conversion

I've been increasingly ill for the past year and a half and I've travelled to a major medical center hoping to finally get a diagnosis. A neurologist has just diagnosed me with psychogenic seizures. "Psychogenic" means that there is no organic or physical cause for my symptoms, that instead my...

Hey guys wuz up. I'm a former believer in 9/11 conspiracy theories. They were so easy to believe given all that has been going on since the tragic attacks of 9/11. I never believed in such theories and for a long time I simply didn't care for them. But then I looked at them in 2006 and was...

I've had a particular debate on this forum a few times. Basically it amounts to: Debate ain't enough. Mockery is the way to convince people. Some kind of stunt -- Quran burning or nailing a wafer. Personally, I compare that kind of thing to the 'exploding tomato'...

I was inspired by Scott Jurgenson's thread about this girlfriend and her church to write this. The description he gave of her church sounded very much like the church I grew up in. It was essentially a mega-church located in South Africa. My parents joined it when it was still a small student...

I mean, everyone starts out as an atheist, so what in god's name, so to speak, happened to them to make them turn into a Christian? What happened to them to make them hate God reality so much. So much, in fact, that they believe the world and normal life in it is evil, in and of itself. It...

Okay, I've officially seen it all. The world is batcrap crazy. Michael Jackson (reportedly) converts to Islam and changes his name to "Mikaeel". Time to do the crazy dance. There is a crazy dance, isn't there? Please tell me there's a crazy dance.

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/27458912/ I've no idea where to begin with this article, with this influential writer, and with the ideas and the reasoning used to form them. I will say that at least we have this example of a theist who turned atheist, who then turned theist again. I'm not sure...

My wife came back from the library yesterday bringing the book "There is a God", by Antony Flew. It is sub-titled "How the world's most notorious atheist changed his mind". My first reaction was "what? Dawkins changed his mind?". Then I realised that the world's most notorious atheist was...

One wonders if some people convert just to gain custody.

So, reading around the forums, a lot of people seem to have personal stories of having difficult conversions to atheism away from faith, and have talked about struggling to come to terms with it. If I remember correctly, I just kinda...stopped believing. Anyone else like this? Short, easy...

This is an open invitation for Christians out there to open a discussion with a true, dedicated atheist. I want to hear and understand why I should become a Christian. This IS NOT being done in an antagonistic fashion -- I'm not out to argue with you, or attempt to convert you to my way of...

In Dr. Dawkins Q & A session after his reading at Lynchburg (which can be found on youtube.com or here, at his website, Dawkins gets asked about anger people experience upon an athiesm conversion, among other things. I think this is a good point to discuss. I know I was angry after my...

A customer is working on a large professionally-done sign for our tattoo shop. We need to email them the graphic for them to cut the vinyl, but they can only work from an .eps or an .ai or a line art format. So, my question is: Where do I get these formats? How do I convert the file to send...

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/12/convert-doc-xls-ppt-rtf-pdf-to-html.html This came in very hand today at the public library. A patron came in with a floppy full of OpenOffice documents (file extension .sdw). We have MS Word on our public computers, but no converter installed. Using this...

This is a post I placed on ShipOfFools - I'm expecting a different take on it here. Recently, as a skeptic, I've found myself challenging my own Christian beliefs. I'd be very interested to hear argument or counter-argument. The train of thought goes something like this: * P: I believe...

And it was due to watching The Passion of the Christ! Once he got through the brutality of this movie, he began to ask himself, "Why would any God sacrific his own son for the whole of humanity's sins? If this 'God' is all powerful, why would he need the sacrifice of his own son to forgive...

From the abstract: The paper is here: http://www.chembiol.com/content/article/fulltext?uid=PIIS1074552106000421 My understanding of this is that they evolved the RNA enzyme into a DNA enzyme, a significant result. I'm no expert though, and couldn't really follow all the details of the paper.

manipulable arrays. A while back we had a discussion about pattern recognition here. It occured to me that if a .bmp file (b&w) could be converted to a vector containing 1's and 0's one might do simple correlations between an unidentified pattern and a library of identified patterns in order...

The article revealing the methods and tactics of Christian relief organizations was first published by the Swedish Svenska Dagbladet, but I read it first in the Norwegian Dagbladet. I will translate a few paragraphs from both, and write SvD behind quotes taken from the Swedish newspaper, and...

I have a bunch of old Laserdisks that I would like to convert to DVD. Some are just not out on DVD (and probably won't be for some time) others I would convert for the hell of it. The question is how? I think that I need a video capture card which would take the s-video out from my Laserdisk...

Has anyone emailed Randi to point out his error in converting Fahrenheit to Celsius? Ouch. That's well over boiling point! It's actually 25°C, and that's plenty hot enough for me right now. I'd email him, but I'm sure someone else will have done so. Edit: Or is he just pointing out that...

How the #@*%! did I neglect to type the word "help" in the title of this thread? Anyway, I've created a one-page poster (including images and unusual fonts) in Microsoft Word. I want the local copy shop to print it out, but when I e-mail the Word file to them, it doesn't look the same as on my...

Can anyone recommend a good and preferably free app for video file format conversion? It's driving me mad. I have a collection of wmv files that I want to burn to DVD so as to make a DVD movie (preferably with each file as a chapter), but none of the DVD burning or video editing apps I have...

Plug'n Pray :D

How many becquerels in a milli-curie?

I found this very interesting, so I though y'all might also.

Ok I understand the theory on power transformation, but have a practical problem: A few months ago when I had my notebook computer power transformer confiscated by Israeli security. So when I returned I bought a generic converter from Targus - the one I got was almost identical to this one...

In reading the commentary this week I realized that my own conversion to atheism was not too dissimilar from the mother of two who wrote Randi a letter. I was brought up as a Methodist in a family that went to church weekly, said grace at every dinner, and attended various religious retreats...