This is not an attack, but it is pointless to argue/discuss with religious believers.

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Well said Shadow Assassin.

Mongerman, we have more proof in evolution than for many events in the bible. To understand evolution, you really need to see the bigger picture - small changes taking place over thousands or millions of years, with some drastic changes interspersed between (like the extinction of the dinosaurs, but the rise of the mammals was still another 10 million years later).

I want to know why christianity and evolution are said to be incompatible. why couldnt god have designed the forces of evolution etc to end up creating us? Why does he need to literally place us down on the earth himself?

Picture this, God goes down to a prophet a few thousand years ago, and says:

"How did humans come to be? Thats a funny story that one. I configured the force of gravity for this universe to be such that the ball of mass that is the sun would separate into planets and planetoids, one of which would be the earth. Now I was sure to make certain that the earth contained the right compounds for life to start. Then I sat back, waited a few billion years, tweaked evolution while I waited, then waited some more, and here we are. took you guys a while, but my prescience showed me you guys would come."

To which the prophet says,

"What is the universe? What are planets and planetoids? What is gravity? What are compounds? What is evolution?"

So God says,

"Nevermind. The real story is I made the whole thing in 7 days, put you guys down here on the 7th, took a day of rest, and here we are. thats all you need to know."

Basically, what I'm saying is, just because god didnt say it back then doesnt mean he didnt mean it.

 

And you complain because our story is hard to follow...

If that perspective were maintained, then their would be no problem with that. But seeing as Humanism is paraded as an alternative to religion and God mocked along the way, isn't that looking for a fight?

Again, proper perspective maintained, but the focus should not be on sorrow, but on how to be more than just sin ridden animals, and the crowning achievement of creation that God intended us to be.

And isn't the idea of religion to help us to make that best and most noble effort? If not, then that religion is too far removed from what I believe...

As it should be, but where it reduces God to the point where he is perceived as non existence or worse, that is where the problem begins.

Wouldn't dogma be a code of conduct? And any religion that works does not rely on witch hunts, inquisitions, crusades and holy wars. Those four are abuse of the name of God, rather than proper worship.

Susipaisti: We have different translations of the Bible. In the version I have, verse 3, the Lord informs Moses that the Pharoah will harden his heart. Further, Moses would not be made a God, but a Prophet, and Aaron his Spokesperson.

Because the Chirstian right insist on a 24 hour day, while the people bringing evolution into play insist that God doesn't exist. Seriously, I believe that Genesis 1 is overly simplified. Not because the prophet or people wouldn't understand, but because the focus should be more on how we ought to live, rather than how the earth came to be...

 

No, you've just never really explored the issue. Had you done so, you would have realized that much as there is no one way to categorize all Christians, there is also no one way to categorize all humanists. The world isn't black and white.

 

Atheist.

And it's against the version of christianity as represented by NOG and Gnarfflinger, actually.

 

But how do you tell the difference? What we see as barbaric, was seen as noble and right back then. What you see as a normal and healthy christian behaviour and attitude may well be condemned later.

This proves that any christian against evolution is against because his minister says so, and NOT because the bible explicitly does.

Fact 1: Darwin was a Christian until he died.
Fact 2: Dont blame Darwin because he actually put a lot of other peoples work together and expanded on it. In other words he acknowledged that his work wasnt entirely original (he gave credit where it was due though).
Fact 3: Evolution says nothing about God either way. It doesnt say that he exists or that he doesnt exist, and that is what bothers me, is that somebody comes up with a more plausible explanation for why we are here, and the Christians debate it because it doesnt contain the word God. That doesnt mean god wasnt involved, dont you see! Its not a proof against god, its a proof for the complexity of life!


Anyway, what was that about the 24 hour day? you do the know that the rotational speed of the earth isnt constant right?

 

There are various interpretations of the word "day" as used in Genesis simply because "day" didn't exist until there was Sol and Earth, darkness and light. The 24 hr day is considered by many Christians to be a poor translation.

