what i find most interesting about this thread is that people who side with science…presume alot. especially when it comes to things they didnt grow up around and aren’t asking the people who did grow up with it how it was like. You are all assuming religion is this evil time consuming manipulator when it’s clear religion can be healthy. People can survive in a world with science by it’s side. People wouldnt even know i believed in god unless i told them on here. I don’t go spouting the good book every 5 seconds, i dont push my ideals on others. But people who support science around here have no problem pushing their way of thinking on others.
Religion is the devil, and this is coming from someone who was basically born under religion.
that doesn’t address the question. creationism and evolution are incompatible. evolution is about the slow gradual change through natural selection of life on earth. a christian can’t believe in evolution and creationism at the same time: if humans have a soul and can go into heaven, yet we descended from simple single celled organisms, at what point did we evolve a soul? because bacterias dont have a soul. that would imply that a soul magically evolved, and that somewhere in between bacteria and humans, other species have “partial souls”. the whole thing is ludicrous. if you even think about it for any amount of time, its pretty clear that the soul is non-existent and an imaginary construct.
My post wasn’t specifically about you, and you didn’t refute it in any way, but I’ll at least humor you with a response: science is practically healthy, as is the nature of science. Religion is ‘spiritually’ or ‘unverifiably’ healthy. The elements that make religion healthy in life, such as a sense of community, family bonds, strong faith, etc. don’t actually need religion (especially dogma) to exist. The elements that make religion unhealthy, such as hours of pointless toil and larking under delusion, are chiefly caused by it.
Bold: Are they pushing their way of thinking or are they pushing demonstrable facts?
Yes, and what of these teachers and professors? They’re even more pushy with their ideas!
As someone who was rised as a Catholic (Specifically a Salesian) i have to say that indeed, teaching religion to your kids can be considered abuse. True not every father is a religion nutjob, but in the long run i think that it does more hurt than anything.
You are taking away time from the child for a lot of shit without even giving him a chance to say if he really likes it or not.
The amount of shit that ends polluting their young minds is simply unnaceptable.
One thing i concede the salesians, they actually care to inculcate critical thinking on their students, is almost like they want to turn them on atheist, apatheist or agnostics since no one i know that graduated with me considers themselve as a religious person 
scientific theories can be used to explain, can be falsifiable, can be used to make predictions, and can be supported with a preponderance of evidence.
creationism is just waving your hands in the air and saying that god did it. it is not falsifiable because you cannot mathematically prove a negative. santa claus probably doesn’t exist, but you can’t prove it. creationism doesn’t explain shit, because “god did it” is meaningless. people attributed earthquakes and lightning to god before we finally gained understanding into the actual mechanisms behind them. “god did it” is just a euphemism for “i dont know”. it can’t really be used to make predictions, because its just hand waving. finally, there is no evidence to support that we just magically sprang into existence, but there is a lot of evidence for the theory of evolution.
also, science refines its understanding over the years. the older scientific models of understanding can still be used to make predictions, but as we improve our understanding, they are replaced with more accurate ones.
Lots of evidence and reasoning vs a crazy persons single interpretation of a book translated many many times. How was this even a debate in the first place it is troubling to me that anyone would side with Mr. Ham in this debate.
Can any of you non believers adaquatly answer this non believers question… what will satisfy the need for spirituality and hope if religion was completely killed off.
and of course this question is going to be brushed off by many of you because you believe that it’s a stupid question…
It doesn’t, it’s just a red herring to make him feel better about himself, and invalidate others immediatly on the grounds of he believes!
Banned? No. Everyone loves a good campfire story. Tricking children into believing in shit that you can’t even explain yourself and forcing them saying, “This is how you will live your life.”, running an entire country based on ethnocentric belief systems (especially a multicultural, “free” religion society), going to war…fucking war with mass murder and torture and rape and all kids of thievery…that should should just be entirely shunned and the people who espouse that form of brainwashing should be left alone in the desert.
The same thing that satisfied it when spirituality and hope didn’t exist eons ago.
Agreed, on top of that teaching your children that anyone who doesn’t believe the exact same proofless myth deserves eternity being tortured is a level of bigotry that the KKK can’t even reach.
The “need” for religion is not genetic, it is a learned behavior. I ask you this, who decided your religion? Was it you? Or was it your parents? Religion doesn’t need to be killed off completely, the religious will simply kill each other off.
How does that take away from the gross inaccuracies, deletions and mistranslations? The fact that you have to cite an early theologian to explain a “common misunderstanding” to a fundamental story taken literally by most christians, (who believe in the direct chronological order listed in Genesis KJV) only further muddies the claim of its relevancy.
The bible is seen as literal when a believer can conjure something historically analogous, and metaphorical when a tale sounds farfetched or has been empirically disproven. How very convenient.
Your problem shouldn’t be with atheism, but the argument form, ergo, logic itself. The burden of proof always rest on the one making the claim, and evidence needs to be shown to validate said claim. It doesn’t matter if the crux of the argument is the existence of god, Sasquatch, plate tectonics, or Atlantis.
