Evolution
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It's the Internet. Calm down. Stuff is bound to get off topic at any given moment.
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Ok guys we're at nine pages now , I'm just checking in on the progress. Have we figured out how and why we are here yet? hahaha. What a great thread, I hope you guys are enjoying the Debate!!
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It's the Internet. Calm down. Stuff is bound to get off topic at any given moment.
Oh don't worry. I only rant for comedic effect. I hope everyone recognizes I didn't ACTUALLY want the discussion to end.0 -
It's the Internet. Calm down. Stuff is bound to get off topic at any given moment.
Oh don't worry. I only rant for comedic effect. I hope everyone recognizes I didn't ACTUALLY want the discussion to end.
I figured. But sometimes I'm not sure with you! :laugh: 0 -
It's the Internet. Calm down. Stuff is bound to get off topic at any given moment.
Oh don't worry. I only rant for comedic effect. I hope everyone recognizes I didn't ACTUALLY want the discussion to end.
I figured. But sometimes I'm not sure with you! :laugh:
You can always tell how bored I am and how many cups of coffee I've had by how much I post on these threads.0 -
It's the Internet. Calm down. Stuff is bound to get off topic at any given moment.
Oh don't worry. I only rant for comedic effect. I hope everyone recognizes I didn't ACTUALLY want the discussion to end.
I figured. But sometimes I'm not sure with you! :laugh:
You can always tell how bored I am and how many cups of coffee I've had by how much I post on these threads.
Haha, I come on here as "breaks"...little intervals between doing homework, or late at night when I can't sleep and have no plans. One reason I like that this whole website and forum is so active!0 -
I've totally enjoyed this thread. I think anyone following along can conclude exactly what a couple of posters have just mentioned: some atheists CHOOSE not to believe in God. They don't WANT to believe. We finally got to the point that even if God were to appear before us today, perform some miracles right before their eyes, they would still choose not to believe or follow Him. I get that and I respect that. We haven't changed each other's minds, but maybe we've educated others on both Christianity and atheism. These arguments we've had here are not original or unique. These are the same arguments Christian and atheists use everywhere. I just bought the book "The Miracle of Theism", which debates both sides. Anyone here read this one yet?0
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Never heard of it, much less read it. I find the arguments from extreme religious zealots and extremist atheists both to be boring and petty and overall crappy reads. :laugh: So maybe one that discusses it from both sides like you just mentioned, Patti, would be a much better read!0
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I've totally enjoyed this thread. I think anyone following along can conclude exactly what a couple of posters have just mentioned: some atheists CHOOSE not to believe in God. They don't WANT to believe. We finally got to the point that even if God were to appear before us today, perform some miracles right before their eyes, they would still choose not to believe or follow Him. I get that and I respect that. We haven't changed each other's minds, but maybe we've educated others on both Christianity and atheism. These arguments we've had here are not original or unique. These are the same arguments Christian and atheists use everywhere. I just bought the book "The Miracle of Theism", which debates both sides. Anyone here read this one yet?
I haven't read it either. But I don't think it's fair to say atheists don't WANT to believe in a God. I just have never been convinced of his existance, and if it happened to be the Judeo-Christian God, and he asked me to gut my own child, I'd tell him I'd rather burn. That being said, if an angel flies into my living room tonight, if Jesus rides down from heaven on a golden chariot, of if all of our loved ones rise from the grave like they supposedly did in Jerusalem when Chirst resurrected, then I will definately change my mind. Until then, I will maintain that Christians, theists, and agnostics are the ones who WANT to believe.
I mean, if I find out there is a god, ok, it doesn't shatter my world view, doesn't change my morality, it just proves me wrong. If you find out there is no God, it destroys your entire world, so who is the ones wanting here? But it's a moot point, because none of this is ever going to happen. We will never be able to disprove/prove the existance of God anymore than we can Cyclops, Dragons, Leprechauns or any other mythology, because when it comes to religion, the believers somehow have it in their head that it's the non-believers task to prove their side when in every other case, extraordinary claims have required extraordinary evidence.0 -
Never heard of it, much less read it. I find the arguments from extreme religious zealots and extremist atheists both to be boring and petty and overall crappy reads. :laugh: So maybe one that discusses it from both sides like you just mentioned, Patti, would be a much better read!
