MY93WRX

If thats the best comment you can come up with i doubt you have the brain capacity to add something useful to the debate.

MY93WRX

That is a very funny clip, thats evangelical Americans for you, nothing rational about the person though. I suspect she needs medical help. As for your poorley written sentence that i believe is trying to say religious people don't practice what they preach, the Catholic faith has a get out clause too, its called repenting your sins. ps i really am loving this oportunity to play devils advacote with sometimes ill informed poorly constructed opinions!

Fuzz

@ Audi Lover, Yea I've seen that before ,it is rather scary that someone can be brainwashed so far to becoming what can only be described as "a sandwich short of a Picnic"!

I got home from work today and there were no notifications about this thread, I thought it died in the early hours, I was thinking, yep it was too long a post..
How you've all suprised me.
Great reading the replies..
Please dont belittle the believers though, it's thier right to believe even if we think we know better (at this point)
I'd rather not see it degenerate and then be locked.

If God did exist though, the line between "he does exist", and science saying "he doesn't", would be steered towards the belief that "he does".
The trouble is, Science can explain and disprove nearly every "God" theory.
I have yet to see one single God theory, disprove the Science theory.
Hence I "believe" there is no god.

Well said about the "idea" and the "belief" thing.
When that line starts getting knocked in the other direction then I might change my "idea" as you say, it's easier to do!

Andy

mpr

People believe in god because they're just too scared to live life on their own as a grown up. Religion should be banned, I'm sick of hearing about it all. It long ago outlived its' usefulness as a means of controlling the population - In fact it's now starting to have the opposite effect.

As for people being scared of dying..... did you know anything before you were born? of course not - you didn't exist, it wasn't scary, it wasn't anything, you'll soon get used to it again!

Bubba po

Not true. His whole "selfish gene" theory is his example. The fact that genes with no function replicate *****-nilly within the genome, thus providing potential extra genes for mutation and selection to work upon is exactly the example that you say he cannot give.

Fuzz

A good website I've been browsing for a year or so is the British Humanist Association

Now that is a "group" that makes sense !

Andy

MY93WRX

MPR You're forgetting that people who are deeply religious aren't scared of dying bacause they believe there going to heaven.- so ahagin the opinion you offer has had not thopught put into it, Why can't you staunch athiasts construct an inteligent argument instead of just mouthing off! I myself am not a staunch religious person i sit on the fence most of the time but lean towards the God is something idea, i'd like to have an inteligent dabate, some post on hear (fiuzz) offer a more inteligent debate against God but the majority (mpr) can't construct an argument just an opinion thats not been thought threw!!!

Fuzz

Perfect....

What enables human beings to live well rather than badly is their capacity for imaginative and sympathetic identification with the joys and sufferings of others, together with their capacity to think rationally about the consequences of their actions.

The religious element, in fact, distorts moral motivation. Good people are those who help others simply because others need help, who tell the truth just because they want to trust others and be trusted, who act fairly and justly out of respect for the needs and rights of others. Someone who acts in superficially similar ways to these, but does it simply because they believe that it is commanded by an all-powerful deity, is not morally admirable but merely servile. Someone who is motivated only by the hope of eternal reward, or the fear of eternal punishment, is merely selfish.


Andy

RedFive

Believe it or not, I talked about you this weekend. (100% true, I swear to G-d ) Had a friend over who is as bad as me (atheist dude ) but always wants to learn more about things. We were talking about those F. thingies, religion in general, and lots of other stuff.

His girlfriend is a Muslim BTW, and a very very nice person she is too. Somehow, we, nor she, feel the need to prove we are the smarter/better person. (yeah of course I am the smartest, but that's not the point )

Literature tip: "Desperately Seeking Paradise" from Ziauddin Sardar. "Journey of a sceptical muslim" is the subtitle. British dude. I guess Scoobynet would call him a "Paki". http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/...850803-2361244

Must read.

OllyK

1) Which god?
2) Please read your bible. The old testament is full of it.

OllyK

If we have freedom of choice then god is neither omnipotent or omniscient which is a bit of a pi$$ser for the the Judeo / Christian / Muslim religions!

OllyK

The burden of proof is upon the claimant, i.e. those who claim that god exists. Science has little interest in trying to disprove something for which there is no evidence of existence.

A natural disaster has nothing to do with free will unless you are trying to claim that a man was responsible for the hurricane or any other natural disaster.

RedFive

Fuzz... can you imagine for 1 minute that I first read Dawkins in 1982 ? For my thesis ? That it made perfect sense to me ? That I'm also an atheist, pretty much hardcore. But that I also dislike (or learned to dislike) the "dedain" for religion or personal beliefs ?

Did you click on the link about Erasmus Darwin ? Did you ? Did you realise even Dawkins admits sociobiology says nothing about religion per sé ? That the Big Bang theory has nothing to do with the evolution theory ? That the Big Bang was "invented" by a Belgian priest ? That Dawkins has become a poster boy ? Did you ever hear about E.O. Wilson ?

