Religons

Religons

Posting a Thread Here From SimGateway.com for safe keeping..didn't want a mod to delete it

That is only in some cases. But in this case, I will represent Christianity.

Christianity does NOT force religon down your throat Dagny. It is free will and of free choice that you choose to accept god or not. We do send out missionairies out into the world to change people, and you may call that forcing it upon people HOWEVER, in the very end, we ask whether a person wants to accept Christ or not, in which a person says yes or no.

Yes Or No, that is a decision there, and one of free will

Little Known Facts...
Darwin, upon his death bed admitted that his theory of evolution was wrong... though people tend to neglect that fact
As for rational mind, some people aren't rational, eg the people who went on a muck on September 11, 2001.

Technically that is a stereotype Dagny. I am a Christian, and yet I don't struggle on issues such as morality. Of course I am human, and I also mess up. But God is always there to pick me up when I mess up. He shows unconditional love to me and no matter how many times I disregard him, or hurt him, he still loves me and loves me for who I am, even if I'm not perfect.

He loves us so much that He sent his own son down to earth so that we may not perish, but have eternal life. (John 3:16)

As I stated before, God loves us so much that he sent his only son down to earth to die for our sins. ROber A. Heinlein does not have a valid point because if God was selfish and has a manners of a spoiled child, he would not have sent his son down to die for our sins in the first place.

Let me ask you this question:

The Air we breathe, and the Wind....We do not see, yet we know it exists.

God wrote through man, Dagny. In the early parts of the bible, it was written by Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Levticus, Numbers, and Deuteronmy). It was Man Who was Inspired By God who wrote the bible.

And before you ask, "how can you prove the bible is accurate," I'll tell you this. God is all powerful. He would have known that man would have made errors in the writing, however he would have accounted for it God inspired man at the same time to avoid those errors and at the same time, incorporated those errors into the bible and it would have conveyed the exact meaning God wanted in the first place.

So in short, if you think man could have made an error, God has already accounted for it and made sure that it wouldn't be there in the first place.

I'll certainly let you express your viewpoints, though I might add that many of your viewpoints are flawed.

If you are an atheist, why are you portraying it as a religon here?

 

Your welcome to reply in it...just that I was keeping that post here for safe keeping.

 

By TylarRose of SimGateway:

Though I thoroughly disagree with debating religeon as it never ends and probably won't end until the thread is closed...I'll have to say you made some very good points ManagerJosh.

Though, I do know what Dagny means by pushy Christians, one case of it still pisses me off what I think about it. Sophomore year, honors English class, teacher leaves and puts one of the students in charge. Student happens to be a very involved member at the nearby First Assembly of God church, we'll call her.."Tina." Another student, who we'll call..."Jim," ask to put a CD on. Tina says no, because it does no praise God. Jim pleads with her saying that the CD has no offensive lyrics and therefore can be played. Tina protest again saying that we will have no music played unless it praises "God." At this point Jim sits back down because after all, this is a lost cause. The class is silent, most in disbelief at what just happened, and we look around the class. I mentioned earlier it was honors, only because as we most know, and not to be so stereotypical, but there are many Asian students in honor class, more so from India or Pakistan areas in mine. Tina had not thought of students of other faiths, many of which were in our class. I wondered how she'd act if the roles were reversed. When I think back of this, it still bothers me, and it's the only thing that bothers me from HS.

There were a whole little "gang" of Christians that "Tina" hung out with, who were always behaving very nicely and inviting everyone to Youth Group (many ppl from school did go) and to go to our High School's Christian Group. But I had friends who had been friend's with them and they were looked down upon if a bad word slipped out, or a shirt was too low cut, and even made a friend of mine cry by the ridicule.

Hah, in the end considering I side way more towards ManagerJosh, I do not help the case much, but I do believe the patient understanding Christian is extremely better than the types I described above.

 

By Dagny_Taggart:

In remark to your last point first: I would like to mention that I said "opinion" of religion, not religious beliefs.

