The Big Big Thread of Religious Discussion

[ZAKtheGeek]

I've only read the first two intros. Looking at the size of this thing, if the intros are any indication of how the whole thing goes, we could spend a couple of pages pointing out parts that don't quite make sense, and then at least 10 more pages arguing about it. *shrugs*

[Bob The Mercenary]

Originally Posted by ZAKtheGeek

I've only read the first two intros. Looking at the size of this thing, if the intros are any indication of how the whole thing goes, we could spend a couple of pages pointing out parts that don't quite make sense, and then at least 10 more pages arguing about it. *shrugs*

Let's start then. What doesn't make sense so far? I'm behind a cloud of a life's worth of church services.

[I_Like_Swordchucks]

Originally Posted by Tydeus

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In essence, what have I done in being proven wrong? I've moved closer to truth. I've expelld from my belief system an irrational and illogical and downright wrong facet. This is my aim, always, in all things. Especially in debate. I am glad that there are people here, in this forum, with the intelligence and clarity to hone my thoughts. And I hope I may do the same for them.

Though I begin to question myself as I write this (just kidding), we have a very similar method of thinking. We've had very different starting points, and we've come to very different conclusions, but our methods aren't all that different.

You might have noticed that for my participation in this thread I've never really focused on the omnipotence and omniscience of God. To be quite frank, much like yourself, my opinion on it has changed over time (before this thread, but due to many of the reasons voiced).

And having studied, I'll promote a shocking conclusion. The Bible doesn't submit that God is capable of doing absolutely everything. If anything else, by reading it one could conclude that God has a nature, a behavioral pattern, a set of emotions, limitations. As Genesis so eloquently put it, God made man in his own image. The image here is not referring merely to appearance, we're basically little replicas. Some scholars would contend that we are more like God in nature than even the angels are. Instead, the Bible contends that God is the Supreme Being. Who is like God? Who can compare with God? Nobody, clearly, but supreme and omnipotent are two different things. God could easily be by far the Creator of the universe, infinite, and the most powerful being in existance without conforming to our definition of omnipotent.

For instance, God can't lie. God can't do evil. God can change his mind. God can be angry. God can be jealous. God can be happy. There are things God hates. There are things he loves. Certain characters in the Bible have been called God's friend. There's even a contradiction in omnipotence and omniscience, because an omniscient being would have no free will... which God clearly would have.

For God's knowledge, I see him look at things on a spectrum. Instead of viewing time as a "roller coaster" he might instead view time as a tree with many branches. He might see the consequences of any choice we could make, but he gives us the free will to choose.

You see, like Tydeus, I take my worldview and then I tweak it by removing the things that don't make sense. Trust me, my view tends to be unpopular with both Christians and athiests alike. God is a Supreme Being. He is beyond challenging by any other being. But I think careful examination of the Bible reveals he does have limitations.

Now to the heaven versus hell thing I mentioned which Tydeus commented on. If God indeed has a certain nature, and must abide by his own rules (In fact you could say the rules are a part of who and what he is rather than he created them, because I would think the rules would exist simply by God existing. I can't imagine him existing before the rules). Therefore he does what he can do without messing with free will, even finds loopholes (like Jesus dying on the cross), and makes every effort he can to extend to humanity.

Why would he make humanity? Man is in God's image much the way children are in the image of their parents. If christianity is right, we are all descendants of God (he was by definition the father of Adam and Eve). Parents take pride in their children, want to have children, yet a good parent also allows the child to face consequences for the bad decisions the child makes. It hurts a parent when they see their child go to jail for a crime, and they still love their child. Yet the law says their child must go, and the Good parent obeys the law.

Now I'm rambling because I'm getting sleepy. It's very difficult to place my entire worldview into words, and I disagree with my denomination on several points. Hopefully I came across as more of a rational thinker than a blind faith follower, because even the Bible tells me to be as wise as a serpent and as wary as a dove.

[Krylo]

In light of the many jokes we say to one another for a laugh, this is a little different: This is not intended to be a joke; it's not funny, it's intended to get you thinking.

No. It's a joke. Just not the funny kind. More the pathetic and useless kind. Allow me to illustrate...