 

That's what I thought. What makes you think your way is right and theirs isn't? You can't prove that there isn't a god, so if you can't prove it how can you be so sure that there isn't one? The great flood did happen, there's proof enough of that, and it's cooroberated by more than one religion(Read the Epic of Gilgamesh, Atrahasis epic, Eridu Genesis, greek mythology(3 of them)). So tell me, what caused the flood? Why did the big bang happen? Science, now, has no answers for you, does it? It may never have any answers on this. So what makes you so sure?

 

If you would be so kind to point to the post where I wrote any of those things you claim?

 

Wow chill dude.

so hes a dirty rotten atheist as you suspected? </sarcasm>

Just because the flood happened and was recorded, doesnt mean god exists. I dont know why the flood happened, but thats akin to saying the bible says god created the sun, and we know the sun exists, therefore there is a god. you're missing a very important point there.

in any case, the point of this thread is not to prove how evil us atheists are, but to discuss the reasons for various religious beliefs with religious beliefs.

 

I wrote that because turn about is fair play. He came in, jumped on a bandwagon and immediately flamed christianity. He added nothing constructive to the conversation whatsoever. Didn't give us anything new, nor even bother to tell us his views. I just thought I'd give him a taste of his own medicine. It's not believing that there is no god that I had a problem with, it was the attitude of the post. If you don't have anything constructive to add to a conversation than don't add anything. My post was there to serve 2 purposes. To challenge Chimera and to illustrate the pointlessness of purely inflammatory posts. But then atleast my post brought something new to the discussion.

Oh, and it doesn't mean God didn't create the sun either. Just some food for thought.

 

a great flood clearly happened, as happens near every greater river, but it never covered the whole world.

and seriusly the whole you catn proof god dosn't excist therefor he might is a bs argument...i cant prove giant speghetti monsters of outer space dosn't excist, therefor they might and then we should worship them?
believing in things you cant proof dosn't excist is silly, i can make anything up that no one can proof dosn't excist, that dosn't meen I or any other should believe in them.

 

What I flamed was NOG's statement about exterminating an entire nation:

Of course, Shadow Assassin, if you consider that statement a representation of the entire christianity, that is your choice.


BTW, she actually.

 

The great flood I'm talking about in these religions all happened at the same time. Now I could go on and then explain that they've found proof of this flood. There is scientific evidence of this flood. I'm not going to go into detail, because I'd rather you go look it up for yourselves. And yes, there very well could be giant spaghetti monsters in outerspace. If you want to worship them then you go right on ahead and do that. Just because you come up with some leftfield crazy crap, though, doesn't change the fact that it's entirely possible for a god, or even multiple deities to exist outside of space and time. After all space and time didn't exist until the big bang, so what was there before it? You bring me the answer to that, then we'll discuss the implications of spaghetti space monters and what economic impact they might have on the pasta industry. After all I'm sure PETA would be all over it.

 

@Shadow Assassin: Actually. Flood Geology , the theory that the Genesis flood actually happened and that all of the flood myths are linked to the same event (a component of young earth creationism), is not accepted by the vast majority of geologists, both Christian and non-Christian, who consider it a form of pseudoscience. In other words, most geologists specifically believe that it didn't happen.

Wiki has another detailed article on the great flood as a whole, but, unfortunately, the system won't let me put parentheses in HTML tags, so I couldn't add this as a hyperlink. Do a google search on "great flood" and the article will be the first entry.

[ April 15, 2007, 21:51: Message edited by: Drew ]

 

no it didn't shadow assassin, the babylon one (gilgamesh) predates the other, and it is theorised that both the herakles legend and noahs ark is based on varius parts of gilgamesh.

and yes i have seen several articles about the great flood that turned the arabic continent from a lush green area into a dessert, the main explanation was a meteorite.
im completely open to a creat casatrophy might have happened and be the root of these flood myth. after all we have several proof of other ares of the earth being scared by great meterorites, mexico for instance.
i guess the difference is you jump to a divine explanation, which i cant see the point in.


considering that both jews and greeks had contacts witht he babylons and thier decendents this is very likely.

and if these gods or god excist why is it that they make no contact with us? its a funny thing, all religions seems to suffer from, for some reason in the past, gods walked the earth and made them self known and for some reason none of the gods do it any more.

i cant explain what happened before the big bang and i will probably never know, but guess what, that dosn't scare me into seeking divine explanations. but ill grand you a god could excist, im just not going to waste my time worshipping something that cant be proven to excist, and who if existing really isn' making an effort

 

Drew, not all the flood myths. Guess I will have to explain it. It's one particular flood that these talk about. It was the Dead Sea.

