Sheaf Saint

Because all he ever does is start threads with a very controversial (that usually turns out to be boolocks) topic and leaves it at that without contributing anything to the discussion. It's getting really tiresome now.

What's the betting he gets injured playing for Uruguay next weekend and misses the first 4 months of the season?

Right, before I get flamed for being a conspiracy theorist nutjob or whatever, I would like to point out that I am very skeptical about this sort of stuff. However, it does interest me greatly. I have read before about US government attempts to use remote viewing, clairvoyants etc.. and I also remember watching a video talk from David Willcock claiming exactly the same thing that is put forward in this link: that nobody has been able to see further than Dec 2012. It could well be all mumbo-jumbo of course, but there is no doubt that the US and other governments have dabbled with experimentation into the occult and it would be foolish to believe they haven't. A lot of it actually has a sound basis in scientific theory, such as the Montauk Project and the Philadelphia experiment. Interestingly though, I have also read a fair bit about the ancient Mayans and their renowned long-count calendar which ends on Dec 21st this year. A lot has been speculated about it over the years, and it is a common misconception that they prophesied the end of the world at this time. What they genuinely believed would happen at the end of the long-count is not fully understood, thanks to the efforts of the Catholic Church to systematically destroy all references to the old spiritual and religious teachings in that part of the world following the Spanish conquest. But studies of what little remains of their literature have shown that 2012 was believed to be the culmination of the 9 'Underworlds' that were central to their beliefs, and would signal the beginning of an era of great spiritual understanding. It is entirely possible that the ancient Mayan astronomers were aware of a possible celestial event at the point of the Winter Solstice in 2012, because it has been shown that their understanding of astronomy and mathematics was far in advance of what the modern, western world would expect for a society that was believed to be primitive and savage. Aspects of the design of their temples and pyramids show that they were fully aware of astral phenomena such as The Procession of the Equinoxes (the process of the sun moving between the 12 regions of the zodiac that cycles round every 26,000 years) and there appears to be some evidence to suggest that the Mayans and other central and south-American cultures were influenced by an advanced civilisation that existed on Earth tens of thousands of years ago (read Graham Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods for a fascinating investigation into this). Is a massive asteroid going to crash into the Earth this December? I guess we will just have to wait and find out, but one thing is pretty obvious to me: if NASA or other government agencies had already discovered this, you can bet your life that they would do everything possible to keep it under wraps to avoid global panic etc...

There's plenty of them in northern Italy

Rick Astley turned up on my doorstep yesterday wanting to borrow my entire collection of Disney Pixar animated films... I told him: "You can have Toy Story and The Incredibles, but I'm never going to give you Up!"

http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/B004FTGJUW/ref=cm_cr_dp_hist_one?ie=UTF8&filterBy=addOneStar&showViewpoints=0 :lol::lol:

I imagine he will be played on the right in place of Puncheon/Guly or on the left where Rodriguez has so far been ineffective.

My heart goes out to you Dr Who. Having your livelihood taken away from you like that, through no fault of your own, is an extremely harrowing thing to face. I know from personal experience.

Of course there won't... Friday is tomorrow

I remember when this thread was nothing but fields.

Yeah I was in Portugal last month and was able to get by very easily with the little Spanish I know. The two vocabularies are something like 75-80% identical.

Sorry BTF, that's 15 words

What about the ones who don't do it for money Frank?

I think you need to re-read View From The Top's post (#105) Again I find myself in almost total agreement with you though FC. It could be argued that forcing your own religious opinions onto your children and making them believe they will burn in the eternal fires of hell unless they conform is a form of psychological abuse. In a totally free and fair society, parents would refrain from imposing their own views on their children and instead wait until they are old enough to use critical thinking to determine for themselves what fits into their own world view. If all parents did this then there would obviously be a much more even spread of religious beliefs in all areas of the world, but this clearly isn't the case, and it is clearly even less so with Islam in particular. As I said recently in the thread about the parents of Shafilea Ahmed, I have a close friend who is from a Muslim family, and her father refused to even speak to her for years after she told him that she had read the Quran and had decided that she did not want to live her life according to the rituals and beliefs contained within it. He clearly felt that his own devotion to the doctrine that he had been subjected to was worth more to him than his relationship with his daughter. Very sad indeed, and it highlights perfectly how religion can poison and divide people.

