America is a big country... That's for most of it success.

Second, America was founded as the new world where the best mankind can afford goes.

Originally Posted by Iwanttobeajarhead

1: mass killings: are you talking of the crusades or something else? 2: 9/11 is not a blessing, it is a curse. but it is not gods fault. god respects free will, and will not just puppet us all. we can choose to be psychopaths if we want and god will respect that decision. I mean, you will still god to hell, but he will respect the decision.

If God's will is absolute, then the world is deterministic and we cannot have free will. On the other hand, if we do have free will, then what's the point of there being a God?

Originally Posted by Naddoður

If God's will is absolute, then the world is deterministic and we cannot have free will. On the other hand, if we do have free will, then what's the point of there being a God?

You have to realise though that God does not promote free will as you are only free to believe in him or not you can not believe in anything else, for example I draw your attention to number 1 of the fabled list...

ONE: 'You shall have no other gods before Me.'

Further to this the guy should he exist is clearly a megalomaniac as the first 4 commandments are cementing power with killing each other only rating a 6 on the list.

To be blunt I think most people these days no longer believe in "god" as a being but more as a collective term for the unexplained mechanisms of the universe and as such it is unlikely that America is blessed and more likely that is simply makes its own luck which isn't difficult if you have a giant piece of dirt with tons of raw materials and non-aggressive neighbours.

PS As you can tell I am pretty much an atheist.

Well... I see that now it is more "God exists" vs "God does not exists" topic, than it should be . For me all of your examples are just pointless. IF God exists ( I believe so, but this is not important now ) than how we can even try to understand what He wants, or what He is trying to do? How an ant can understand what we ( humans ) are doing, and why?

BACK to our topic: I think that every country has such battles and moments in its history . I'am from Poland, and from our side I can tell You, that there are plenty of them. Maybe main achievement was regaining indepencence after 123 years of occupation and not loosing our cultural identity.

Sorry for my bad english. I hope, that you can understand what I am trying to say.

Ave

Boy, y'all have an answer to everything. Here it is:

"You can't prove what you're saying, so it's garbage. I can't prove what I'm saying, but it is hard core, 100% fact that you're a nutcase religious fanatic without a brain if you don't accept that my lack of proof is better than your lack of proof..."

Yeah. Your argument is just that compelling.

Originally Posted by Aleksander

Well... I see that now it is more "God exists" vs "God does not exists" topic, than it should be . For me all of your examples are just pointless. IF God exists ( I believe so, but this is not important now ) than how we can even try to understand what He wants, or what He is trying to do? How an ant can understand what we ( humans ) are doing, and why?

BACK to our topic: I think that every country has such battles and moments in its history . I'am from Poland, and from our side I can tell You, that there are plenty of them. Maybe main achievement was regaining indepencence after 123 years of occupation and not loosing our cultural identity.

Sorry for my bad english. I hope, that you can understand what I am trying to say.

Ave

But the existence of god is paramount to answering the question asked, you can not be "blessed" if god does not exist therefore any atheists and agnostics responding can not be true to their beliefs and answer "blessed" leaving the only viable option as "Lucky".

Originally Posted by Naddoður

If God's will is absolute, then the world is deterministic and we cannot have free will. On the other hand, if we do have free will, then what's the point of there being a God?

Kind of reminds me of the old joke:
If we are all Gods children what is so special about Jesus?"

Originally Posted by Iwanttobeajarhead

I do believe we have been blessed. the bible is one of the oldest books in print, and the whole thing is in perfect unity, something which writers of today that weren't thousands of miles and centuries apart fail to do. how do you explain that?

How can you claim it is in perfect unity when Genesis has two contradictory accounts of the Earths creation?

Problem 1:
================================================== =============================================
Genesis 1:25-27
(Humans were created after the other animals.)
And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let us make man in our image.... So God created man in his own image.

Genesis 2:18-19
(Humans were created before the other animals.)
And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
================================================== ===============================================

Problem 2:
Genesis 1:27
(The first man and woman were created simultaneously.)
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

Genesis 2:18-22
(The man was created first, then the animals, then the woman from the man's rib.)
And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them.... And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.
================================================== ================================================

Genesis so badly written and riddled with inconsistencies that it alone should be enough to put a logical mind off the God idea.

MontyB, your logic is somehow flawed.

You dont need a god to be blessed. When we say "god bless you". It means also "we bless you in the name of god".

If you see carefully this blessing comes from a man who by a declarative sentence gives a blessing in the name of an entity's principles.