Of course you didn't. You got an email link from somewhere

OK, creasjonists and ID doods are wacko. Not many sane people would deny that. (you have to wear tin foil hats to believe in that crap). Still, again: it all says nothing about belief or religion. And I bet you still know **** all about sociobiology.

Science is not about opinion, or even about Scoobynet approval: it's about learning ****. Start reading Edward. O. Wilson, and work your way up from there. Yeah, the ants, it's tedious, but it's important. You might become an informed atheist (G-d knows we need more of them ) And might even find Dawkins is far more known for his "opinions" than for his scientific work (and to make it even more complicated: I admire the guy in many ways)

Stop spouting email-linked opinions, start reading FFS.

RedFive

They are called "the desert religions" in short.

OllyK

True in the broad sense, but many fundamentalist christians deny this

And if that's true, god is not all powerful as claimed in the bible, you can't have it both ways. If he isn't all powerful, where does the limit of his power lie? Can he really have the power to do anything?

Let's be clear here - "hell" as fire and brimstone is a New Testament concept, it does not exist as such in the old testament.

OllyK

Hypothesis, it wasn't a theory. Besides, science is self correcting, that's the beauty of it. When have you heard a clergyman say "damn, you know we got it wrong, Jesus was actually a woman". Religion cannot admit to being wrong about anything otherwise people will start to question all the inconsistencies and the whole lot comes crashing down.

Fuzz

I may not have done a thesis on the subject, nor would I want to, I've got better things to do with my time here.
However,
No one e-mailed me anything I've posted, It's something that I've come across whilst browsing about that particular subject because I'm interested in it, although I wont be dedicating my life to it either.
So in the nicest way possible.

And while I'm at it WTF does "dedain" mean.

Andy

warrenm2

Can you not use a spell checker?

If you want debate - answer all my previous points. Earth created 6500 years ago? Bible factually accurate? Woman created from Adams rib? Stoning of improperly covered women. Lets hear it then?

mpr

Sorry, I was actually targetting both groups of muppets at once. I.E. you religious types (even though you partially deny it), and the ones that are brow-beaten into being religious types because they're scared of dying.

You could also do with a grammar checker, once you find the spell checker that is.

StickyMicky

if we evolved from apes/monkeys

why are the current apes and monkeys not evolving as we did
as far as i know they are still doing the same things they have always done (bar the odd trained jobbies making cups of tea)

warrenm2

because they live in a prticular ecological and evolutionary niche, we moved out of that niche and evolved to survive outside it.

StickyMicky

who moved us away

OllyK

Quite simply - we didn't. Apes / Monkeys and humans derive from a common simpler primate / mamalian ancestor, we evolved differently from that point, we did not evolve from modern apes.

Mungo

Not sure what the "official" evolutionist theory on this one is, but I'd assume that either:
a) Because Man has evolved into very much the dominant organism on Earth, we are now restricting the capabilities of other large mammals to evolve (erosion of habitat, etc). However, I believe that much smaller organisms such as viruses and bacteria are still able to mutate and evolve. We struggle to control the micro-habitats that they inhabit.
b) They are still evolving, but because of the extremely slow rate of evolution, it's not noticeable to us. Man took somehting like 10,000 years to move out of the caves and into the modern world. We've only been aware of evolution for 200 years - comparatively not much time to notice and measure evolutionary change in apes.

Go ahead, shoot me down....

OllyK

See my answer above! And both us and modern apes are still evolving and will continue to do so.

JTaylor

That's just sloppy.

alloy

I thought that was a convincing read, my only problem is this chance effect and the fact that there still had to be something in the beginning. This goes right back to the old which came first scenario of the egg and the chicken.

I can't comprehend religion to be honest, i do like facts and knowledge, religion hasn't answered my questions but you look at the effect on a vast volume of people that religion has had over the ages and then you have to wonder, then there is science which for every question it answers, poses two more possibilities into the frame. Then when you look at the universe you see how insignificant we are anyway in the scheme of things.

I am not religious in my mannerism but what is religion anyway, is it a belief? is it hope? is it just the longing for companionship in times of need? to each person it's very much an individual relationship with your subconscious self on some level leading me to belive there is no God in the normal sense but ultimatly there must have been some divine entity that instigated the first domino in the series to fall.

OllyK

Why does there have to have been a begining? While the big bang was the start of time as a non physical dimension, it makes sense, as you say, that there was "something" there prior to that. So as god "has just always been" why not the universe?

alloy

It just seems to easy, there had to have been a beginning for there to be something. I stick by guns and reiterate this comment

Geezer

But surely that is just once again, down to human inability to comprehend something and attaching some sort of relgious conotation to it? We don't understand the process behind the Big Bang, so it must have divine intervention?

Primitive humans probably didn't understand the process involved in procreation, doesn't mean that all births have an immacualte conception.

It still beggars belief that in the face of such an overwhelming lack of evidence of any sort whatsoever, that people can still believe in a God of any sort, especially one who preaches fear, intolerance, hatred and bigotry.

Then again, I believe that girl in accounts fancies me................

Geezer