Doesn't appear to be a dense read. I will give you my review when I'm done. :flowerforyou:0 -
I mean, if I find out there is a god, ok, it doesn't shatter my world view, doesn't change my morality, it just proves me wrong. If you find out there is no God, it destroys your entire world, so who is the ones wanting here? But it's a moot point
We will only know the truth at the time of our death. If I'm wrong and you're right, who is shattered? If I'm right and you're wrong, who is shattered then?0 -
Never heard of it, much less read it. I find the arguments from extreme religious zealots and extremist atheists both to be boring and petty and overall crappy reads. :laugh: So maybe one that discusses it from both sides like you just mentioned, Patti, would be a much better read!
Doesn't appear to be a dense read. I will give you my review when I'm done. :flowerforyou:
As long as it's not by Richard Dawkins. I can't stand his stuff.
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I mean, if I find out there is a god, ok, it doesn't shatter my world view, doesn't change my morality, it just proves me wrong. If you find out there is no God, it destroys your entire world, so who is the ones wanting here? But it's a moot point
We will only know the truth at the time of our death. If I'm wrong and you're right, who is shattered? If I'm right and you're wrong, who is shattered then?
I don't know, what happens if you get to heaven and are greeted by Allah? Or Zues, or Ra, or any of the other thousands of Gods that people whole heartedly believed in. Like I said, if a God exists, fine. if the Judeo-Christian god exists, and I still won't worship him. If anything, I'd make a citizens arrest for killing all those babies in Egypt.0 -
I don't know, what happens if you get to heaven and are greeted by Allah? Or Zues, or Ra, or any of the other thousands of Gods that people whole heartedly believed in. Like I said, if a God exists, fine. if the Judeo-Christian god exists, and I still won't worship him. If anything, I'd make a citizens arrest for killing all those babies in Egypt.
I'd be in Heaven, so I'm sure I will be fine. You sound very angry with Christianity (which is common among some atheists I've conversed with). Like I said, I respect your personal reasons for rejecting Christ. Notice not once in this thread did I mock, make fun of, or speak in a demeaning way toward any belief or non-belief. I've even been quite tolerant of your bashing, mocking, and offensive comments about God and Jesus. Debates work well when everyone is respectful of each other's positions. We do not ever have to agree. We can debate for pages and pages, but we should always be as respectful as we would expect in return.0 -
As long as it's not by Richard Dawkins. I can't stand his stuff.
Did you read "The God Delusion"? I wouldn't recommend this one. In fact, it's a good tool to use for the defense of Christianity. If he would stick to science and try not speaking on theological or philosophical issues, he might be okay. 0 -
You're right. I was just going for the cheap laugh.
Here's a cheap laugh for you, Brett: :laugh:0 -
I don't know, what happens if you get to heaven and are greeted by Allah? Or Zues, or Ra, or any of the other thousands of Gods that people whole heartedly believed in. Like I said, if a God exists, fine. if the Judeo-Christian god exists, and I still won't worship him. If anything, I'd make a citizens arrest for killing all those babies in Egypt.
I'd be in Heaven, so I'm sure I will be fine. You sound very angry with Christianity (which is common among some atheists I've conversed with). Like I said, I respect your personal reasons for rejecting Christ. Notice not once in this thread did I mock, make fun of, or speak in a demeaning way toward any belief or non-belief. I've even been quite tolerant of your bashing, mocking, and offensive comments about God and Jesus. Debates work well when everyone is respectful of each other's positions. We do not ever have to agree. We can debate for pages and pages, but we should always be as respectful as we would expect in return.
Isn't it intersting that in a debate about morality, where you firmly said you believe in Jesus and love but don't fear him, you had to end it with "What will happen to you when you die? I'll be in heaven!" So much for it not being about fear. And the thing is, no matter how much of a smart *kitten* I can be, how vulgar, how mocking, I could never be as offensive as believing that the people who don't believe in my way of thinking will be tortured in a pit of fire for all time. That's offensive.0 -
So now I'm really confused. If civilization, humanism, and intelligence cannot bring morality, but is imprinted on our mind, then why did God give us a bible in the first place. I happen to think that our morality is evolving with no help from a God. And I'm also confused. Are you saying that the Bible is bogus then? Because everything you just mentioned, from raping foreign citizens and so on was in the bible, sanctioned by it's God. I won't get bogged down with the miracles and magic tricks, whether or not stories in the bibles were parables? I'm talking about the Abrahamic God asking Abraham to gut his own child to prove his devotion.
