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View Poll Results: What do you identify yourself as? | |||
Atheist/Skeptic/Agnostic | 151 | 70.89% | |
Catholic | 21 | 9.86% | |
Protestant | 24 | 11.27% | |
Jewish | 5 | 2.35% | |
Muslim | 2 | 0.94% | |
Philisophy (Such as Buddhism) | 10 | 4.69% | |
Voters: 213. You may not vote on this poll |
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2012-05-02, 12:03 PM | [Ignore Me] #586 | |||
Second Lieutenant
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Your friend (and millions like him) probably don't really, really believe that stuff. Next time you get in a car with him, check to see if he's wearing a seat belt. Ask him, if he thinks people really go to heaven when they die, why are funerals sad? Think about it. Heaven is a place where everyone is happy, forever. It's paradise. It's 100x better than any vacation could ever be. No suffering, no stress, no worries, for all eternity. Sounds good, doesn't it? So why are we SAD when people die and get to go there? Why isn't everyone just... jealous? It's because we know they're dead. We know deep down that when you die, you go to the same place you were before you were born. Nothing. That's not necessarily bad; I wasn't around during the civil war or the Jurassic period and I can tell you that I didn't find it all that inconveniencing. But heaven is a nice story we can tell ourselves because otherwise, contemplating the enormity of mortality can really ruin an afternoon. So long story short, I find that most people really don't believe. The ones who do tend to be the sort of people who wear glassy, vacant smiles and say the word 'jesus like this: "Jeeeeesus. <3 <3 " They tend to be really creepy, mostly because our brains are very good at spotting poeple who are 'off'; they are delusional and it makes our reproductive bits go "No. No no no. This person is defective. Do not spread genes." |
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2012-05-02, 12:07 PM | [Ignore Me] #587 | |||
Colonel
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I think, as you said, pity is really all you can feel for them as they get trapped in their own mind games.
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[Thoughts and Ideas on the Direction of Planetside 2] |
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2012-05-02, 12:20 PM | [Ignore Me] #588 | ||
Second Lieutenant
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I actually find most religious people have a hard time thinking there are very many people in hell at all. It's a very short logical road to get there.
If they have kids, you ask them a simple question: "Is there anything your kids could do, anything at all, that would make you think that the only reasonable response would be to chain them up in a basement and torture them?" Almost nobody will ever be able to name any crime, no matter how heinous, that would make them do that. Then you ask if God sees us all as his children. Then you ask why it is they have a stronger moral sense than god. Watch their brains implode. |
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2012-05-02, 12:39 PM | [Ignore Me] #589 | |||||||||
Second Lieutenant
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Well first of all, I just want to say that I'm here to give the biblical perspective, because I find a lot of Christians don't know the bible and have just been taught churchianity so to speak. Not that I've arrived, but that's my focus, and judging by this thread, don't expect me to hang around for any merry-go-round arguments. Having said that I will take a shot.
There's only one Biblcal God...so perceived differences in his identity/character are purely FROM local and contemporary cultural issues; which are distortions. I partially disagree on Sumerian influence. The sumerian influence manifests itself in Samritans, but **** did not historically associate themselves with them for this reason. Corruptions did start to occur; though the bible called it (and still does) baalim (many husbands...the Mosaic covenant is considered a metaphorical marriage covenant for example), thus maintaining a definable difference.
"And he said unto me, 'My grace is sufficient for you: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.' Most gladly therefore will I rather boast in my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me." To what end?
"The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit." Shalom Last edited by Red Beard; 2012-05-02 at 01:36 PM. |
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2012-05-02, 01:25 PM | [Ignore Me] #590 | ||
Second Lieutenant
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Thank you for your thoughtful response, Red Beard. I know you said you weren't going to stick around but I implore you to do just that. I feel you would be most interesting to talk to.
Having read your reply, again and again your offer justifications for the unusual nature of the One True Faith. However, does it not strike you that the other religions of the world also share nearly identical patterns? They all start small and grow, over time, through writings, preachers, and other purely terrestrial and mortal conduits. They are, in practice and execution of their spreading, nearly identical. What, then, convinces you of the Truth of yours, and the Untruth of competing religions? By what measure do you decide that your team has it right, and everyone else, whose various belief systems share all those same characteristics with yours, are not? |
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2012-05-02, 03:43 PM | [Ignore Me] #591 | |||
Master Sergeant
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I'm just uninterested in talking to people that have no interest in hearing my opinion. That's all. |
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2012-05-02, 03:45 PM | [Ignore Me] #592 | |||
Master Sergeant
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That's your mistake. Also, I like the little attacks and jabs you guys put in...and then ridicule me for not wanting to debate with you. Hilarious. ;0) |
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2012-05-03, 02:49 AM | [Ignore Me] #596 | |||||||||||
Lieutenant General
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Much appreciated. As you focused on the Abrahamic god, I'll do so as well, although my argument is more a macro-argument where yours is more of a micro-argument as it is focused on a single perspective, rather than the wider worldview.
