Dagobahn Eagle

Sure, and if you want the laws to be made harsher in anticipation of their deeds, go right ahead. I'm talking about the one of Utøya infamy. Either way, as was just said, the Norwegian justice system aren't about punishment or retaliation, but about rehabilitation and the safe-keeping of dangerous individuals (such as murderers, rapists, and, of course, terrorists) so that their victims don't have to live in fear of running into them on the street. We're not like certain other countries that subject people to long sentences in deplorable conditions or kill them outright to make other people feel good, the victims will have to get their therapy elsewhere. In the case of Breivik, though, it's far from a given that he'll be let out on the streets in 21 years. He's a very special case to say the least, and it's a bit of a "wait and see" situation right now. Far from unlikely that he'll be in for life, though.

Nope. As was said earlier, we're not changing laws to punish one individual, and any law/Constitution change would probably come too late to affect Breivik anyway. Either way, punishment was never what the Norwegian justice system was all about. What it boils down to is that the 21 year limit for offenses has been in placefor an eternity. It's not like our Constitution and laws were written while the attacks were taking place. If you want laws changed to punish a terrorist attack more severely, then that's something you have to campaign for and implement before the attack occurs, not in the following days and weeks. A Norwegian saying about about shutting the door to the stable after the horses have ran off comes to mind:raise:.

So now picketing soldiers' funerals makes you a worse person than someone who presides over, and denies, the cover-up of sexual abuse of minors? Agreed. Given that no one has even suggested anything remotely like this in this discussion, why do you ask:confused:? You continue to deny accusations no one has made. Except that yes, the Pope is indeed head of the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church. That one is true. You're shamefully ignorant of the facts of this case. The policies of transfering offenders to other churches and shaming the victims into silence was indeed official RCC doctrine, and the number of offenses was more than "a few incidents". As I said earlier in the thread, I frankly do not understand how it's possible to deny this, given the extent of the media coverage and the sheer amount of evidence that's been produced. Here is a snippet of data to get you started. Newsflash: when someone does something outrageous, people are outraged. "I beat this baby seal to death and now all of a sudden everyone hate me, they must have an agenda!". Puh-leeze. He didn't. The Vatican did.

Que? All Phelp's church does is hold idiotic protests and funeral picketings. I'm not aware of them covering up sex crimes within their family. I'm just as shocked every time someone posts a response of this kind, because I honestly do not understand the problem. The Catholic Church is covering up sexual abuse up to and including rape. Please, take a step back and think about this. Imagine it's someone else than the Vatican. Imagine it's, say, the Boy Scouts in your country. Imagine that not only are Boy Scout leaders sexually abusing young boys, and that those few that dare tell the superiors about this are threatened with expulsion from the Scouts if they tell anyone, even their own parents. Imagine that you learn that boys or girls have been abused at your local school, and that two girls told the principal and their parents what had happened, only to be expelled from the school. Then imagine you learn that the teachers who committed the crimes were not punished, just given a diciplinary talk and moved to a different school. What exactly is the reason for your anger? That he shouldn't be attacked because he is the Pope? That people who happen to be non-believers shouldn't attack him? What? Source, please? Edit: Never mind, found it. You had it all wrong: the Pope “Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live. I also recall the regime’s attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives. As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a “reductive vision of the person and his destiny” (Caritas in Veritate, 29).” Dawkins responds: Even if Hitler had been an atheist, his political philosophy was not based upon atheism and had no connection with atheism. Hitler was arguably (and by his own account) a Roman Catholic. In any case he enjoyed the open support of many of the most senior catholic clergy in Germany and the less demonstrative support of Pope Pius XII. Even if Hitler had been an atheist (he certainly was not), the rank and file Germans who carried out the attempted extermination of the Jews were Christians, almost to a man: either Catholic or Lutheran, primed to their anti-Semitism by centuries of Catholic propaganda about ‘Christ-killers’ and by Martin Luther’s own seething hatred of the Jews. To mention Ratzinger’s membership of the Hitler Youth might be thought to be fighting dirty, but my feeling is that the gloves are off after this disgraceful paragraph by the pope. So basically, you're correct except you kinda, slightly, sorta turned the matter on its head. It was Ratzinger who compared atheists to Nazis, not the other way around . Dawkins merely pointed out the Vatican's hypocrisity. Hope that clears stuff up for everyone. ...huh? Okay, now I'm definitely lost. Who are you replying to here:confused:?

Hilarious :¬: . Apart from all the bigoted bargage he spouts about everything from nonbelievers to abortion, there is the disgusting business with him covering up sexual abuse Catholic Church priests, going as far as to excommunicating victims who dared press charges against their assailants. I honestly have no idea how on Earth you've managed to remain unaware of this through the huge storm the media and, frankly, everyone, have raised for quite a long while now . You're right. It's not as if we already discuss war and sexual abuse in these threads.

