you did not even tell me in that reply if you directly belive or disbelive the theory of evolution!
the hell i dont. i already have the truth. you seem to be saying the same things over and over again. i just dont find them interseting.
that or i dont have enough patience.
And if a billion men went on to say “I have the truth of God himself; I am absolutely right.” – and if these men keeped on saying this for thousands of years, how would they and you feel about such a claim?
What if an atheist merely is able to see the vast arrogance of all religious claims, and they at least had enough decency to act and claim in the same line as their knowing.
Yes, it’s a tall order that I claim I myself am God, but whether I claim God to be me, or to be in heaven in some other way, the fact that I have zero solid proof – should deter your precious trust away from my madness. Has it?
They get us farther and farther away!
It’s a logical shit-castle build on such a small understanding, yet now such a vast estimate, that it is now more false then nutrality!
Attempt?
Who attempted before we did?
Someone obviously planted this unnatural idea of God into our minds, because we cannot see this God or ever experience it.
Lets look at it from a different angle:
Who is the one making claims about God, and where does the money from the collection plate go!? Same place. There’s your question, and your answer about God and His “truth”.
“I already have the truth” – this is arrogance.
Neither of us have the “truth”, but one surely has placed trust in books and men who claim to represent God, whilst the other has put a measure of trust in modern researchers who claim to represent fact, and whilst one group can handle critic, the other cannot.
I believe the parts of evolution which look certain, and I believe the parts of the bible that are certain, but what you want is to label me, and to have my absolute compliance/trust. You want the perfect slave, as do they. No questions asked, no resistence, no self, no disobediance…
had you emptied your cup and cleaned it before arriving you’d see that you are drinking the same tea as me.
Do you believe in gravity?
Do you believe that we are on a semi-sphere that rotates on itself roughly every 24 hours, and around the sun roughly every 365.25 days?
Why? because some guy named Galileo told you so? he’s a heretic didn’t you hear the church? Just like those blasphemers teaching evolution! There’s no reason to fear the evolution of the bird flu virus, evolution is only FUD to scare believers.
first of all, do not attempt to label me as a scientific ludite(because i love true scince) and do NOT identify me with the churches. my beliefs and thiers are not the same thing-i will take no responcibility for thier crimes.
scientists have identified over 100 chemical elements.thier atomic structure displays an intricate mathimatical interrelationship of the elements.the periodic table points to obvious design.such amazing design cold not possibly be accidental, a product of chance.
the only reason we cannot yet prove god’s existence is he is too far beyond what we know. would people belive what our science has found out 1000 or 2000 years ago? and that is merely proveing him directly.
i also want to know WHY all you athiests out there would want to perswade me there is no god. me living by the law of the christ is a benefit to you. if you do not need to perswade me,you do not need to reply to this post. if you do need to why? do you have a personal vedetta VS. god himself or “his” so-called religions down here?
we cannot pigeon hole all religions as god or his will.
if the shoe fits. I do believe you stated that “evolution is not real science”…
And why not? If we examined the computer you are working on, one could say that it can’t just appear out of nowhere… it’s an incredibly complex machine, running incredibly complex software. BUT, it’s also subject to the evolution of technology, what started out as a simple mechanical calculator, became something much much more. The same is true of the pocket watch, the pocket watch has it’s roots in less complex designs. To state that it just appeared that complex is ignoring the evidence.
Same with us. We didn’t just “pop” into existence this complex (and dare I say flawed. We still carry useless genetic traits, like our “hair standing on cackles” (goosebumps, look at a scared/startled cat) or the appendix. To think that we were always the way we were is ignoring the history of our planet, and present day transitionary forms. From the lung fish, to the platypus.
What was the spark that drove life? I don’t know. Was it random chance? I don’t know.
Does that mean god did it? It’s not likely. If god created us, he’s not a very powerful god, nor a very wise god. our bodies our wrought with frailties and one wrong bump on the head can you change you from drift on the philosophy forums, to the retard in the wheel chair. (BTW, Retard is not a derogatory term.)
And here’s where you apply what I like to call the “beer goggles”. You ignore that, our predecessors had a better idea of what god was, and what god looked like than we did. Suddenly we become more scientific, more logical, understand the world around us better and god becomes further away not closer? Doesn’t that suggest the opposite of what you are saying? The more we know, the further away god will get. The more logical and reasonable we look at the world, the further we get from our superstitions… is this a bad thing? leaving behind superstitions, god, for a new age of reason?
Is it reasonable to believe that there’s a god out in the universe somewhere who created us, and we are at the center of his attention, yet we are not the center of the solar system, galaxy or all of space. We are a mere infinitessemely small grain of sand of space in the far corner of the entirety of space.
