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Please look at some of the posts about the evils of religion, which these threads always bring about. Those are insults. How you brought about this discussion is pretty much an insult.



Let's make this simple. If you want a reasonable discussion about faith. Ask a question, and people will have answers. Now, this thread was created a few years ago, but you bumped this thread for whatever reason, no?

So why did you? Simple question. You like a song? Great! There are threads for that in existence. But no, you created a thread to bring about a fight, which isn't exactly a new thing on this site.

So if you don't believe in God, or Gods, or Gaia, or whatever else, fine. If you're going to create a thread about a song with anti-religion lyrics, and then expect not to be somewhat insulting? I'm sorry, that makes no sense, much like if I started popping out threads about religious songs talking about the evils of atheism and such.

   

*Rolls eyes*

See this is probably the main reason I hate discussing religion over the Internet. Too much bullshit flows out.

Christianity in the Dark Ages didn't destroy science, the opposite is true, it preserved it. The many scientific figures were commonly monks, and monasteries were common to be preserving pre-Dark Age science. Also, the first universities in Europe were religious ones.

Of course, please ignore these basic facts for your anti-Religion crusades. Have fun

   

I've eaten pudding with thicker skins than some of the religious types on here

   

Do tell?

   

If he has a recipe, I hope he posts it, cause the psoriasis gives me some pretty thick sin (kinda one of the fringe benefits of it)

   

Well if it wasn't people then it mut have been a deity, but since we are sorely lacking in any real physicl evidence that a deity either exists or existed we are left with humanity. Who is well know for believing in what they want



And i speaking of scientific answers, sicence may begin with an assumption (It's called a Theory) And then its set's out to prove if possible if that theory is correct

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Rligious 'assumptions'should be criticised, especially when they creep into public policy. But i can say the rlgion is anti -itellectualy because instead of searching for evidence it simple skips to the end and relies on 'faith'



The problem being is that all religions begin with a 'being or' force' that according to thier lights is 'outside' of the laws of nature. Ergo Supernatural. If your god is a lump of mold you found under your armpit one day, o.k., there's your god. It's a bit trickier to determine that if that lump of mold created the entire universe scientifically

   

Galileo if he were alive would disagree

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair

in part

   

Whoa relax, I'm not trying to attack you, it was a joke.

That makes sense. However, if one were to pray for something, and have it happen, is it reasonable to see that as divine intervention or pure dumb luck?


So he gave us free will to destroy ourselves. Seems almost mean. It's hard to convey what I am trying to say there. But we were also created in his image right? Is this physical and mental?

   

Sort of. I'm not saying that he should step in so that someone can get a raise, or step in so that someone can find a wallet on the street or something. I'm more talking about the slaughter of millions of people. We are no more than his pets in my opinion. If my dog started killing another dog, would I not intervene?

Two things that I can see there. One, I was under the impression angel's weren't given free will like we were. How could one revolt then?
Two. If we are created in god's image, and make the decision to fall into sin, it's because he made us in such a way that would have us do it. He gave us our emotions, our wants, and our needs.

   

One can question it all they want, there is no such thing as "reasonable faith".

   

not only that, he would have had to have known that it would happen - how does an all-knowing being that transcends time and space and knows the nature of every single thing in the universe not know at the precise moment of creation exactly how everything will pan out? Does he put on some sort of supernatural blindfold while he's doing these things? Otherwise, as soon as he set a particular atom spinning off in a particular direction, he'll immediately know the consequences of that, and he's therefore deciding the entire timeline of events from then on.

He knows what we're all going to do because he's designed us in that particular way, yet he would judge people (very harshly) for acting precisely they way they were supposed to, and precisely the way he knew they would, when he created them. The instant that our nature was conceived our fates were sealed, but it's still our fault, and we should be punished if we happen to be the individuals who fell into the wrong spots.

