Does Religion Have a Place in the Future of Humankind?

Well so much for the god who says "Thou shalt kill" and is a "loving god"...

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/donald_morgan/atrocity.shtml

I'll take a few, Rex.



This was a spiritual death. After this man had a sin nature, which is why we needed Jesus to die for us.



Can God not love a blind man? When your parents had you, did they decide not love you because you weren't perfect. God has a plan for everything.



This was to be an outward sign of his followers trust and love in him, much like communion is today.



God is everywhere, darkness and light.



God doesn't say we won't go through physical pain.

Rex the Wonder Squirrel
You must be unbelievably niave to believe the nonsence you are spouting. Or should I say thoroughly brain washed.
Do you also believe in Grims fairy tales.

He is a part of God.


How about backing up your insults with counterarguments, facts, etc? Running around saying "You're wrong, you sound stupid every time you say that" followed by a sarcastic remark to everyone doesn't do anything to strengthen your argument.

Quote, "This was a spiritual death. After this man had a sin nature, which is why we needed Jesus to die for us." If this is a "spiritual" death, what ever happened to "forgiveness?" 940 life span sounds like he was more than a "sinner." LOL

Rex the Wonder Squirrel]Yes, and whose bible did Christianity take it from
Rex wrote
Yes, their is only one bible and ten commandments And that is the old testament. The one that Christianity adopted.
Rex wrote

Yes. again the Hebrew bible.


Rex wrote

Without Judaism you know the religion that Christ was born into and whose concepts that Christianity adopted would Christianity even exist today? What would be it's foundation.

Rex wrote

I suggest you read European history. The Holocaust is just the last in the long line of holocausts. Most instigated by the Catholic Church.

Rex wrote:

A lot of ****

Au wrote:

Pure schoolage

And Child of the Light read in amazement, both at Rex's stuff and Au's stuff.

The facts for the future of religion are these. 1) Most children will follow the religion of their parents, 2) Most follow the religion of their country, and 3) The majority of Americans are Christians.

Child of the Light
Yes Rex I am afraid put a match to my fuse

You've got to be kidding me. You can say I'm wrong, but calling me naive (and not even spelling it right either ) isn't logical-- here I am, using evidence to back up every single one of my claims, not missing a step, while you continue to post without any knowledge of what you're attacking.

Give me a break. You're entire argument, and the way you go about arguing, is nonsense.



The saying "die the day he ate the forbidden fruit" does not mean he was to drop dead the second he put his lips to the fruit, it meant that "the day he ate the forbidden fruit, he was destined to die." The verb "die" in this instance does not imply immediate death.



Christianity didn't "adopt" anything. Followers of Christ were still called Jews until Antioch, remember?

The Old Testament was written, then the events of the New Testament occurred and were recorded, and then they were collectively called the Bible. No adoption whatsoever.



Hebrew Bible = Old Testament of the, how should I say, "Christian Bible" (including the New Testament).

Saying the source is the Hebrew Bible rather than the "Christian Bible" is like saying source of an apple isn't an apple tree, it's a branch. Well duh, the branch is on an apple tree.



You confuse "foundation" with "precedent". Judaism was the precedent to Christianity-- again, Christianity was founded upon Christ's teachings, and it's pillar is faith in those teachings as outlined in the Bible.

By your logic, everything stands upon the thing that came before it. The foundation of the Lazarus-Macy's store must be the store of Lazarus, which doesn't even exist anymore. Which isn't the case-- the Lazarus-Macy's chain is, and I quote from their website, "built on (founded upon) a commitment to its community."

The pillar of Christianity is not Judaism. Judaism is its precedent.



Are you referring to the inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church? Or the Crusades?

C'mon, be a little more specific here. I've studied European history very extenstively, and I hardly need to read over any of it, but how in the world am I supposed to refute something you give little detail on?

That's like me saying "Something happened. Do you believe that?" Give me a break already.



I mean the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob...the God of Jesus, His Son, who died on the cross to cleanse the world and was resurrected three days later.

