religious threads (4 Viewers)

hscishard

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Like once thought, WWI, a war that ends all wars. Like this thread, a thread to end all threads.

You know what I mean by threads:).
 

Lukybear

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AND one's perfect but by your standards neither is God. You didn't seem to address my point about inbuilt failure but I'll let that slide.

Moral righteousness has no value in it whatsover. Moral superiority does.

I, as a Libertarian Atheist have better morals than the Taleban. I have better morals than the Catholic church and far better morals than the vast majority of governments on this earth.

If you see morals as an ethical judgement in regards to the reduction of human suffering, then I am a superior being to the vast majority of people in the world. I do not wish hate against people for believing a particular religion. I do not wish hate against people for being of a particular sexual orientation. I do not want to control people's sexuality, I do not want to force people to see themselves as evil.

I want everyone to live freely and to do the best they can do enjoy the lives they have.

How utterly foolish it is of you to claim any degree of moral certainty based on your own religious beliefs. My beliefs are based on the minimisation of human suffering and the maximisation of human happiness.

Yours are not. Ergo you are less moral than I am. If you can suggest a method of quantifying morality better than minimizing suffering then I'm all for it.

Otherwise you're a maniac with a set of idiotic postulates that you refuse to review.
Firstly inbuilt failure was not a input by God. The Church's doctrine is that God created human perfect. But we we're gifted with free will and with it was sin.

And addressing morality, I think you missed my drift. I used morality as an argument for the purposefulness of Church. They change people inspiring morality. They become better Samaritans and are beneficial to society. And its really the result that matters, and the Church is therefore a benefit. Other then that we aren't arguing about the same thing Let me explain.

Sure, your maximization of human happiness and minimization of human sadness is valiant. I applaud you. Perhaps you are more moral then I, fantastic. But you see you are not perfect. No matter how hard you try, glints of immorality will always exist. I know that in your heart this is the truth. We believe that the result is eternal damnation. But we believe our savior is Jesus Christ, whom died for our sins and rose again from the dead. Thus we are saved.

In reality, it all comes down to a difference in beliefs You are against us proclaiming our views about the world. You are against our views against our people's sexual orientations. You are against what is our attempt to save others as you do not believe in our religion. Absolutely fine. We are morally justified spreading the world as a process to save others. We are legally justified to voice our opinions and proclaim what we believe. You are legally justified to reject our opinions. And if you say "stop" I don't want to hear it, then we shall go.

Now I never said we are morally "greater" then you are. And once again, I admire your uptake of the world. It is valiant.
 

Lukybear

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Citation needed.

Further to this point it's far more likely that entropy reversed than an intellectual being intervened to create everything and gosh darn it he cares about you!
About the citation. If you Google it you'll find it. Its pretty common knowledge. Even some galaxies are apparently expanding greater then the speed of light.

But on your second point. Can I please point you to this. http://www.onlinedebate.net/forums/showthread.php?t=15307
It follows a series of arguments to try and prove the existence of God. I am always very skeptical about using science to prove anything based on God. But it is quite interesting. It basically follows this line of argument.
1) Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2) The Universe began to exist.
3) The Universe therefore had a cause.
4) Naturalistic explanations are insufficient in comparison to God in explaining this cause.
 

Scorch

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You say a lot of stuff about the bible. Please do show me some evidence, at least link me somehow. I could just as easily point you to documentaries that I have seen presenting the Gospels as truth and historically accurate, even recorded by secular historians. Now I am not very well versed in History, but I do have a certain interest in science.

[...]

Believe it or not, I do have a very basic understanding of history and logic. But I still don't where you've acquired all these accusations about the bible from.
These are not accusations, these are historical and archaeological facts, but I'm going to assume that what you were referring to as accusations was this:
The Old Testament is a vague collection of nationalistic scribblings by separate tribes and cultures, which ranges from pseudo-historical to absolutely mythical (there was never an exodus in any form, for example, no conquests of Joshua, etc). The New Testament is historically inaccurate, shows clear evidence of being edited to adopt shifting theology of the early church and is heavily influenced by concepts of Zoroastrianism, Mithraism and Buddhism.​

On the first account, the most integral myths of the Old Testament show evidence, through geographical comparison, political allegory and archaeological parallel, of being written and compiled around the 7th century BC about events that were little more than a vaguely-envisioned mythic consciousness, selected, written and integrated in a literary format for their political nuances as much as for their emotional meaning.

The exodus from Egypt did not happen. The conquest of Canaan under Joshua did not happen. The wanderings in the desert did not happen. The patriarchs were not historical figures.

