It's more that the fourth and fifth book are dull and repetitive. Every Brienne chapter in CROWS is the same. Every Tyrion chapter in DRAGONS is the same. Every time they eat a meal Martin stops the story to give us a detailed recipe. I'm planning to read the final two books if they're ever released, as I'm already well in for a penny, but I genuinely think the show is at the point of doing a better job of telling the story than the books. It boils it down to the interesting bits, still takes the time to let the characters be more than just cardboard cutouts, and when nothing interesting is happening in the books it does a good job of coming up with something in the proper spirit for both plot and character.

So maybe after screen testing they decided a raven looked cooler than a crow, or maybe it would be easier to track the third eye on a larger bird, and instead of calling a raven a crow they just made it a raven so they specifically wouldn't get nitpicked.

NICE TRY SHOWRUNNERS

Its sole purpose, ultimately, is to have the three main kids not at the Halloween feast so they can be alone when they discover the petrified Mrs. Norris and the bloody message.

Indeed. I don't care how many goddamn voices he did in ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, Jim Dale's readings are terrible.

Defining truth is difficult, as centuries of philosophers will tell you. I suppose truth is whatever objectively is, and what would be whether or not I or anyone believed or knew of it. Some people like math for this. It is always true that if you put two things next to two other things there are always four things in that set, and this was true before humans existed and it is true where no humans will ever exist and it will be true when all the stars are dead. It is also always true that two and two is never five.

The mechanism I use to separate truth from falsehood is evidence. As sellew and avatar described, I am agnostic in the sense that I don't believe it is possible to know anything with 100% certainty. New information could always come to light that will require me to change my understanding of what is true, but at a certain point it is safe to say that, based on evidence or lack thereof, something is almost certainly true or not true, to the extent that we can confidently say something is true until further notice.

It is true, on Earth, that if I hold a heavier-than-air object and release it, it will fall. Every experience I have ever had with gravity indicates that it always works this way, every experience other people report indicates it always works this way. It is possible that one day I will release a heavier-than-air object and it will float into the sky like a helium balloon. But this is so unlikely based on everything we know and have experienced, it's not worth considering until it actually happens.

If someone came and told me this had happened to him, but could not replicate it, it would certainly be possible that he had experienced something completely unlike anything in human experience and that our understanding of gravity was fundamentally flawed, but the much more likely explanation is that he was lying or mistaken, as both of those things happen with humans all the time.

My goal is to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible. I can never be sure that I am doing so, but the surest way to approach that goal is to demand a certain threshold of evidence -- extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, as the saying goes. If you tell me you had a tuna sandwich for lunch, well lunch and tuna sandwiches are things I know exist and are common, so I can take you at your word. If you tell me you were abducted by aliens and ate a tuna sandwich they gave you while orbiting the rings of Saturn, lots of that is extremely uncommon, and I would probably not believe you unless you could demonstrate that these uncommon events had occurred, and showing me the tuna sandwich would not suffice.

It may really be true that you were abducted etc. But unless you can demonstrate it, I have no way of telling the difference between that story being true and you pulling my leg, and so I would not be justified in believing you.

But there's no "considering" going on. You've already stated that you assume they are true and that you don't care whether or not there's evidence because you just wave your hands and call it faith. You're trying to make it sound like you're approaching it intellectually and you're not. You're shielding what you choose to believe from the same standard of evidence you're applying to the things you do not choose to believe.

And as I've said many times, the fact that the stories mention people or places that existed does not mean the history is accurate. This would be tantamount to someone in the future asserting that the film AVENGERS is historically accurate because we have found evidence that New York City did in fact exist.

To get away from conversations about the Bible, let's talk about this:

To me, having come out of this view of the world (after I was no longer a Christian I still believed there must be a God for exactly this reason), the need for a creative being comes from the basic assumption that the universe had to be the way it is. Obviously to start from "nothing" (not literally nothing, but not the universe as we know it) and get to the universe the way it is now as an ultimate goal, you'd have to have a plan and therefore a planner.