Take that statement as you will.



And you were the one who took my statement and twisted around its meaning because of your lack of any grammatical comprehension in this subject.

In fact, I already point that out in my previous post-- yet, here you are, not willing to admit that you assumed wrong in your assumption. I mean, debate me on religious issues all you want, but if you have not the sense to realize you were wrong in your assumption of the meaning in my statement, then I don't even think I should be taking the time to respond to you, since that would be an obvious sign of your lack of an ability to debate properly.



There is evidence in the Bible, yes-- the entire book is about God! It is whether you believe in it or not.

So, if you don't think there is any evidence for a God, not even in the Bible, why do you believe in one?



Here you go, taking things out of context again. If you don't stop doing this soon, I'm going to have to start ignoring you-- it's getting quite annoying, and the activity itself is very childish. Are you a minor?

Anyways, I've already proven that "my" (and I use that term lightly, for fear that you may take that out of context again) religion does not rest upon yours as its foundation.



Oh, did they really gather up armies, invade villages, and force all of the inhabitants to convert to their religion under the threat of death like Mohammed did?

Yeah, no. Read Acts. Everything was peaceful. Except for the Crusades, and let's not get into that, since it's a lengthy debate that you would clearly lose.



Well then that's your belief, and I have to respect that. I was only defending my religion's view on the subject, which you were attacking.



True, but it would help you gain a better understanding of the religion you're trying to refute. Again, that mechanic/car analogy.



Thank you very much. That was a very intelligent statement.



Where did I ever say that? Quite the contrary, I brought up the philosophical point of cogito ergo sum, which shows that everything, aside from one's existence, is based upon faith. Faith in one's senses all the way up to faith in one's God. So everything is circumstantial, and a lack of respect for someone elses beliefs would be hypocritical. But I respect your beliefs-- I just don't take kindly to when someone starts attacking mine with claims that they're false.



I'll watch my step regarding that, then. In the meantime, I would suggest not assuming and not taking things out of context in a post would also lessen the chance of a negative response.



That's a very good point. But, with the growing liberal trend in young adults (breaking away from their parents' beliefs) and the slo removing of all religious(or, should I really say, "Christian)-related things in America, this could mean a big change in the future of religion.

Plus that whole thing about the Middle East being majorily Muslim because of the countries there.



Oh, and cicerone, here's some things to consider in the first two of your "biblical inconsistencies". I'll get to the rest later-- again, I ended up typing a lengthy post in response to other people before I got to all of your points.



It is easy to set two verses against one another when they are pulled clear of their respective contexts. In both instances, the context determines the reason for God's conduct in regards to man. Note from Psalms 145, the Psalmist first shows God's greatness in His care for His creation. In this respect, He is good to all. The writer says, "Thou openest thine hand, and satisfiest the desire of every living thing." (Psalms 145:16) In like manner, Jesus speaks of the fact that God makes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust (Matthew 5:45). However, in the latter portion of Psalms 145, the writer makes a distinction between the good and the evil. He writes, "The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon Him, to all that call upon Him in truth. He will fulfill the desire of them that fear Him; he also will hear their cry; and will save them. The Lord preserveth all them that love Him, but all the wicked will He destroy..." (Psalms 145:18-20) Though He sends good things upon the wicked, according to His justice, the wicked will ultimately be destroyed.

In Jeremiah 13, again, context determines what is meant. The Lord is speaking of a rebellious and disobedient nation (Jeremiah 13:10), and the destruction which would come upon them on account of their wickedness. Such is in complete harmony with what the Psalmist wrote in Psalms 145.

There is no contradiction.



"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

"A time of war, and a time of peace. (Eccl. 3:1, 8)

God could have said, "There is a time for peace, but in My plan there is no room for war." He didn't. He clearly states that there are times when peace will reign, and other times when war is necessary. God doesn't like war, but neither does He like sin. Both exist in the world. In fact, war is always a direct result of sin.

Rex, Adam and Eve had to die, or this world would be crowded by animals, and nobody would survive. If Adam and Eve had "everlasting life," you and I would never have seen the light of day.