She said, "I believe God is deeply saddened by this, just as we are, but for years we've been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government and to get out of our lives. And being the gentleman He is, I believe He has calmly backed out. How can we expect God to give us His blessing and His protection if we demand He leave us alone?"

Bullshit.

Calmly backing out like a gentleman does not mean turning your back on those people later on. That's what storming out like a child and throwing a temper tantrum is like.

I mean, there are plenty of better ways to absolve God from that, even without claiming his inexistence. I mean, fuck, just blame it on satan. It's what they do with everything else. Or call it a test. Yeah, it's a test of our faith. Whatever.

In light of recent events...terrorists attack, school shootings, etc. I think it started when Madeleine Murray O'Hare (she was murdered, her body found recently) complained she didn't want prayer in our schools, and we said OK.

I'm pretty sure the terrorism started when Bush, a man who believes whole-heartedly in God, decided to completely ignore warnings of a terrorist attack handed down from the administration before him. Or maybe it was when RELIGIOUS extremists, men who believe in god SO HARD that nothing else matters, decided to blow up buildings by killing themselves and planes full of people.

I'm also pretty sure that school shootings started when teachers couldn't be bothered to deal with the mental health of their students or stopping bullies from pushing youths to sucide, and when those youths made the decision to not ONLY kill themselves, but as many of their tormentors as possible.

I mean, I'm just saying that the absence of religion is FAR from the defining factor in these things. They rather have much more easily identifiable factors.

FURTHER, talk to your grandparents in frank terms about what they did when they were kids in school. I mean, grandaddy may not have had access to a gun, but I know my grandpa at least got into knife fights and was in a gang in elementary school that bullied adults.

This isn't something new. It's just something only recently being reported.

Then someone said you better not read the Bible in school . the Bible says thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, and love your neighbour as yourself. And we said OK.

The bible also says to stone your children to death.

FURTHER, reading the bible in school is FAR from illegal. The only thing illegal is teaching the bible as fact in public schools, as it should be.

It's not that we live in an athiestic country (nice as that would be), but rather that we live in a religiously free country, and as such teaching any religion as fact in public schools severely impedes upon the religious freedoms of everyone not of that religion.

Teaching the bible as literature, however, is far from illegal, and is still done AND useful on the basis that many other works of literature draw from and to it.

Now we're asking ourselves why our children have no conscience, why they don't know right from wrong, and why it doesn't bother them to kill strangers, their classmates, and themselves.

Probably, if we think about it long and hard enough, we can figure it out. I think it has a great deal to do with "WE REAP WHAT WE SOW."

Funny how simple it is for people to trash God and then wonder why the world's becoming a hell.

Crime rates + Time show that violent crime has been dropping steadily since the 1920s, so I must ask what the hell this guy is even talking about with immoral and violent children.

The ones who are immoral and corrupt are the newscasters who have brought the knowledge and glamorization to things that have been happening since... well... forever, to higher degrees than they are now.

Resource A: http://www.crimereduction.gov.uk/sta...atistics35.htm Note the chart at the bottom that shows the crime rates in the US dropping steadily since the 80s. Most of the rest of the world is also dropping, as well, with the notable exception of austria.

Resource B: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/viort.htm

In fact, if you look the only violent crime that has really gone up is rape from the 1920s, however that's one of the ones that 'doesn't really count' so far as this is concerned, as that in the 1920s rape was like, two laughs short of legal, and the overall awareness of rape has increased resulting in a greater crackdown and fewer people getting off.

Which is to say, there was probably more rape in the 1920s as well, just that hardly anyone went to jail for it.

Indeed... the sharpest fall in violent crime rates was in the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, which would be about the time when the whole "Religion outta government/school/everywhere else" really reached critical mass.

I mean, if we want to draw connections between violent crime and the proliferation of religion in public life. I don't particularily think that is necessarily connected, just saying that if you're going to make THAT connection, it doesn't go the way this guy says. (Fun fact, it also started falling really sharp around the time FF7 came out, and video games became really popular... these two things also happened at around the same time.)



MOVING ON!