It’s highly egotistical to suggest self importance via some inane connection to an unseen, unproveable supernatural being.
that old saying… the truth will set you free. Frankly I like the debate. I enjoy mental masturbation. I don’t actively seek people to disprove god, and I have christian friends that I don’t even challenge their notion of god. You are here in a philosophy forum so you’ve got to expect challenges to what you believe.
personal vendetta? you are taking this really personally. My concern when freeing humanity from god, (for those who are brave enough to challenge their beliefs) is that humanity is overly obsessed with the supernatural and not the here and now on earth.
certainly not, I’ve stated many times that all religions are different, thus a believer in christ is an atheist to YHWH, ZEUS, ODIN and ALLAH.
Certainly you don’t believe in Marduk, Krishna, Brahmin, and other such gods. you know how to externalize skepticism.
let’s take a few examples.
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This past weekend I drove my car onto interstate 42. After driving 1500 miles, I hopped onto hyperstate 69, and traveled 238900 miles to the moon. While there I visited the moon landing site. It was fantastic! luckily I brought my camera and took some photographs of myself on the moon.
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While on the moon I found a unicorn ranch. I rented a unicorn for riding and took it back to earth in my trailer. Would you believe that when i got home the unicorn gave birth? I’m thinking about starting a unicorn ranch! That will be fantastic!
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Sunday rolled around and I prayed to my god, Thor. He granted me strength and wisdom to get through the week, and then after eating a Eucharist in the name of Odin, I left the local church. When I got home I found that Loki was there tempting me to sell the unicorns. He told me he’d give me 100 dragons for my 2 unicorns. It was a very tempting offer, but knowing the wily ways of Loki, there was no way I could give in to him!
Now ask yourself. Are any of these fantastic scenes believeable? Why not?
What makes YOUR god, anymore believeable than a trip to the moon?
What makes the eucharist of christ more important than a eucharist for Odin?
What makes Satan more real than Loki?
How do you know that Unicorns aren’t real?
How do you know a hyperspace byway to the moon isn’t real?
Hmm, I am an ‘atheist’ for all intents and purposes, and here I will tell you something I and not missing.
When secular rules and laws are made, their creators, realizing humans are prone to error will generally amend them when they do not work.
Non secular rules, having been imagined to have been handed down from an insurmountably superior and unquestionable authority, are upheld no matter what the real world concequence.
After all, to them, god knows best, and he had his people write that in there for a /reason/ damnit!
And of course, inevitably religions split into sects over time, so eventually you have several groups with varying versions of what is ‘absolutely and unchangeably right’
Just look to the middle east both now and in the time of the crusades as case examples of why this is bad.
show me where i said this. the last thing i want to do is be a hypocrit.
“but only theists can understand this”
You have to think like a theist before you become one.
You have to start thinking like an atheist before you become one.
To many theists, anything is proof of god.
To many atheists, anything is proof of the opposite.
There’s nothing you can prove by saying only theists can (mis)understand this.
drift,
Your words imply that there is a reason not to believe in evolution, thusly I asked you is there reason to not believe gravity?
I think this site: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mark_vuletic/vacuum.html provides a fairly understandable scientific explanation of the creation of the universe.
But, while we are at it, let us cover the origin of life too. I liked this site for that topic: http://www.iscid.org/encyclopedia/Abiogenesis
Scythekain:
No offense, but at least try to be correct.
(From:http://www.solstation.com/stars/asteroid.htm)
Please show me where you got your information that the asteroid belt was once a planet, then I will lend a little credibility to everything else you said.
wdmc,
The only hypothesizers I could find for the exploded planet theory, are pushing UFO theories about our origins. 
I think they make some good points, but… who’s going to listen to you when you couple it with UFO’s and the origin of religion?
I also found what You did, the amount of matter currently in the belt is not even enough to make an object the size of pluto. But, as one of the theorists stated, isn’t it possible that if a catastrophic explosion did occur that it would eject alot of the rocks elsewhere into our solar system? Some of those becoming comets, moons, and such of other planets?
The composition of the asteroids is what gives rise to such a theory, it’s composed of material, that can only form on a fully risen planet, and not random space rock… nickel/iron from a core, rocky iron from a crust. And magma type rocks thato would’ve been in the middle of the planet. Is it really likely that these rocks just formed by themselves in space? or that they were once part of some other body?
If it’s a possibility shouldn’t it be looked into?
At the same time, I understand Why someone wouldn’t want to touch this theory with a ten foot pole. One need only read one of these crackpots and see the psuedo science bullshit they are pushing.