Rex
While anti-Semitism, broadly speaking, may go all the way back to the Egyptian historian Manetho, anti-Jewish polemics by Christians began in the Patristic period (end of first century through the eighth). Here you mainly find the argument that the Church has replaced Israel and the Jews as God’s people: "The Jews, because of their stiff-necked rejection of the Christ, have in turn been rejected by God. The mantle has passed from Jew to Christian. Christians are the new 'chosen people.' The Church is the New Israel. '"

Propaganda turned to actual repression during the principate of Constantine (d. 337), who appointed bishops as civil servants, judges, administrators, and bureaucrats. Christianity became wedded to the secular power of Rome.

As you consider the record of Christian dealings with Jews throughout the Middle Ages and down to the birth of Zionism at the end of the nineteenth century, keep in mind that many of the events mentioned below were done legally: that is, they were sanctioned by civil authority or religious authority and often both.

305 In Elvira, a Spanish town in Andalusia near Granada, the first known laws of any church council against Jews appeared. Christian women were forbidden to marry Jews unless the Jew first converted to Christianity. Jews were forbidden to extend hospitality to Christians. Jews could not keep Christian concubines and were forbidden to bless the fields of Christians.

312 Constantine became emperor and converted to Christianity. Christianity could now be practiced openly and was officially tolerated for the first time.

391 The Edict of Theodosius declared that Christianity was to be the only legal religion in the Roman Empire.

589 In Christian Spain, the Third Council of Toledo ordered that children born of marriage between Jews and Christians be baptized by force. A policy of forced conversion of all Jews was initiated. Thousands fled. Thousands of others converted.

614 Chosroes II and his Persian (Sasanid) troops overran Palestine slaughtering thousands of Christians and destroying churches. The Jews supported the invaders in defiance of the emperor, Heraclius, who had previously ordered all Jews to be baptized.

629 Heraclius ousted the Persians and took bloody revenge upon the Jews.

680 In Spain, the Christian King Ewig ordered every Jew to be converted or face expulsion.

694 In Spain, the Christian King Egica accused Jews of treason. Property was confiscated, Jews were declared slaves, and were forbidden to practice their faith. It was decreed that their children be taken from them at age seven and be raised as Christians by tutors.

711 The Umayyad conquest of Spain began. Islam reached India (Indus river). Christian decrees against the Jews in Spain were reversed by the Muslim conquerors. Jews living in the region were invited by the Arabs to join in the creation of what became one of the highest achieving and tolerant cultures of the Middle Ages. (See Umayyad Spain for more)

848 In Bordeaux (France), Jews were accused of betraying the city to the invading Danes. In Toulouse on Easter, a Jew was publicly slapped in the face by the bishop as punishment for his people’s betrayal of Jesus to the Romans. This had been a customary part of Easter observances in Toulouse for some years.

876 In Sens, southeast of Paris, Jews were expelled from the city.

1095 Pope Urban II proclaimed the First Crusade to liberate Christian holy places from the Muslim "infidels." The following year, large numbers of peasants with some knights among them with the vanguard led by Walter the Penniless made their way toward Jerusalem massacring Jews in the Rhineland as they went. Eight hundred Jews perished in Worms. More than a thousand Jews died in Mainz and were buried in mass graves. In all, five thousand Jews were killed in the Rhineland. Walter’s army was stopped by Muslim forces in Dorylaeum in Asia Minor, but two other armies following him continued on toward Jerusalem, which they reached in 1099.

1171 The Jews of Blois (north central France) were accused of ritual murder, charged with slaying Christians (usually infants) to obtain blood for their Passover feasts. Jews were rumored among Christians to be inhuman, born of the devil, and in need of drinking human blood in order to retain human appearance. (Similar accusations were leveled against Jews in Norwich, England in 1144). On May 26, 1171, all 33 Jews in Blois, men, women, and children, were burned at the stake.