From Bob's site:

Most skeptics believe that humans invented God as a means of comfort against an uncertain world that is filled with peril and disappointment. However, if people were to have invented the God of Christianity, it is unlikely that it would be the demanding God of the Bible. The God of the Bible is described as holy1 - without sin and without the ability to commit sin.2 The holiness of God is described as being above anything that humans can attain, such that no human can stand before Him as holy.3 Behaving more morally upright than most other people is not sufficient to escape the punishment of the God of the Bible.4

On the contrary, the gods of ancient Sumeria didn't allow ANYONE to escape punishment, and ranged from super holy to super assholes.

The gods of olympus, again, allowed very few men, regardless of their moral caliber to escape sin.

The prime gods of ancient Egypt were seen as perfectly and untouchable-y holy (and, indeed, being but the distant relative of one of them made you perfectly holy and unquestionable), AND allowed only the most absolutely righteous and pious men into the favorable afterlife. Your soul had to be so light of sin as to be able to nearly float. In other words--no one passed the test to get into the underworld fairly.

FURTHER, the idea of a god that is absolutely perfectly moral and all powerful is quite possibly the most comforting idea one can think of. No matter what happens in this world we can believe it is for the greater good, as that it is the will of a perfectly good and all powerful god. How could anything that happens not be good in the end? It may seem bad now but 'God works in mysterious ways' and 'God has a plan' and his plan will work out in the end, right?

I see no reason that this should be harder to believe in, than, say, Zeus.

It also seems unlikely that people would believe in the existence of a being who is known not to exist. For example, most of us believe in Santa Claus as small children, but give up that belief by age 10.5 People do not believe in false things, even if those things make them feel better. If people routinely believed in things just to make them fell better, we would all continue to believe in the existence of Santa Claus.

So then the Buddha exists? The Eternal Tao is accurate? Vishnu and Brahma are real? Allah is the one true god, and so is the christian God?

This arguement is patently ridiculous. Honestly it even equally validates Zeus/Jupiter et. al. After all, thousands of Greeks believed in them well into adulthood. The only way it would make any sense is if either there was only one religion in the world, or every god could coexist. As that neither of these things are true, it's completely invalid.

In addition to the above problems, believing a lie contradicts the beliefs and teachings of the Bible. In fact, Luke, in the introduction to his gospel, says that he has carefully investigated everything so that the truth may be known.6 Christians are told to believe and practice only truth,7 and warned against believing and practicing lies.8 So, the idea that they would violate their conscious and beliefs just to feel better makes no sense.

And for THIS arguement to work, Christians would have to know, 100%, with empirical evidence, that God exists or does not exist.

Without that 100% knowledge, they are not violating their belief of truth by believing in God because they don't know that God isn't real.

Just like if someone were to say, leave a heavy camera on the edge of a railing on the empire state building, and someone was tripped, stumbled, and their back knocked the camera without them ever noticing. Then that camera killed someone. Well, that person didn't just violate their belief that killing is wrong, because they had no idea they were killing someone, or even that someone is dead at the end of it. The belief is intact.

Again, this arguement does not hold.

The origin of life by naturalistic means seems extremely improbable. In addition, the earth seems to exhibit unusual design, since the existence of tectonic activity on such a small planet for such a long period of time is probably the result of an extremely unlikely collision early in its history. Without tectonic activity, the earth would be a waterworld, since continents would not form. Advanced life (beyond fish) cannot exist on such a planet.

KP. Few pages back. Three hours in a lab to create life.

This guy sucks at this.

It was obvious to this honors student that the "scientific" explanation for the origin of life was completely unreasonable. Since those days (the early 1970's) the evidence contradicting a naturalistic origin of life has become much stronger. Even more compelling than the evidence against abiogenesis is the evidence for the design of the universe. The scientific evidence shows irrefutably that the universe had a beginning. In contrast, atheism would predict that the universe would be eternal. In fact, this belief was prevalent among atheists until the evidence against the steady state theory became overwhelming last century. Although it is possible that the universe could arise by itself, the level to which it is fine tuned is contrary to this hypothesis. In fact, the degree of fine tuning is up to one part in 10120.

Ahem. Three hours. Not a problem. On the life thing. And on the 'eternal universe' thing. Answered. Many times. In many ways. All of which are equally valid. All of which equally discount this guy.

