enlightened members of the human race; not creationists, obviously, and probably one or two other aspects of the god-bothering fraternity might lop off heads in an effort to prove that we are not evolved from apes (who have never developed the ability to manage wide scale slaughter over little things like differences of opinion regarding religion) but the process is there whether you want to believe it or not. Just because you don’t want to believe it does not make it any less real; I once stood and chatted with a man who honestly believed that dinosaur bones were products of 1930’s Hollywood, buried to try and break the spirit of believers, and he was sure that no one of faith would fall for that trick – although he was a little flummoxed when I asked how his theory could explain all the dinosaur skeletons found prior to the 1930’s… Can you explain dinosaurs?

Oh, oh yeah, hmmm, proof yah sure, as persons in my area of the U.S. are often quoted as a saying in both a positive and negative at the same time.

So others have also dealt with you? You must be used to it by now…

God may have used a big bang, possible, and then it may be people seeing what they want to see, aka, a mirage but I suppose science can now accurately measure to any time scale they choose to suit their ego.
If it IS the big bang they are hoping for, for it to be the beginning of one humungous accident totally by chance, science says it must be as there is no god for most, well I have always wondered how science, which studies the procedure necessary for a process to proceed, put all it faith into some mystical multiple random occurrences which by scientific standards even less believable than a mystical god.

More men and women of appropriate learning have reached a conclusion that concurs with the big bang theory rather than one that agrees with that that comes from fictional historical representations supposedly given by gods or their earthly representatives – unless you include those religious bigwigs with a vested interest in maintaining a hold on the hearts and minds of their followers and an observance of their sacred commandments amongst those of appropriate learning.

Well if one has to choose between a god that has always been there performing tasks with energy that has always been there – vs. – energy always being there suddenly for no reason chaotically goes boom and over time creates a myriad of functional precise systems by chance the choice is easy by simple logic not to say mathematical odds.

Logic involved with a mythical god? Good grief…whatever next.
Always been there? You have nothing to convince us and yet we are told that this god has always been. What energy are you talking about here? I don’t expect you to provide anything that might be proven because you have none, but nevertheless something that would be understood to be tangible would be nice.
And the energy represents what, exactly? Father, son and holy ghost? Some sort of god? Why do you believe that this apparent energy is a force for good? There must be just as big a chance that something that cannot be proven and exists within your mind is the same thing that exists in the minds of those who claim they slaughtered innocents on the word of god but which others (of a more distrusting bent) swear is the work of the devil. What do you think?
Heaven? Hell? You believe? It further amuses me that Heaven used to be (might still be for all I know – not my scene, I’m afraid) the name of a gay night club in London and Hell is a town in Norway, frequented by tourists all eager to be photographed next to the name-sign on its outskirts – cold days in Hell are not as rare as people seem to believe…

Edgar, just because you are old enough to remember those rhymes when they were young, fresh and radical doesn’t mean everyone is.
I repeated them because I was unaware of them before doing some research about two years ago, and figured that others – not you, obviously: you know everything – might also be thoroughly unaware of them too. (There is another one that I’d forgotten – remember the chants that the Hare Krishna followers used to chant, but replace Hare Krishna with Harry Roberts…!) Sometimes you have to eat a little dirt, and sometimes you have to hear (or read) unsavoury things, and these rhymes demonstrate the sort of lengths some people went to in an effort to rile the police; although I cannot honestly believe that anyone took those rhymes seriously at the time, as in believed that Harry Roberts was their friend because he’d killed police officers, but it is a crazy world and stranger things must have happened in the past. I would never condone what this man did and judging from the things he has done when in an open prison (smuggling in contraband and selling drugs to other inmates) and threatening the owners of an animal sanctuary he was working at with violence when he was on day release that, short of a recent full frontal lobotomy, I can’t imagine he is anywhere near rehabilitated enough to anybody but an opportunistic parole boards satisfaction.

It comes as no surprise to see you leaping to this creature’s defence, but it would be appreciated if you had the courtesy to read what was written.

Mr Boyle, I think you’ll find the ‘creature’ he is referring to might actually be me…

Edgar disagrees with me; apparently anything I put here is wasted space and antagonistic, my only purpose is to stir up trouble, and he will happily point that out to me at every available opportunity – witness his second sentence in post 7 (above). Water off a ducks back, though.

…the Stug incidentally is a FV432 converted to look like one.

So…what is this one converted to look like???

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Charlie, I’ve been rather busy for the past few days… But I do sometimes wonder about the criteria of some members for making threads – some appear trivial but generate lots of responses (mostly moaning ones from Edgar if it was mine) whilst others which might be important or enlightening sometimes sit there without comment. Clarkson makes a tweet mentioning driving with a beer in the car – nothing to say he is actually drinking it or that it was a can that was even open, but a connection between drinking alcohol and driving nevertheless – and that is ignored by you lot because it is ‘good old Clarkson’. Yet our friends around the world might not have heard about his most recent publicity screw up (not every country’s media is transfixed by Jezza’s every utterance like ours appears to be) – do they not ‘deserve’ to hear the latest foot-in-mouth antics of this buffoon?
As for wondering who would post a thread… I’ve noticed no one has posted anything about another rather devastating event that occurred the other day. Is that because, maybe, they didn’t know where to put it (we don’t have a space forum, or maybe it hovered between the commercial and general aviation forums) or just because they couldn’t be bothered, do you think?