[Freddio]

lol jab

[Steven Stahlberg]

Jabberwocky...
Confusius say, woman standing on head has crack up...


Sorry...

[MoleculeMan]

I am an agnostic psuedo-protestant/UCC. That means that i think there is a god, but i don't know what they are and my dad's a pastor heh. I mean there is just too much in the universe for there not to be Something. Also since i believe in free will that there has to be something out there. Besides Aetheism is kinda pessamistic for me. (if you are, i ain't saying you are, just that it would be for me heh)

Jake

[sacrelicious]

Now, when people say they're pagans, I wonder which gods they worship. Any in particular? Or is it sort of an Earth Mother/Life Force type thing?

Another thought. Even if you believe in an afterlife, you'd probably concede that it's still part of the universe in some way or another, correct? Well to the best of our knowledge the universe will end in complete entropy in a few hundred trillion years. So even if the afterlife and human souls are, say, made of energy and occupy an alternate dimension (for want of a better term) they'll still disintegrate in the end. Unless, of course, the power of God transcends physical laws. Thoughts?

[fshock]

Gekitsu, thats the same as being Buddhist.
I call myself a buddhist because its the religion that best describes my feelings.

Faust, I`m kinda dissapointed with you, I thought you would have come up with something really crazy.

Maus, I`m the same as you but the dense illusions shit.

[edraket]

sacrelicious:

Many pagans worship specific gods. Often more than one. But in the end they all stand for the Male and/or Female god(dess). You just pick one that's right for you.
Or you don't and just rever the earth and the sun. As I do. It's all about the need to put a face to it I think.

Eventhough science has come with a lot of usefull goodies for day to day life I think it is way to limited to live by in a deeper, more spiritual sense.
After all science is limited by our own human mind.

[wayfinder]

believe what you will, it will probably be true for you in the end. i guess. who invented the sad idea that religions were mutually exclusive?

[LinaBo]

My own. I believe in god and certain things on my own terms. I don't understand this urge for people to 'join' something that is already created. I say, why not create your own. Don't conform out of fear of social rejection or anything.

Of course, if that is your choice and you truly believe in a set of ideals already put forth, more power to you.

[GatoNegro13]

quote

Quote:

Now, when people say they're pagans, I wonder which gods they worship. Any in particular? Or is it sort of an Earth Mother/Life Force type thing?

It depends.
Paganism is a multi-faceted religion much like christianity. THere are Celtic pagans, Wiccans, and the list goes on.......Im still trying to find my true belief system, I think its more my own religion, because I cant say I agree with everything. It just matches me most.

[Wild]

Personally, I think that atheism IS a religion. It's like the world religion.

Think about it, a few hundred years ago, everybody KNEW that God existed and that the bible was true and so on. NOW, everybody KNOWS that God doesn't exist, and that everything is built from these little tiny, tiny pieces called atoms.

Now, I have never seen any proof of the existence of these "atoms", maybe thay exist, maybe they don't. See my point?
I mean, right now, all I hear from my atheist friends is "How can you believe in God when you KNOW (?) that earth was created over the course of billions of years!?" etc etc.
So, as I see it, I believe in the existence of God, instead of believing in his non-existence.



BTW, I'm evangelic-lutheran... don't know if that's what it is called in english though...

[Steven Stahlberg]

Atheism isn't the world anything, most of the 6 billion here are followers of one of the 5 major religions. (Islam alone has about 2 billion.) And most of the rest will usually say if questioned "I don't really know." And a few hundred years ago everyone did not believe in God.

The universe was created a few thousand years ago, in 6 days, come on... You're going to claim that all geology, cosmology, physics, astronomy, paleontology and biology etc etc are just plain totally 180 degrees wrong, while the jumbled collection of stories, myths and laws of a long dead desert people, passed down through thousands of years as an oral tradition, is totally right in every way? If you're right then God is for some reason going to great lengths to fool and deceive anyone with brains enough to look around and draw conclusions - why would God want to do that?

God and science are not mutually exclusive - in fact each needs the other, like a bird needs both wings to fly.