1190 A mob of English crusaders attacked the Jews of York. The Jews took refuge in the castle, then committed mass suicide. About the same time, Jews were officially designated slaves of the English king, Richard I, "the Lion Hearted" (1189-1199). Pope Innocent III (1198-1216) applauded the new decree.

1215 The same year the Magna Carta was signed in England, the Fourth Lateran Council (named after the Lateran Palace in Rome where it was held) was called by Pope Innocent III. He was instrumental in the formation of the Inquisitions. Jews and Moslems were ordered to wear distinctive clothing to set them apart from Christians. Jews were forbidden to hold public office.

1227 In Narbonne, all Jews were required to wear oval badges, and were forbidden to leave their homes during the Christian holy week.

1232 In Provence, the books of Maimonides (1135-1204), one of the greatest Jewish philosophers of the Middle Ages, were burned. (more on Maimonides)

1240 On June 25 in Paris, the Talmud was put on trial (this was the same city where a pig could be tried for murder). The accuser was Nicholas Donin, a Jewish convert to Christianity. The Talmud was condemned. On Friday, June 6, 1242, twenty four wagon loads of Jewish books were burned. The Jews smuggled in other copies. In 1248, there was another trial. Again the Talmud was condemned. Again the books were burned.

1290 Five thousand Jews were expelled from England and were taken in by French dukes.

1291 An army of 1,600 European peasant crusaders sent by Pope Nicholas IV landed at Akko and began massacring the inhabitants, Christians as well as Muslims and Jews.

1348 As the "Black Death" raged in Europe, in Germany Jews were accused of causing the plague by poisoning wells. Six thousand Jews were massacred in Mainz, and in Strasbourg, two thousand Jews were burned to death on a wooden scaffold built over a huge pit.

1394 Jews were expelled from France and wandered into Spain.

1469 The marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon to Isabella of Castille united the two chief kingdoms of Spain. Mass expulsions of Jews from Spain began. Also beginning at this time, Muslims were forcibly converted to Christianity (the conversos). Muslims, and Jews, too, fled or were arrested by the Inquisition.

1483 Tomas de Torquemada was appointed head of the Spanish Inquisition. In his twelve years in office, 13,000 Jewish converts to Christianity accused of practicing their original faith in secret were burned. The last burning occurred on October 27, 1765 in Portugal (the victim was a Jew).

1492 The same year Queen Isabella funded Columbus’ journey to America, Christians captured Granada. On March 31, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella signed an edict expelling Jews and Muslims from Spain. 100,000 to 200,000 wandered into North Africa while others found refuge in Ottoman domains. This marked the end of Arab civilization in Spain.

1543 Martin Luther published a pamphlet entitled On Jews and Their Lies. This was a period when Europe was especially rife with anti-Jewish sentiment. Jews had been expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1394, and from Spain in 1492. In addition, the inquisitions had been busy purging various quarters of their Jews, Muslims, witches, and other "heretics." Jews in particular had been singled out by superstitious European peasantry as practitioners of witchcraft and sorcery, poisoners of wells, blighters of crops, and eaters of Christian babies. The ecclesiastical authorities did little to stem these lies and in some cases actually promoted them.

Luther added fuel to the fire by asking the question, "What shall we do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews?" Here are some of his suggestions:

"’First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians, and do not condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blasphemy of his Son and of his Christians.’" (Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, trans. by Martin H. Bertram (Philadelphia, 1971), 288).

Luther went on to recommend that the houses of Jews be, "’razed and destroyed,’" the Talmud be taken away from them, and that Germany should, "’emulate the common sense of other nations such as France, Spain, Bohemia, etc., compute with them how much their usury has extorted from us, divide this amicably, but then eject them forever from the country.'" (ibid, 272)

1553 In August, Pope Julius III (1550-1555) condemned the Talmud. One month later on Rosh Hashanah, a mountain of Jewish books was burned. In July 1555, the pope ordered Jews of the papal states into ghettos. Jews were forbidden to own property and were compelled to wear yellow hats. By 1612, all the Jews of Tuscany, Padua, Verona, and Mantua had been herded into ghettos. Their gates were locked at night by Christian gatekeepers whose salaries the Jewish internees were required to pay.