As for forcing down people's throats, I was mentioning what the religious faith tries to get its people to believe (and I will add that many religious sects, Christian, or otherwise, do try forcing their beliefs down other people's throats: the Romans, the Crusades, numerous wars between the Muslims and other neighboring peoples, which can include the most recent terrorist attacks, the Spanish conquistadors, etc, etc, face it: the history of man is filled with incidents of people trying to force their beliefs down other people's throats).

Why is it that people call messing up "human"? As far as I'm concerned the statement "I'm only human" translates to mean, "Please don't judge me, I'm only subhuman!" Doing anything right and rational is so gloriously human! What does your "technically that is a stereotype" paragraph have to with what I said?

As for evolution and Darwin, why bring up the last five minutes of his life? So what if the first evolutionist suddenly doubted his own theory on his deathbed? I've heard that people suddenly change on their deathbeds (fear promotes irrationality, and I think we can both agree about that). There have been so many evolutionists since Darwin, and they have a much fuller picture of what the theory truely entails. It would take me too long to cite all of the examples used to support evolution right now. I need to go to dinner before the dining hall closes. I will pick up on this refutation later (don't start in on me again until I finish--it's bad to cut in on the middle of an argument.)

 

By: TylarRose


Excuse me, I did read the last sentence of your post, but you know, if I am in an "argument" and the other person pauses and gives me a chance to speak, then I will. I don't man to disrespect you, but I feel like a dog stuck on a leash unable to leave my "boundaries."

Not all Christian's force their religeon down other people's throats.

"Why is it that people call messing up "human"?" Maybe because no one is perfect. That's a well known fact. We all make mistakes, therefore we all mess up, which makes it a human act.

You made a very good point about people making quick decisions in their last moments of life, however, that doesn't mean he was right before he quickly changed his mind.

For example: A man lives his life in prejudice against another race or sexual preference, he lies on his deathbed and begins to feel guilty so he expresses his regret that he treated others unlike him so horribly. Now, since it was a change right before his death does that mean he was right to be prejudice? There you go.


Once again, I believe this thread is never going to end until it is locked.

 

First of all Dagny, that Christianity is on choices. You choose whether to be a Christian. No one can make that decision for you. People may talk to you about Christianity, but that does not imply they are shoving Christianity down your throat.

You still need to make your choice and accept Jesus as your Lord and Personal Savior.

It is because everyone sins that makes us human. No one on earth, who was ever born on earth is perfect and has not lived a life of sin. We have all lusted at one point or another. We have lied. We have cheated. We have done numerous things in our life and sinned in God's Eyes.

It was the beginning when Adam and Eve sinned, and the sin carried over. God judges only sinners who have heard the word of Christ and refuses to believe.

First, I never said during the last 5 minutes of Darwin's life he admitted he was wrong. I said Deathbed. It could be months. It could be years I don't know. All i know that Darwin was dying and he admitted his theory was wrong.

Secondly, you brought up the Theory of Evolution in your post earlier. I'm pointing out that the creator of the theory admitted his theory was incorrect. Indeed there has been many evolutionists since Darwin however if you read enough of their work, they based a good key part of their foundation upon Darwin's Theory.

Thirdly, it is a theory. Do you recall the tree of evolution? According to Darwin's theory, there are suppose to be fossils when a certain creature took two paths, one took this route and another took another one.

For sake of illustration, we'll say Creature A is at that base, and it is the turning point of where it would either turn into a reptile or a mammal.

Yet to this very day, no fossil has ever been found of Creature A. Fossils exist of reptiles and mammals and yet none of Creature A. Even today the Scientific Community is reevaluating this because the theory is slowly falling apart through scientific evidence.

 

You must also understand this too Tylar, that many people in the world calls themselves Christian and yet they do not behave like one. They are hypocrites.

Though I wasn't in the classroom to witness it, I'll keep a neutral stand point, but I must say that "Tina" is still human and that she makes mistakes.

Being a Christian does not mean imply you are perfect.

 

It is how people twist it up Fae...majority of those posts above are replies on another forum I attend. I just post it here to prevent people from deleting that thread ...

