It is nice to know that god talks to you direct,  we have people here in Canada that talk to god we call them schitzophrenics;  they spend a lot of time in a place we call "the house  of perpetual fingerpainting." 

           I like the way you use the word CHOOSE and all capital letters.   So sorry to hear that our freedom of choice so offends your freedom to CHOOSE for us.  I  like thinking for myself, I encourage you to try it one day soon.   You can pray for us {consult Templeton foundation on Prayer & Medicine}  we will think for you.  'cause clearly you aint thinkin for yo-self.

I apoligize. I didn't know that this would be posted, but I do choose for myself.

I choose God and if you can't accept that, then that's that. I strongly hope you change your mind about God though.

Please, I advise thinking about this:

God is ALIVE! Jesus will come back soon and believers will eternally live in Heaven. Sinners will go to Hell:

Fire, pain, no love, endless work... is that really what you want? A life of Pain?

You have the choice.

It's not my fault you didn't read the contact form.

You choose God? Yippee! I gave up my invisible friends fairly early in life.

God is Alive? If only you had proof...

Fire, pain, no love, endless work? Sounds like my marriage (yes I'm married to a Christian).

I grew up in a good, loving Christian home.  I even persisted in belief well into my adulthood.  What happened?  I experienced a change of values.  I came to understand that faith is not a way of knowing but of wishing.  I came to understand that reason and evidence are the way to knowing things.  For many years, I'd assumed that the beliefs in which I'd been raised would be borne out by rational investigation but, when I finally got around to looking into such things, I found that that was not the case.  There simply are no good reasons to think that your God (or any other) actually exists.

I choose to try to live in reality.  I'm always sorry to be reminded that so many people choose instead to live in faith.

I enjoy M.C. Escher's depiction of hell. 

I've never understood prayer. Are people actually egotistical enough to think they're wants and needs are so important that god will change his plan for them? God already knows what his plan is, and he's staying the course. Geesh. Dumbasses.

Dude, do you really think we haven't thought about it? Do you truly think we just arbitrarily choose to not believe in god?

Let's take a look at your claims:

People have been waiting for almost 2000 years for Jesus to come back. It says in the Bible he was going to come back within the lifetime of those people in the New Testament, yet he did not (major prophetic failure), or if he did, nobody noticed. Why do you suppose he's coming back soon?

Second: why do you believe god is ALIVE!? If he is, and is as powerful and influential as you seem to think, where is the evidence? Why have all the miracles conveniently occurred in the distant past, where there can be no validation? (Well, except for the flood. There should've been tons of paleontologic and geologic evidence, but there is none whatsoever. So that one's been disproved.)

From an philosophic standpoint, why would a loving god wish to torment those he professes to love? So I don't believe in him. Is that truly sufficient reason to torture those he loves? Is he really that egocentric, that he insists we all love and worship him? If so, that's not a god that deserves respect.

I can't choose to believe in god. Belief is not simply a switch you can turn on and off. Simply put, god looks more like a fictional construct of man, rather than an ontologic entity. How can I force myself to believe something so patently false?

Anyway, have fun. I hope you at least take comfort from your beliefs. Also, please don't use your belief as an excuse to persecute other people -- say, by restricting same-sex marriage. And please don't try to use your beliefs as rationalizations to invade foreign countries, or to elect Sarah Pallin (or those just like her). Also, if you would be so kind, please don't badmouth education. It is knowledge and education that have given you the comforts you enjoy right now.

Thanks much.

Ewww, you discust me.  Preach your fear tactics elsewhere, i dont conversate with people telling me im going to die while holding an imaginary gun to my head.  You are so very transparently a nut!!!   How DARE you make these claims, you are logically insane for doing so.  Piss off!!!

I'm with you on this, iwbiek.  It makes me shudder when people use language badly.

And just to add one finger-wag of disapproval, 'conversate' is the type of word used by rappers to sound all intellectual and shit....

It's not working, rappers. Seriously now......

P.S. Jeffrick, please tell me that your use of 'greatist' was ironic, or you may have to stand in the corner for an hour.

      My comment was in plural form,   you are far from the only one and even I made a spelling mistake with "greatest" which was quickly pointed out to me.     Keep in mind some of our regulers do not speak English as a first language.

Unfortunately, the world doesn't work that way. People judge, they point out what is 'wrong' or different, and they get annoyed by simple spelling errors.  *rant*  My biggest spelling pet-peeve is the misuse of 'there, their, and they're' ~ It drives me bat-shit crazy    I continue on with reading the author's message for the content and meaning, but there is a part of me that thinks a little less of the person's reliability /rant.

With that said, let's take into consideration the forum that we are in. In most cases, someone comes in with a specific position to argue, and they want everyone to listen and understand what they are saying. With numerous spelling and grammatical errors, that task becomes time consuming for the reader. Many of us have been with this community for years and when the same level of spelling inadequacy pops up over and over~it becomes tiring. Much like the same tired arguments presented regarding the existence of a god! 