[jr]

to know science is to look into the mind of God........
hey you guys ever read joe campbell?

[Steven Stahlberg]

Hm who's that, I did a search but nothing seemed to fit?

[Jyashuwa]

I beleive in a God, but don't necessary conform to cristanity.

I also beleive science is simply just another religion.

[ceenda]

Firstly, the 6 days people mention are, AFAIK, referred to as 'epochs' in the Torah, the Jewish Holy writings which comprise the Old Testament. An epoch simply means a period of time. It is also said that for God, a thousand years is like a day and a day is like a thousand years. Bear in mind also that Tradition was also told in such a way to be memorised and passed onto future generations, so it seems prudent that the 6 days story is memorable regardless of your view on it's accuracy.

On a side note, the name Adam can be traced back to the word 'man'.

As for my religion?

Well, I was raised into an Anglican family who later became Baptists. It's odd, as a kid I was allowed to watch Predator, Aliens and any other violent movie... but Life of Brian was simply out of the question.

With regard to Christian background, I'd say that the Eastern Orthodox Church is the fullest expression of the Christian faith without being dragged into denominational conflict and fundamentalist ideals.

[[Shizo]]

Everybody was reading christian bible on weekends a few hundred years ago? bwagagaahah
Science is religion? MAUAHAHHAH

[FatPenguin]

I think that people who say 'science is just another religion' don't have a very good idea of what science is at all. Try to define the two terms, and explain how they are similar.

[Steven Stahlberg]

Ceenda - yes! Genesis, in fact the whole Old Testament, is simplified and exaggerated in order to be easy to remember! Of course! That makes perfect sense in an oral tradition, it would have to be wouldn't it? And so it follows, it can't possibly be taken as verbatim 'truth' as some say.

I'm not sure if you guys know this, but there's this whole big serious counter-movement out there who claim that the book of Genesis is true word for word, and they try to prove it 'scientifically'. [shakes head]

[jr]

Joseph Campbell was the greatest mythologist in history, a professor and scholar who revealed history's mythologies as pathways for the human soul. His important works include: "Creative Mythology", "The Masks of God", "The Hero With A Thousand Faces", "Myths to Live By", "The Way of the Animal Powers", and others.
The short passage below shows the sweep and power of Campbell's comprehension of mythology and psychology, and gives light and inspiration to the sometimes dark path we travel in search of our personal truth.


The way to become human is to learn to recognize the lineaments of God in all of the wonderful modulations of the face of man.

With this we come to the final hint of what the specific orientation of the modern hero-task must be, and discover the real cause for the disintegration of all of our inherited religious formulae. The center of gravity, ie., of the realm of mystery and danger has definitely shifted. For the primitive hunting peoples of those remotest human millenniums when the sabertooth tiger, the mammoth, and the lesser presences of the animal kingdom were the primary manifestations of what was alien -- the source at once of danger, and of sustenance -- the great human problem was to become linked psychologically to the task of sharing the wilderness with these beings. An unconscious identification took place, and this was finally rendered conscious in the half-human, half-animal, figures of the mythological totem-ancestors.

The animals became the tutors of humanity. Through acts of literal imitation -- such as today appear only on the children's playground (or in the madhouse) -- an effective annihilation of the human ego was accomplished and society achieved a cohesive organization. Similarly, the tribes supporting themselves on plant-food became cathected to the plant; the life-rituals of planting and reaping were identified with those of human procreation, birth, and progress to maturity. Both the plant and the animal worlds, however, were in the end brought under social control. Whereupon the great field of instructive wonder shifted -- to the skies -- and mankind enacted the great pantomime of the sacred moon-king, the sacred sun-king, the hieratic, planetary state, and the symbolic festivals of the world-regulating spheres.

Today all of these mysteries have lost their force; their symbols no longer interest our psyche. The notion of a cosmic law, which all existence serves and to which man himself must bend, has long since passed through the preliminary mystical stages represented in the old astrology, and is now simply accepted in mechanical terms as a matter of course. The descent of the Occidental sciences from the heavens to the earth (from 17th Century astronomy to 19th Century biology) and their concentration today, at last, on man himself (in 20th Century anthropology and psychology) mark the path of a prodigious transfer of the focal point of human wonder.