Interesting viewpoint VFTT. Somebody recently sent me a picture describing Christianity as "The irrational belief that some cosmic Jewish zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat of his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master so he can remove an evil spirit that exists in mankind because a woman made from a man's rib was convinced by a talking snake to eat fruit from a magic tree".

It's because dune has been banned.

The spiritual beliefs of the Aztecs, along with the Incas and the Mayans, died out thanks to a concerted effort from the Catholic Church to destroy any and all references to them. It is a shameful episode in human history that so little remains for us to study of a rich and advanced culture thanks to the insistence of The Vatican that all cultures should be forced to accept their own doctrine or be killed. The same thing happened to Paganism when Christianity was brought to Europe. Indeed. Christianity itself was just one of many religions being followed in the middle east during and after the time of Christ. Most of them died out, but Christianity only went on to become as prevalent as it did thanks to the Romans seizing upon it and using it as a tool to expand their empire. Quite ironic really, given that it was the Romans who supposedly* executed Jesus in the first place. *That's if he even existed, of course.

"Science asks questions which may never be answered; religion gives answers that can never be questioned". I honestly don't know who that quote is attributed to (something tells me it might have been Carl Sagan) but I came across it recently and thought it pertinent to the debate. I have to say I have thoroughly enjoyed catching up on this thread today and reading some excellent posts put forward - mostly - in a way respectful of others' opinions, as it should be. And that, I believe, is where religion often goes wrong and causes unnecessary division, when people of faith (theist or otherwise) attempt to impose their doctrine onto others who hold differing views. It all comes down to tolerance, which is so often lacking in religious history. Those on here who claim that atheism is as much a belief system as any theistic religion may have a certain point, but I would have to largely disagree. While it is true that claiming "I believe there is no God/god(s)" is as much a statement faith in one's own opinion as those who claim that there is, it can hardly be labelled a belief system because there is no specific framework that comes with it. To call oneself a Christian/Muslim/Sikh/Jew/Hindu (etc...) one must accept certain rituals and adhere to specific values that go with it, whereby atheism refers specifically to the rejection of not only a belief in a deity but also of religious observances.

By doing it gradually instead of splashing out ridiculous sums of money on one single player that might turn out to be a Billy-Big-B0ll0x and disrupt the team spirit. He might not, I grant you. But it's a massive gamble IMO, and the last couple of years have shown that's not how we do things at SFC, and the events at the other end of the M27 have shown the catastrophic results of a reckless transfer policy.

All this excitement about this one player joining... Am I really the only one who actually has concerns about it? Firstly, we aren't just breaking our previous transfer record for him, we're taking a sledge hammer to it, for someone who we're not even sure will adapt to the English game. That's very risky IMO. Secondly, if it's true that he has been told he will be the main man (admittedly that is just conjecture from some posters) and will be on massively higher wages than the other players, how will the rest of the squad feel about that? Isn't there a good possibility that it will upset the fine balance that NA has worked so hard to nurture over the last two years?

http://newsthump.com/2012/08/20/howard-webb-completes-shock-move-to-man-city/ Gotta love Newsthump!

From what I could gather on the TV, some fans were booing because he was down for ages and then got up and walked off the pitch.

A great performance, no doubt. I bet Citeh never expected to find themselves behind after they scored first. Very calm and never panicked, and when we did get the ball down and play it we looked OK. But there are still a few negatives to take away from it as well. I thought we sat back and invited far too much pressure onto us, and against a team like Man City we WILL get punished for that. And Fox's defensive header to set up their third was just abysmal. Get your head on it Danny and make sure it goes anywhere except back towards the penalty spot where a multi-multi-million pound player is waiting to pounce. I was a fan of his last season but on today's evidence I think he will cost us a lot of goals this year.