Does God exist? (14 Viewers)

[Enteebee]

I said if you "truly have faith." Most religious people don't commit attrocities, but neither do most atheists. The bible states that god is all merciful though, and so if you truly believe in him (and I don't mean stab someone and say "lol, i <3 jesus.") you will be saved. There is little difference between a little sin and a big one, in the eyes of the lord.

Yeah but I really don't see this as such a big problem and I do still feel like perhaps your language suggests the burden for a christian to 'get away' with such crimes in the eyes of the lord is quite low, I don't really believe it is. The idea would be that someone who truly believes in god has repented from their past crimes, they are rehabilitated from their 'evil mind' that caused them to do such terrible acts.

Also, in the eyes of the lord there may be no difference between sins but christians are not the lord, they have been given hints as to ways to order the mortal world by god but they are not to dispense God's justice.

My round-about guess would be perhaps that sin is seen as a state of being corrupted, to be one with god you need to be perfectly pure, perfectly free of sin and it is in this way that all sin is equal, in that even one sin is enough to deny you fellowship with god.

 

[inasero]

Besides, Inasero is wrong. According to the bible as long as I truly have faith in jesus I can do whatever the fuck I like, just gotta go to communion every now and then.

the good book also says

In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. Do not offer the parts of your body to sin, as instruments of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God, as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer the parts of your body to him as instruments of righteousness. For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace. What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! Don't you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were entrusted. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness

If you love me, you will obey what I command

So you see if someone is truly saved, they'll become "slaves to righteousness" so to speak and no longer be involved in sin. If someone consciously continues on sinning after having accepted Jesus, it shows they don't appreciate the implications of his sacrifice and I would be inclined to question whether they were truly saved in the first place.

 

[Slidey]

So you see, the 'good' book contradicts itself a lot, allowing a fundamentalist to easily match it to whatever he's currently arguing, and evade logical consistency completely.

 

[Enteebee]

So you see, the 'good' book contradicts itself a lot, allowing a fundamentalist to easily match it to whatever he's currently arguing, and evade logical consistency completely.

Yeah of course... There's a way around it though, they just have to give us a heuristic that couldn't be applied to verify an equally cryptic old text.

 

[Garygaz]

Mk, I'm not going to go through the 600 or so posts and see if someone has already said this. BUT it is completely irrational (in my opinion, of course) that one could not believe there is something else of a higher power out there. A lot of atheists cry out 'Big bang, big bang', but 90% of them don't even know what the big bang consisted of. I'm not a science fan, but thus far, no one has been able to explain where original matter came from. I mean the very first thing that there was ever any where in any universe, galaxy or whatever. Was there always just stuff just floating around? small miniscule, non-alive bits of dusts waiting to magically explode and create universes and life? Just because science can explain the process of which things are made and what they compose of doesn't take away from the belief that there is a God. So I pose YOU the question, where the hell did the very first thing to ever exist come from/how did it come to be?

/stream of consciousness

 

[hero.]

Those Questing for Truth and Accuracy ON THE INTERNET

Yeah, there's your problem.

 

[Kwayera]

Mk, I'm not going to go through the 600 or so posts and see if someone has already said this. BUT it is completely irrational (in my opinion, of course) that one could not believe there is something else of a higher power out there. A lot of atheists cry out 'Big bang, big bang', but 90% of them don't even know what the big bang consisted of. I'm not a science fan, but thus far, no one has been able to explain where original matter came from. I mean the very first thing that there was ever any where in any universe, galaxy or whatever. Was there always just stuff just floating around? small miniscule, non-alive bits of dusts waiting to magically explode and create universes and life? Just because science can explain the process of which things are made and what they compose of doesn't take away from the belief that there is a God. So I pose YOU the question, where the hell did the very first thing to ever exist come from/how did it come to be?

/stream of consciousness

Why is it irrational to not believe in a supreme being? Nothing in all of our models requires, assumes or even suggests the need for a creator.

I'm loathe to summarise various reams of scientific data which admittedly confuses even me at times (I am no physicist), but nothing happened magically, and all is within the realms of what we currently understand about the universe, even if we don't quite understand all the mechanisms.

An interesting article, if you're interested in the origin of the universe (and the formation of matter etc) is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_epoch and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Big_Bang

Whether you're a science "fan" or not, you can't outright deny it without at least giving it some attention. Read some of the literature, and then come back to us with questions.

 

[scarybunny]

Just because I don't know where/how the very first thing started doesn't mean that I fill that gap in human knowledge with a sky fairy.

 

[Enteebee]

BUT it is completely irrational (in my opinion, of course) that one could not believe there is something else of a higher power out there.

Even if this were true (it is not) it does not get you anywhere near a personal god, let alone a specific one such as for example the god of christianity, as you conceive him.

A lot of atheists cry out 'Big bang, big bang', but 90% of them don't even know what the big bang consisted of.

I agree there are some people that tend to take up an acceptance of 'big bang theory' without even really understanding what it means and this is terrible. I can assure you though that most of the atheists in this thread are not amongst them, what do you have to say to them?

I'm not a science fan, but thus far, no one has been able to explain where original matter came from. I mean the very first thing that there was ever any where in any universe, galaxy or whatever.