(edit/aside: I actually Googled this issue to see how religious people explained it, and the only real explanation I found is that yes, God knows everything including the future, but it's still our choice. The analogy is that a parent knows that a child will choose to eat a bowl of chocolate over a bowl of dead mice, but the child still makes the choice, so it's possible to know the future and still have a choice. The problem with that is that God knows these things not from natural experience like the parent would (which is why the parent can't predict every little thing the child does), but because he created you, the mice, the cocoa plants, and the people that would create chocolate, and so on. If he decided to do things differently, cocoa could be poisonous to us and we'd consider dead mice a delicacy and nobody would know the difference. Likewise, he had to have created some people to prefer murdering over not murdering, because there's no way he could have set the universe up in a way that he didn't know some people would end up murdering and all the other bad things that he frowns upon.)

Not only is he upset by the way he knew we'd act, but this is the way he deals with that: he sends a piece of himself down from heaven to earth as his "son", gets himself "killed" by some people (again, which he knew would happen from the beginning), and then sends himself back up to heaven... it's an act that's about as much of a "sacrifice" to God as killing my character in a video game would be to me, and that's supposed to be a big deal. He could send another "son" down to earth if he felt like it, or two, or three - he could make an entire generation of "sons" on Earth, but since he's arbitrarily decided that Jesus was his "only son", it's supposed to be a big deal.

It's a messed up way of imagining how the universe works.

   

Careful Blue you might be insulting or making fun of people's faith.

   

That's my job

Seriouly though he's quite right. You cannot have claim to 'know' there is an omnipotent being who is capable of creating the universe and at the same time claim that this being willingly blinds themselves to it's own future and humanities and still claim that it is in fact omnipotent. And if it in't omnipotent then it isnt much of a'god' now is it.

   

In reference to the issues raised by the graph posted earlier in the thread, there's a good presentation by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson on the subject of religion and science, and what happens when religion gets in the way of scientific curiousity.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Coles Notes version from a different presentation (bad audio)

For those not interested in the somewhat lengthy video, he argues (with several examples) that even if scientists themselves have religious convictions, it's when they start attributing things they don't understand to God or the supernatural that they hit a wall and stop progressing their knowledge. Invariably, someone else comes along who isn't so awestruck by the "glory of God", looks at what the previous person (or people) had accomplished, and continues the scientific examination into the phenomenon.

One of his examples is Baghdad, which for 300 years was the intellectual centre of the world - not because of anything to do with Islam, but because the city was open to anyone of any faith to come contribute to the scientific and mathematical advancements. It was when a religious nut Hamid al-Ghazali stepped in and, among other things, claimed that math was the work of the devil that the advancements stopped, and their culture has basically failed to progress since then.

Right now the US is one of the big players in scientific advancement and was founded on the principles of religious freedoms, but consider what's going to happen if religious fanatics continue to promote the notion that stem cell research is evil, or that evolutionary biology deserves no more attention in the science classroom than intelligent design.

Time and time again (watch the video for more examples), its shown that religion contributes nothing of value to inquiry into the nature of the world. Despite many scientists' religious convictions, it's when they allow those beliefs to enter into their work that they've ruined their chances of progressing.

   

What makes you think Hitler and Charlie Manson will be in Heaven? The idea of confession and attonment is voluntary, Hitler and Manson had no remorse for their actions and I'm pretty sure 10 hail mary's will no5t be enough to grant them entry. I'm not a christian so....
But I think people ask too much of their gods no matter what they believe, I mean if we are talking about the creator of the whole universe what makes everyone think he actually gives a shit about us
I'd say that people who are secure in their faith are happy and content, it works for them so have at it, personally I tend to believe that IF there is a heaven then your beliefs don't matter rather how you live your life will be the deciding factor. I also don't think that in a world with as many religions as ours that a Christian god would refuse those of other faiths entry to heaven, most of us believe what we were taught as children and some of us have expanded our beleifs based on our own lifes experience.

   

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