Setec

Yeah, well, "your" an idiot.

Well, according to the bio on His blog, God admits to Richard Dawkins' characterization of Him as

Why can't we make fun of that?

His nephew Jesus is a little strange, too. And he's not very good at taking care of ponies, either.

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Setec

"No matter what unconscionable thing I do to them, they just thank Me for not doing something even worse." -God

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Romestar

Setec, guess what? You probably just quoted all of my posts I made in this thread except for the one when I said I was done. This argument is pointless because neither side will change. You said you can just look up in Google how creationism is wrong, but you can do the said for evolution too - it's endless. Also, I still believe I am the ONLY person on this thread that has studied BOTH evolution and creationism.

shaggz

Here's how I see it:

Religion originated as a way for people to find ease in death. Face it, it is pretty damn scary to face death if you know it is 'the end'. It is much easier to say 'mom is in a better place' then to say "mom's stream of consciousness just flatlined". I have a son. My son is the only individual that I would unequivically give my life for without any thought or consideration to myself. If my son were to die due to uncontrolled circumstances, I believe I would surely lose it. No shit. I would really like to believe there is an afterlife, but I am not sure. If someone came to me right now and claimed they knew the real truth, and if I guessed right i'd get 10 million dollars, my guess would be that there is no afterlife. Seriously, who the fuck really knows? Back to my point...........my son is the most important thing in my life. If he died, and I felt like he was robbed of life, it would be a nightmare. However, if I believed that he was truly in 'a better place' and that I would see him again, it would make things SO MUCH easier. That, in my opinion, is how religion caught on as a staple of society. It's easier for a person to believe in it than it is to disbelieve. Presented with 2 options, most people will choose the easier path.

Then, some sordid sons-of-bitches learned how to manipulate religion for money. A shitload of years later.....and here we are.

Romestar

I know God exists and I would bet my life on it, because I have a personal relationship with God - something you should seek.

sounds like scientology, lol

emp

And you decided for creationism? ...snicker...

::emp::

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Grower

We've all studied creationism on the level that you studied evolution.

About smart people: 99.9999% of all scientists think you are wrong.

But still, you've done your "research" and know better..

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claudek

Again, these thread is leading nowhere. Setec, there are webmasters here who would find degoratory references to God quite offensive. I know I do.

Considering the original submitter started the thread just to get a few laughs and perhaps rep points and has not taken part in this thread at all, this thread is pure DP and should belong there in their Politics & Religion Forum section.

emp

LOL, I guess I am not letting this end, and, after all, this is the "Shooting the shit" section.

Just wanted to vent and tell you that I've just about had it with pansy Xtians who cry foul whenever someone says anything about their G_d.

(and "Baby Jesus" isn't even derogatory)

Yet you feel justified in calling other people worthless.

@romestar - as for ethical behaviour:
Yes, I DO link to bluehat, however, I DO NOT traffick Trojans. Even Deli switched from zango to promoting Google Pack. Sending people to the site, that is, NOT installing it without asking.

@anyone
Science is no belief. I do not believe in Evolution. I look at the data that supports it and decide to go along with the theory until a better one comes along.

So far, Creationism does not present itself as being supported by hard evidence.

ID is dead in the water as well, there are just so many flaws in the creatures of this earth that there must be a drunk God indeed.

Yes, the chances that ANYTHING like a single cell evolves out of matter is indeed very small.

The chance that there is a "Supreme Being" creating the world and all it's creatures is even smaller and can ONLY be arrived at by a leap of faith.

As a scientist, I will NEVER take that leap. Give me a chance of 134billion to 1 over faith anytime.

Now, please turn in your antibiotics, Roman.
::emp::

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Grower

Leave him alone. God never said: thou shall not add trojans to screensavers and promote them. That makes it OK.

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illusion

Bahahaha, Romestar you are classic man. Even my religious education teachers at school are sketchy on "God" but I don't wanna get involved.
You are so right

Romestar

no, no, no! According to Christianity you are absolutely not worthless (your God's creation!). I meant that if you believe in evolution then you believe that you do not have a purpose - you can about through random; opposed to being created by God and having a purpose.

