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Paulos23
Skeptic Friend
USA
446 Posts |
 Posted - 01/12/2005 : 09:17:18 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by Renae
I wish I'd been born 1,000 years later, so that I could exist in a world that had evolved out of the need for religion.
I think 1,000 years is an optimistic figure for that... |
You can go wrong by being too skeptical as readily as by being too trusting. -- Robert A. Heinlein
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. -- Aldous Huxley |
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Rubicon95
Skeptic Friend
USA
220 Posts |
Posted - 01/12/2005 : 12:16:39 [Permalink]
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Tsunami was not "cleansing act by God". Tsunamis happens, Earthquakes happen. These events are morally neutral.
In the Gospel of Luke 13, 18 people were killed when a tower fell on them. Everyone got on the "God punished them bandwagon". Jesus rebuked people for such mentality stating the we all are guilty. No one person or group is more guilty or deserving of punishment.
That reminds me a "Twilight Zone" episode. This guy was going to make all evil people turn in 2 inches tall on a certain day. Well, the day came, and he was 2 inches tall. Then got eaten by his cat. 
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Dr. Mabuse
Septic Fiend
Sweden
9696 Posts |
Posted - 01/12/2005 : 13:23:04 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by Storm
quote:
In essance, this is the Book of Job.
It's all that other shit that Verlch is blathering about that I have much trouble with
So are you implying you still believe in the book of Job Doc? 
No, just that the text you quoted was some of the most sane things Verlch has ever written. |
Dr. Mabuse - "When the going gets tough, the tough get Duct-tape..."
Dr. Mabuse whisper.mp3
"Equivocation is not just a job, for a creationist it's a way of life..." Dr. Mabuse
Support American Troops in Iraq:
Send them unarmed civilians for target practice..
Collateralmurder. |
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 01/12/2005 : 22:30:45 [Permalink]
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quote:
Here's the thing I don't think people get. If the God that I know exsists does in fact exsist; then he is so infinitely wiser, and more powerful than us that we can't even begin to comprehend it. And as politicly incorrect as it is to say, and as much of a bashing as I could take for saying this, God DOES have a reason for this even if we don't know what it is. So even if it is a HUMANLY devastating thing, which it is, I too am deeply sobered by the extereme loss of life, but in some ways it doesn't matter the loss of life if it accomplished what God was intending for it to!
blah blah blah....
I pity you and those who believe garbage like this. I also find it reprehensible that you can believe your god did this, and continue to worship it, and come up with this type of justification.
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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H. Humbert
SFN Die Hard
USA
4574 Posts |
Posted - 01/13/2005 : 04:17:23 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by creation88
People seem to forget something. That something is that God does not have to be a good god. By his grace he is a good God, but he didn't have to be. If you think about the implications of this your perspective might change. Good is coming out of this even if we don't see it. It is all the work of a GOOD God.
Holy shit, I can't understand how anyone can think this way. God could be evil, but instead he's good. We have no way of knowing that, but we can assume he's good since horrible things happen, which actually must be good in a way we don't comprehend since we already have decided he is a good god...
Wow. Just fucking wow.
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"A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true." --Demosthenes
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." --Richard P. Feynman
"Face facts with dignity." --found inside a fortune cookie |
| Edited by - H. Humbert on 01/13/2005 04:18:11 |
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 01/13/2005 : 12:04:33 [Permalink]
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quote:
Holy shit, I can't understand how anyone can think this way. God could be evil, but instead he's good. We have no way of knowing that, but we can assume he's good since horrible things happen, which actually must be good in a way we don't comprehend since we already have decided he is a good god...
Wow. Just fucking wow.
It is mind boggling. It makes you think that people are just plain fucking stupid when you hear them spout this type of fecal apologetics. That's not the case however. It seems that even intelligent people can hear this shit and agree.
Which then makes the issue one of character. What type of person could hear that and think it is true? Only morally reprehensible individuals.
I pity them, even though they disgust me.
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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moakley
SFN Regular
USA
1888 Posts |
Posted - 01/13/2005 : 13:06:37 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by verlch
Man created God? I suppose man created himself....lol...What purpose is there for man to create God? Something not even the hate of Liberals can erase God from the hearts half the population? Humans created evilution to counter the bible and claim man created God! To explain mans own creation!
How many gods have man feared and worshipped ? I have seen numbers greater than 2500. Now if the number were just 2500 verlch. How many of these gods would you say were created by man ? I suspect that your answer would be 2499. With this being the case it would show two things; 1) that man has a propensity for creating gods, and 2) that you and I would almost be in total agreement on this question.
Why would man create so many gods ? Probably to explain that which he did not understand, belief can be consoling, and justification for heinous acts against his enemies. Any number of reasons.
Eliminating God beliefs is not, nor will ever be, a goal of mine. I recognize its importance to many and the consoling nature of such beliefs. I do want to ensure that the superstitions of a 2000 year old mythology are never taught as science.
quote:
Your god should have nver given us such big and complex brains. It allowed us to to find natural explanation for these miracles. Maybe he should have given us all birth marks or a freckle arrangement saying, "Made by God".