Equester, there ya go, the biblical flood is the same one that appears in gilgamesh. However you apparently didn't notice that I said Eridu Genesis, that being from Sumer, not the bible.

Isn't it more likely that they all just happened to live in the same general area and eventually wrote about the same flood? After all Judaism came from another religion, and I'm still waiting for someone to tell me what religion that is.

You made it quite clear that you didn't bother to read much of this thread. It's obvious because it seems that you assume I'm a Theist, or at the least a deist. Anybody that's read this thread would know better.

My point exactly. We can't know.

 

Yes, yes, yes, we all know that the dead sea flooded. On the other hand, we also know that the flood myth was actually plagiarized from Sumaria and Babylonia. Proof of a flood also doesn't amount to proof that a man built an Ark and took two of every creature in the world on a big boat in order to repopulate the world after the waters receded.

http://www.inu.net/skeptic/flood.html

 

You'd be surprised what we have learnt about that. An astrophysicist friend of mine told me that the scientific community isnt fond of infinity (ie an infinity of mass in an infinitely small space) so the current theory is of a universe that starts from a very very small space (but not infinitely small) and expands to a maximum size, then contracts again to that same small size and does it all over again.

Read Bill Bryson's book a short history of everything, which is damn brilliant. It explains it quite nicely.

Anyway, whatever we do or dont know about the big bang, we know less about the potential existence of deities, but thats kinda irrelevant isnt it? you cant prove or disprove the theories.

as for the flood, most of humanity tended to live in a very small geographical area, and its quite likely that one flood was recorded by many civilisations, not that that has anything to do with the existence of god.

 

im sorry you feel such silly needs to defend yourself and jump to conclusions when attacking me of the same
i have read the entire thread and tried to stay out of it, i was in fact puzzled about you insistance on the possibility of a god or gods existing because you in your other post didn't come of as a believer. i guess i misundestood you and for that at least i apologiese. but it seems like your as good as me at jumping to conclusions.


proteus_za

i heard that and a couple of other theories when i had physics at college, they made sense, but they are still just theories, who knows what the scientific comunity will say later.

my point of not knowing, was that i really dont need to either.

as for flood myths in general, most major civilizations start out near great rivers and these rivers tend to flood at times, which is often blamed on god/gods. secondly most civilizations encounter other civilizations and ideas are exchanged.
that several civilizzations nabouring each other has similiar myths is hardly a proof of anything divine.

 

Kin:
Most of your quotes may be taken a little wrong. Christ did not come with the intended purpose of causing division, but rather knew that it was an inevitable consequence. As such, He didn't want any followers that would crumble if their parents criticized them.

Your last quote, however, is pretty much spot on. This is one of the final judgements against a world in the hands of the Anti-Christ. In other words, that isn't the objective of Christianity or anything, but I think (hope) you knew that.

A defence of misinterpretation is a poor defence indeed. No, the common defence for a lot of misunderstandings is one I have tried to explain over and over again on these boards: context. I hope you know what it is and how important it is. As for your question of the fallability of God, He is infallable, but we are not. If a human being wrote it down, there is a chance for mistakes. God inly protects His message, not every word in the Bible. I'll even offer you some examples of mistakes. Between the books of Kings and the books of Chronicles, the Bible authors describe a number of battles several times, yet they can differ wildly in terms of the number of troops present on either side, the skill of the troops, and how well equiped they were. This is a mere historical footnote, though, and doesn't change the message of God.