ALSO!

the level to which it is fine tuned is contrary to this hypothesis. In fact, the degree of fine tuning is up to one part in 10120.

I've really wanted to bring this up.

There IS no fine tuning. The idea that the universe was created in such a way that life could survive here is ridiculous. It's EXACTY THE OPPOSITE WAY AROUND! Life came about in such a way that was capable of surviving in this universe.

If we lived in a world that had slightly different levels of gravity, or warped space time, or whatever, we'd be sitting here having this same discussion. Only we'd think that our universe, which nothing from THIS universe could survive in, was the one in ten to the power of one-hundred-thirty-two chance.

I mean, even supposing the idea of a god, it would be far more efficient for him to create the universe and then create life capable of existing in that universe, rather than creating a universe around the idea of a certain type of life being able to exist there.

Honestly, guys, stop posting poorly created arguements from elsewhere.

You're ALL much better at this. MUCH better.

At this point I see no reason to read the rest of the site, as the part I did read (fully) was had more logic holes than swiss cheese. Not that swiss cheese has logic holes. Swiss cheese has cheese holes... but if we were to assume that the cheese holes were logic holes, then the guy has more logic holes than swiss cheese does.

[ZAKtheGeek]

I've read a bit more of that large site. Yeah, it seems to become much less convincing when it tries to explain Christianity as opposed to vague creation. More later!

Instead of viewing time as a "roller coaster" he might instead view time as a tree with many branches. He might see the consequences of any choice we could make, but he gives us the free will to choose.

That's how I see it too. Except it knows which branch will happen. Like I've written a couple of times already, there's really too much mystification over this concept of "conscious thought." It's not some random, chaotic, unpredictable process! One can know what choices a person will end up making, what will go through their mind, especially if they're all-knowing (supreme probably works too) and the designed that very mind.

To refer to the site, it says that God didn't actually make you because you came from your parents and not God directly. Well, if God can know what at least his original people thought, as well as how this universe it designed works, then it should easily have been able to predict exactly what would happen, everywhere, at any point in time. No cop-outs; God made everything. God can be blamed for everything.

[Bob The Mercenary]

Well, I'm happy to have participated in this, and it's been a fun discussion, but that was my last bullet in a chamber full of duds, apparently. I have nothing else to offer thaat would be of any use, and I'm exhausted (reading the retorts have actually helped put me to sleep, not insinuating that they've been boring).

Who knows, maybe this entire faith thing stems from the fact that I can't stand thinking that some people won't be able to see their loved ones again, and a lot of them never got to say goodbye. I'll check back in here from time to time, but as of now, I'm spent.

You're all excellent debaters, by the way, not that I'm one to rank anyone else. It's what puts this forum above others.

And this thread was a great idea, fifth.

[42PETUNIAS]

I'm looking at the site that Bob linked to. Most of the stuff looks pretty valid, but right now I'm taking a look at one of the arguements (Why would god create a person predestined for hell) because we had talked about it in this thread. The arguement seemed pretty weak as much as I'v read.
Here's the part that's supposed to prove that we all have free will.

Originally Posted by Rich Deem (The guy who wrote the article)

You have absolute free will within the confines of your personal ability. You can prove this to yourself. Determine two possible courses of action. They don't have to be big decisions, just any two possible actions. Assign each action to either "heads" or "tails." Flip the coin and do what whatever course chance decided. You can do this as many times as needed to determine that you do, indeed, have free will. Occasionally, do the opposite of what the coins tell you. Has God prevented you from doing anything? No!

This arguement declares that God as omnipotent, and yet it declares that anything we do in the world that this omnipotent being created can not be influenced by this being. I don't see how this is supposed to prove that we have free will, so much as it is to prove that we have the illusion of free will.

The second incorrect assumption is that God alone has created you. You are the product of choices made by your parents. Therefore, God has not predestined you to be born at all. How can you blame Him for creating you to send you to hell?

If God is indeed omniscience, then the second he even considered creating the first man, he immediatly knew everything that would follow. Ever. He knew I would be here, at this moment, typing at my computer, he knew exactly who would be alive at any time, anywhere, and so on and so forth. God created the first man, with an exact knowlege of what this creation would bring, therefore, god created me. I don't see any other way that God couldn't know that the creation of the first man would bring me. He knew that I would not accept Jesus (Unless I happen to convert later in life), and that I will go to hell because of it. Therefore, when he created the very first man, he destined me to hell.