What happened was that Israelite culture developed in the late Bronze age out of a Canaanite cultural antecedent. The idea of Israel as a political entity in Canaan is evident as early as 1207BC, but it really is a lot easier to attach the nomenclature of Israel to the cultures of the Palestinian hills around the 8th/9th century BC, however these cultures are directly linked to the cultures that we can locate as emerging from Canaanite origins in the 13th century BC. No exodus, no conquest, nothing along these lines.

These myths have more socio-political resonance within the 7th century culture they were written and compiled in, because they are nothing more than the interaction of that culture with a psuedo-historical mythic past, and the stories of the Patriarchs, Exodus, the wanderings and the conquests of Joshua bear little relevance to any serious study of the history of this area.

Like I said, this is but one example but these are not accusations but historical facts that you are pitifully unaware of.

If you see this post you will see many of the historical concerns to do with the New Testament dealt with, but there are several more including Herod's non-existent slaughter of the innocents and other historical/sociological mistakes made by the Biblical authors; that is to say nothing of the consistent contradiction between them.

Your points on morality are so philosophically simplistic that they really do not merit a reply. I would direct you to an article I wrote for an online blog to do with Atheism:
Many people attempt to claim that religion is a good thing because books such as the Bible provide a sense of morality. There are several problems here.

It is difficult to claim that there is any form of universal or objective morality. All we see are moral statements that, more so than others, tend to be culturally universal and broadly-accepted. For example, let’s consider the commandment “Thou shalt not kill”.

To deal with the obvious first, I hope that there isn’t anyone that genuinely believes that the Jews and other people of the Earth thought for 196,000 years of humanity’s existence that it was fine to kill others within their social group and were shocked when Moses came down and suggested that, in fact, God doesn’t like this.

The important thing we have to recognise here is that religion is, in no way, the source of this ‘morality’. These are concepts that came about through the process of humanity’s interaction with the sociological and biological realities of the world they inhabit. They transcend and outdate religion. Religion, in saying that one should not kill, is only entering into a discourse that reflects society’s engagement with the realities of their existence. It is not saying anything that is original or ground-breaking and, in fact, it really just saying things that secular reasoning had determined tens of thousands of years prior.

Holy Scriptures such as the Bible have very little original to say, and people who point to parts of it and say “but we can all agree this is good” ignore the fact that the reason we can all agree this is good is an entirely secular one to do with human sociological patterns that, in fact, renders the morality of religion entirely useless.​
 

57o1i

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Oh for fuck's sake. That's right, blame it on teh ghey. So we've got "talking shit about the Church = the Holocaust" and "their repressed and sick love of cock made them molest (male AND FEMALE) children, so sad ...". This is a fail of epic proportions.

Sure, your maximization of human happiness and minimization of human sadness is valiant. I applaud you. Perhaps you are more moral then I, fantastic. But you see you are not perfect. No matter how hard you try, glints of immorality will always exist. I know that in your heart this is the truth. We believe that the result is eternal damnation. But we believe our savior is Jesus Christ, whom died for our sins and rose again from the dead. Thus we are saved.
This argument essentially boils down to "Jesuschu, I choose you!"

Do you think that these priests who molested kids will be "saved" from "eternal damnation" by their sincere belief in Christ and their praying to him for forgiveness?
 

Lukybear

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Your points on morality are so philosophically simplistic that they really do not merit a reply. I would direct you to an article I wrote for an online blog to do with Atheism:
Many people attempt to claim that religion is a good thing because books such as the Bible provide a sense of morality. There are several problems here.

It is difficult to claim that there is any form of universal or objective morality. All we see are moral statements that, more so than others, tend to be culturally universal and broadly-accepted. For example, let’s consider the commandment “Thou shalt not kill”.

To deal with the obvious first, I hope that there isn’t anyone that genuinely believes that the Jews and other people of the Earth thought for 196,000 years of humanity’s existence that it was fine to kill others within their social group and were shocked when Moses came down and suggested that, in fact, God doesn’t like this.

The important thing we have to recognise here is that religion is, in no way, the source of this ‘morality’. These are concepts that came about through the process of humanity’s interaction with the sociological and biological realities of the world they inhabit. They transcend and outdate religion. Religion, in saying that one should not kill, is only entering into a discourse that reflects society’s engagement with the realities of their existence. It is not saying anything that is original or ground-breaking and, in fact, it really just saying things that secular reasoning had determined tens of thousands of years prior.

Holy Scriptures such as the Bible have very little original to say, and people who point to parts of it and say “but we can all agree this is good” ignore the fact that the reason we can all agree this is good is an entirely secular one to do with human sociological patterns that, in fact, renders the morality of religion entirely useless.​
History dosen't interest me very much, and honestly I wouldn't have a clue how to reply to your thread, except that my faith is strong and going.

But your point has nothing to do with my argument. Church transforms people. It makes them BETTER, and really benefits humanity. Even IF (i disagree) morality was not universal and passed down through God, SOCIETY is still benefited through the Church.