Is that evil? I say yes. Now you can try to back and forth and trace how I got my morality back through time, good luck with that, we haven't even fully understood the physical evolution of our species yet, and I'm supposed to have all the answers of morality? I don't think so. But just because I don't have all the answers, once again, does not istantly mean some ancient, invisilbe sky Jew gave me morality anymore than when the ancients thought that diseases were a curse from God.
The Bible was not given by God because humans had no clue what morality is. If humans had no sense of morality at all the message of the Bible would make no sense to anyone. That would be like trying to get a blind person to understand what a rainbow looks like. The Bible does not sanction the raping of foreign citizens. That is false. Concerning Abraham, you don't seem to have any sense at all how the story of Abraham and Isaac fits into the context. It is precisely the bizarre nature of that story that makes its point so powerful. There is no other Old Testament story where God tells anyone to offer their child as a sacrifice. Such things are everywhere condemned. Since Abraham knew God had promised to bring a great nation into existence through Isaac, if he were asked to sacrifice him it must mean that God would raise him from the dead. In the end, as you know, Abraham was stopped before the sacrifice. The whole point is to show how Abraham had, at long last, come to trust in God completely. Of course this means little to you since you cynically read the biblical stories, looking for "fodder" to criticize. It is certainly unfair to the Bible to extrapolate from this story a general principle of child sacrifice. The Bible condemns such things frequently.
I am certainly not saying the Bible is bogus. I'm only saying that the discussion of the moral law is not, properly speaking, a biblical discussion. We can discuss morality in the Bible but that does not mean I think the Bible is the only source of valid moral reasoning. There is an objective moral law, just like there is an objective realm of "logical" thought that forces certain rules upon the human mind. You can't "make" 2 plus 2 equal anything you want. There are laws of logic that constrain your thinking. I'm saying the same thing is true about morality. If there is a logical and moral order that the human mind can access but is constrained by, that leads to the conclusion that there is an objective source of truth and morality that is beyond your mind and will. That's the essence of everything I've been arguing today.
You say that the biblical stories are "evil"? Really? Upon what do you base that? What gives you the "right" to "judge" the biblical stories as morally evil? If you say that you don't like them or they don't make you feel good, well, that's not news. I can already tell you don't like the Bible. Why isn't your dislike just like one person liking chocolate ice cream and another not liking it? You certainly can't say a certain flavor of ice cream is "evil" just because you don't have a taste for it. What gives you the privileged position to judge another culture and time as "evil"? What is your standard of judgment and how do you justify it? I don't think you can.
Sounds like you have a lot of faith in science to tell you about the origins of morality. Good luck waiting on that. Science has nothing to do with morality. Science is, by its very nature, a set of disciplines that focuses on certain aspects of reality and deliberately excludes other aspects. A scientist, as a scientist, can tell you how to build a bomb but cannot possibly tell you, based on science, why you shouldn't use it. If he does address the question of what you "should" do with a bomb, he has left the methods of science and is now in the realm of morality. You can have a blind faith in the future power of science to answer everything but such is wishful thinking.
Your last sentence seems to be purposefully designed to be offensive. I have no intention of offering future replies if you do not refrain from deliberately insulting remarks about beliefs that billions of people find very holy and precious. It doesn't speak well of your moral sensitivities to insult the sincere beliefs of the majority of people in your society in such ways.0 -
Isn't it intersting that in a debate about morality, where you firmly said you believe in Jesus and love but don't fear him, you had to end it with "What will happen to you when you die? I'll be in heaven!" So much for it not being about fear. And the thing is, no matter how much of a smart *kitten* I can be, how vulgar, how mocking, I could never be as offensive as believing that the people who don't believe in my way of thinking will be tortured in a pit of fire for all time. That's offensive.
You totally took my two comments out of context. I suspect that's why you used your own quote system and not the one on MFP. You asked the hypothetical question of what would happen to me if I got to Heaven and saw zeus or another god. YOU said I was in Heaven. My reply was, "Well, I'd be in Heaven, so I'd be okay". I didn't say you were going to hell. You brought up this hypothetical of us finding out we were wrong and our worlds being either fine or shattered. I NEVER used your above quote, and I'd appreciate you quoting me correctly.0 -
So now I'm really confused. If civilization, humanism, and intelligence cannot bring morality, but is imprinted on our mind, then why did God give us a bible in the first place. I happen to think that our morality is evolving with no help from a God. And I'm also confused. Are you saying that the Bible is bogus then? Because everything you just mentioned, from raping foreign citizens and so on was in the bible, sanctioned by it's God. I won't get bogged down with the miracles and magic tricks, whether or not stories in the bibles were parables? I'm talking about the Abrahamic God asking Abraham to gut his own child to prove his devotion.
