though, in fairness, some people really are terrible singers... ;)
Then you are not using the Bible to determine what morals, etc. are good - you are using your own faculties/morals to determine what parts of the Bible are good.
And how does a protest demanding equal treatment by their government or having pictures of that protest land in a newspaper hurt anyone?
Should no one ask for anything - since it might be denied?
I think they are referring to organizations that are experts in the field and that this is more of an appeal to authority than just an ad populum argument.
Santa Claus, or the tooth fairy were only for example - the question remains:
Do you still believe in everything you believed in when you were young? If not, what convinced you otherwise?
never had a reason to doubt
- the bible contradicts science ref ref (e.g. says there was an earth with an atmosphere and trees and grass and night and day, etc. before there was a sun)
- it contradicts history ref
- it makes unfulfilled prophesies ref
- it makes self-contradictory claims about God (e.g. is it possible for an all-powerful god to make a stone that god cannot lift?)
- it tells similar stories that existed in close by regions (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
- it even contradicts itself! ref ref ref
there certainly is "reason to doubt", you just choose not to
I've believed in him since I was young
Do you still believe in everything you believed in when you were young (Santa Claus, tooth fairy, that the earth is basically flat), etc.? If not, what convinced you otherwise?
I almost forgot the best one. What were Jesus' last words? You would think that might be important to get right, but out of the 4 gospels - Jesus has 3 different last words.
Matthew 27:46 -
About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?" - which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
Mark 15:34 -
And at the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?" - which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
Luke 23:46 -
Jesus called out with a loud voice, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." When he had said this, he breathed his last.
John 19:30 -
When he had received the drink, Jesus said, "It is finished." With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.
he spoke to me after that and said he was lying to you - then we had a good laugh (and a good scotch)
maybe you mean regional cooling and warming, but the entire globe cooling and warming at the same time is not possible unless you have a new brand of physics you want to spring on us.
and whether or not anyone is depressed is not a valid arguement that they are right or wrong.
what do you use to tell what parts of the bible are completely true and what parts are completely made up?
been there done that - it is an entertaining read to see what people are willing to believe with sufficient unknowns.
for those who haven't gone back and read again with fresh eyes - here's a good example of of the fun you can have:
The serpent told the truth!!
re-read the garden of eden fable and you will see that:
God told Adam that the day he eats the fruit of that tree he will die
the serpent (who at that time had feet) said No you won't die, you will learn the difference between good and evil
eve and adam ate the apple
THEY DID NOT DIE! Adam lived 930 more years
* they learned the difference between good and evil - just like the serpent said (and like the name of the tree would suggest)
Moral of the story: God lied! the serpent told the truth!
to cut it of at the pass for those who say that after eating the apple they became destined to die, keep reading - there was also a tree of life in the garden (the reason they were kicked out) which would not be necessary if they were going to live forever from the beginning.
presumably if you believe in the big bang then you don't believe in the god of Abraham from the old testament who created an earth with water and grass and trees and night and day - before there was a sun or moon. Gen 1:1-16
also, the balance of nature is exactly how evolution works - not a benevolent god. how would the extinction of most species that have ever existed including humanoid species like Neanderthal be considered benevolent? what was their purpose - if they had none, isn't it then possible that we would have none?
ludacris ad hominem assertion by someone who, of course, presents no evidence for his argument
an example of the fear employed to get people such as yourself to believe i suspect
what makes me feel more and more correct that there is no god is that the explanations just boil down to "of course he [exists]"
although your solution is a god with infinite power, infinite knowledge, infinite presence, infinite morality, and has existed infinitly. if 2 infinitly existing planes of energy collided and caused the big bang - that would require infinite time, but no morality or involvement/presensce in our current universe. there are many explainations that do not require a god to create our universe - the fact that we haven't narrowed it to one for you does not mean the demonstrably flawed bible is correct
"as a Catholic, I DO believe in God"
nice tautology but that's not really a reason for believing is it? If your kid asked you why you belive and didn't just accept because your Catholic, how would you explain it to them
I agree mostly with your reasoning on why religion attacks science, but i don't think most people realize that this argument is showing up as supporting belief in god. Since it wasn't tagged, I think it is getting a lot of 'i wish we could all get along' points but giving them to the supporting position.