Better the Brits than us. Here's hoping he stays far away from Scandinavia.

Reality disagrees: You seem to be subscribing to the idea that morals are an unchanging, absolute thing set in stone. It isn't. 50 years ago coloured people in the US had to fight hard to be allowed to even go to the same school as whites. Today, the US has an African-American President. Morals change, all the time, regardless of how many people sit there on their high horses with their stone tablets and arrogantly declare that out of all the countless moral stances out there, they possess the one true right one. How awfully kind of you. I don't like to make decisions based on gut feeling. More arrogance -- "there's me and those who think like me, and then there's the weak-minded who easily fall prey to immorality". "Your"? Do you assume that the only people who support homosexual rights are the gays themselves? Apples and oranges. Doesn't follow. Buh-bye !

No. I'm saying it's as baseless as racism or sexism. Going by the same reasoning, why should it be against the law for a private school to prohibit coloured people from joining?

Regrettably, yes, though I have this funny feeling people wouldn't be as okay with this if people were discriminated against on the basis of disabilities, skin colour, ethnicity or their stance on the eating of meat . Weasel words noted. You have a point -- Nemi (of the Norwegian comic with the same name) once said, while discussing the intolerance of the Salvation Army, that she doesn't understand Christians who want to be Christians, because to her they come across as Negroes (her wording) who want to join the Ku Klux Klan. On the other hand, despite all the archaic stuff the Bible says about homosexuality, I view it as a good cause to try to nudge people people into the 21st century. There were probably lots of coloured kids who didn't want to go to school with the racist whites when Segregation ended, either, but that seems to have worked out just fine.

Not that you could build and maintain a ship like that. Wooden ships have an inherent limit to how big you can make them, and the amount of leakage and other problems the Ark would suffer from would be catastrophic, hugely adding to the chores Noah's family would have to undergo. If the ship floated at all.

Well, technically, you could say God is a metaphor, that the Flood happened through other supernatural means, and that Noah and his family were still warned somehow. If you can remove God from the creation of a universe, surely a tiny little world-devastating flood can't be too much ?

We're discussing Noah's Ark now? I must've missed that particular derail. Either way, as a Bible enthusiast, I find it a fascinating, if not deeply disturbing myth, but I don't believe it for a second, not only due to its many, many, many impossibilities, but also because it's obviously one of the many adaptations of the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh. It has so many of the same features - a great flood, only a few humans surviving, those few humans living for a long time, and so on, that it's really hard to dismiss as a coincidence, especially seeing that the Israelites were slaves of the Babylonians for a time, and adopted Babylonian customs, ethics and laws during their stay. As an aside, the Babylonian ruler Hammurabi was also the source of the Jewish doctrine of "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth". Other than its obvious source, though, the myth itself is simply impossible in so many ways, not only because of geological reasons but also due to the impossibility of caring for so many species, for so long. I'm a former animal shelter volunteer. We had a staff far larger than Noah's family, and cared for far less animals (mostly dogs and cats, but also some smaller specimen like rabbits and hedgehogs), and it was still tiring work. We had to feed the animals, care for them, take them for walks, give them medical care, etc. Our shelter, at any one time, had some young animals and some older ones. Trust me, reducing their age reduces somewhat the problem of space and habitat, but introduces several new ones. First and foremost, how are these young animals supposed to survive in the wild after having been raised by humans for their first month of existence? You try to raise a couple wolf pups for the first portion of their lives, for then to drop them off in a patch of woods utterly devastated by a massive, horrific doomsday flood, and see how they cope when they suddenly have to find their own food (what food? Don't ask me). Look, M@RS, I realize you probably have a lot invested in the Bible, but there's just no way around the fact that the myth of Noah is fiction.

After rethinking this thread some on a climbing trip, I've come to the new conclusion that the derailing into a scientific discussion was slightly uncalled for. I thought to myself, hey, if I made a thread asking how old the Earth and universe are according to science, and somebody popped up going "according to the Bible, for anyone out there willing to find real truth, it's 6000 years old", I'd be mildly annoyed . While my open-minded, climbing-trip-in-idyllic-nature-induced peace of mind lasts ... if I was to create a whole universe, I'd spend a day sitting back admiring it, too. Then again, it does specifically say rest, and I don't know if his omnipotence was established yet by Genesis' time.

He is a fan of Rube Goldberg devices .

I honestly don't see the problem. You asked a question and received an answer, and Achilles added his opinion. Religious thoughts, no matter how much they mean to you, are not above correction if they interfere with the knowledge we have of the world we live in.