Well, for example: the way you ran your 'ofcourse' together totally freaks me out ~ and the fact that in numerous posts before this one it was spelled 'ofcoarse' really gets to me ~ I am not picking on you ... just being a smart ass AND I even understood the content of your message!

Personally, I would never call anyone out on their grammar or spelling as a way to discredit their argument. I think there is a word for doing so... it slips my mind. The content is the most important part of a post so the point is this: If someone wants their audience to understand what their message is, they need that message to come across loud and clear, not in the muck and mire of bad spelling and grammar. Most readers will lose focus on the content if there are too many spelling and grammar mistakes!

Paige,
 
I'm sorry that you can't think for yourself and believe that an invisible man in the sky you can't see, hear, smell, taste or touch talks to you specifically.  There's plenty of people like you in the world - some of them fly planes into buildings when their invisible man in the sky tells them to.  Others incinerate Jews when their God tells them to.
 
I'm sorry that you CHOOSE to delude yourself and hand over money to churches and waste your life by listening to the rantings and ravings of goat herders that have been dead 2,000 years plus.  I'm sorry that you hate life so much that you have to hope for a do-over once you're dead.  I'm sorry that your existence is so pathetic, meaningless and shallow.  I'm sorry you think that prayer does anything.  I feel terrible for the girl in Wisconsin who died of her diabetes because her parents were stupid enough to think that prayer cures disease. 
 
Maybe you'll get lucky and shake off your idiotic upbringing and whatever moronic teachings you were handed to make you believe in a God - a Christian god at that.  I won't hold my breath, though - you're probably too scared, pathetic and unwise to put down your drugs.
 
While you pray, we'll think.  And we'll come out ahead.
 
Sincerely,
Brian

Let me draw a distinction here between spelling errors and grammatical errors. I agree that spelling errors, while annoying, are for the most part trivial, since they tend not to affect the logic of the comment, but only the manner in which it is presented. (However, I'd be willing to wager that very poor spellers tend not to be well read, and so this does minimally affect negatively the ethos of an author when issues that tend to require a great deal of reading before they can reasonably expected to be understood properly -- such as the issues raised in these forums -- are discussed.) Grammatical errors, however, are a different thing entirely. Poor grammar often reflects poor thinking in a way that spelling errors generally do not. That is, there is a logic to grammar that spelling, for the most part, lacks.

I only attack spelling and grammar when I think the person has earned it.  I do it for fun, not to try to "protect the language".

"edejardin, that would be accurate enough if grammar were universally the same, but it is not. French and English are practically in reverse of each other grammatically."

Vastet, I think this actually proves my point. If I were to write an English sentence using French grammar -- or, better yet, the grammar of a heavily declined language such as Latin -- the overall logic of it would be affected in a way that is generally unaffected by spelling errors. The fact that different grammatical rules obtain in different languages is no more relevant that the fact that different logical rules obtain in classical logic and paraconsistent logics. The point is that the rules affect meaning. In Attic Greek, it's perfectly accurate to render the English sentence, "[The dog] [bit] [Bill]" as "[Bill] [bit] [the dog]" without affecting the meaning one bit; in English, however, the syntactical rules are quite important, and obviously affect the meaning profoundly, especially if you're Bill or the dog.

"And grammar is no more immune to time and evolution than spelling is, as the same example points out."

Of course it isn't (excepting the possibility of a universal grammar), but that too isn't relevant. The point is that if you're reading the Old English of Beowulf or the Middle English of Chaucer -- or even, in parts, the Elizabethan English of Shakespeare -- you have to understand the grammatical differences if you're to make sense of the sentences *because*, as I said, the grammar affects the internal logic of the sentence.

That should be two words: word form.

There should be a period after the closed parenthesis and the 'g' in "get" should be capitalized as the beginning of a new sentence.

Just messin' with ya!

well, i'm afraid your philosophizing won't help my students pass the slovak state exam in english or the cambridge first certificate exam or get them their toefl qualification.  so you'll have to excuse me if for practical reasons i continue to fight against the meme.

precisely.  wonder why...

that's actually pretty sad, since comparitively english is an easy language.

btw, just so we're straight, i am an american, and i have little sympathy for american students (barring those with learning disorders) who struggle with english, when i see so many foreigners really taking it seriously and asking their teachers tough grammatical questions.  many of my students could end with high-paying and prestigious jobs as interpreters, but that market is very competitive, so that's why they can't afford even small mistakes.

of course, it's very unlikely any of them will ever read posts here, but knowing the basics of memetics, nonexistent words are still one of my pet peeves.

for some reason i always used to hear that too, but practical experience doesn't bear it out.  all the europeans i've met who are proficient in multiple languages (and many europeans are at least rudimentarily trilingual) tell me that english was by far the easiest.  so far the people who have told me that were variously proficient in english, french, german, czech, slovak, russian, hebrew, japanese, polish, ukrainian, hungarian, and arabic as second languages.  their various nationalities were slovak, czech, polish, hungarian, german, and egyptian.  many of them had less formal education in english than their other second languages.

most of the linguists i've read say that by far the most difficult languages to learn are from the finno-ugric family, which includes finnish, estonian, and hungarian.  that explains why so many southern slovaks, despite being right across the border from hungary, have little or no understanding of hungarian, unless they're of recent ethnic hungarian extraction.