I am glad this is coming to an end though.

Setec

Problem is, if you look up how "evolution is wrong," you get a bunch of shitty propaganda from idiots with few if any academic credentials. They raise arguments that have been debunked a million times over, most of which (including your favorites) are a complete joke to anybody with an IQ over 100.

If you look up why evolution is right, you can find many well-written summaries backed up by scientific material of any depth and rigor you desire -- tens if not hundreds of thousands of interesting, insightful, peer-reviewed public papers. Of course, you would be lost in all the big words, but that doesn't make them incorrect.

No, you aren't. You haven't studied evolution, or if you have, everything went in one ear and out the other. Somebody intelligent could easily study it, starting from scratch, in about half a day, and understand it much better than you do. The straw-man arguments you throw against it show very conclusively that you don't really have a clue what evolution actually says. If you want to claim you've studied it, go back and actually study it.

Creationism doesn't need to be studied in detail to be understood as bullshit, any more than astrology or phone hotline psychics or faith healers... er, wait, the last ones are creationists. Oops.

That "who the fuck really knows?" is a much more respectable position than the religious one, but it still has one problem. We do really know.

Lots of people only think about the question like this: "hey, you can't come back from the dead, so nobody knows," as though an eyewitness account from beyond the grave would be the only way to answer the question. But it's not.

We know where the mind comes from and what it requires to function: the physical brain. Everything about who you are and every thought you have is a chemical characteristic or signal in your brain. That doesn't diminish of those thoughts or feelings or memories, which is why I don't say it's "just a chemical characteristic." It just makes the brain that much more interesting to study.

Neuroscientists can prod your brain with electrical signals and give you thoughts. Drugs, by chemically interacting with your brain, can give you delusions. Injuries to the brain can radically alter a person's personality or erase their memories. So can diseases like Alzheimer's. High G-forces, by cutting off the flow of blood to your brain, can make you pass out. None of these things would make any sense if the mind/soul were some abstract thing independent of the body. If it could exist after the body is gone, then surely it could not be radically changed by minor chemical trifles in the brain.

Furthermore, there is no mechanism for an external soul to exist. A mind is necessarily an extremely complex thing containing a large amount of information -- what kind of particles could hold it and keep it organized and awake? Nothing can do that... except the actual brain. So the afterlife isn't just one independent idea you're buying into -- you would have to also believe there's this complicated framework for supernatural things to exist outside the rules of everything real we've ever observed. Statistically the odds of that are nil.

Just because an idea is designed to not be technically disprovable (like God or the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the afterlife) doesn't mean it has any realistic chance of being true. If you look at it realistically, without awarding it undeserved credibility just because a bunch of religious people believe in it, then it seems like a ridiculous idea, doesn't it?

So?

At least I'm just insulting your imaginary friend. Major Christian leaders with significant political power spend a lot of time telling most of the nation that atheists are evil people. Which is worse?

This is probably just semantics, but the most annoying thing about is that it DOES "present itself" as being supported by hard evidence. Of course it's not supported by any evidence whatsoever, hard or soft, but creationists are constantly claiming they've got evidence. Most of them don't just throw their arms up in the air and say, "fuck it, everything points to us being wrong, but we're going to believe it anyway." Instead, they look at the credibility science attained by way of hard evidence and say, "we want some of that," so they fake it and pretend the science supports them. It's an ugly, incredibly dishonest disinformation campaign designed to rob the general public of any understanding of basic principles of science which contradict their book of fables.

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Setec

"No matter what unconscionable thing I do to them, they just thank Me for not doing something even worse." -God

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Romestar

Read These:

Updates (March 20):
Chapter 8: How old is the earth?
The earth: how old does it look? - Creation Magazine
Astronomy And The Bible

Also, how does evolution work with the Law of Biogenesis?

If we are going to continue this argument let's do it peacefully

Setec

Those websites are frauds, and any intelligent 8th grader could point out many of their flaws.

