Religion Thread

[Skieski]

Oh yes, I went there.

Tell me your thought´s on the matter!

Necessary? Good, bad? Expand!

[Pillz]

Screw you, I so made a religion thread, spent 10 minutes typing, just to see you made one. Oh well I guess I can just paste it here...

Here we go.

So.
I don't believe in religion. I understand it's importance in the dark ages and how it came to be, seeing as the human race was primitive and feeble minded still. They couldn't understand anything and people felt that perhaps there were deities controlling the weather and whatnot. I mean when I was five years old, the belief that a god put the world here was so believable. I was always asking questions on the limits of gods power and was amazed by it. As I grew older and payed more attention at Sunday services I started asking more questions that started my doubt in the christian god I believed in so avidly up until then. At the age of thirteen I was so full of doubts I stopped believing. It wasn't until me and my friend Kiyka started talking again and got into an argument with a few Christians online two years later, that I had the new belief of atheism. When a girl about a year or two younger than me tried to explain the creation of the grand canyon and mountains/valleys with the argument that the Noah's flood created them, the argument persisted. She had never even heard of plate tectonics, because her private christian school didn't teach it to her. I mean really? All the mountains, valleys, canyons, caves and rest of the worlds topography created by a 40day flood? And there was no rain ever until that flood? How was life supported with no precipitation? Where the hell did all the water that just came out of nowhere, go? It covered the entire world then just disappeared? If the only people alive in the world were on Noah's boat, wouldn't the worlds population(5-50 people I guess) die out in the next century from inbreeding? I mean.. aifjadigajgi

Now I know that there are more enlightened Christians out there than the 14 year old girl who had an IQ of a fish, but seriously, how do people believe such silly things?

Religious Topics to be argued:

Free Will
Afterlife
Creation of the World
Existence of Jesus
How the story of Jesus is the same of other messiahs throughout time
How much war has been caused by religions
Why believe?
How do we know the people who wrote the bible weren't just hopping on the religion and made everything up?
What the fuck is Scientology about anyway?

[Priest]

Umm im confused. Do we just give our opinions of religion in general or is there somthing more specific?

[juke60xxx]

The problem i see a stagnate sense of stupidity towards the promises of science. Science vs Religion is more like it, I think that could be the demise of christianity, because science can either support or demolish it completely. In the case of modern day christianity, they spend more of an emphasis on the bible then actual reality, which is fine in their sensibility. However, the basis of their arguments became an actual assumption of pure belief of word for word on ancient book of stories and history. The entire belief is structured in faith, the only way you will truly be success is to have unrelenting faith. Sounds preposterous especially when science tells us otherwise so what is their to believe?

Some people put their trust in confirmed belief of others around you who strongly agree with your claim and validate your beliefs. But in retrospect this isn't belief at all, this is a naively concept that I personally have been struggling with for years. My entire perception of the religion was based on ideals of others, never the feelings of my own. This is due to my fustration and the perplexing idea that an absolute being created me to do his work. Now at the time, this made me and everyone around me feel special and right as rain... As i matured is saw the cruel underlining fact that my voice was going unanswered, i felt devoid, empty and withdrawn. How could i have spend my entire life speaking to someone who never answered or comfort me in times of distress?

I humbly came to conclusion, that i could never truly comprehend the vastness of the idea of God. As a finite being bonded to a mixture of elements how could i separate logic from spiritualism? To this day, its been a struggle tug of war between belief and doubt and the time is ticking. From the day of first belief, they institute fear of damnation one of sheer methods of compelling those to believe now so you would be spared from this ultimate fate. With these a bunch of other fear driven talks,  to force you to live your life with expectation of being left behind and face Apocalypse. A convicting claim and even more obvious decision making, the magnitude of such a lifestyle is inconceivable enough.   But then try to accomplish and even more near impossible duty of self purification, when in fact were are an impure being incapable of such a statue.

So until certain events depicted in the bible occur i dont think i could fully believe or even begin to understand whats going on.

[Priest]

Is religion any more silly then believing that we evolved from a small rodent millions of years ago?

[juke60xxx]

No priest that isn't religion that is science and evolution.

[Priest]

I'm not trying to be rude but do you speak english fluently Juke?

[Pillz]

Believing that we evolved from other creatures as did other animals, is way more plausible than believing we were just spawned from dust. The only thing religious people have against nonbelievers is that argument exactly. It's rather annoying really because yes. It is more believable than all the fiction packed into a novel that we wouldn't expect to see outside of a fantasy novel. If you read the same stories put in different context in a different book, and we're asked if it were fact or fiction, a person with a functioning brain would say it's fiction. When you read and understand evolution, it actually does make a lot of sense. Religious people think we we're put here for a purpose, and I think that is just silly. We weren't created, we were practically accidents. An accident in science that had positive results and was repeated. Kind of like the solar system. It wasn't made so earth would be at just the right distance from the sun to support life. It was just a really fortunate happening that resulted eventually in life. So I believe that's a gift indeed. Science put us here, not a deity who was just like "I think I'll make a universe because I'm bored doing nothing."

[Priest]

Everything is a theory. Whether it comes from the Bible or from a textbook makes no difference. These books are just ideas. Nobody really knows about our origins. But if it makes people feel better about their world to have a shared theory about existence, then who am i to say that they're wrong?

[juke60xxx]

I'm not trying to be rude but do you speak english fluently Juke?