It's hard, especially when brought up religious, to wrap the mind around the idea that the universe had no plan and where we are now was nobody's goal. It's just a thing that happened to turn out this way, and everything in it is a series of things that happened to turn out the way they did. We are looking at the end of a chain of events that we can choose to view as auspicious (and we certainly should, as one of the "things that happened" is us) but were unplanned.

It wasn't completely random, though, due to what we as humans think of as the natural laws. To say that nature requires a creative mind is effectively to say that the natural laws are impossible, to say that 2+2 cannot equal 4 without a mind to make it so, that the force of gravity is unsuitable to the tasks our model of the force of gravity clearly indicates it is quite capable of accomplishing. If a universe with a creative mind behaves identically to a universe without one -- and we are not required to assume a creative mind before we can build an accurate and predictable model of the universe or its interactions (see: physics) -- how can we tell the difference between a universe with a creative mind and one without one?

Except that you approach this one with a presupposition.

I'm afraid it's the only valid form of faith. True faith demands evidence. What you call faith is mere credulity, and provides no mechanism to separate truth from falsehood.

That's like saying chocolate chips are not satisfactory when it comes to vanilla flavoring. You're talking about two completely different things. I humbly suggest you take a little bit of the time you say you spend researching the Bible doing the research on these topics, at least enough to understand the fundamentals, before you dismiss them out of hand.

I'll also note that the universe is under no obligation to behave in a way you find satisfactory. And before you say it: no, the same cannot be said of God, because God -- the one you're talking about at least -- is not indifferent to us in the way the universe is.

We're going in circles. It impresses you that people writing what to me equates to fan fiction would have a consistency of theme. It does not impress me because it's not like they were writing in a vaccuum. Have you ever read fan fiction? Most fans understand the themes of the core story and incorporate them into their own writing. They knew the story they were adding to, they understood the theme and the purpose of the story, and they could tailor their writings to that purpose. And the ones that didn't weren't accepted as canon. This is how fiction in a shared fantasy world works, it is done all the time, and I do not understand why when the Bible does it I'm meant to be impressed.

Oh, they're not pent-up in the slightest. They're just easy to unleash because Christian arguments are always the same, often near-verbatim. In fact I made most of them in my time.

But I agree and also appreciate fireproof for taking it in stride. For what it's worth I argue the same way with my very best friends when they're being wrong. 

As I said before, I reject this assertion most strongly of any, being living proof to the contrary.

The Bible is really not that unique or impressive. The 40 people writing on message were selected out of many other people writing off-message. So of course what's reached us has a consistency of message, that's why these specific ones were selected and others weren't. That's arguably compelling for sociopolitical and historical reasons, but it doesn't make the Bible a unique and special snowflake in all of human history.

It seems more to me that you're predisposed to the Bible and you're coming up with post hoc rationalizations that it's something special in order to justify your predisposition.

Faith in its proper form is important to every day life. Every time you step into a crosswalk, you're having faith that the people in the death machines around you will obey the laws and not turn you into paste. Every time you tell your best friend a secret, you're placing faith in him or her to keep it for you. You cannot know that a drunk driver will not come careening through that crosswalk, or that your friend won't decide to betray you, but based on past experience you take that leap. Faith is not based on proof, but it is based on evidence.

Religion has corrupted the word to mean believing something, not just in the absence of both proof and evidence, but often in the face of conflicting and even contradictory evidence. I do not accept that as a valid definition of faith. To me that's just gullibility.

And for all we know, they put out a sequel to their story that said exactly this and just didn't wind up getting passed on down the centuries. We know that deliberate hoaxes, once they've taken hold in people's minds, can survive being exposed even by the masterminds of the hoax. It can even intensify them. Ask the guys who made that Bigfoot video, or the folks who started the crop circle craze.

Many early Christians were, but we can't be sure that the Gospel writers were among them, since as I mentioned, we do not have solid evidence (disregarding "tradition") of who said writers actually were.

I have never understood -- even as a Christian -- why this is considered a compelling argument. An accurately reproduced work of fiction is still a work of fiction.