Read the Index of Creationist Claims to see why all the arguments those pages present are wrong. I'm not going to go through and explain why they're incredibly, staggeringly, mind-bogglingly, stunningly fucking stupid one by one when you can just look it up. Actually, if you can't look at some of them and see this for yourself, you're probably hopeless anyway. Take this one from the Helium link: "One important argument against evolution is the fact that information always requires an intelligent mind." What the fuck? No it doesn't. That's like saying "one important argument against gravity is that bananas are a type of cheese." It's false and has nothing to do with anything -- the fact that it's a grammatically valid sentence doesn't give it meaning.

Just like it works with the law of gravity: there's no conflict whatsoever unless you're completely misinterpreting what the law says. (From the Index page on that: The spontaneous generation that Pasteur and others disproved was the idea that life forms such as mice, maggots, and bacteria can appear fully formed. They disproved a form of creationism. There is no law of biogenesis saying that very primitive life cannot form from increasingly complex molecules.)

Biogenesis is actually consistent with the fact that all living things share common ancestry. Abiogenesis only had to happen once in the simplest of forms, and in a primordial soup packed full of the necessary amino acids, that's not implausible at all.

See the Miller-Urey experiment for details of a lab experiment in the 1950s that showed that the conditions in the early atmosphere could easily produce the necessary ingredients for life. Now consider an ocean full of those ingredients, stewing for hundreds of millions of years, reacting and combining in trillions of ways... something like a primitive form of RNA, the first self-replicating molecule, need only happen once, and it's off to the races of evolution.

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Setec

"No matter what unconscionable thing I do to them, they just thank Me for not doing something even worse." -God

Duhhhhhrrrr Buy My Stupid eBook! <--as seen in Jon's sig!

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guysmy

What are your thoughts on this, Romestar:
Vatican astronomer joins evolution debate - Science - MSNBC.com

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Romestar

I don't support the catholic church, I'm a Lutheran. I would say some stuff about them, but it's better to be a catholic than an atheist so I won't.

Grower

I love your links. Evolution can not add new information? Well that is news to the people that successfully use evolutionary computer algorithms.

The application of laws of thermodynamics to evolution is so wrong it is not even funny.

Other arguments are of similar quality.

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mdm13

i read through most of the responses and i saw at least one similar to what i think, and that is that there very well may be a god and there very well may not be, but that the scientific theories that explain our existence probably require as much faith as it does to believe in a religion

and no am not a scientist and qualified to say that but for all i know the true source of our origin may very well be unknowable

yoink*gasp*

All due respect, but the difference between Lutheran and Catholic is small at best. Furthermore, if you're all God's people, why the fuck does it matter?

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Maybe ANOTHER WAY to navigate the issue would be to ask this question: Do Religion and Science ANSWER the same questions? Are there separate spheres of inquiry (as suggested by the late great Stephen Jay Gould)?

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emp

Well, keeping them seperate would work, but try and tell that to creationists.

::emp::

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Heartcore

I love how christians believe in a forgiving god and hell at the same time.

I love how christians talk about people who don't believe (in a very bad way obviously)

I love how christians fail to see that the only reason they truly believe is indoctrination. (yes it's true)

Setec

I would say no. Richard Dawkins does a pretty good take-down of this "separate magisteria" argument in The God Delusion.

Religions tries to tell people how the Universe came to be. That is purely a question of science. It tries to tell them beings exist which are "supernatural." This is also a scientific claim in that it's saying something very strong about the nature of reality: that existence includes some mechanism by which intelligent life can exist which does not consist of matter and is not bound by the rules of physics which govern everything else we've ever observed. Most of them assert that this same supernatural being meddles in our Universe on a daily basis, which says something about matter and energy in our Universe -- that they will occasionally act in inexplicable ways thanks to divine adjustments. They claim that the mind/soul is not inextricably linked to the brain, which flies in the face of neuroscience, and that when the body dies the soul will scurry over to heaven or hell, which either do or do not exist -- questions of fact. Furthermore, the large percentage of people who take a literal view of their religion swear that the Earth is 6,000 years old, Noah put two of every animal on a boat, etc.