Chandos:
I will say whole-heartedly that I support the picture of humanism you present. God gave us reason and rationality so that we could use them. That being said, however, the picture presented earlier seemed to indicate that humanism sought to remove God from His pedestal and give that pedestal to man. That is something I cannot support under any conditions. Which is humanism? Is humanism such a loose conglomerate of ideas that both can be it?

Proteus:

Ahem... You believe. That's what you mean. You mean that you believe there is no God.

And again, you'll have to cite this for me. Where does God command His soldiers to rape women? Where does He command them to leave said women to fend for themselves?

Shadowed Assassin:

I must have missed that. Last I checked, the odds of an environment suitable for any form of life we understand developing by random chance was so astronomical that you would need billions of universes of about our size to get even one such environment. When did we change this?

Drew:

The people in those regions today, such as the Palestinians, are the decendants of the people groups that weren't wiped out from Canaan intermarrying with Jewish women. The results were as ostricized by Jewish society as the fathers had been. By the time of the new testament, these people are being called Samaritans. You remember how much the Jews hated the Samaritans? Well, it was because the Samaritans and Palestinians had been causing them so much trouble for so long.

Ok, excuse me, for all but the past ~400 years of the past 3000 years.

Shadowed Assassin:

I wish more people thought like this.

Unfortunately, there is a fine line between philosophy and religion, one that is left to the individual to find.

On your history, I am very saddened to hear about this. In many ways, I am very much the same as you. The difference is that God got my attention again and called me back. Basically, 'There, but for the grace of God, go I.'

Well, that root religion aspect is actually part of the problem. Each group claims to be the only way, each group (as far as the fighters go) is a radical fundamentalist group, and each group claims there holiest ground within the same city. For the Jews and Muslims, it is actually the same spot in the same city. There's a lot of fireworks there. The radicals are a big problem everywhere, though. Anyone that would rather kill or attack an 'unbeliever' that sit down and talk with them needs help.

Proteus:

Ah, but you have to compare them on equal terms. Think of each event in the Bible as each step of evolution. If you do that, we have a LOT more evidence for the accuracy of the Bible than we do for evolution. You're right that there are some events in the Bible that we have no historical evidence for at all (though that is becoming fewer and fewer every year), but there are a lot of stages of evolution that we have no evidence for.

Guess what? They aren't! For all I rail on evolution, I actually believe in it. I only rail on evolution because it is so often a theory presented as fact. For many people, evolution has become a religion, a matter of faith, and that is terrible.

Lol. Funny story, and probably not too far off. The thing is, if you look at the original language of Genesis 1, you see that the 'seven days' presented are not presented in a chronological timeline at all, but rather in a categorical ordering. Basically, it is the equivalent of "Well, first of all, I made everything that's not alive. Secondly, I made everything that's alive, but doesn't live on land. Thirdly, I made everything that's alive, lives on land, but doesn't have bones. Fourthly..." THis isn't intended to be a chronological listing at all, and as such, it actually doesn't oppose evolution in the least.

Chimera:

And what do you have against my representation of Christianity?

Proteus:

Hah! Sorry to say it, but you won't like the answer here. The way to tell the difference is by the will of God. Now that may sound high-falutin' and out there, but it really isn't. God told us to love one another, to forgive those that hurt us, love those that hate us, and bless those that curse us. Anyone trying to do the opposite in God's name isn't serving His will.

Or just because he doesn't believe the limited evidence, or because, like me, he does believe, but recognizes it as belief and not knowledge. More or less, though, you got the right idea.

Yes, but we're human, so we have to standardize everything. The day is 24 hours long! I don't care if the spin of the earth changes, the day is 24 hours long!

Chimera:

Meh, standard atheist claims. They were assumed.

Equester:

My God does, and He does it in much the same way He has for thousands of years. He only 'walked the Earth' once, and He's not doing it again until the end, but He does make contact with people.

Proteus:

Except that that is in contradiction with the current evidence that the rate of expansion is increasing.