Not the animal world, nor the plant world, not the miracle of the spheres, but man himself is now the crucial mystery. Man is that alien presence with whom the forces of egoism must come to terms, through whom the ego is to be crucified and resurrected, and in whose image society is to be reformed. Man, understood however not as "I" but as "Thou": for the ideals and temporal institutions of no tribe, race, continent, social class, or century, can be the measure of the inexhaustible and multifariously wonderful divine existence that is the life in all of us.

The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. "Live," Nietzsche says, "as though the day were here." It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so, every one of us shares the supreme ordeal -- carries the cross of the redeemer -- not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.

[balistic]

If atheism is a religion, then black is a color and abstainence is a form of sex.

[edraket]

I just have some random remarks that I thought were interesting:

In almost every culture or religion the creation myth involves everything beginning with the world being covered in water.
This is conform to what science tells us.
I think this is just an incredibly cool thing because to me it seems to prove that man somehow has a memory of those times when life was created.

The mormon church, I think, explains the 6 days that god took to create the world as being in "GOD" days. His days are supposedly a lot longer than ours.

If you would ask a scientist to tell you how the world was created in a few lines I think it would not be very accurate either.

Myths are the very fabric of religion. They involve symbols..archetypes. (Much like art does)Things that people need to understand or communicate concepts that cannot be captured in normal language. To take these myths literally and use them as proof that this religion isn't the "truth" is, in my eyes, kind of unfair.
Of course there are religions that believe their myths as if they were literal truth.

ok well.. those were my additions for the day.

eddy

[balistic]

There is absolutely no evidence for a global flood. If you melted the ice caps, you'd only raise sea level by about six feet. There's simply not enough water on Earth to flood the world, and the atmosphere wouldn't be able to support that much water anyway . . . barometric pressures would be positively Jovian.

I think that a lot of cultures have flood mythology because floods are one of the most common natural disasters . . . and if your world extends only a few hundred kilometers, then a regional flood could seem like a large-scale catastrophe.

[faustgfx]

quote:

---

Originally posted by fshock:
Faust, I`m kinda dissapointed with you, I thought you would have come up with something really crazy.

---

sowwy.

[Red Leader]

I am firmly, 100% certain in my mind, without a shadow of a doubt, that
there is no god, gods, or higher powers of any kind.
Never has been Never will be.
As far as I'm concerned, a sentient God is both needless and irelevant. I could easily debate this forever, but *sigh* there's no point. It's a question of observation and reasoning as far as I'm concerned. I can easily list off endless reasons why a god has no observable part to play in the universe, whereas People of Faith can only point to a pile of books written by very human authors, or their politically motivated spiritual leaders for their proof.

That said, I am happy, fulfilled, and see hope for the future. It baffles me why people feel a need to seek comfort in a creator who will protect them/ guide them when this power lies in all of us to do ourselves.

I am sorry if anyone takes offence at this, I just can't see the point. Almost every aspect of the holy books of our cultures can be cross related and tied into myths, legends, and historical facts that have been altered due to countless oral retellings. If you can't rely on the truths of some of it, how can you put faith in ANY of it?

[Ninja]

I don't follow any religion, but I do subscribe to the notion of good vs evil.

I refuse to let a mortal give me an authoritive answer. In the grand scheme of things, I don't think we are truly enlightened to be able to make judgement on which deity is real, and which one is an 'empty tomb'.

[Awetopsy]

Very interesting thread.

I am a bible believing christian. (not like stneil777 mind you)

a few random thoughts that popped up from reading through this:

1)Where does it say in the bible that the earth is only a few thousand years old? That wouldnt leave alot of time for dinosaurs would it? Instead the logical explanation is this: God told Adam and Eve to go forth and REplenish the earth, this is after all the animals were already in place. What does "replenish" mean? To plenish again, indicating that there was some sort of life that existed before our currently debated recorded history.