This may be a problem with the site counting points for non-tagged arguments for one-side or the other.
see Miller Urey and the many other experiments that deal with origins of life from inorganic material to organic material (amino acids, etc)
god created animals then man and woman in Gen 1:24-27
but he created man first, then animals, then woman in Gen 2:18-22
God told Noah to take a male and female of every animal Gen 6:19-20 and four verses later says to bring 7 pairs of every clean animal and 2 of animals that are not clean Gen 7:2
Even the lineage of Jesus doesn't get further than Joseph and Mary without contradicting itself
so if i was french irish does that mean i would have to half-believe in god, or believe in a different god? If you feel compelled to believe your parents that doesn't mean they are right.
hmmm - what argument would you use to prove them wrong exactly? since that is what we are interested in here...
you can debate faith in some regards - if someone believes god makes lightning and uses it to smite people, then we show how lightning actually works - then the person of faith can either believe their god does not exist, or is less powerful in that it no longer is responsible for lightning, or made it possible for you to discover how lightning works but also still controls it, etc.
when given enough fallacies - 6000 year old earth etc a person is either left with a much weaker god that only does whatever you can't prove it didn't do (and many claims of things that it did which you can prove unlikely), or no god at all.
science can attempt to evaluate whether there seems to be a why, and i think it could make at least a significant case that there isn't. Christians, Muslims, and Jews all believe in the God of Abraham, yet all have different stories, different traditions and different morals. there were 1000's of gods before that one which we now believe do not exist. at a time with very little understanding of the earth's place in the universe, we created stories that tried to describe how and why we are here. as science described the how, god became smaller and smaller, but our desire for purpose and science's inability to disprove our desire, we have left to god the reasoning rather than throwing out the immaterial god with the material one.
every time we try to assign to god some specific act, science comes along and shows plausible ways it could happen without god. The Miller Urey experiments of the 1950s showed you could take elements present in the early stages of earth and apply electricity to simulate static electricity/lightning - the result was amino acids and oganic compounds. the fact that inorganic can turn into organic and that better and more complex beings can come from lesser beings are both easily observable and all that is necessary for evolution to explain our existence.
If I was to say the invisible flying speghetti monster exists and created the god that you believe in - how would you prove that it doesn't.
You might try finding the origination of that belief and discrediting it source, by finding inconsistencies within the beliefs, or inconsistencies with what they believed and our current knowledge.
for example - if a religion believed:
there was an earth with water and grass and trees and night and day
- before there was a sun or moon
Gen 1:1-16
that the sun and moon are in our atmosphere
Gen 1:8,14
that god created animals then man and woman in Gen 1:24-27 but created man first, then animals, then woman in Gen 2:18-22
that Sons of God (nephilim) had sex with the daughters of men and created giants Gen 6:2-4
the omniscient, all powerful, all good creator god regretted creating everything and decided to kill all humans, plants, and air/land animals less than 1700 years after creation, but decides to let one 600 year old man build a football field sized boat and get all the animals and enough food for them to live more than a year at sea since there was enough water to cover the entire earth more than 22 ft higher than the tallest mountain Gen 6:6-7
that God told Noah to take 2 of every animal in Gen 6:19-20 but four verses later says to bring 7 pairs of every clean animal and 2 of animals that are not clean Gen 7:2
and that's just in the first seven (out of 50) chapters of Genesis
if you were to read a book like this that was not called the bible - you would likely wonder what crazy stuff people were smoking in those days
it is left over from when we had no answers to these questions so we made answers up. the idea of a god was around long before the bible - were those gods all made up?? - then why not one more
only moves the question - bible just says god did it, and when asked where god came from - umm - he's always been there. yeah, thats it
evolution more aptly explains the morals that we have than god. competition is better explained by competition by groups for resources than a god that says thou shalt not covet, and love thy neighbor as thyself
You, Me, Life the World, the Universe is proof of You, Me, Life the World, the Universe - not god.
"Where did that little ball of matter that exploded come from" - god only shifts the question to where did god come from. if god is allowed to exist forever, then why wouldn't something simpler.
if you believe the bible is wrong what are you going on that god (or a higher being) exists?
I think many people have decided god does not exist becasue many attributes assigned to god have been successfully explained by science. god doesn't have to exist to explain earthquakes, asteroids, lightning, etc.