I'd love to read the rest of the article, and analyze it too, but frankly, it's lights out on campus, and I have to go. I hope I don't miss too much tonight.

[Archbio]

Bob_the_Mercenary,

I'm not going to go through that whole website. In fact, I'm not going to read any more than I've already read.

That is, the article about "Who created God?", because I thought it would be illuminating to see how they tackle that question. They don't.

"God has always existed because he's outside of time as normally conceived, where cause and effect don't apply"

Questions of time and space are a little beyond my depth, but since I suspect it's beyond whoever wrote this too, I'll take a shot at it. That "cause and effect don't apply" means that effect doesn't follow cause, but, to me, it doesn't mean that you can have an effect without a cause. It just means that that cause can be located at points in time that you would, in normal time, not expect it to be.

But in all fairness, nothing is impossible, and they don't even have to posit some vague woo about things out of time to be able to get away with the notion that God always existed. It's conceivable that there's something eternal about the universe: to me, it's more plausible than something out of nothing.

Here's the rub: I've always heard theists of all stripes go against this idea. Watches must have watchmakers, ect. Normally, they're consciously blind to the notion that their religion, be it disguised as philosophy or science, hasn't got the high ground on this at all. If the universe must have a creator, than so does the creator. If the universe must have an origin, the origin... well... it hardly makes sense to stop there because it fits an ancient dogma.

That's why I was interested in this section so particularly. It was a rather unpleasant surprise.

Why can't the universe be eternal?

Imagine that. They have an answer! Goodie!

First, they acknowledge the rub:

The idea that God can be eternal leads us to the idea that maybe the universe is eternal, and, therefore, God doesn't need to exist at all.

Strange. It seems that this is couched as if theism (or even religion) was the default hypotheses. That first sentence goes very far in that implication, and I think it might be the strongest statement in that sense the article makes. That doesn't mean it relents in this. I'm not going to note it the other times, but I count this as an indication of a very skewed vision of things: scientists don't factor God in.

Actually, this was the prevalent belief of atheists before the observational data of the 20th century strongly refuted the idea that the universe was eternal.

It did? That sound like fresh totallymadeupstuff. I thought the idea of an eternal universe was still fairly credible!

This fact presented a big dilemma for atheists, since a non-eternal universe implied that it must have been caused. Maybe Genesis 1:1 was correct!

Oh yes, that sounds like the workings of the scientific mind right there. Instant conversions!

Not to be dismayed by the facts, atheists have invented some metaphysical "science" to attempt to explain away the existence of God.

No comment.

Hence, most atheistic cosmologists believe that we see only the visible part of a much larger "multiverse" that randomly spews out universes with different physical parameters.1 Since there is no evidence supporting this idea (nor can there be, according to the laws of the universe)

Suddenly, they care about the laws of the universe, in cotnradiction of the "effect don't need causes!" crap that's the base of the whole article.

it is really just a substitute "god" for atheists.

This goes beyond imagining everyone is secretly theist. It combines that and the notion that atheism, or science, is religion. Anything unproven that has to do with the origin of the universe is a God. Why even bother misusing language like that? If they didn't, they couldn't do what follow:

And, since this "god" is non-intelligent by definition, it requires a complex hypothesis, which would be ruled out if we use Occam's razor, which states that one should use the simplest logical explanation for any phenomenon. Purposeful intelligent design of the universe makes much more sense, especially based upon what we know about the design of the universe.

It has to be a god, or else they couldn't qualify it as a "non-intelligent god", making the term more complex and apparently kicking Occam's chainsaw into gear. I say "making the term more complex" because I have no idea how a thing qualified by non-intelligence would be more complex than something qualified by intelligence, everything else being equal.

Intelligence implies structures, patterns, ideas. Intelligence evokes a brain or Skynet. Non-intelligence evokes a lump of mud or a pile of rock.

In conclusion:

The only possible escape for the atheist is the invention of a kind of super universe, which can never be confirmed experimentally (hence it is metaphysical in nature, and not scientific).