Is that evil? I say yes. Now you can try to back and forth and trace how I got my morality back through time, good luck with that, we haven't even fully understood the physical evolution of our species yet, and I'm supposed to have all the answers of morality? I don't think so. But just because I don't have all the answers, once again, does not istantly mean some ancient, invisilbe sky Jew gave me morality anymore than when the ancients thought that diseases were a curse from God.
The Bible was not given by God because humans had no clue what morality is. If humans had no sense of morality at all the message of the Bible would make no sense to anyone. That would be like trying to get a blind person to understand what a rainbow looks like. The Bible does not sanction the raping of foreign citizens. That is false. Concerning Abraham, you don't seem to have any sense at all how the story of Abraham and Isaac fits into the context. It is precisely the bizarre nature of that story that makes its point so powerful. There is no other Old Testament story where God tells anyone to offer their child as a sacrifice. Such things are everywhere condemned. Since Abraham knew God had promised to bring a great nation into existence through Isaac, if he were asked to sacrifice him it must mean that God would raise him from the dead. In the end, as you know, Abraham was stopped before the sacrifice. The whole point is to show how Abraham had, at long last, come to trust in God completely. Of course this means little to you since you cynically read the biblical stories, looking for "fodder" to criticize. It is certainly unfair to the Bible to extrapolate from this story a general principle of child sacrifice. The Bible condemns such things frequently.
I am certainly not saying the Bible is bogus. I'm only saying that the discussion of the moral law is not, properly speaking, a biblical discussion. We can discuss morality in the Bible but that does not mean I think the Bible is the only source of valid moral reasoning. There is an objective moral law, just like there is an objective realm of "logical" thought that forces certain rules upon the human mind. You can't "make" 2 plus 2 equal anything you want. There are laws of logic that constrain your thinking. I'm saying the same thing is true about morality. If there is a logical and moral order that the human mind can access but is constrained by, that leads to the conclusion that there is an objective source of truth and morality that is beyond your mind and will. That's the essence of everything I've been arguing today.
You say that the biblical stories are "evil"? Really? Upon what do you base that? What gives you the "right" to "judge" the biblical stories as morally evil? If you say that you don't like them or they don't make you feel good, well, that's not news. I can already tell you don't like the Bible. Why isn't your dislike just like one person liking chocolate ice cream and another not liking it? You certainly can't say a certain flavor of ice cream is "evil" just because you don't have a taste for it. What gives you the privileged position to judge another culture and time as "evil"? What is your standard of judgment and how do you justify it? I don't think you can.
Sounds like you have a lot of faith in science to tell you about the origins of morality. Good luck waiting on that. Science has nothing to do with morality. Science is, by its very nature, a set of disciplines that focuses on certain aspects of reality and deliberately excludes other aspects. A scientist, as a scientist, can tell you how to build a bomb but cannot possibly tell you, based on science, why you shouldn't use it. If he does address the question of what you "should" do with a bomb, he has left the methods of science and is now in the realm of morality. You can have a blind faith in the future power of science to answer everything but such is wishful thinking.
Your last sentence seems to be purposefully designed to be offensive. I have no intention of offering future replies if you do not refrain from deliberately insulting remarks about beliefs that billions of people find very holy and precious. It doesn't speak well of your moral sensitivities to insult the sincere beliefs of the majority of people in your society in such ways.
1. Did God tell Moses to kill all the Caananites except for the virgins to keep for their soldiers? That is rape, unless you think all those young girls just happened to have a war fetish.
2. Not that this is going to happen, but lets say it did. Tonight, a big booming voice comes out of the clouds and tell you to take a knife and kill your own child to prove your devotion to God. What do yo do?
3. I have faith in a lot of things, like that I can get a loan because I have good credit. But the religious, in the absence of true miracles have taken the word "faith", and turned it into "blind faith", which is completely different. So yes, I suppose I do have more faith in science to answer questions about life than ancient middle eastern manuscripts.
4. I' pretty sure that if I were being offensive, I could do a much better job, but as far as I can tell, I have obeyed to forum rules. But once again, if I am not able to judge morality, and God never changes as he himself states (I'm not bothering to look up the quotes), then is Statutory rape a crime or not. The virgin mary was definately under the age of 18. More than likely 12-14 years old like all Jewish girls back then? So if god never changes, and we need him to be moral, does that mean every one who is in jail for sex with a 14 year old is actually the victim?0