But in reply to this morality point. It is interesting that you stated that morality isn't universal and that it is acquired via human interaction with the biological environment.

It is interesting that morality, or a system of laws have been in existence for long periods of time throughout humanity's history. From the very beginnings of humanity we see evidence of moral laws. In fact these are universal to almost all cultures even though their development was separated by geology. This pose the question, how does different cultures inherit the same set of moral laws? What I believe, and what C.S.Lewis believed is that there is a divine creator, who is able to create these laws. The ability to judge morality, whether this is good or bad (without philosophical training) is evident of this. The ability for a child to recognize that stealing is bad is inherit. For me this only strengthens the argument for God.

And yes it is true, tho shall not kill is part of the recognition of the existence of society. But we do kill, and we kill for things. But we are taught that we should not kill even though it is for our benefit (biologically speaking) but rather for the survival of society. But this is altruistic. We are not benefited, from not breaking the law. So again, morality for me at least dosent appear natural.
 

Scorch

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History dosen't interest me very much, and honestly I wouldn't have a clue how to reply to your thread, except that my faith is strong and going.
Yes, in the face of utter ignorance.

And yes it is true, tho shall not kill is part of the recognition of the existence of society. But we do kill, and we kill for things. But we are taught that we should not kill even though it is for our benefit (biologically speaking) but rather for the survival of society. But this is altruistic. We are not benefited, from not breaking the law. So again, morality for me at least dosent appear natural.
Of course we benefit from the order imposed on society. Humanity needs society to survive because it is biologically incapable of sustaining solitary existence. Complex society relies on the social bonds formed within a social group for its very existence, and if these relations are threatened then society comes crashing down and, with it, humanity. Thus, early societies develop discourses against killing, for instance, that keep the entirety of humanity safe within the social bonds of society.

The fact that we still kill today is irrelevant, it is the very fact that it is looked down upon, and that the indiscriminate murder of our fellows within our social groups is considered a terrible thing that we must consider, because it is this idea of morality arising out of biological need that keeps human society secure in its social bonds.

Like I said, your ideology here is more than simplistic, it is just wrong.
 

Lukybear

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Which means the failing falls back on the designer. If you make a bridge that holds 9/10 people you still fucked up son.


Your argument is centered upon the fact that your morality provides the best outcomes from society, which is naive at best and dangerous at worst.
Im leaving our the second part of your argument for it is irrelevant.

Firstly, you cannot say that the designer is at fault. Free will cannot be determined. But once again, you do not know the workings of God, and his transcendence of time. And really he provided a solution to our sinfulness, that is Jesus on a cross. So he didn't fuck up?

I didn't say my morality provides the best outcomes for society, but rather better. And I am not arguing on philosophical grounds but rather on evidence. Religious charities have volunteers that donate their time due to their beliefs, otherwise they wouldnt. They are changed. This is evident enough.
 

57o1i

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History dosen't interest me very much, and honestly I wouldn't have a clue how to reply to your thread, except that my faith is strong and going.
:uhoh:


That's pretty much the point where you should pack this up and go home.
 

thongetsu

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wow usually blastus is a douche but for once im actually agreeing with him... You know you're losing the argument when people like me agree with blastus.
 

Lolsmith

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Nah man. Like most (former or otherwise) gold members, they've got something important to say and usually have a lot of solid intelligence behind it. This makes me happy.

The Church is not a good thing. In fact, the only people that actually give the Church any shred of decency (which is very little) are the people that don't even follow the Bible properly. I respect any person that gives up their own time to reduce the sufferings of others but they shouldn't be given extra credit or funding just because they wear a crucifix.
 

Scorch

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Firstly, you cannot say that the designer is at fault. Free will cannot be determined. But once again, you do not know the workings of God, and his transcendence of time. And really he provided a solution to our sinfulness, that is Jesus on a cross. So he didn't fuck up?
He fucked up so bad that, if you are to listen to the Bible, he had to kill everyone and everything on the entire fucking world minus like, 8 people and some animals.

The main point is that in order to get some sort of consistent and respectable ethic from Christianity one must ignore large chunks of the Bible, and that is hypocritical in the highest. When one must ignore verses ordering the death of gays, brutal sexist verses and those regarding genocide, slavery and butchery just to ensure that your religion makes sense in the 21st century then perhaps your Holy Book is not as timeless as you once thought.
 

theMaster

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I learnt something from these threads, Athiests are not very accepting of religion and those who practice it.

True?
 

Lolsmith

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Generalisations about any specific group of people are usually not helpful. A lot of atheists detest religion and sometimes that flows onto the people that believe/practice it. Some atheists do accept others' need to practice, some don't.

There's no set template.
 

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