Well, there is the collision/ejection formation theory for our own moon, arising due to the moon’s compositioin comparing well with what we would expect of an object formed in such a way.
If the moon did indeed get ejected from the earth during a collision, an object about the size of mars would have had to smack into our planet. Chaotic events like that were supposed to be common in the early solar system. How did the rings of the gas giants form? Saturns’ beautiful ring set was created very recently in terms of geological time, probably when two of it’s numerous moons collided.
(@Dr.S, interesting note about the non-secular, but realize that religion usedto control many nations and be seated in some government chairs. I’d sooner say that religion is sub-government that can have even more control then any modern governer.)
Firstly, it would be an error on our part to think that a folder or gatagory of comprehendable concepts was ever existent in anything other then our heads, so the word “God” can mean anything to anyone, and is just super-stimuli to the specific organism.
If you are seeking a first hand taste of this super-stimuli, I would only suggest things like scitzophrenea or LSD, otherwise we can actually be humble and reasonable enough to realize the arrogance of all those who claim to know “God”, whilst we stay nutral about that, and, perhaps we also stay focused on the things that we are doing/having done to us in our own life.
God:
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God is most likely a force or theoretical being that humans admire most. Generally, a sentient yet unfathomable being that has no solid proof or interaction with the individual believers. Would we be so right if we saw something that looked like God, then said that He was God? The only reason that we would theorize this was God that we were seeing, would be our own natural instinct/values system [fear, admiration, concepts of beauty]. Actually, we would think God was beautiful if He looked like a human [which makes no real sense, because God doesn’t need skin [his invincible, unneeded organs don’t need protection], God does not need muscles [he is all powerful, and his body does not need to burn sugars/oxygen then pull mass with retractable organic-fibers], God does not need a nose [God doesn’t need to breath air, because he is all-mighty and all-powerful, no need for oxygen], God doesn’t need teeth, or a mouth [because he doesn’t need to eat, because eating just gives energy, but he has infinite energy], and he doesn’t need a skeleton, a human-shaped skeleton, [because he is not on the surface of a planet & in need of something to prevent gravity from squashing all of his unneeded organs]. Once we really think about it, if we see a shining humanoid walking around with a thunderous voice, we are making a huge mistake in thinking that this is the creator of the universe, because it is more likely a super-human biped sort of creature on our planet – that needs/wants something from us, and this is why [the theoretical “God”] has began to interact with us. Also, if this being claims to have created the universe, his claim will have no proof. If challenged to create another universe, or part of one somehow, He wont accept that challenge, and if he got angry at the person questioning him, and then hurts this person instead of giving this person some answers/truth, then we would see that this “God” was an actual con-artist that does not have the interests of the people as his goal!
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Demi’s words:
God is the greatest enemy freedom has ever known. Such a fixation and reverence for a theoretical “higher-power” is perpetually tainted by members of culture that have ever touched the concept of God, and these individual organisms [whilst adding their views to “God”, this part of their mind and self] later become(s) the theoretical “God”, which is no longer a god, but is instead a potential equal, OR EVEN AN INFERIOR – BEING SET ABOVE AND BEYOND ALL UNIVERSES, DIMENSIONS AND REALITIES. This leads to arrogance, mental adamance and long, long, LONG-term suffering. The second that we think or feel that we know some part of God, we will make the perfection-fallacy, which will stop all progress and change of the supposedly “perfect” idea/theory.
And I suspect that people who want to learn about “God”/“Truth” will read my post here, but people who want to quickly judge the entire universe, which they don’t even begin to understand – wont give anything much time of day other then their deeply ingrained, initial dogmatic premise.
The GOD or the UNKNOWN GOD or the Son of Man is that person courageous enough to self appoint himself that role. I am the unknown god because I create universes in my mind, I create elementary particles, contradictions and mix all up as I wish, I have infinite power, I am the contradictory item that is always true because if false it is true and viceversa. I see the plank level time space and manipulate it all to infinite levels. I destroy Non contradiction in my universe-mind and delude myself at ease and with pleasure. Be your own GOD , be your own BOSS.
I am heavily agnostic, but one thing I will say, that if the Jewish / Christian / Islamic God exists, he is not morally good under any rationally constructed definition of the term “morally good”. He is at best morally neutral and very possibly evil.
So even if He does exist, why would anyone want to worship Him other than for the purely selfish reason of personal salvation?
KidA41 -
do you say so because of Epicurus’ riddle?
cheers,
gemty
No, and I’m a bit of a novice… can you explain this?