The components of everything which exists now existed at time=0, the big bang describes the events which occurred just after time=0 (or when time began if you prefer that terminology) when these basic components began to change their forms. To ask what came before time=0 is illogical as 'before' is a time-centric concept.

There is of course much scientific evidence that there was a time before our own time, however I submit that this is a more than adequate explanation for our universe and could very well be a suitable explanation for the very first coming into existence of any wider universe (beyond the scope of our own... you must understand here I use universe in the sense that a physicist would, not a philosopher).

So I pose YOU the question, where the hell did the very first thing to ever exist come from/how did it come to be?

I think I've given you a decent answer to think about and respond to... however the truth is I don't even need an answer. Before people knew that earthquakes were caused primarily by shifts in the tectonic plates, were they any more right to proclaim it was the work of god? No. They just didn't know, that's all they could say.

 

[Kwayera]

Exactly. It is okay for us to not know everything about the origins of the universe yet. We're only just now developing technologies that can feasibly explore it. Demanding a lot of us, aren't ye!

 

[KFunk]

not a science fan, but thus far, no one has been able to explain where original matter came from. I mean the very first thing that there was ever any where in any universe, galaxy or whatever. Was there always just stuff just floating around? small miniscule, non-alive bits of dusts waiting to magically explode and create universes and life? Just because science can explain the process of which things are made and what they compose of doesn't take away from the belief that there is a God. So I pose YOU the question, where the hell did the very first thing to ever exist come from/how did it come to be?

Theologians don't have much success on these issues either. As an example I quote the following from (1994) Catechism of the Catholic Church (note, this is their official publication and so is not a 'strawman'):

296 We believe that God needs no pre existent thing or any help in order to create, nor is creation any sort of necessary emanation from the divine substance. God creates freely "out of nothing":

[The text quotes St Theophilus] If God had drawn the world from pre-existent matter, what would be so extraordinary in that? A human artisan makes from a given material whatever he wants, while God shows his power by starting from nothing to make all he wants.

 

[KFunk]

Also, ponder the difficulty of answering the question:

Why is there something rather than nothing?

I'm not sure that we can reasonably expect satisfactory answers to a question of this sort. If you have any interest in reading philosophical jabs at this question you could check out Robert Nozick (see Ch 2 for an accessible account), Martin Heidegger (for a difficult account) or Bede Rundle (for a thorough, focussed account). I personally find Nozick's approach the most refreshing:

"The question appears impossible to answer. Any factor introduced to explain why there is something will itself be part of the something to be explained, so it (or anything utilizing it) could not explain all of the something--it could not explain why there is anything at all...Some writers conclude from this that the question is ill-formed and meangingless. But why do they cheerfully reject the question rather than despairingly observe that it demarcates a limit of what we can hope to understand?" (Nozick, Philosophical Explanations, start of Ch 2)

 

[Graney]

Why is there something rather than nothing?

That question does my head in. It should do so to any sentient individual. The universe should not exist. As far as I can conceive, whether you're a theist or otherwise, you're faced with the inexplicable origin event. We will forever be faced with it, it's a seemingly unknowable problem. Existence is an impossibility.

Thanks, will read Nozick.

 

[Riet]

I'm not a science fan, but thus far, no one has been able to explain where original matter came from. I mean the very first thing that there was ever any where in any universe, galaxy or whatever. Was there always just stuff just floating around? small miniscule, non-alive bits of dusts waiting to magically explode and create universes and life?
/stream of consciousness

This just becomes circular though. Where did god come from? Why does matter need a creator but not god?

 

[Slidey]

i have discovered a principle:

B = k / U

B - belief in god
k - proportionality constant
U - understanding of science

Hahaha. Post of the year.

 

[Riet]

i have discovered a principle:

B = k / U

B - belief in god
k - proportionality constant
U - understanding of science

http://img356.imageshack.us/img356/2669/3322147dkl7.jpg

 

[*TRUE*]

This just becomes circular though. Where did god come from? Why does matter need a creator but not god?

God doesnt need a creator because of his nature. He is our ( meaning all that we will ever know or have ever known aswell as our'selves') beginning and end.
Christians believe all our physical laws were set in place by God.
That might pose problems.

 

[Slidey]

Hey guys just to make this thread more bearable I've updated that greasemonkey ignore script to work with all sorts of random characters so anyone you put on ignore will be purged from this world

http://www.ultimatescienceteam.com/scripts/bosignore.js

Install greasemonkey and install this script.

Cheers dude!

 

[Riet]

God doesnt need a creator because of his nature. He is our ( meaning all that we will ever know or have ever known aswell as our'selves') beginning and end.
Christians believe all our physical laws were set in place by God.
That might pose problems.

Why does the nature of the universe need a creator? Maybe it just exists, by nature as you put it. There's no possible answer other than "because god/the bible says so." Which like I said, becomes circular.

 

[long tiem]

you misinterpreted me, i didnt mean that all people killed for faith, and i dont think they do, what i should have said is that some extreamests kill others for their religious faith, religious or not, i dont think anyone can truly understand why people do this to others, but its a little ironic dont you agree, as all religons preach that there is no room in heaven for murderers, and yet people kill for faith and religion..


im aware my spelling and punctuation is attrochus.. and in my statements i donot mean to offend anyone who reads them!

thanks!