If god dont exist, it will be the principles of those who believe in him alone. And if god exist, it will be his principles and the principles of it's followers.

To put things into a short term.

God exists if there is people who believe it. It's not the truth. But it's a reality.

Go say that god dont exist on this forum. And god wont strike you with a lightning bolt to punish you.
But go say that in Afghanistan in a Taliban assembly. And you will see god's wrath.

These religious beliefs can be strong enough to make these concepts a reality. The concept of god is a powerful reality.

If 50.000.000 Americans believe that America is blessed. Then America is blessed by 50millions Americans.

Isnt that godly enough?

Originally Posted by MontyB

You have to realise though that God does not promote free will as you are only free to believe in him or not you can not believe in anything else, for example I draw your attention to number 1 of the fabled list...

ONE: 'You shall have no other gods before Me.'

Further to this the guy should he exist is clearly a megalomaniac as the first 4 commandments are cementing power with killing each other only rating a 6 on the list.

To be blunt I think most people these days no longer believe in "god" as a being but more as a collective term for the unexplained mechanisms of the universe and as such it is unlikely that America is blessed and more likely that is simply makes its own luck which isn't difficult if you have a giant piece of dirt with tons of raw materials and non-aggressive neighbours.

PS As you can tell I am pretty much an atheist.

Well Monty; you don’t have to convince me. I've been an atheist for many years.

But the answer to the joke “If we are all Gods children what is so special about Jesus?" is very easy.

He is his begotten son, we are his created children.

But for all that I care; people can believe in whatever they like.

LeMask!

Santa exists if there are people who believe it. It's not the truth. But it's a reality.

As I said; people can believe in whatever they like.

Originally Posted by AZ_Infantry

Sigh... all these narrow minded, short sighted people who refuse to believe anything they don't have answers for in order to believe in... things they have no answer for.

Well, whatever. Science sure has proven a lot to us, hasn't it? It couldn't possibly be that God created a structured set of blocks in which defined parameters operate outside of any plane of our current understanding, each little piece affecting another little piece.

Nope. It's all random chance. Every bit of it. Those algorithmic patterns we use to describe and define the very chemicals that we have faith in as the goo that binds life together, with zero proof of any of the such, is an act of pure chaos, two lifeless meteors slamming together.

It's always fun debating with those who believe the unbelievable to dismiss the unbelievable. Y'all fail in your very core beliefs; science itself has proven that there is nothing "random," yet you tout it as some victorious citation. Guess what? If "random" cannot exist, as science says, then "design" is the only other way. Or how about "planned?" We like to call those 'opposing terms' when we're talking about debates, but I am sure none of you will have any of that realistic, mature and educated logic.

That can't exist, because I am a product of quadrillions of atoms slamming together in random patterns, with a chance of life being 1.67 TRILLION to the TENTH power, and then again to the TENTH POWER.

The number is so large that, literally, this board wouldn't let me post it all in one post.

But that's more likely than some type of divinity, right? That one in whatever-billions-of-billions-of-billions chances is far more believable for 3.9 billion people living on the planet than admitting that you. Just. Don't. Know. It. All.

What arrogance from such simple minds...

Classical Newtonian mechanics assumes no randomness- everything is controlled by simple equations of motion, and that's the end of the story. However, in modern physics we have a key concept called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which states that you can never truly measure both an object's position and momentum with total accuracy. Hence it's impossible to predict with total accuracy how one particle will affect another. This effect is most pronounced for objects at the atomic level, but the effect on the real world is profound. The way that molecules in a gas interact, for example, can only be modeled as random.

Think about this experiment that shows how randomness is present in every day life - suppose you line up 10 billiard balls, with each ball separated 1 meter from the next. Using a cue ball, is it possible to hit the first ball into the second, so that the second hits the third, the third hits the fourth, and so on for all ten balls? It sounds simple enough - just a very good combination shot. But if you do the math you'll see that any error in the way two balls collide is magnified by about a factor of 30 when the next ball is hit. So for ten balls any initial error is magnified by 30^10, which is about 6 x 10^15. Stated another way, the initial hit would have to be accurate to better than 5x10^-15 cm. To achieve this level of accuracy the balls would need to be smoother than atomic structure allows. At this level the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle sets in. So it's impossible to predict exactly what will happen to the 10 bals - the end result is random.

Now think just how much more incredibly complicated the universe is compared to just 10 billiard balls, and you can see that randomness is indeed fundamental to how things behave.