Wait a minute. These are my words. verlch, try to use quotes if you would Please.
quote:
Perhaps we can open the 500 million year old fossil record and observe this window of evilution of the human brain! I would rather spend 9000 a year than have my children have to learn this in public school. And yes I do pay that much! Evilution is something you have made true by your distain for God!
$9000 a year. The price of controlling the your children's beliefs and thoughts is not as high as I would have expected.
quote:
Look at the fruits of your works and pray tell me how they are good and not evil?
Are you suggesting that you can get into heaven through good works. Are you suggesting that "No good deed was ever done by a non believer." I'm not sure how I could convince you since you paint all atheist with such broad strokes.
quote:
http://www.caseagainstfaith.com/submissions/hitler.htm
And according to his own words, he considered himself to be a devout christian.
[/quote] |
Life is good
Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned. -Anonymous |
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moakley
SFN Regular
USA
1888 Posts |
Posted - 01/13/2005 : 13:34:43 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by creation88
Here's the thing I don't think people get. If the God that I know exsists does in fact exsist;
- then he is so infinitely wiser, and
- more powerful than us that we can't even begin to comprehend
...
- God DOES have a reason for this even if we don't know what it is.
...
- if it accomplished what God was intending for it to!
...
- That something is that God does not have to be a good god.
- By his grace he is a good God.
...
- It is all the work of a GOOD God.
...
- But only the good, and living God knows all the reasons that these things have happened
This supports my point made in response to verlch on how man has created gods. What we have here is a list of attributes that man has given to a god. These attributes define the god. There fore this god has been created by man.
quote:
This goes back to what I was saying earlier. In a hypthetical situation like this, if you were to pray and my some mercy of God be saved, then this might increase your faith in him. If you prayed and died anyway, it truly was in Gods plan.
You must believe that your God changes its mind.
quote:
Something good will come out of it, even if we don't know what it is. And even if something good did not come out of it, in the eternal scheme of things your death really is not that important.
It is likely that my life will not be that important either, but I am still just absolutely thrilled with it.
quote:
Because we are here to serve God. He is not here to serve us. But by his amazing grace he has served us more than anyone ever could through the death of Jesus Christ!
Faith such as this is clearly consoling to the believer. |
Life is good
Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned. -Anonymous |
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R.Wreck
SFN Regular
USA
1191 Posts |
Posted - 01/13/2005 : 16:48:25 [Permalink]
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Here are some more asinine rationalizations from the Chicago Tribune.
quote:
This is the God of Jesus, who cried for his son at his crucifixion, but then took that horrible act and transformed it into a resurrection that offers salvation to the whole world. If we conceive of God in this way, then God cries with us over the tsunami, but begins transformative work right away to show love through human hands and hearts. This is the work that God desires, and this is the work in which we should engage.
quote:
We have been given a profound enough answer to that in the amazing life and death of Jesus Christ. But will we allow the bitterness of still unanswered questions to harden our heart against a God we often do not understand, or will we allow Jesus to give us as much understanding as is possible in this life, and to take our grief and use it to soften our hearts to make a lifestyle of giving ourselves to the hungry and thirsty, the homeless and the prisoner, the sick and the lonely wherever we encounter them
We need Jesus make us help?
quote:
And so now is when we must rely on faith. It is precisely now when we have all these questions that will not be answered that we must let go of them and believe in a God who loves each of us who have been created. It is not easy. Faith is not easy. Millions of our sisters and brothers in South Asia know this better than we do today. But I believe that if we lose faith, the tragedy worsens.
quote:
Despite how fragile it all is, we move on celebrating the moments of grace and wrestling with the difficulties. This is life. None of it diminishes God's love for us, manifest by the fragile infant in the manger, born not only to experience what it means to be human, but to laugh with us and also to cry with us. Our faith tells us that we and our sisters and brothers in South Asia, no matter what the pain, we are not alone.
Some of the clergy interviewed at least had the sense to say "I don't know" why god allows this kind of disaster, but most either rationalized or evaded. |
The foundation of morality is to . . . give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibliities of knowledge.
T. H. Huxley
The Cattle Prod of Enlightened Compassion
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Starman
SFN Regular
Sweden
1613 Posts |
Posted - 01/14/2005 : 01:24:25 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by Dude
It is mind boggling. It makes you think that people are just plain fucking stupid when you hear them spout this type of fecal apologetics. That's not the case however. It seems that even intelligent people can hear this shit and agree.
Which then makes the issue one of character. What type of person could hear that and think it is true? Only morally reprehensible individuals.
I pity them, even though they disgust me.
The same or similar apologetics have been used to excuse non-imaginary tyrants.
I've read stories of how devout communist being sent to Siberia, their spouses and other members of their families executed, during the Great Purge (before Beria, when Nikolai Yezhov led the NKVD), kept their faith in the goodness of "Papa Joe". Not because of the Stockholm syndrome. These people still believed that Joseph Stalin was the best thing since sliced bread. They blamed their misfortune on the "bad" advisors and commissars working for the great leader. The leader had to use those methods to protect the people.