At least I have an archive of what to say

 

By: dagny_taggart
About evolution: of course you're not going to find a fossil show the split between the reptiles and the mammals--birds came between the two. And I ask you to take a look at the fossil record and notice the distinct progression of forms. Then notice the gradual changes in structures between the vertebrates, going from fish to amphibian to reptile to bird to mammal. Explain vestigal organs to me (vestigal organs are organs that serve no function in all members of the species) without evolution. Why would there be organs that serve no function in a being if it wasn't because it was a leftover from an earlier form. And another thing to consider about evolution is that it is an incredibly gradual process taking millions of years. Genetic lines are mutating all of the time. There are a few cases when we get to witness a microcosim of natural selection over the case of a few years. For example, there is this species of moth in England that comes in a white color and a grey color (I am not making this one up--this was an actual study). There are a lot of white trees in the area, so the white moths could blend in with the trees better than the grey moths, so there were many more white moths than grey moths. However, a factory was put in nearby, and in the course of a few years, the trees were grey from all of the soot in the air being deposited on them. The grey moth replaced the white moth as the dominant moth in the area (and I do believe they checked the grey moths to make certain they actually were grey moths, or one of the colors had a certain type of spot on the wing, which would help with identification). These types of events on a much larger scale are the core of evolution. It does not matter if the man who started the fire (i.e. Darwin and evolution) suddenly started to hate the fire at the end of his life, the point is that other people saw the fire, and realized that it is good and added kindling and gasoline to the fire. I would also like to point out that there are two different types of evolution: gradualism and punctuated equilibrium. This distinct and sudden change in the species that you mention in your example is an example of punctuated equilibrium, which seems much less plausible than gradualism, in which the forms gradually mutate over time (so gradually that it would take millions of years to notice drastic changes). You obviously don't know that much about evolution if you don't realize that there are several distinct versions of the theory. I will also add that it is pointless to try bring religion up as an argument against religion: I know many people who do try to reconcile religion with evolution, and some of them are fundamentalists.

I would like to add that when you ask a person to take something on faith instead of using reason, you have just negated their free will, because reason is the only thing that allows us to make decisions.

As for what I said about all the gods that man has dreamed up having the manners and morals of a spoiled child, I never used the word "selfish" in reference to them, and it is wrong for you to put that word into my mouth, especially since I mean something different by it than what it is conventionally considered (I will get to the corruption of the term selfish in the next paragraph). It is childish to expect people to worship you! And don't go on about how he "loves" us all. Love is an incredible emotion that cannot be given out wantonly: it is stupid to "love" everyone. Love is a recognition given to a person saying that you see in that person what you value and that seeing that virtue in that person brings you joy. It is impossible to love everyone, since not everyone is a good representation of what you value. Don't fool yourself into thinking that a person can "love" everyone. Considering the way I am, if there was a God (I am not saying that there is), in the proper sense he would hate my guts, because I am in direct opposition to what he values. I still ask of you, why would a superior being demand to be worshiped by his inferiors and threaten to punish them if they don't?

Moving on to selfishness: conventionally a person is considered selfish if a person is concerned with obtaining material gains and other desires for himself, at the cost of sacrificing others to himself. One of the problems with the conventional view of selfishness is that a person is trying to better his or her standing in the eyes of others, not in his own eyes, and often uses sacrifice as the primary means of achieving his goals; so the person considered selfish in the conventional sense is actually selfless, because the person is more concerned with what others think of him and how he can manipulate them than what he thinks of himself. Under the way I define selfishness, along with the Objectivists, a selfish person is intent upon achieving his own potential without sacrificing others to himself or sacrificing himself to others, and relies on his own rational thoughts in his course of action. The selfish person in the true sense is not concerned with what others think of him. A key difference between the Objectivist view of selfishness and the conventional view is how a person determines his course of action. The conventionally selfish person acts on emotional whims, but under the Objectivist view of selfishness, the selfish person's course of action is determined by rational thought, not whims. I will not ascribe the status of selfish to any gods, since they do not deserve to be labeled with this beautiful term.