Now as for why we don’t believe in Zeus, Thor or Ra (and there are still fringe believers for all listed, surprisingly) is because those cultures either died out, or were conquered and adopted a different religion. For example, the Vikings believed in Norse mythology, then adopted Christianity for mostly political reasons due to King Harald Bluetooth etc. etc. (Now their nations are mostly secular and coincidentally extremely successful and tolerant. Whodathunkit?)
The political and cultural zeitgeist is what ultimately decides the beliefs of a nation, not some self-evident truth in gods.
Eh, I’m investing too much time circling this revolving door. A decade of these recurring religious arguments have taught me when to stop. Deuces.
The love of and for your family and friends. The actual instinctual desire to make things better. Also, see Buddhism.
Although your implication that there is an actual NEED for spirituality and hope is a straw man.
You are sooo wrong. People didn’t stop believing in Zeuz and Greek gods because they were “disproved”.
Christianity became the main religion of the Roman Empire because the emperor Theodosius I persecuted all the pagans.
He destroyed the temples, had the priest’s tongues cut out, destroyed their documents, banned visit to temples (meaning you’ll be killed if you go) and the traditions he couldnt get rid of he just shoe horned them into Christianity like the Christmas tree. If it wasn’t for this persecution we would still have pagan religion being strong today. On the other hand, we still have Christianity not because its “validity” or cause it hasn’t been disproved but because of the political power behind it that uses it control the masses and generate profit.
That is was I dislike about the religious institution. The take advantage of misery and hopelessness by selling hope and salvation for those in need or ignorant.
Business wise it an amazing idea, you don’t have to pay taxes, don’t have to restock inventory, and its basically all profit for the exception of operation costs.
Spirituality, as a connection with the inner self doesn’t need religion. Are you claiming that an atheist can’t be spiritual?
That Is like claiming that we need religion because the charities they do when in fact there are now lots of charity organizations that don’t have an agenda on indoctrinating people in their beliefs.
I personally don’t have anything against the existence of religion, what I’m against is when they try to pass legislation and attempt to get it in the science classroom like that retard Ken Ham. That’s ridiculous! You can have bible camps or whatever you want but KEEP IT OUT OF THE EDUCATION SYSTEM! Religion is NOT education.
Values like respect, love and mercy do not belong to religion, you don’t need it to teach good values.
And yes, religion is definitely child abuse. How is it not abuse to tell a young child that they are under surveillance 24/7 by that an all powerful being who will save you because you were born being a sinner and in debt with this all powerful being who will send you to hell if you don’t follow his standards? Not only that, but also this horrible practice of telling children that people who die are just “waiting” for them in a paradise. I still remember when I was a kid, I always asked my parents “Hey, so if its better after you die, why don’t we just die already?” Religious beliefs can most definitely fuck with a kid’s head big time.
Oh and Cisco is sooo washed up now, he never made any sense, but he was better at hiding it, he’s now a retired old man.
What is really worrying is how people simply do not understand what science IS, let alone how to do it.
It is not a belief system, or a way of organizing society. It is a method of gathering data from the natural world.
Religion vs Science is stupid debate. Creationism should not be taught in science class. Creationism should be argued in philosophy class.
Christians, Muslim and Jews all deserve to be mocked and ridiculed for their false beliefs though. Hatsune Miku is the one true God.
Glory Unto Miku
It actually does, first of all. Saying that evolution and creationism can’t be believed at the same time is historically wrong, because originally evolution was made as a theology before modern science existed. Just read the books of St Augustine and Gregory. It was taught before that we were not created static. Where we differ is the part on natural selection, we highly disagree that natural selection was unintentional, we believe and consider it logical that natural selection was intentional. That this world was created with a mechanism and we were given our own systems to adjust to it in order to survive.
Souls = our conscience, our identity and Spirit = our life force or our energy. As taught in early AD by Christianity, our Spirits did not evolve but de-evolved after the fall, and that we are at a goal (spiritually) where we have to progress and return to what we were originally created to be, in the likeness of god. does energy evolve or grow, if energy can grow then spirits/souls can grow/evolve. Even Buddhaism when talking about Chi does not deny that it potentitally can grow or evolve. It’s not an evolution in the biological sense and straight philosophical in description than science, but to think evolution can’t be belived because of the belief in souls not making sense to you is just your confusion. Not to insult you or anything, but when an atheist thinks evolution is a science that shows god doesn’t exist the more he shows he doesn’t know much about it, because Darwin himself did not become atheistic when developing the theory.
As for your post to Serpent. The God of the gaps is not just waving around “god did it”… Saying God did it is because of that same reasoning shown in that painting example. A man sees a painting and he concludes that a painter did it, another man butts in and says the same things you are saying… that’s the logic with in saying “god did it” because there is just no observable facts that show that language, order, and systematical mechanisms can just be here with out a mind.
Of course you can prove a negative mathematically. Take, for example, the statement ‘the world is not flat’. If we cannot prove a negative, how can we know that this statement is true or false? You referenced Santa Claus can’t be proven true, if that’s the case then why is he (the guy from the north pole who brings gifts around) ultimately known as not real if no one can prove he isn’t real?
I had a comment ready for this thread but there are too many creationists here it seems. :\
Not touching.
Because the devil has sown the seeds of doubt in the hearts of man and thus denied us the TRUE meaning of Christmas.