There is nothing to indicate that any of these questions should be treated with less rigor, nor their answers with less skepticism, than any other question of fact about the Universe. To give nonsensical, made-up answers a free pass just because they're labeled "religion" is to put them on a pedestal they don't remotely deserve.

Religion also tries to instruct people on how to live a moral life, based on mandates from a supreme being. They justify obeying its alleged will because of their claims about its powers and accomplishments (like creating the Universe, and being able to send people to a Hell). If their claims of fact are wrong, there's nothing behind their moral orders.

If you actually strip a religion down to the parts which don't conflict with science -- the parables about how to live a good life -- you take away 95&#37; of the beliefs of most people, and you're stuck with so many conflicting and archaic stories that they really make no sense as a modern moral code. They are based on the whims of authors thousands of years ago, which are contradictory and open to interpretation, leading many people into the dangerous situation of believing it is divinely moral to do something which common sense (as well as secular moral philosophy) would deem immoral... like suicide bombing.

The only way that the separate magisteria argument makes sense is if the two distinct realms are "fact" and "fiction."

No, it's a waste of time (though it did get me some +rep). But at least it's entertaining, like playing a video game.

Now, being a "why can't we all just get along" concern troll... there's something really pointless.

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Setec

"No matter what unconscionable thing I do to them, they just thank Me for not doing something even worse." -God

Duhhhhhrrrr Buy My Stupid eBook! <--as seen in Jon's sig!

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guysmy

evilbible.com raises an interesting argument re: the God of the Old Testament.

Evil Bible Home Page

The original Hebrew translation uses the term Eloah (singular) AND Elohim (plural) for God, yet English translations do not reflect this. YHVH refers to the Israelites as "his" chosen people. The gentiles had other Gods such as Baal (which we now know were a number of different Gods).

Suddenly the God of the new testament (or Christianity) is the one God for all people. How can we assume this is the same God of the old testament when the temperament is completely different?

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GeorgeA

I just love how the Romestar guy just avoided the issues I posted some pages back at Science vs. Faith (PIC)

Maybe I've wrote something that wrong that I can't even see it properly. Could you take some of your precious time to enlighten me ,and present arguments to what you said earlier in the post I quoted,or do you agree that you had no idea of what you wrote,and just jotted down some ideas that some "wise" people told you?
At least make the proof of understanding evolution,not just repeating like a parrot something you've heard and don't understand.

emp

This is something I also noticed, no one on the creationist side ever answered to the arguments.

And for all those who argue against having this thread at all:

1) No one is obliged to read this
2) It is in the "shooting the shit section", so sue us
3) If you are insulted by science and/or religion, see point 1 and 2

Although I do poke fun at religious people, I try to never do it in a hostile way, there are too many religious friends around me. I hope I haven't been hostile in this thread either.

Insulting people for their religion is stupid, poking fun at them is ..well...fun!

If someone's religious beliefs are as firm as they claim, surely they'll stand above that.
After all, having asupreme being(tm) on your side who'll save you from bullets, death and the calories of cream cake will make you impervious to little jokes by mere heathens.

So lighten up.

::emp::

PS:
Yes, this also means that all the scientists are allowed to act bitchy and insulted, lacking the support
by a supreme being(tm) and all that.

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Jon

So this is what a simple joke becomes.. a huge argument about God?

I'm Jewish. Religion was pretty much shoved down my throat from as far back as I can remember all the way up until the first year of HS. I don't really follow any rules. Sure, I know a lot about my religion, and my siblings and family are religious too (not the crazy kind), but when it comes down to it, I don't really believe in any higher power other than maybe the Sun. I can see the sun, it makes me happy when it's out, it gives me warmth, it won't kill me unless I try to touch it, it doesn't yell at me or tell me I'm going to hell for anything.

But, I would never try and get someone to join my religion, and my opinions on religion are my own. It's a losing battle for both sides. These arguments have been going on for thousands of years, and more people have been killed in the name of a religion or God than anything else.