1648 The Chmielnicki Uprising broke out, a rebellion of Ukrainian Cossacks against their Polish overlords and the Polish Jews who functioned as tax collectors for these overlords. The uprising was led by Bogdan Chmielnicki. A letter written during the period recounts the capture of some towns by the Cossacks:

"’They slaughtered eight hundred noblemen together with their wives and children as well as seven hundred Jews, also with wives and children. Some were cut to pieces, others were ordered to dig graves into which Jewish women and children were thrown and buried alive. Jews were given rifles and ordered to kill one another ‘" (Chaim Potok, Wanderings (New York, 1978), 445)

1694 - 1778 Life of Voltaire: French philosopher and champion of the Enlightenment. His enlightened attitudes apparently did not extend to Jews, however. He wrote,

"’They are all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts, just as the Bretons and The Germans are born with blond hair. I would not be in the least bit surprised if these people would not some day become deadly to the human race.’"

Voltaire went on to condemn them for "’their stubbornness, their new superstitions, and their hallowed usury.’" Addressing the Jews directly, Voltaire wrote, "’You have surpassed all nations in impertinent fables, in bad conduct, and in barbarism. You deserve to be punished, for this is your destiny. ‘" (Potok, Wanderings (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1978) 482-483)

ca. 1840 Russia began imposing restrictions on Jews. Pogroms (mass violent attacks on Jews) broke out in the 1880s.

1879 The neologism "anti-Semitism" was coined by a German writer and hater of Jews named Wilhelm Marrih in an attempt to replace the word Judenhass ("Jew-hatred") with a more "scientific" term. His intent was to sanitize and otherwise dress up discourse devoted to defaming Jews.

1881 Pogroms (riots against Jews) in Russia sparked the first wave of Jewish immigration into Palestine.

1886 In France, Edouard Drumont published his book Jewish France, in which he argued that the influence of Jews on France had been destructive. Drumont called for the ejection of the Jews from the country and the division of Jewish property. Anti-Semitic rallies followed.

1894 The "Dreyfus Affair" erupted in France. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish military officer, was charged with espionage. He was court-martialed and, on the basis of false documents forged by a fellow officer and political pressure fueled by the intense anti-Semitism in France at the time, he was convicted and sentenced to Devil’s Island for life. From 1897 through 1899, there was a great public outcry in France demanding that this injustice be undone and the real spy, whom it was suspected the General Staff was concealing, be brought to trial. The fellow officer who had falsely accused Dreyfus had meanwhile committed suicide in prison. A new trial for Dreyfus in 1899 resulted in a second conviction, but his sentence was reduced and the President pardoned him. In 1906, he was finally exonerated. The term "intellectual" entered common usage at this time: used by those who thought Dreyfus was guilty as a term of scorn to discredit those who were arguing that he was innocent. It was the Dreyfus Affair that led Herzl to conclude that only a separate Jewish nation could guarantee Jewish safety.

1896 In the same year Marconi patented the wireless, Theodor Herzl, a journalist and playwright from Vienna, published The Jewish State which called for a Jewish national homeland. The Dreyfus Affair had irreversibly convinced Herzl that a separate Jewish nation was the only guarantee of Jewish safety. See Roots of the Arab-Israeli Conflict

1897 The first Zionist Conference was held in Basel, led by the founder of the movement, Theodor Herzl. In response to renewed, virulent anti-Jewish persecution, especially in Russia, Herzl called for a free state for the Jews in Palestine. Note that the call went out during a period of intensive European colonial activity in the Middle East and Africa. It was the Dreyfus Affair that led Herzl to conclude that only a separate Jewish nation could guarantee Jewish safety.