I would argue that from a wider worldview, it is much harder to make it "have sense" than if you derive the logic from the excuses made within a particular frame of reference. Anyway.
The god in question here is claimed to want all to know off said god and then make a choice. With the OT being a few thousand years old and well before the appearance of Jesus and even longer till an actual NT is composed, it can easily be argued and shown that the timing and placement is very poor. Although Christianity is one of the larger faiths today and argueably past its prime, it has not succeeded in reaching all corners of the earth (in time). In the 6.000 years that Judeism and 2000 years that Christianity exists, it left millions of generations of people in the dark. The methodology applied by a claimed omniscience, omnipotent and omnipresent god is flawed at best. To reach his goal and minimize suffering, it is eay to see in retrospect (which a timeless god can) would have been far better to use multiple independent "seeds", meaning that by the time the Spanish arrived in Peru or any other colonists in Africa or the far east, they'd have found mostly **** or Christians. Either way, a people that would not be considered third rate and thus not treated as such. Also hundreds of generations of people that could have been saved left "wasted" under the "yoke" of other religions. This does not conform with other religious claims and even Christians realised quite soon that to branch out they either needed to conquer and commit genocide or use (forced) indoctrination, where missionaries of course are (flawed) seeds that any omnipotent god could have created/inspired anywhere on earth seperately, if they were present at all. It is however clear they were not present there prior to a missionary or other religious fellow being there and spreading a faith manually. So again, the question is how come that other gods are free to establish themselves until someone comes in and manually overrides the self-coding of a person or people? If there is only one faith that's true, self-coding should at the very least be possible, even if unlikely. It is not however. Choosing "one chosen people" with an inconsistent, myth riddled, unevidenced faith is not just lazy, it's ineffective and self-centered. Incidentally, so are humans. Considering every faith is ineffective and self-centered, that suggests humans are at the core of the creation of faiths, rather than the other way around.
Furthermore, since the event itself, but not the outcome or interpretation, was shared so strong in the collective memories of these particular regional cultures and all others would have come from them, then it should have been equally strong or at least mentioned in other cultures said to have spawned from them. However, world floods are not even mentioned in many other religions or myths from other cultures, at all. They also do not agree on who did it, nor why.
The answer is spreading, like with any other religion, happened primarily through military power and political control, a purely human methodology.
Your example definitely goes for variety within a religion, but not for variety between religions, you see, those other cars have no blue in it at all.
The existence of gentiles in the first place disagrees with the entire concept. Again, the exposure of gentiles is always human on human. Some humans are selected for random exposure to a god, but always within the same culture and preferably long before trustworthy accounting methods were established. Again, not a very good methodology.
I'm disproving gods through the lack of spiritual consistency in the world (spirtuality being a local and not universal thing), an argument further strengthened by the physical evidence. Which, like with all those other spiritual interpretations, does not agree with one another. Therefore none of the faiths suggested, regardless of excuse theory, can be "the truth". "Universal constants", given some variation, are things that are omnipresent on earth. The most omnipresent thing would be gods and their creation stories. These should not be able to pop up independent from one another and spawn wildly varying theories depending on location. If you have a god that's a universal constant, your location should not matter if you are in search of a divine answer. In fact, the intend of the god (whether he choses you or not) should not matter, since any religion is able to interpret real world events as acts of god. That they can be interpreted differently at the very least means the god is not timeless, omnipotent and not omniscience: He'd know how humans witnessing the event will end up interpreting it from a personal perspective. Hence there's no reason to do events in a way that's imperfect (leaves random survivors who are not intended to survive and mess up the whole intend of the event) if you know in advance this will be so. The whole Noah flood example in that respect is just... Insane and pointless from both a mortal and divine point of view.
Last edited by Figment; 2012-05-03 at 02:53 AM. |
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2012-05-03, 08:54 AM | [Ignore Me] #597 | ||||
Sergeant
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2012-05-03, 03:06 PM | [Ignore Me] #598 | ||
Second Lieutenant
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I dunno Figment; I think this is where the conversation bends into a circle, as it seems we are approaching the territory upon which we will not have any common reference with which to reconcile world views...I appreciate the thought; even if I disagree with portions.
This is the stage where I find if someone won't accept the other's point of view and try to use 'proofs' which the other party doesn't recognize as such, it invariably degrades from sharing ideas into an ego centred battle of wits that promotes an entropic spiritual vacume, if you know what I's saying...So I'll probably just leave it there. Sorry to be a downer |
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