When you note that words in the Chinese language are formed by putting something in front of other words, what you're noticing is that Chinese is agglutinative.  English shares this property to a very limited extent.  In English, new words are usually unique.  That can (and does) happen in Chinese.  For instance, words in Chinese, despite popular misconception, are not always single syllables, but rather usually contain at least two syllables and are represented by two characters.  Similarities that are notable between English and Chinese are word order  (Chinese can be an SVO language -though it does show similarities with SOV languages) and the lack of a need for (or the complete absence of) inflected verbs.

Some things that may make Chinese easy to learn for English speakers are pronoun dropping (which English speakers tend to do very easily) and a lack of particles.

There are major differences that can make Chinese quite difficult for a speaker of English, however.  The language requires the mastery of a tonal system, the phonology of Chinese having phonemes represented by changes in tone.  English has absolutely no phonemes that are tone dependant.  An English speaker who is tone deaf may well find it difficult if not impossible to speak Chinese.  Further, in the instance of word order in SOV English speakers typically have problems, as well as with things like postpositions.

In writing the language an English speaker would have to memorize all the relevant characters for words, as the written language is logosyllabic (morphemes -or parts of morphemes -are represented by a single logogram).

Conversely with a Chinese speaker learning spoken or written English, that person will face problems adapting to a language that actually has inflected verbs (though they're not strictly required for communication) and inflection at all (Chinese doesn't contain things like plural nouns or -with few exceptions - any inflection at all).  They'll have to get used to including pronouns in sentences and sticking to a strictly SVO word order (though this shouldn't pose a particular problem).  What will be easy for a Chinese speaker is likely the written system of English.  From the perspective of anyone outside the English language and anyone in the know, English is not a phonetic written language and our alphabet does not represent it.  English contains not less than 48 phonemes and the alphabet contains 26 symbols that represent only 21 of those phonemes, only 5 of which represent 5 of the 23 vowels and diphthongs.  To a learner of English (particular one that does not use a latinate alphabet) they need only learn the writing system in chunks of loosely regulated symbols.  Compared to the task of memorizing literally hundreds (or thousands) of characters, a Chinese speaker would need only memorize 26 very roughly phonetic symbols and employ a set of simple rules to pen any English word.

So, learning a language easily is somewhat dependant on the rules of your own language and how similar they are to the language you wish to learn.  English and Chinese aren't terribly dissimilar.  A language like German, from either Chinese or English, might be very hard for either learner.  For the German speaker a language like Scottish Gaelic might be difficult to learn.  It's important to remember, however, that there is no language that is necessarily difficult to learn for any learner and there has never been (nor is there ever likely to be) a language that is universally difficult to learn.  Every child on Earth with the capability of learning one language can learn any other language it's exposed to when developing up to a (theorectically) arbitrary number.

Excuse the lesson ...or not.

not anymore, but it used to be.  in college i had the enormous pleasure of taking a chaucer course where all we did the whole term was read aloud the entire canterbury tales in middle english, and it was completely phonetic.  spelling and speaking didn't evolve along the same course, unfortunately.

there were various attempts in the 19th century to reintroduce phonetic spelling into english.  while they obviously failed, they were a bit more successful in the united states, which is the main reason why you have the classic differences between "british" and "american" spelling (draught/draft, centre/center, colour/color, etc.).

yeah, that's precisely what i always heard.  it's no wonder even mao zedong struggled with it.  he was never able to go beyond his hunanese dialect.

then again, there are also his legendary and reportedly hilarious struggles to learn english.

i used to room with a vietnamese guy and he told me vietnamese uses seven tones.

well, to be fair, it wasn't just my thinking, it was mostly info from my professor, who granted may have simplified things in the context of the course, but considering he was a harvard valedictorian and spent most of his graduate studies handling original shakespeare first folios, i certainly had no reason to doubt him.

of course i am aware that there was no standardized english spelling or grammar until at least the 19th century.  double negatives, for example, feature in both shakespeare and chaucer, as do variant spellings of a single word within the same text.  but, in my opinion, this supports the notion of the phoneticity of written middle english, since it seems likely people wrote what they heard.

i don't know why you say that chaucer's english wouldn't have well-represented the spoken english of his contemporaries.  of course it varies from tale to tale.  "the parson's tale" is basically a direct translation of a latin allegory, so its language is spiritual and more or less artificial, but "the wife of bath's tale," for example, uses very common speech, aside from being metrical, and i don't know what better text we can use to approximate the speech of the illiterate masses at that time, since they were, you know, illiterate.

unless i misunderstand your meaning, i would say it would be like a guy digging up bukowski or spillane in 600 years and saying one cannot get an idea of the spoken english of the common american factory worker or barfly from it.  if we can't use chaucer, who the hell can we use?  if we can't use written middle english at all, then we're in the realm of pure speculation and we might as well call the whole thing off.