About how can I prove that the air exists, first off I would like to say that you can see air, you just don't think about it. If we did not have an atmosphere, the sky would not be blue (even at night the sky is a shade of dark blue, not pitch black). On the moon, where there is no atmosphere, the sky is always pitch black. I will also add about air that the colors you are seeing right now are influenced by the color of the air around you. Glass is pretty transparent, and yet you know that it exists. We can see the light reflecting off of the air just like we can the light off of glass--it's just more transparent. Also, you can see gases when they are more concentrated, like when you are heating something and the gases are suddenly released, and the gase does not disappear as it moves away--the particles just spread apart to the point that you do not notice them. I can't believe you tried to use something as ridiculous as saying "How do you know that air exists?" You do not answer a question by asking another question!

About the historical veracity of the Bible: how do you know that God wrote through man? How do you know that it wasn't just written by a group of sick, psychopathic people who wanted to see how miserable they could make mankind? And I will add that in the study history, a primary source generally carries much more weight than something written by someone who was not there at the time, and was not based on a primary source. If Adam and Eve did not write that down, then there is no primary source on it, so we cannot say that that is what actually happened.

What really disgusts me is your calling error human. Achievement is human, nor error! If you don't believe me about error being human, then ask yourself how it is that you are sitting in your nice cozy little building in your storebought clothes clacking away at your computer connected to the Internet, instead of still living in a cave, wearing animal skins and clubbing animals for dinner. Human achievement is what brought us up out of the cave! The mistakes are the subhuman! The truth is that few people have actually aspired to their human potential, and it is those few to which the credit for our coming up out of the cave must be given to. I am one of these proper human beings, only do not kid yourself into thinking that I will bleed myself to death for the sake of these subhumans around me. I will offer them my services only in exchange for a value from them. This is the way of survival proper to man.

 

BY: dagny_taggart

Someone had to say it--and it might as well be me, since most people don't seem to have figured out what I have. To be honest, my parents did take me to church when I was a little girl, but I never really did accept what I heard, but waited until much later to give myself a more honest label. About two years ago, I reclassified myself as agnostic, and on October 13, 2001, I finally decided to call myself atheist (I remember the exact date because I was reading on the bus ride to the Westlake Marching Contest--man, that was the best time I had at Westlake: my band received our highest scores ever at that contest, and I was reading Atlas Shrugged). My basic beliefs never have really changed: what has changed is what I was trying to pursue. I never did like Christianity, but as a little girl, I assumed that I must be missing something, so I left analysis on the back burner of my mind. On the day I declared myself atheist officially, I finally realized that my doubt was well-founded. What I saw on that day was not proof against the existence of God, but a really good reason why man should not worship God. Basically, all religions are saying that you should negate reason and accept answers to life's most important questions on faith, which leaves man without his means of survival. Basically the only reason man has survived so far is because those who do use their rational minds have not realized how society is cheating them, evaluating the subhumans around them to be better than they really are. Most social systems have claimed an automatic right to the innovations of these innovators, because they have "need." "Need" is not a claim on the life of a person better than you. A lot of people don't realize that the innovators don't have to provide them with the innovation if the innovator doesn't want to. In a proper society, value must be exchanged for value. I am disgusted by all of the government welfare programs that rob people for the "common good." If a person is too lazy to work--don't help that person--leave the lazy bum in the gutter. If you want to help a person after you have taken care of yourself, that is all right, but you must put yourself first if you want to survive. Since I am against altruism, my prefered social system is lassiez-faire capitalism. I believe that the only function of the government should be to protect the rights of its citizens. As for freedom of action, it must be noted that there can be no such thing as the "right" to cause physical harm to another person or that person's property. I believe that the only sections the government should have (outside of the legislative section) are: courts, a military, and a police force. There should be no governmental welfare programs and the schools should be privatized. Why should a person have to pay for something he or she doesn't sanction? And taxes should be voluntary (don't immediately think that voluntary taxes won't work, listen to me explain how you can get people to want to pay taxes). The government could require that a certain percentage of the monetary transaction in a contract be paid to it in order make the contract enforcible in the legal courts. If your business is making an important transaction, I certainly think that if you had to pay a fee in order to make certain that the contract can be enforced, you would. Imagine what would happen if your business had a multi-billion dollar contract with another company and the other company didn't come through on their part of the deal--you'd lose a lot of money if it wasn't legally enforcible. Lassiez-faire capitalism is much more effective than any altruist system. Selfishness is such a beautiful thing--the only proper way for man to live (reference paragraph 4 of my previous post for my definition of selfishness, which is significantly different from what the term has been corrupted to mean).

