I'm enjoying the good discussions on here. Many thanks to all who have taken the time to contribute! To me, just the possibility that there might be a god and an eternity makes these issues worth thinking about and discussing.

Every now and then interesting side points are made in a thread that don't deal with the topic at hand. In order to counter thread drift I might repost some of those ideas here.

Here's one:

I think Americans would be amazed and shocked at how many people in other countries really believe a variation of this! I've met highly intelligent graduate international students who are in the top 1% of their countries social and intellectual elite who have told me that they believe this. And I haven't even talked to international students from Muslim and Middle Eastern countries about this. I wish there was a way to find out how many of the less educated people in other countries believe the story above? I wonder how many Americans believe it? Why would any American believe this nonsense?

Tibet

As a further aside, I also know Chinese PhD students who believe the Chinese government party line about the killing of Tibetan demonstrators a few years ago. Here's the Chinese government side that was told to me:

According to the Chinese government the whole U.S. reporting was a fabrication of the U.S. media because the media is controlled by the U.S. government. The Chinese claimed that only "a few" Tibetans were killed when the poor PLA soldiers were forced to defend themselves. Most of the soldiers were just standing there and letting themselves be assaulted by the mobs without retaliating. (Not to mention that the Tibetan mobs were probably incited by foreign influence in the first place.) Many soldiers were killed but only "a few" Tibetans were killed in self defense.

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I was flabbergasted to hear this, to say the least! Umm, yeah. Now whose media is controlled by the government? And these soldiers with guns are just standing there and doing nothing?

Most amazing is that this is the exact same story that the Chinese government used after the Tiananmen massacre in 1989! They're not very creative. But since the current Chinese generation has never been able to hear about the Tiananmen demonstrations anyway they've never heard this story in the first place.

Never underestimate the influence of Chinese government propaganda!

The quote thing

You can also do it a little easier like this:
1) Copy the text you want to quote
2) Click the little yellow "Quote" tags icon in the Reply box (3rd from the right, next to the #) and paste the text between the tags.
3) Type in the user name as Juke shows above

You can also make nested quotes

BAH! I never noticed that thing in there before. Thanks, I hate typing the code by hand. LOL

Dave242,
Does that mean man-dog or dog-man? fully human/fully dog?

close - you gotta get a little dyslexic for the full meaning. Its a rip off of one of my favorite jokes: Did you hear about the dyslexic-agnostic-insomniac? He used to lay awake at night wondering if there was a dog.

buh-dump-bump

After what you said in the other thread I figured it had something to do with switching the letters around. That sounds like your kind of humor.

BTW, I like the dyslexic agnostic joke too.

LOL, I thought Dave242 meant he was quoting his own book that never made into the bible.

I'm spending way, Way, WAY too much time in this group!