I wrote it kind of quickly before going to class, english is my native language i dont know where you came up with that
Not that it matters since this is the internet, no one has perfect english not even you
My ideas may be fragmented but they are clear if you analyze them and not just read them ....soooo i do apolgzie for that statement up there.

If you believe that human beings evolved from small rodent millions of years ago that pertains to the evolutionary theory.

[juke60xxx]

Everything is a theory. Whether it comes from the Bible or from a textbook makes no difference. These books are just ideas. Nobody really knows about our origins. But if it makes people feel better about their world to have a shared theory about existence, then who am i to say that they're wrong?

Actually the bible is valid source of history. Without the bible, fragments of the past and morals as we know it would be non existent. Everything clearly isn't theory obviously since we can validate theory from assumptions and thus make them law.

[Skieski]

Certain theories are way more plausible than others, Priest.

[Priest]

I'm not trying to be rude but do you speak english fluently Juke?

I wrote it kind of quickly before going to class, english is my native language i dont know where you came up with that
Not that it matters since this is the internet, no one has perfect english not even you
My ideas may be fragmented but they are clear if you analyze them and not just read them ....soooo i do apolgzie for that statement up there.

If you believe that human beings evolved from small rodent millions of years ago that pertains to the evolutionary theory.

Yeah i wasnt trying to be rude. It just sounded strange like English wasn't your native language.

[crypto]

I don't believe in religion. I understand it's importance in the dark ages and how it came to be, seeing as the human race was primitive and feeble minded still.

Humans were neither primitive nor feeble minded a thousand years ago. It was not as if the entire species devolved just because the Roman Empire collapsed, and Rome was an clever, enterprising, innovative civilization. So were Greece, Egypt, Carthage, China, Japan, the various Persian states, Babylon, Assyria, Sumer, India . . . and just about every other civilization before the Dark Ages. The enterprising and innovative aspects carried right the fuck over through the Dark Ages; progress was simply hampered by (and this is a gross oversimplification) a slew of political/military catastrophes beginning with and focusing on the fall of the empire that was holding together the entire known world west of the Silk Road. If the entire United States got overrun by a bunch of third world countries, would you blame the people living in following generations for stagnation in cultural, societal, and technological progress?

That's setting aside the debate of whether or not there was a definitive amount of stagnation; a huge amount of advances were made in the Middle Ages, many of them financed, planned, and led by the Church.

Which reminds me, I just love the way so many proudly iconoclastic atheists (who, frankly, are so moronic that they haven't earned the intellectual right to be as full of themselves as they are) badmouth Christianity for the Crusades while refusing to give Christianity any credit for the advances it generated throughout its history. I don't run around giving you and other atheists shit for how your brother in arms Stalin killed millions of Christians and deported fuck knows how many more. We all know Stalin's harebrained tendencies have little in common with the prevailing atheist school of thought. Same goes for Christians who have committed atrocities. And while you're at it ("you" addressing no one in particular), rudimentary study of war policies in the Middle Ages would show that many of the so-called atrocities committed in the Crusades were not atrocities at all by contemporaries' standards.

They couldn't understand anything and people felt that perhaps there were deities controlling the weather and whatnot.

Until very recently, the human species did not possessed the technology to develop many scientific theories that we find so basic. Don't get me wrong; they weren't completely helpless (Eratosthenes, Posidonius, Pythagoras, Heraclides, Aristarchus—the list goes on and on). But they simply didn't have the gadgets you need to figure out how the universe works. They needed gods to fill in the gaps. There was no other logical explanation. It's the same way with us. There are a number of aspects of the universe that we are fairly clueless about, and there are aspects that haven't even occurred to us.

The issue isn't that we can't "understand anything." It's that we just haven't found everything yet. In a couple hundred years there will be people saying that those guys in the twenty-first century "couldn't understand anything"—and they'll be full of shit.

. . . I grew older and payed more attention at Sunday services . . .

When a girl about a year or two younger than me tried to explain the creation of the grand canyon and mountains/valleys with the argument that the Noah's flood created them, the argument persisted. She had never even heard of plate tectonics, because her private christian school didn't teach it to her. I mean really? All the mountains, valleys, canyons, caves and rest of the worlds topography created by a 40day flood? And there was no rain ever until that flood? How was life supported with no precipitation? Where the hell did all the water that just came out of nowhere, go? It covered the entire world then just disappeared? If the only people alive in the world were on Noah's boat, wouldn't the worlds population(5-50 people I guess) die out in the next century from inbreeding? I mean.. aifjadigajgi

Now I know that there are more enlightened Christians out there than the 14 year old girl who had an IQ of a fish, but seriously, how do people believe such silly things?

Well, sir, if you really did pay attention to your Sunday services, you'd know Christianity—or at least, Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and almost every Protestant sect—doesn't teach what that girl was arguing. There are a lot of atheists around who are so stupid they boggle my mind. I don't hold their idiocy against atheism as a whole (which I realize is largely the point of your last sentence).

[Pillz]

She was trying to argue that's what she was taught. I had never heard that from the church, they tried not to touch too much on the subjects.

Regardless, I understand all of what you're saying crypto. And nor was I just speaking of christianity/cathocalism. I meant religion in general.  Thank you for basically restating the second thing you quoted from me by the way, for that is what I meant.

I'll argue more later, my brain is dead atm. Bring up shit to argue about