The vision of restoring "Zion" (one of the names for Jerusalem, and by extension all the territory associated with ancient Israel and Judah) had been active among Puritan and evangelical Christians in Europe as well as well as among Jews. Two English Puritans, Joanna and Ebenezer Cartwright, petitioned the British and Dutch governments in the mid 1600s to become "the first and the readiest to transport Izraell's sons and daughters in their ships to the Land promised by their forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob for an everlasting Inheritance." Puritans believed that the second coming of the Messiah could occur only after the Jews had been restored to Zion. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Britain's Lord Palmerston extended British consular protection to Jews living in Palestine and promoted the idea of a Jewish Palestine as a way of propping up the crumbling Ottoman Empire. (See David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Henry Holt, 1989), 268ff.)

In his diaries, Zionism's founder Theodor Herzl took a hard stance toward the Arabs. In an entry written in 1895, he said, "'We shall have to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employments in our own country. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly.'" (quoted by Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1992, 13))

ca. 1900 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion appeared in print in Russia for the first time. This was an anti-Semitic treatise believed to have been composed by members of the Russian Secret Police in Paris during the last few years of the nineteenth century. The Protocols argued that a worldwide conspiracy existed among Jewish leaders to set Christian nations against one another and dominate the world. As H.H. Ben-Sasson explains, "The authors took a pamphlet by a French lawyer, Maurice Joly, which had appeared in the 1860s and was directed against Napoleon III, leaving it almost untouched and substituting the leaders of world Jewry as the object of the attack." (H.H. Ben-Sasson (ed.), A History of the Jewish People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 981) The treatise circulated widely in Russia, Germany, France, the United States (where it inspired a series of anti-Semitic articles in the 1920s in a weekly owned by Henry Ford).

1935 On September 15, the Nuremberg Laws were enacted in Germany. Jews were legally stripped of citizenship. Germans and Jews were forbidden to intermarry. Intercourse between Jews and Aryans was punishable by death. The rationale was to prevent "racial pollution" of Aryan peoples (it is worth remembering that anthropologists tell us that by the Neolithic period (20,000-2,000 B.C.E.) there was no pure Aryan race or racial purity of any other kind).

1938 On November 9, "Kristalnacht" ("night of broken glass") marked the beginning of the holocaust. There were actually two consecutive nights of Nazi violence against Jewish shops and businesses in German cities.

1945 Germany surrendered to the allies bringing the European theatre of World War II to a close. Allied armies liberating the POW and concentration camps confirmed what many had feared: that for years the Nazis had engaged in the mass extermination of European Jews according to a plan designed to eliminate "inferior" races. Six million Jews (1.5 million of whom were children) were killed between 1933 and 1945, an event called simply, the "Holocaust," from the Hebrew word ola ("burnt offering"). Two thirds of European Jewry (one third of all Jews worldwide) were annihilated.

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, defamation of Jews found new expressions in the Muslim world. Consider Egypt. (See also remarks by Egypt's Sheikh Tantawi in 2002, and remarks by Malaysia's Mahathir Mohammed in October, 2003.)

Final Note:

In sum, conclusions Jews have drawn from their history of living in the West over the past two thousand years include the following:

1. The holocaust was no accident, but the logical outcome of the two thousand years of history that preceded it. Hitler did nothing really new. Only the scale was different.

2. Jews could never again feel secure in Europe (or really anywhere else), only in a state of their own. For many years after Israel was founded in 1948, recruits to the Israeli army were sworn in atop the mountain fortress of Masada beside the Dead Sea at dawn where Jewish rebels against Rome had taken their last stand in 73 C.E. There they pledged that "Masada will never fall again."

au, Thanks for the history lesson, but I'll bet my bottom dollar that most Jews or Arabs/Muslims do not know this history. Most that relate to the holocaust in the thirties and forties are now disappearing, and the only view most have of Jews are from media news about Israel and their conflict with the Palestinians - rightly or wrongly. Two ideas I'd like to share with you and the participants of this discussion. 1) In the cathedral in Toledo, Spain, a portion of the statues designed inside the church was the work of a Jew, and he left on the floor the design of the Star of David. 2) On my recent visit to Vietnam, we learned that most Vietnamese do not know about the Vietnam war, because the majority of Vietnamese are under the age of 40. I'm not sure how these two relate to the Jews of today, but I'm sure there's a message there.