 

I'll be refering to this book: (Evolution: a theory in crisis."
by Michael Denton) (Non-Religious)

Organisms and watches are similar because both are complex and have many co-operating parts. But they differ also in many ways. For example watches are made of glass and metal, and organisms are not. This is not a relevant difference. Relevant for the validity of Paley's analogy are properties bearing on the questions 'Where did this object come from?' or 'How was it produced?'. The following properties are relevant for the validity of the watchmaker analogy:

Watches don't reproduce
Watches don't have heredity
Watches don't have mutations

Typical for artefacts, a watch is produced from raw materials by external forces. Watches don't self-assemble. Watches don't descend from other watches. There are no father and mother watches, no baby watches. Every single watch we encounter is necessarily produced by external forces because watches are unable to reproduce themselves. Obviously watches need a watchmaker!
We know today that organisms reproduce and self-assemble on the basis of internal information (DNA). Watches don't have internal self-descriptive hereditary information. The instructions to manufacture a watch are located outside the watch, which explains why they cannot reproduce themselves. The properties reproduction and heredity tell us how living individuals come into existence. This is not a superficial difference, but a fundamental difference.

To my surprise Paley proposed designed, self-reproducing watches (10) and concluded that his design inference was reinforced. He was right that self-reproducing watches are a more powerful design. And he was right that self-reproduction is not an 'ultimate' explanation, because self-reproduction was designed by the watchmaker and not by the watch itself. Now my point is that if self-reproducing watches are a more powerful design strategy, then creating the first form of life and let it evolve into all the million of species, is certainly a far more powerful design method. Furthermore, designing the laws of nature and creating the initial conditions of the Big Bang must be the most powerful creation method. Paley wrote his book before Darwin's Origin of Species. If he had known about natural selection, then only the religious dogma of the fixity of species (biblical 'special creation') could prevent that one species could originate from another species. And the whole point of his analogy was to prove a Designer without relying on revealed religious knowledge. (11)
=========

Next you do not negate your own free choice. You still make decisions whether to commit a sin or not. You still make decisions on a daily basis...and you hardly negate your free will there.

If you trace the lineage of Love, there are several terms for it. It dates back to Greek culture where there are three types of love.

1) Eros
2) Agape
3) (can't remember)

But each of those three loves are different. Eros is love as in romance. Agape is unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another: as (1) : the fatherly concern of God for humankind (2) : brotherly concern for others

But in short, love is such a broad definition, and the love I'm refering to is Agape.

In response to your claims of air, it is a metaphorical reply. Your claims earlier stated that you only believe what you see. I replied back stating that you can not see the air or the wind, and yet you know they exist and you believe that they are there.

How do you know that it wasn't just written by a group of sick, psychopathic people who wanted to see how miserable they could make mankind? Because if they were sick, God would still have influenced them no matter what. Man was inspired by God to write the Bible.

As for "And I will add that in the study history, a primary source generally carries much more weight than something written by someone who was not there at the time, and was not based on a primary source. If Adam and Eve did not write that down, then there is no primary source on it, so we cannot say that that is what actually happened.," God told Moses what to write. God is first person since he is omnipresent, therefore he falls under your category of first person.

Well I'm glad to see that you take it as an achievement that Adam and Eve sinned.

People learn, dagny. We learn from observations and experiments. That is hardly evolution.

First is who are you to call yourself proper? That is very...um...well biased and neo-nazi. You ahve no right to judge yourself as a "God" nor to call yourself superior to anyone else.

 

I agree with you 100% Tim.

 

More updates on dagny..however I decided against posting the text here..It makes it too much of a headache to seperate our comments from the original text.

You'll find the thread containing the updates in the Off Topic Area (This Forum)