2)Athiesm is the world religion? 90% of all people on earth believe in some form of deity.. Are they all nuts? (I know somebody is going to say "yes") the definition of athiesm is this:

quote

Quote:

"Disbelief in or denial of the existence of God or gods."

3)Most religions try to discourage you from questioning the doctrines/beliefs. Some would say that Christianity is the worst or that... but I dont see that. The Christianity that I know asks you to research everything, to get the facts.

4)I personally am a person who requires everything I know to make sense or to be logical. If God didnt make sense I wouldnt believe in him at all. All it takes is a little more research than most people are willing to do. Personally I think it takes more faith to believe that mankind came from goo than it does to believe in creation.

[edit]I had originally mentioned evolution but as balistic pointed out, I was using the non-scientific definition of evolution.[/edit]

If any of you want to talk to me more about any of this, feel free to email me or ICQ me.

[ November 30, 2001: Message edited by: Awetopsy ]

[[Shizo]]

Now hear my little thought of what universe is:

Key to everything is infinity, which is hard to understand but here is how to at least try. Universe is not a bunch of black space or emptyness, just like say, water is not all green just because the pond beside your house is green and you never saw and will never see in your life the oceans that are billions of light years away. That's just an example. So IMO universe is everything, and there are no extremes in universe. Another example would be.. For humans "extreme" high or low temperature is fatal. But for organisms which live in that environment - it's normal and HUMAN temp is fatal. And so there is no fast or slow, big or small, hot or cold, bright or dark.
With an example of size, it is infinitely small and infinitely large. Just recently smaller particles were discovered (in last few years). And try to tell me that a planet (for ex.) has a limit in size like.. it cant be larger than 10000km in diameter because i'll say that it can be infinitely large or small.

And taking 'everything' in account.. I suppose everything imaginable and everythign unimaginable by human brain is quite possible, it exists (at one point in universe) existed and will exist.

So pick one crazy thought in your head like "planet where gravity is inversed" or "creatures that are bigger than planets" or "a living trashcan thats going x3985 the speed of light" and i'm saying it exists somewhere in the universe.

umk?

[balistic]

Awetopsy: thing is, we've seen evolution. Even outside the fossil record, speciation has been observed and documented hundreds of times. There's a full list over at www.talkorigins.org, which is a very good site for information on evolution.

The difference between believing in evolution and the kind of belief that comes with religion, is that if evolution is disproven, its not a big deal. Individually, scientists may become attached to pet theories, but the community as a whole will always gravitate to whatever explanation has the best evidence.

Like I said before, its a matter of unanwerable questions versus unquestionable answers.

I'd suggest that before anyone tries to provide an argument for biblical creation, they take a look at talkorigins.org to avoid reusing old fallacies.

[ November 30, 2001: Message edited by: balistic ]

[Awetopsy]

ah, sorry balistic. I should have been more precise...

After reading through some of that, it seems that what they are describing evolution as is adaptation. they specifically say that it doesnt apply to 'the individual'. My question is this then... What about that individual cell that first formed in the ocean? if Evolution doesnt apply to individuals then that individual cell shouldnt have changed.

or am I reading it entirely wrong? (thats possible too)

[ November 30, 2001: Message edited by: Awetopsy ]

[Wild]

hehe... well, I certainly got a reaction to that one...
Also, just to clarify, personally, I don't believe that earth (and everything else) was created in six days. If it was that easy (God saying "let there be light" and there was light...) then God would not really be the most powerful force in the universe, since there, in my opinion, there should be some kind of force that carried out God's orders.

But anyway, my point is, people were being told "this is how this and that works" before. Now, when everyone is so much smarter and wiser, people know that a lot of things that were facts two hundred years ago are now proven to be bs. But you are still told "this is how it works" in school.

Also, unless you've already figured it out yourself, I have a lot of freetime which i spend thinking about these sorts of things. They are my opinion, and you are free to ignore them. But remember:

QUESTION THINGS WHICH SEEM OBVIOUS