Again, intermittent care for evidence, logic and science. God comes out of top, because they're religious. Why even bother writing this?


From Krylo's post:

However, if people were to have invented the God of Christianity, it is unlikely that it would be the demanding God of the Bible.

To add something to Krylo's reponse to this which is already fairly complete: gods as a source of authority isn't just comforting to the believers, it's also very comforting to the mortals claiming authority. The fact that this site ignores what might be the second most cited reason why gods were invented: to create legitimacy to the rulers. Indeed, I've come across the idea, more than once, that originally, any measure of leadership on a scale that we now consider significant only could come from the gods.

This seems to be compatible with the theocratic nature of the most ancient governments, and the fact that their gods were the reflection of temporal governments.

[Bailey]

This is probably going to get torn apart by both sides within ten minutes of me posting it, but whatever. I'm bored.

Suppose that, perhaps, God is a game developer who has come up with an advanced AI system and is testing it out.


For the purposes of this jaunt into madness, let us come up with methods of rationalizing the omni-s.

Omni-present: God has the debug codes to get to anywhere He wants to be.
Omni-potent: Again, debug codes. He simply changes the code and something is.
Omni-scient: God programmed everything himself, didn't He? Of course He would know all about it.
Omni-bonum(dunno if that's the right word but it sounds about right): The world is in Beta and God is still weeding out the bad.

[I_Like_Swordchucks]

Originally Posted by krylo

It's not that we live in an athiestic country (nice as that would be)

Uhhuh. Cuz Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, North Korea, and China are such wonderful places. You realize you succeed in proving little more than there are some bad religious people, and some people misuse religion in any of your posts?

Originally Posted by krylo

KP. Few pages back. Three hours in a lab to create life. Ahem. Three hours. Not a problem. On the life thing. And on the 'eternal universe' thing. Answered. Many times. In many ways. All of which are equally valid. All of which equally discount this guy.

Wow. Isn't that so wrong? That experiment KP mentioned didn't result in life, nor anything close to it. Nobody has ever EVER created life in a lab. The best they've done is mix carbon, nitrogen, and hydrogen together an watched them form amino acids after blasting them with excessive amounts of energy.

Now for a biology lesson... an amino acid is the smallest possible unit of a protein. One protein generally contains anywhere from 500 to 2000 amino acids. A cell, the smallest form of life, contains hundreds of different kinds of proteins, carbohydrates, nucleic acids, and lipids. An amino acid is not life, nor anywhere close to it.

But its not really much of a surprise that if you mix all the required materials for a compound and blast them with energy, you might get a compound with those materials in them. Life is far more complicated than that.

Consider the evolving from a common ancestor with the apes thing. We're 98% genetically similar. Again that makes sense considering we have many of the same physical features. I mean, we're 60% genetically similar with a mouse.

So 2% difference. Thats 60 million base pairs in the genome. So in the run of 4 million years we would have incurred 60 million mutations, and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM would had to have provided a competitive advantage. Considering higher level mammals have backup mechanisms, so mutations are rare, and beneficial mutations are like gold, diamonds, and platinum, you might consider that the odds of it happening on its own are slim to none.

Much like the creation of life. We have yet to prove spontaneous generation is even possible, yet its consistently put in science textbooks. Experiments at spontaneous generation have failed miserably every time yet, but science clings to it. That sounds like blind faith to me. How unscientific.

To illustrate my point:



This is an amino acid. Real complicated stuff there.



This is a protein. Its made of thousands of amino acids, all in the proper order, and with the proper charge to give it an active site, a water soluble region, and a lipid soluble region. One wrong amino acid can cause a bad mutation (this is hemoglobin, so a wrong amino acid causes sickle cell anemia).



This is a cell. The is what the first life would have looked like. I used a bacteria cell, because animal cells are far more complicated but didn't come first. Even so, this thing is made of hundreds of thousands of proteins, lipids, nucleic acids, and carbohydrates. Each one has a particular function.


So according to scientists, they're able to make an amino acid (picture one), so therefore spontaneous generation of a cell (picture three) is possible. Yeah, no leap in logic there. It's like saying that the materials that make bricks can form naturally, so therefore given enough time a house could spontaneously generate.