Before I even respond to your post, au, I would politely ask you to post the link where you got your post. I'd like to see where it came from-- and, besides, failing to cite your original source is plagiarism.

Rex, I don't imagine you are open to considering any other views, as you have a god who has all the true answers, so I won't waste too much time except to correct you on a few points in which you misrepresent me.



This may well be at least partly true, I value questions more than answers.





No, there are no contradictions here. Read more carefully.



You are correct there is no way to be certain. In the mind of the scientist, the apple will fall. In your mind it will fall only if god wills it to fall...and oh look, he did. What a clever god. And we prayed that it would fall so he obviously heard our prayers! Halelujah!



Yes this is true, but no less for you than for me. I can choose to follow the same rules you follow and you can choose to break them if you wish. There is no difference except that you have the promise of reward and punishment after death to coerce you in addition to the rewards and punishments offered on earth.




It's very common for theists to claim that faith in science and faith in gods are equal things. They are not. If I have four apples and I give you two I know that I still have two apples. I can reason this using a formula tested countless times and proven true. I can then test my theory with my eyes and be extremely close to certain that I have two. I can also show you my math and my results so that you can see it is true. You claim that this process is equal to your faith in an unseen, unlikely almighty power for which you have no objective proof at all. Please keep your imaginary pears away from my perfectly real hypothetical apples

If I may quote you one of your own wise leaders...(I assume you are american)

It is an established maxim and moral that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false is guilty of falsehood, and the accidental truth of the assertion does not justify or excuse him.

Abraham Lincoln



If you believe the Bible is absolute truth then there is no point to our discussion. I wish you good luck with your wrinkless book.




You are using the "Straw Man" arguement. OK you are right, my view of the world is ridiculous. I'm now worried that I let those idiot scientists plan missions to Saturn, should have let Benny Hinn arrange it. You might well accuse me of using the same tactic with my original analogy:)




No, my point was...I was told that I don't have to obey the old testament laws because the new testament changed things. Doesn't stop redneck judges trying to hijack courtrooms with old testament laws though does it?

Rex
The time has come to ignore you. If it pleases and comforts you to believe that yours is the only way so be it. The fires are stroked and the brimstone is prepared. Have fun.

Ain't it nice that Rex was created by an intelligent creator. Nature/god has been kind to him; he was not born with HIV/AIDS, mental disability, Siamese twins, heart problem, body deformity, and with an average mental capacity - which makes him "all-knowing." Wish I was that smart...

Refresh my memory...when did Rex say that he was all-knowing?



Whether you want to admit it or not, you were made by an intelligent creator also. It still amazes me how atheists are around. I don't understand how they think that we are an accident, when in reality, we are a miracle. Look around, what makes you people believe that our self-sustaining, completely and miraculously fine-tuned earth was made in a blast that was pure chance!? It is a mathematical impossibility!

According to your math....think "evolution."

"The probability of life having originated through random choice at any one of the 1046 occasions is then about 10-255. The smallness of this number means that it is virtually impossible that life has originated by a random association of molecules. The proposition that a living structure could have arisen in a single event through random association of molecules must be rejected." [Quastler, Henry. The Emergence of Biological Organization, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1964, p. 7.]

"To get a cell by chance would require at least one hundred functional proteins to appear simultaneously in one place. That is one hundred simultaneous events each of an independent probability which could hardly be more than 10-20 giving maximum combined probability of 10(-2000.)" [Denten, Michael. Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Warwickshire, Burnett Books Limited, 1985]

"The more statistically improbable a thing is, the less we can believe that it just happened by blind chance. Superficially the obvious alternative to chance is an intelligent Designer." [R. Dawkins, "The Necessity of Darwinism". New Scientist, Vol. 94, April 15, 1982, p. 130.]

http://home.att.net/~scott.lisa.sutherland/evolution.html

I'm not about to put my faith in those types of numbers. If you want to, then you'll reap what you've sewn.