So why fight? This is a losing battle for everyone here. Just keep to yourself, and stop trying to get people to see "your way" because it won't happen.

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DavidR

That's just about the smartest thing I've heard anyone say in a long time.

gh0stb0t

people were burning at the stake. the church science diagram was awesome!

if anything should be illegal it should be the fucking church from being involved in political legislation.

gh0stb0t

Setec

Jon, the problem is that mutual respect for religious belief has allowed people to get away with way too much in the name of religion. Furthermore, religion is constantly trying to expand its influence -- that's what it's designed for. Religions are cultural memes which evolve similarly to natural organisms in that the ones most likely to reproduce become more prolific. The successful ones which become major religions are the ones which tell their followers to aggressively spread their beliefs. If nobody speaks up equally vocally in opposition to the bullshit, you end up with a Saudi Arabia or a Texas.

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Setec

"No matter what unconscionable thing I do to them, they just thank Me for not doing something even worse." -God

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Jon

Hey, I never preach any religious aspects of Judaism to anyone, and expect the same in return from them from whatever type of religion they are in. In fact, I respect every religion, except maybe the hardcore Islamists, but the religion is very similar to Judaism, and without Judaism there wouldn't have been Christianity, etc etc.. It's a never ending battle.

From the wise words of George Carlin in one of his acts about religion..

This is how religion has and always will be:

Religious fanatic: Do you believe in God?
Random person: No.
BAM! (fanatic shoots person in the head)
Religious fanatic: Do you believe in God?
Random person: Yes.
Religious fanatic: Do you believe in MY God?
Random person: No.
BAM! (fanatic shoots person in the head)

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Romestar

God is a forgiving and loving god, but people like you reject him - you have to come to him.

I updated the links here too:
Science vs. Faith (PIC)

Setec

I wasn't saying all religious people try to spread their religion. But religion is like a virus -- not everyone who's infected is going to cough in someone else's face, but if enough people do, the damage is still done.

I thought your "sun worship" paragraph on the last page sounded like George Carlin... that's a great bit he does. He has a good point too.

Along similar lines, many American Indian tribes had much more reasonable beliefs than most major religions today, because at least they worshiped things that exist for doing stuff that those things actually do. Sun brings light. Clouds bring water. Earth makes food grow. Of course they embellished with some superstitious stuff, but given their level of technology that's understandable. Unfortunately for them, the sun and moon and wind never told them to go overseas and face other people with the choice of conversion or death. So when Spain came along in the 15th century to bring them God and Smallpox, they were screwed.

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Setec

"No matter what unconscionable thing I do to them, they just thank Me for not doing something even worse." -God

Duhhhhhrrrr Buy My Stupid eBook! <--as seen in Jon's sig!

"Honesty is the best policy - when there is money in it." -Mark Twain

pfgannon

Theres a video somewhere that points out and explains all the similarities between major religions and the reasoning for why the writers of religious document probably included them.

When I get home from work I'll try to find it.

As far as whoever said Lutheranism and Catholocism are basically the same ( I think it was yoink*gasp* (sp?) ) I've got to disagree. I was raised Catholic though I don't believe in Catholocism anymore, and I've gotta say that there are some major differences such as the Eucherist (again sp?). Things are pretty much the same though up until when Jesus makes his appearance in the Bible.

Plus Catholics dont have as much fellowship BS.

P.S. No offence to Lutherans, if it make you feel better I think Lutheranism and Catholicism are both equally full of BS

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Pheelix

Hey! You forgot the last line:

Religious fanatic: MY GOD HAS A BIGGER DICK THAN YOUR GOD!!!

GeorgeA

))) . That reminded me of some pastafarian ( you know , the FSM stuff) replying to a christian: "You're just jealous because our God has bigger balls than your God!"
See: http://www.venganza.org/wp-content/t...eborder220.jpg :P.
Also , did anyone notice that most religious people tend to get a bit aggressive (at least verbally) when confronted with the idea that their God might not exist, and actually bring arguments to support scientific theories such as evolution & co. ? I wonder why that is :P .