If you support the actions of and pledge loyalty to a mass murdering tyrant, can you be a moral person? |
"Any religion that makes a form of torture into an icon that they worship seems to me a pretty sick sort of religion quite honestly"
-- Terry Jones |
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 01/14/2005 : 10:12:27 [Permalink]
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quote:
If you support the actions of and pledge loyalty to a mass murdering tyrant, can you be a moral person?
Within the context of your specific society, yes.
It's the subjective nature of ethics and morality.
By our current standards, no. We view the actions of Stalin, and those who supported them, to be morally reprehensible.
To illustrate:
If you were born in the USA, in GA in 1810, you would probably accept the owning of slaves to be morally acceptable, commonplace even. (trivia: the Southern Baptist Convention was originally formed to demonstrate the biblical justification for owning slaves) It is all about subjective context. I doubt you could find many people in the US today, with the possible exception of the most hardcore neo-nazi racists, who would really support slavery now.
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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questionit
New Member
21 Posts |
Posted - 02/02/2005 : 20:49:17 [Permalink]
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Verlch wrote: "We have not seen such moral darkness since the dark ages"
So incredibly typically ignorant to make a statement like that from a fundy. The Dark Ages was when religion ruled the world. You don't know your history at all. The Church ruled supreme during the dark ages, crushing any kind of free-thinking. Question the church, and you get burned alive.
They conceal information like that in books, Verlch. |
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the_ignored
SFN Addict
2562 Posts |
Posted - 02/05/2005 : 23:42:51 [Permalink]
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AIG reply to those who criticized their tsunami article: you'll find a link to their original article where they basically blame the tsunami on human "sin"!
For something really stomach churning though, you'd want to check out this.
Then, of course, there's Richard Dawkins take on it...
quote:
Not only does science know why the tsunami happened, it can give precious hours of warning. If a small fraction of the tax breaks handed out to churches, mosques and synagogues had been diverted into an early warning system, tens of thousands of people, now dead, would have been moved to safety.
Let's get up off our knees, stop cringing before bogeymen and virtual fathers, face reality, and help science to do something constructive about human suffering.
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>From: enuffenuff@fastmail.fm
(excerpt follows):
> I'm looking to teach these two bastards a lesson they'll never forget.
> Personal visit by mates of mine. No violence, just a wee little chat.
>
> **** has also committed more crimes than you can count with his
> incitement of hatred against a religion. That law came in about 2007
> much to ****'s ignorance. That is fact and his writing will become well
> know as well as him becoming a publicly known icon of hatred.
>
> Good luck with that fuckwit. And Reynold, fucking run, and don't stop.
> Disappear would be best as it was you who dared to attack me on my
> illness knowing nothing of the cause. You disgust me and you are top of
> the list boy. Again, no violence. Just regular reminders of who's there
> and visits to see you are behaving. Nothing scary in reality. But I'd
> still disappear if I was you.
What brought that on? this. Original posting here.
Another example of this guy's lunacy here. |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26031 Posts |
Posted - 02/06/2005 : 01:29:36 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by the_ignored
For something really stomach churning though, you'd want to check out this.
That may be stomach-churning, but the next two pages of that RR thread are much more interesting, with alleged Christians sniping and griping at one another over how close the Rapture is. |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
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verlch
SFN Regular
781 Posts |
Posted - 02/06/2005 : 12:21:50 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by questionit
So I was at work and one of my fellow nurses brought up the tsunami that's killed all those people. We started talking about it, and someone said that a nurse in one of the other departments felt this was "God's way of taking out the nonbelievers."
Funny thing was, this attitude is in keeping with the Old Testament's God. Yet one more reason why I've happily abandoned the camp of the righteous...
He says in verses 6-7, "And you shall hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not troubled; for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places."
The scripture says these are warnings that the birth pangs are happening and soon the earth will give birth to her dead! There is a lot of activity here on this small planet! The end is not yet, but we need to be good humans and watch that we don't miss out on eternity with God the Father! |
What came first the chicken or the egg?
How do plants exist without bugs in the soil, and bugs in the soil without plants producing oxygen?
There are no atheists in foxholes
Underlying the evolutionary theory is not just the classic "stuff" of science — conclusions arrived at through prolonged observation and experimentation. Evolution is first an atheistic, materialistic world view. In other words, the primary reason for its acceptance has little to do with the evidence for or against it. Evolution is accepted because men are atheists by faith and thus interpret the evidence to cor-respond to their naturalistic philosophy.
For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables. II Timothy 4:3,4
II Thess. 2:11 And for this cause God shall
send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie:
You can not see the 'wind', but you can see its effect!!!!
Evolution was caused by genetic mistakes at each stage?
Radical Evolution has 500 million years to find fossils of fictional drawings of (hard core)missing links, yet they find none.
We have not seen such moral darkness since the dark ages, coencides with
teaching evolution in schools. (Moral darkness)
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places, EPH 6:12.
"Thus, many scientists embracing naturalism find themselves in the seeming dilemma recently articulated by biochemist Franklin Harold: "We should reject, as a matter of principle, the substitution of intelligent design for the dialogue of chance and necessity [i.e., Darwinian evolution]; but we must concede that there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical system, only a variety of wishful speculations."
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